Fresh from an historic victory in New York City’s mayoral election, Zohran Mamdani announced an all-female team to steer his transition into office, pledging to “work every day to honour the trust that I now hold”.
The 34-year-old former rapper will become the city’s first Muslim mayor, the first of south Asian heritage, the first born in Africa and the youngest leader of the Big Apple in more than a century.
He campaigned on an agenda that includes free buses, free childcare and rent freezes.
But he wasted no time in challenging his arch-enemy, Donald Trump, who threatened not only to defund New York but also to arrest and deport Mamdani if he won.
“If anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him,” the mayor-elect told cheering supporters.
Mamdani, who was born in Uganda to Indian parents and became a US citizen after graduating from college, cast himself as the embodiment of the resistance against the president’s aggressive anti-immigrant agenda.
“New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant,” he said. “So hear me, President Trump, when I say this: To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.”
He said his election would “turn the page on a politics that abandons the many and answers only to the few” – and even echoed the words of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, saying: “We have stepped out from the old into the new.”
Trump, who has spent months insulting Mamdani, posted on Truth Social: “ – AND SO IT BEGINS!”
It remains unclear how else Trump plans to respond to the victory. New York City holds special significance for him, as the place where he ran his business empire and became a TV star.
Mamdani must now build an administration and plan how to accomplish the ambitious but polarising agenda that secured his victory.
Among his promises are free childcare, a free city bus service, city-run grocery stores and a new Department of Community Safety that would send mental health care workers to handle certain emergency calls rather than police officers. But New York state’s Democratic governor Kathy Hochul is opposed to raising taxes on wealthy people to pay for such measures.
Mamdani named political strategist Elana Leopold as executive director of the transition team. She will work with: low-income support organisation United Way of New York City president Grace Bonilla; former deputy mayor Melanie Hartzog, who was also a city budget official; former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan; and former first deputy mayor Maria Torres-Springer.
“I’m confident in delivering these same policies that we ran on for the last year,” he said.
More than two million New Yorkers cast ballots in the contest, the largest turnout in a mayoral race in more than 50 years. The result has sent shockwaves though a city known globally as a bastion of capitalism.
It “will be an interesting experiment and we'll see how much he tries to really change New York City”, said Tim Ghriskey, senior portfolio strategist at brokerage firm Ingalls & Snyder in New York. Jamie Cox, managing partner at Harris Financial Group, said the election was a “very big wake-up call for Republicans”.
Democrats also won governor races in Virginia and New Jersey, although, in contrast to Mamdani’s insurgent populism, winners Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill are both moderates with national security backgrounds.
The party also swept a trio of state Supreme Court contests in swing-state Pennsylvania, and approved new congressional district boundaries that will help determine which party wins control of the US House of Representatives in 2026.
Reuters and AP contributed to this report
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