During the campaign, Mamdani liked to remind his audiences that New York is the richest city in the richest country in the history of the world, and that its government could do more for the people who live here. While his opponents described New York as broke, dysfunctional, and crime-ridden, Mamdani talked about the city as a lovely, if chaotic, place—full of tumult and injustices, yes, but also of life and possibilities. The Mamdani Cinematic Universe is a place where you can take the subway to the city clerk’s office to marry the girl you met on Hinge, where you can do Tai Chi and salsa-dance with old folks on the Lower East Side, where you can go for a polar plunge off Coney Island on New Year’s Day and walk the entire length of Manhattan on a hot summer night.

The feel-good content complemented his sharp-elbowed politics. Mamdani’s most Cuomo-esque quality is the evident pleasure he gets in public political combat—“Habibi, release your client list,” he taunted the former governor, over the mysterious legal-consulting practice that made him some five million dollars last year. When pressured to temper his criticisms of Israel, Mamdani has barely flinched. These qualities convinced many young voters, in particular, that he might have what it takes to follow through on his promises. They voted for him because they could imagine a city with free buses; because they thought that the idea of freezing rents in the city’s million or so rent-stabilized apartments sounded fair, even if they didn’t live in rent-stabilized apartments themselves; and because they liked the idea of New York being a place that offers universal child care to kids as young as six weeks old. The alternative that Cuomo offered—thoughts and prayers for high rents, more games and opaque machinations in City Hall, Democratic officials skirting around the bloodshed in Gaza—was simply too bleak.

Since the primary, senior figures in New York’s Democratic establishment have continued to hold Mamdani at arm’s length. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries put off endorsing him for so long that he embarrassed himself. Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand (the latter of whom had to apologize after suggesting on public radio that Mamdani supports “global jihad”) never came around. But former President Barack Obama saw something in Mamdani—he’s called to check in with the young guy twice since June—as has New York’s moderate governor, Kathy Hochul. At a rally in the campaign’s closing days at Forest Hills Stadium, in Queens, Hochul warmed up the crowd for Mamdani—or tried to. “Tax the rich!” the crowd jeered at her. The shy, tax-averse governor struggled to maintain her composure. “I can hear you!” she said. Mamdani appeared on the stage, strode over to Hochul, and held one of her hands in the air. The heckling transformed into a roar of approval.

When I first talked to Mamdani, two years ago, he was an Albany backbencher with few allies in the legislature. He called me a few days after October 7th, worried about Islamophobic backlash in the city. Shortly after, he got arrested while protesting for a ceasefire outside Schumer’s apartment building. He was, at that moment, about as far out on the margins of power as an elected official can be. In the past few months, Mamdani has looked more comfortable navigating the compromises and contradictions that being mayor will impose on him. He has expressed newfound appreciation for the role of private real-estate development, and has promised to ask the police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, a favorite of the city’s wealthy establishment, to stay on in his administration. “If he becomes mayor, so be it,” Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, said recently. Mamdani is untested, his network of longtime allies is small, and he lacks the connections and history in the city’s power structure that even an ambitious progressive like Bill de Blasio relied on to get things done. But that’s the point. New Yorkers didn’t want an insider with decades of experience. They wanted Zohran Mamdani.

“Do we Americans really want good government?” the muckraker Lincoln Steffens wrote in McClure’s magazine in 1903. “Do we know it when we see it?” Steffens had spent months investigating the peculiar limitations and outrages of New York City’s Tammany Hall-era bureaucracy. It wasn’t that the people of New York didn’t know that the machine was corrupt; it was that they only rarely could be bothered to care. “Tammany is corruption with consent,” Steffens wrote. “It is bad government founded on the suffrages of the people.” Occasionally, when the excesses of the machine grew “rampant,” the people were moved to throw the bosses out. An outsider mayoral candidate would put himself forward, pledging to make a “clean sweep,” organizing the various factions of the city’s political opposition, and galvanizing the city with a “hot campaign.” But it never ended well. Inevitably, the bosses were voted back to power. Steffens called this frustrating pattern “the standard course of municipal reform.”

With the exception of Fiorello LaGuardia, every liberal, reform-minded mayor since the late nineteenth century has met some dismal version of the “standard course.” Seth Low, the wonkish former Columbia University president who was mayor when Steffens was writing, was denied a second term by George B. McClellan, Jr., a favorite of the Tammany boss Richard Croker. In the sixties, John Lindsay came into office riding a wave of charisma and good feeling, and left behind frustrations and disastrous city books when he departed eight years later. David Dinkins, the city’s first Black mayor (and also the first mayor who had been a member of the Democratic Socialists of America), saw his administration undone by racial violence and concerns about crime, and was beaten by Rudy Giuliani when he ran for a second term. De Blasio, whom Mamdani considers the best mayor of his lifetime, accomplished much of the agenda that he ran on in 2013, but New Yorkers got sick of him anyway. “The good mayor turns out to be weak or foolish or ‘not so good,’ ” Steffens wrote. “Or the people become disgusted.”