Every mayor of New York depends on a winning coalition. A recent poll suggests that Democratic frontrunner Zohran Mamdani has consolidated support among a majority of foreign-born voters and religious groups other than Christians and Jews. His meteoric rise tells the story of a new electoral alliance, built on a constituency that is socially conservative in many respects yet has found common cause with the hard-Left: Muslim New Yorkers.
In 2016, 768,000 Muslims lived in New York City. Less than a decade later, that figure has risen to about one million, placing the city’s Muslim population roughly on par with its estimated 960,000 Jews.
With his Muslim, Ugandan-Indian immigrant background, Mamdani understood this dynamic better than his rivals. Despite a thin record of accomplishment over his five years as an assemblyman, he became known for a 15-day hunger strike to secure debt relief for taxi drivers, many of them Muslim. He expressly invoked his faith as he broke the strike, timed to break the Ramadan fast.
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John Ketcham is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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