‘A politics of no translation’: Zohran Mamdani on his unlikely rise

In interviews with more than 30 lawmakers, political figures, supporters, friends, and critics, Mamdani emerges as both more interesting and more complicated than the caricatures suggest. He is a very eloquent, very young man who is both less experienced than his predecessors and more gifted than almost any of his peers at connecting with the party’s voters. He is an ideologue interested in creative solutions, less radical than painted when you dig into his policy proposals and yet more sincere in his left-wing ambitions…