One-on-One with Zohran Mamdani

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🗓️ 2 July 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

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Summary

NPR's Leila Fadel speaks with Zohran Mamdani about his vision for New York City and his surprise win in the Democratic primary for mayor.
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Transcript

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0:00.0	When he announced his candidacy for New York City mayor last year, it's fair to say a lot of people had no clue who Zohran Mamdani was and didn't think he had a chance of winning.
0:12.8	But the 33-year-old Democratic Socialist is now the Democratic nominee in New York City's mayor's race.
0:18.5	It's sent a shockwave through our politics.
0:21.4	He's out down with him on Monday one-on-one for this special episode of Up First from NPR News.
0:29.7	Coming up, Zohran Mamdani speaks about what the Democratic Party can learn from his campaign.
0:35.0	For far too long, we've thought of politics as removed from people.
0:38.8	He also talks about the barrage of bigotry he's been getting while running for office.
0:43.1	It's been very difficult to see just how much of this hatred has been normalized.
0:46.7	And I ask him how his faith informs his politics. Thank you for coming in.
1:03.7	Thank you very much for having me.
1:04.7	It's a pleasure.
1:05.3	So I really want to start with how you did this.
1:08.1	I mean, you were a person that most people didn't know your name.
1:11.7	They still can't pronounce your name. Struggling. Spelled like it sounds. You did not have the
1:17.8	establishment of your party behind you. The paper of record in New York City, the editorial
1:22.7	board of that paper, actually asked voters not to rank you at all, and yet you won. How did you do that?
1:29.1	And why did voters choose you? You know, from the beginning, we wanted to break out of the bubble of
1:34.3	New York City politics and into the world of New York City itself. This is a city that I moved to
1:38.7	when I was seven years old. It's where I've grown up. It's where I got my citizenship, where I got married. It's a city that I love.
1:49.8	And I've been frustrated over many years to see how separate often our politics is from our place.
1:57.2	And we sought especially to increase turnout amongst New Yorkers who hadn't been participating and to register new voters. And we said that we would do this by espousing a politics of no translation, by speaking
2:01.9	directly to the crisis that working people were facing in this city, which is ultimately a crisis
	...

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