A Wave Of Asian Votes Helped Propel Zohran Mamdani's Trailblazing Win

By Haidee Chu, Rachel Kahn, and Marina Samuel, The City

June 30, 2025, 12:45 p.m.Even after months of organizing 250 volunteers to canvas for Zohran Mamdani in the city’s South Asian neighborhoods, Jagpreet Singh was stunned to see how those communities turned out for the 33-year-old Democratic Socialist on election night.

“We saw, like, all of our neighborhoods just glowing,” said Singh, the political director of the South Asian and Indo-Caribbean political organizing group DRUM Beats, recalling the moment when a researcher at Mamdani’s election party held up a map of how different areas had voted for their first-place picks in the ranked-choice election.

“It was unbelievable. I was basically floating in the air at that point. I’m not gonna get my voice back for another day or two.”

Mamdani — who would become the city’s first South Asian and Muslim mayor if he prevails in the unusually crowded general election in November — handily clinched a commanding lead in Asian neighborhoods representing many ethnicities across the five boroughs.

Zohran Mamdani supporters at a Long Island City rooftop bar were delirious after his commanding win in the Democratic mayoral primary, June 24, 2025. Credit: Alex Krales/THE CITY

He led former Gov. Andrew Cuomo by 41 points in Kensington, Brooklyn, nicknamed “Little Pakistan,” and by up to 49 points in the parts of Parkchester in The Bronx where there’s a fast-growing Bengali community, according to the Board of Election’s unofficial election night count of first-place votes.

Mamdani also dominated South Asian enclaves in Queens: Bengali Dutch Kills in the west, diverse Jackson Heights in the middle, Sikh and Indo-Caribbean Ozone Park, Richmond Hill in the south and the Hillside Avenue corridor in the east with its burgeoning Little Bangladesh.

His gains in heavily Chinese communities — including Manhattan’s Chinatown and Brooklyn’s Sunset Park and Bensonhurst were notable, too.

Supporters of Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign pack into a Chinatown community space to watch him speak several days before the Democratic primary, June 20, 2025. Credit: Alex Krales/THE CITY

Overall, Mamdani won 52% of the first-place primary votes in areas where more than half the population is Asian.

Mamdani’s 15-point lead against Cuomo in those predominantly Asian neighborhoods, combined with his 6- and 5-point leads in primarily Hispanic and white neighborhoods, helped him secure the Democratic nomination even as he trailed Cuomo by 18 points in Black voting blocs that are often crucial to electoral victories, including Southeast Queens and East Brooklyn, where concerns around affordability, especially in housing — a major campaign point for Mamdani — have been driving an exodus of Black New Yorkers.

Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani (D-Queens) campaigns at a Chinatown community group headquarters several days before the Democratic mayoral primary day, June 20, 2025. Credit: Alex Krales/THE CITY

Mamdani’s success among Asian voters was no small feat for a third-term state legislator who, by his own telling, had been a “no-name” candidate who started the race with just “one percent name recognition.” He energized Asian voters who had sat out in previous elections with a 50,000-member canvassing army that knocked on more than 1.5 million doors, while he starred in infectious social media campaign videos to explain ranked-choice voting in Hindi, Urdu and Bangla, using South Asian culinary staples like mango lassi and mishtis as visual aids. In the week leading up to Primary Day alone, he visited 135 mosques.

“There’s a level of base-building that has been really essential in reaching people who otherwise are not brought in — Muslim voters, and also working class immigrants who are often not engaged or reached by establishment politicians on either party,” said Farihah Akhtar, a Queens-based senior lead organizer at CAAAV Voice, the political offshoot of CAAAV, a tenant organizing group focused on Asian working-class immigrants, which was among the first groups that Mamdani’s campaign thanked on election night.

“I just could tell how jaded all of these working class immigrants felt throughout the city, especially South Asian Muslim community members. They’ve seen their communities be destroyed by the Patriot Act in post-9/11 New York … They just felt jaded towards New York City politics. They didn’t see that any politician could serve them anymore,” Choudhury continued.

