Identity politics out of style? In NYC’s mayor’s race, Mamdani leans into his.

Zohran Mamdani, a Democrat running for New York City mayor, recently dropped an ad almost entirely in Hindi and Urdu.

Even with English-language subtitles, the video — which is crammed with vintage Bollywood references — would be fairly impenetrable for most New Yorkers. But for many South Asian New Yorkers, the ad was an immediate hit. It lit up family WhatsApp groups and gained Mamdani just the sort of attention he sought going into the final weeks of the Democratic Party primary.

“It’s not only talking to the diaspora but it’s very much speaking from the diaspora,” said Swati Khurana, a South Asian American writer and artist in Harlem. “So, to me, the ad is a win.”

The ad is just one part of a mayoral campaign that political strategists said has been without precedent in a city mayor’s race. Mamdani has embraced his immigrant identity and has loudly proclaimed his Muslim faith, rather than downplaying it.

Will it work? Most polls have the 33-year-old state assemblymember running in second place, behind former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. And one political analyst noted the campaign had not produced a surge in new voter registrations from the South Asian community — a key bloc courted by Mamdani.

“It looks like [the Mamdani campaign’s] strategy is really to activate low-propensity voters and get people who are already on the rolls and say, ‘Hey, here is one of your own and you should go out and vote for this guy,’ and that could have some impact,” said Raj Goyle, an Indian American who won a state legislative seat in Kansas in 2007 before moving to New York and cofounding a political organization, Indian-American Impact. He is not affiliated with any of the mayoral campaigns.

Mamdani, who is vying to become the city’s first Muslim and South Asian mayor, seems to be betting that the path to victory lies in courting constituencies often overlooked by political operatives and the establishment press.

“ Zohran as a candidate and his campaign have completely shifted the political paradigm for South Asians in the United States,” said New York-based political strategist Amit Singh Bagga.

By some estimates there are more than 750,000 Muslim New Yorkers, and 450,000 South Asians across the five boroughs according to the 2020 census.

The Ugandan-born Mamdani has heavily courted these voters, from visiting numerous houses of worship to posting a psychedelic Eid greeting on Instagram in early June. At the same time, Mamdani's campaign and supporters have drawn attention to what they say are racially motivated attacks on him by Cuomo and Cuomo's allies.

The city’s immigrant press has closely followed Mamdani’s campaign along with leading news publications in Pakistan and India, which noted that Mamdani’s mother Mira Nair is the famed director of “Monsoon Wedding” and “Mississippi Masala,” and that his father Mahmood Mamdani is a Columbia University professor.

"Why is New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani winning South Asian hearts across the globe?" asked a headline in Dawn, one of Pakistan's biggest news outlets.

Making diasporic waves

Some members of the South Asian diaspora said in recent weeks the Mamdani campaign had taken hold of the community.

“ I feel like every young South Asian that I know who's registered in New York knows who he is, is talking about him, is sharing messaging of his policies and his platform with others as well,” said Versha Sharma, editor in chief of Teen Vogue.

She said the Bollywood ad was also emotionally moving. She recalled coming of age in Louisiana in the wake of 9/11, when Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment were rampant. Then-U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal, a Republican and the first South Asian American elected to Congress in nearly half a century, was visiting her family temple.

“His team specifically asked that no photos be shared or publicized from the event,” Sharma said. “We’re going from that in my teenage years being mainstream American politics to [Mamdani’s] ad being mainstream American politics, and this guy is co-headlining rallies with AOC [U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]. Just like massive, increasingly national presence. So that feels like progress.”

Bagga, who often works with the Working Families Party and is not affiliated with the Mamdani campaign, said Mamdani had succeeded at addressing concerns in working-class and immigrant communities across the city, namely the problem of living in one of the world’s most expensive cities.

“One of the biggest challenges that we have with the Democratic Party is that we have not been listening,” Bagga said. “ I think the greatest feat that Zohran has demonstrated in his campaign is that he has the ability to capture and repeat back to so many New Yorkers what the experience is of being a New Yorker today.”

