During the coronavirus pandemic, Khan started giving out hot halal meals. One of the people who showed up to help was a young state assembly member who wasn’t even from the district: Zohran Mamdani. So when Mamdani announced his campaign for mayor last October, Khan made the pilgrimage to Long Island City in Queens for the launch. He still remembers Mamdani’s exact words: “This is not a time for lecturing. It’s a time for listening.”
Full disclosure: I door-knocked for Mamdani’s campaign on two occasions, plus a short, sweltering stint outside the polls on Election Day. I’d never volunteered on a political campaign in my life—I’m a journalist, not a joiner of political parties—but I could see that Mamdani was a different kind of politician, and I wanted to see it from the inside. And here’s what I concluded: Mamdani understood something that all the professional moonbeam extractors missed. You don’t appeal to working- and middle-class voters by going on all the right podcasts, hiring influencers like Olivia Julianna, posting on social media a certain number of times per day, or hammering at them with meticulously focus-grouped talking points. Mamdani’s secret sauce is much simpler.
Food has been the key to electoral politics since the days of bread and circus. But for modern-day Dems—and their consultants, surrogates, and attendant media—this is apparently news. Think of the Democrats lecturing us that food prices didn’t matter because of the offsetting benefits of Bidenomics. When they do try to use food, it’s even worse. Remember Biden holding an ice cream cone as though it was a live grenade and musing awkwardly about Gaza? Or Nancy Pelosi showing us her two enormous brushed-steel refrigerators, stuffed with $12-a-pint boutique ice cream, at a moment when a lot of Americans were wondering how to get their next meal?
Even the logo’s colors were delicious: Red and yellow are the top two colors in food logos and branding (Cheerios, mustard, McDonalds) because they increase memory, attention, and alertness; marketers think they influence food sales by stimulating your appetite—especially in combination with each other, a belief called the ketchup-and-mustard theory of color psychology.
Mamdani did something simple but revolutionary: He asked halal cart owners why they raised the price of chicken and rice from $8 to $10. The city’s licensing process leads to an owner monopoly on halal cart licenses—a problem he knows well, because he went on a hunger strike in 2022 to support taxi drivers who were suffering under a similar monopoly on taxi medallions. And then he named four City Council bills that could solve this problem. “If I was the mayor, I’d be working with the City Council from day one,” he said, with his trademark dimpled smile, “to make halal eight bucks again.”
But no matter how much Mamdani clearly loves food, I don’t think his emphasis on it is unconscious or merely instinctive. It taps into a deep tradition within American socialism of addressing justice through practical, bread-and-butter issues. Milwaukee had its sewer socialists, who excelled at delivering basic services. Mamdani is proposing what I’m going to call halal cart socialism: using the lesser-known mechanisms of city government to improve the delivery of basic goods—especially the ones, like food and childcare, that mean survival in everyday people’s lives.
All three talked about small businesses—groceries, pharmacies, barbershops—and how New York City’s government can be a powerful tool to strengthen them: not just by cutting the kinds of fines and fees that hamper businesses small and big (the Abundance school, which has been flirting with Mamdani) but also by taking on monopolies (the Joe Biden–Lina Khan school). “New York City being the most expensive city on earth isn’t inevitable,” said Mamdani. “It’s a choice.” The same landlords who said they couldn’t afford a rent freeze, he pointed out, had just donated $2.5 million to Andrew Cuomo’s campaign.
We met, at her suggestion, in the air-conditioned lobby of the Whole Foods on 125th Street in Harlem. “We have fewer Black-owned grocery stores today than we did in 1965,” she said, by way of introduction, before veering down the escalator into the bowels of the megastore. Teachout believes that Mamdani’s city-owned grocery stores can do more than just offer food at lower prices. She’s hoping they can be a wedge to take on the monopolies that make those prices higher in the first place—and thereby help local mom-and-pop stores.
To illustrate this point, she walked us uptown to Pioneer, an independent supermarket chain a few blocks away. “We have two sets of laws in the grocery business,” she said. “Little grocery stores have to strictly follow price-gouging laws. And Tyson, and Procter & Gamble, the big meatpackers—the dominant upstream firms—don’t have to follow the rules.” In the cereal aisle, she picked out the same box of Cheerios: $10.79.
“Whether it’s price-fixing in eggs, or price-gouging in diapers, they know that these prices are not fair, and they do not reflect real costs,” she said. “And so he’s not just saying, ‘I’ll do a pilot program.’ He’s saying, ‘I actually see this pricing problem.’ I think that’s really, really powerful. And what that leads to, when you have a Mayor Mamdani, is an administration that is asking questions about shady practices that we have just accepted as ‘that’s part of capitalism.’”
I got in line with hundreds of other New Yorkers, including Sai Foster, 22. They didn’t vote because they just moved here from California, but they showed me a picture on their phone: an election flyer from Morris Hillquit, a socialist who ran for mayor of New York in 1917.
“What will be interesting,” said Foster, “is to see if Mamdani can maintain his policies once he’s in office. Especially when things get difficult.”
But Mamdani has something very powerful on his side, too: the people. He succeeded because he listened to New Yorkers’ deepest fears and anxieties about surviving day-to-day in the city, and then he made those worries central to his campaign; that is, his message resonated with voters because it was their message. And equally important, he showed voters exactly how he would use the mechanisms of government to address their concerns.
In his victory speech, Mamdani quoted Franklin Delano Roosevelt on a struggle that many Americans are feeling as keenly right now as they did in 1938. “Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations—not because the people of those nations disliked democracy,” FDR said in a fireside chat, “but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and government weakness through lack of leadership in government. Finally, in desperation, they chose to sacrifice liberty in the hope of getting something to eat.”
Mamdani rejected that as a false choice. “New York, if we have made one thing clear over these past months, it is that we need not choose between the two,” he said in his speech. “We can be free. And we can be fed.”
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