Mamdani, though, was different, said MD Parveg Hasan Dolar, a 71-year-old Bangladeshi immigrant who lives in a rent-stabilized apartment in Dutch Kills, where he said he’s been harassed by his negligent landlord over the years as market rents soared. Dolar recalled meeting Mamdani, his local assemblymember since 2021, during the push for more affordable housing in the Astoria mega development project, Innovation QNS, nearly three years ago.

“The thing that I really appreciated was that I saw him acting with principles, and treating people of different classes and working-class organizations as equals,” Dolar told THE CITY in Bangla, through interpretation by Akhtar. Mamdani’s day-one promise to freeze the rent on stabilized apartments, Dolar said, was a direct response to demands from CAAAV Voice tenant leaders like himself, which earned their trust.

“It is for that reason — reason-the reason that he’s followed our leadership as working class people—that we’ve been able to mobilize such support for him,” Dolar added. “There’s not a lot of trust for politicians, and so the way that he has actually listened to us and led alongside us, that’s the basis of the love we have and the reason we have fought with so much love.”

Dolar is not a citizen and, therefore, ineligible to vote. But he spent countless hours in between overnight shifts as a food worker spreading the word about Mamdani in the streets of Dutch Kills and in places as far east as Jamaica, where he’d chat up straphangers on visits to his doctor’s office.

Like Dolar, Ren Ping Chen, a Chinese immigrant and rent-stabilized tenant who’s lived in Chinatown for 30 years, was also encouraged by Mamdani’s promise to freeze the rent. The 67-year-old green card holder is also not eligible to vote, but spent hours in the record-level heat Tuesday and in the months before that getting out the vote for Mamdani.

“It’s been very hot over the last month or so, and we all got very tan under the sun from canvassing outside,” Chen, a long-time canvasser for CAAAV Voice, told THE CITY in Mandarin. “But if Mamdani can become mayor because of our work, I’ll do it no matter how exhausted I get. He serves us, the common people. He is our path to the future.”

Sadiyah Ahmed, a 36-year-old special-ed teacher, also canvassed for Mamdani in Parkchester, after seeing firsthand how the cost of childcare had driven one of her colleagues to quit her job to take care of her children. (Mamdani has promised to provide universal free childcare.)

“It’s in our nature in Bangladesh to fight for change and to advocate for it,” said Ahmed, whose grandfather and parents fought for human rights and independence in their home country.

Ahmed ended up spending the 100-degree Primary Day getting out the vote in Castle Hill in The Bronx — where Mamdani beat Cuomo by 27 points in parts of the neighborhood — after a long day of assisting with her students’ graduation ceremony. She greeted a woman in Bangla under the 6-train tracks late in the evening, she said, and walked with her to the poll station 15 minutes before the polls closed to cast her vote for the first time.

“I think showing that excitement and seeing someone of your own community have that excitement too — and that we have someone that is going to represent our needs — was really beautiful and validating,” Ahmed said.

Canvasser Aditya Mukherjee, whose Bengali grandparents immigrated here from India in the 1950s, also recalled how a young Bengali girl around the age of six had noticed the campaign literature in his hands as he knocked on doors in Parkchester the day before the primary.

“As she’s bringing the mom, she’s saying ‘It’s Zohran, it’s Zohran,’ — she can’t even read but she can see his face,” Mukherjee said. “And the fact that you got them so excited that even their kids know who this guy is, I was like, ‘Oh, we are in a different world.’”

While Mukherjee said election night was exhilarating, he also offered a note of caution, recalling the thrill he’d felt when Barack Obama won the presidential election in 2008 after he’d briefly canvassed for him: “I don’t know that I would let myself feel that same kind of excitement again.”

The reason, Mukherjee explained, is “not because I’m not excited about Zohran, but because I know what needs to be done now.”