Mamdani was born in Uganda and moved to New York at the age of 7, according to the biography posted on his legislative site. He was educated in the city’s public school system before attending Bowdoin College. He worked at a Queens nonprofit for people facing foreclosure and won a state Assembly seat with the DSA's backing in 2020, representing Astoria and Long Island City.

The following year, he helped lead efforts to secure debt relief for taxi drivers, many of whom are South Asian and Muslim, and took part in a hunger strike to advance the cause. The historic deal, which followed a spate of driver suicides, provided hundreds of millions of dollars of debt relief to thousands of overburdened drivers, and became a centerpiece of Mamdani’s story as a voice of working-class New Yorkers.

“I'm proud to be the first South Asian elected official, the first Muslim elected official to ever even run for mayor,” Mamdani said in an interview. “And as part of that, I want to make sure that every New Yorker sees themselves in our politics and sees themselves in the policies that determine the future of this city.”

That approach has people paying attention in and out of New York City.

Parag Mehta, an Arlington, Virginia-based political strategist who served as former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy's chief of staff, said he hadn’t been paying attention to the race, “but two weeks ago, my WhatsApp started blowing up with friends sharing Zohran Mamdani’s latest campaign spot.”

“I’ve spent years teaching candidates how to create effective messaging, and it comes down to three questions," Mehta said. "'Is this person strong?' 'Is this person trustworthy?' 'Do they care about people like me?' In 2 minutes and 22 seconds, Zohran Mamdani won me over on all three.”

Targeting overlooked communities

Beyond Instagram ads, Mamdani’s campaign said he’s put considerable effort into meeting the city’s South Asian and Muslim communities where they are.

A campaign staffer said he’d visited the biggest Sikh gurdwaras, attended weekly Friday prayers at mosque and conducted “Chai with Zohran” events in Parkchester in the Bronx as well as in Jackson Heights in Queens.

Groups that have endorsed Mamdani are trying to expand the campaign’s reach into immigrant enclaves.

Saman Waquad, the president of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York, said in a statement that “thousands of Muslims are volunteering for Zohran to help get out the Muslim vote and beyond.” The organization shared a link to a video showing hundreds of South Asian New Yorkers surrounding the candidate at a June 14 rally in Queens and chanting “Our mayor! Your mayor!” repeatedly in Hindi.

Jagpreet Singh, the political director of the Queens-based South Asian political group DRUM Beats, said the group’s volunteers have knocked on the doors of more than 4,000 Punjabi and Nepali households and have called more than 10,000 people in the Bangladeshi community. Singh said these are communities that are largely ignored by campaigns and that the level of canvassing was without precedent, not just in New York but “across the country.”

Trip Yang, a Democratic strategist who is not affiliated with any of the mayoral campaigns, said despite being the fastest-growing community in the city and accounting for 18% of its population, Asian Americans tend to be overlooked. He said Mamdani had the potential to change that well beyond his own run.

“It requires top-tier candidates,” Yang said. “They generate a lot of media attention.”

Mamdani has not shied from flare-ups related to his identity, which have included a Queens councilmember’s baseless claim that he is not a citizen and should be deported. “Enough,” Mamdani wrote on social media. He called such attacks “an assault on the values of our city and our Constitution.”

He accused a pro-Cuomo super PAC of Islamophobia after a flyer featuring his image was manipulated to show him with a thicker beard. The same group produced an ad calling Mamdani “radical” and “dangerous” while showing him dressed in a kurta or South Asian shirt, prompting criticism from New York Muslims that the ad was an act of fearmongering.

At the most recent debate, Cuomo repeatedly called attention to Mamdani’s relative inexperience and skimpy legislative record. He repeatedly mispronounced Mamdani’s last name, prompting Mamdani to loudly correct him.

Mamdani said the experience was “all too familiar” for immigrants across the country: “The name that you have been given, the one that you are proud of, instead being attempted to be reduced to an act of mockery.”

“And in correcting his pronunciation of my name, I was also seeking to show him that the very New Yorkers he has denied that dignity to are ones who will not wait for him any longer,” Mamdani said.

The Cuomo campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated an affiliation of New York-based political strategist Amit Singh Bagga. He has worked with the Working Families Party.