There are any number of personal qualities that make New York mayoral front-runner Zohran Kwame Mamdani's political prominence seem improbable: his youth, his inexperience, his socialism, his terrible rapping, his statements of anti-Israel animus in the world's second-largest Jewish city. But the unlikeliest aspect to the State Assembly member's meteoric rise may be that an electoral pulse-quickener got anywhere near a position of prominence in a one-party polity.
The default Democrat in jurisdictions where Republicans are rare (they're outnumbered six to one in NYC) isn't a social-mediagenic semi-outsider; it's a dull-as-a-doorknob survivor of internal party jockeying. Think Bill de Blasio (not the Long Island one), or former California attorney general (and, gobsmackingly, secretary of health and human services) Xavier Becerra, not a junior Barack Obama wannabe.