“I know that this is a victory but it also means the biggest part of our work is ahead,” Mukherjee continued. “It’s not at the ballot box where we get the victories we care about, it’s by actually organizing and keeping sustained pressure and movements alive.”

‘New Generation’

In Jackson Heights, where Mamdani won by 30 points, Ohid Euddinbhuiyan shot up from the plastic crate he had been sitting on in Diversity Plaza when asked about the young politician who’s just catapulted himself into the national spotlight.

Mamdani’s blue-and-yellow poster was everywhere across the plaza, too, his face looking out from the windows of cellphone stores and salons and a paan shop where Mohammad Kamtruzzaman was mixing a white paste called chuna while preparing the popular Indian betel leaf treat.

Mohammad Kamtruzzaman saw Mamdani speaking from his shop a few days before the election in Diversity Plaza, Jackson Heights. June 26, 2025/Alex Krales for THE CITY

“He was here a few days ago and he gave a speech here — he was very good,” Kamtruzzaman said, pointing out to the plaza. A handful of customers erupted into a cacophony in response. One voice, from a restaurant worker, emerged: “He’s young and smart, he’s not only intelligent but he’s polite. I don’t speak English very well, if I did, I would explain to you.”

Across the plaza, Ayesha A. was perusing the windows of a gold shop with her daughter and niece.

Ayesha, who withheld her last name, declined to say how she voted in the past, but said she was excited about Mamdani’s primary win because he’s young, energetic and clear about his message.

“New York is really, really expensive, and people are living like, one bedroom, five people, six people,” said Ayesha, a math teacher and immigrant from Bangladesh visiting from Queens Village, where Mamdani won along the Hillside Avenue corridor.

“This situation is not me, but I see it all the time. The students have no place, they’re living in shelters, they have so many crises … So really, really, this is very important for improvement for living.”

In Dutch Kills, the Little Bangladesh of Western Queens where Mamdani led by up to 75 points, Islam, a 21-year-old who asked only to be identified by his last name, said Mamdani has become a frequent topic of dinnertime conversations in his household ever since they learned about the candidate from social media.

While his parents, immigrants from Bangladesh, aren’t usually engaged in politics, Islam said, Mamdani quickly earned their vote between the prospect of having a South Asian mayor, his platform on affordable rent and his disapproval of the war in Gaza.

“This is one of the most recent elections that’s really sparked their interest,” Islam said. “It brings me hope, but at the same time he has to get work done.”

Several blocks from Dutch Kills playground, taxi driver MD Khan, 48, was hurrying into his yellow cab to pick up his child from school.

M.D. Khan, 48, driving his cab in Dutch Kills. June 26, 2025. Credit: Alex Krales/ THE CITY

He nonetheless stopped on hearing Mamdani’s name to talk about his support for the assemblymember who had gone on a hunger strike along with taxi drivers in 2021 to help pressure elected officials in Albany to provide them with medallion debt relief.

“This election, I already gave everything I can,” Khan said, referring to donations to Mamdani’s campaign. “You know, he’s young, and old people and young people, the thinking is different. But this is New York City, we need change.”

As Khan drove off, another taxi driver, Abu Khander, stopped to park across the street. Khander said he had never voted in a primary election until now, but turned out specifically to vote for Mamdani because his daughter had attended Bronx Science with him.

Abu Khander, 65, in front of his Taxi cab. June 26, 2025. Credit: Alex Krales/ THE CITY

“I have to support this person because he was my daughter’s classmate. That makes him like my son, too, you know?” said Khander, who was impressed by how Mamdani has united young and old people in his neighborhood. “That’s the main thing. New generation — we need, you know?”

The 65-year-old immigrant from Bangladesh said he is hopeful about the general election in November, and excited about the prospect of electing the city’s first South Asian and Muslim mayor.

“It’s a clear message for the new generation of immigrants — that the children can be more aggressive in politics, that they can be highly educated and go to school to learn,” Khader added. “It’s, like, showing them the road to go.”

This press release was produced by The City. The views expressed here are the author’s own.