This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

It has to cross your mind. I'm 33 years old. I'm running 20 points ahead.

The guy that's right behind me has the likeability factor of a traffic jam.

It's very likely that you're going to be the next mayor of the city with a $115 billion budget,

a president that calls you a communist half the time, and he's threatening the city in many different ways.

When you go home at night and you're thinking about this emotionally and people are questioning

your experience as well, naturally simply on the basis of age, when you're staring at the ceiling

at three o'clock in the morning, as you must do, you know?

You know, I have to be honest with you. I don't have trouble sleeping. At all. I don't. Because you're walking across the city half the day. I'm quite tired when I get to bed. Zoran Mamdani is running to be mayor of New York City, and the polls have him at least 15 points ahead of Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani is 33.

He serves in the State Assembly,

and he's a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

And a year ago, almost nobody had heard his name.

But doubt never enters your mind.

A lack of what if I let them down never enters your mind.

The weight of that hope is one that I do wrestle with and the responsibility of living up to it.

But doubt, I wouldn't say.

In the Democratic primary in June, Mamdani pulled off a huge upset, not unlike Alexandria Accio-Cortez did when she ran for Congress as a young Democratic socialist herself.

Mamdani beat former governor Andrew Cuomo, who was trying to stage a political comeback.

Cuomo is still in the race as an independent, and the Republican Curtis Sliwa trails long in the distance.

It seems on one hand like an astonishing launch for a guy who would be New York's youngest mayor in generations and the first Muslim to hold the office.

But this has not been an easy run, not by any stretch.

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