Sometime tonight, we will probably learn that democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani will be the next mayor of New York City. Since the thirty-four-year-old state assembly member became the Democratic nominee and front-runner in the race, the city and the American public broadly have become increasingly familiar with Mamdani, a largely unknown candidate who polled at 1 percent when he first launched his campaign a year ago. But Jacobin has been covering Zohran’s campaign from the beginning.

In fact, we’ve been publishing articles about and interviews with the would-be mayor since his victorious 2020 campaign for the New York State Assembly. We interviewed Mamdani just after he took office in 2021 as part of the wave of democratic socialists ― including himself, Phara Souffrant Forrest, Marcela Mitaynes, and Jabari Brisport ― who joined Julia Salazar in the state legislature that year.

We continued to catch up with Mamdani during his time in the legislature as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)–endorsed bloc in Albany grew and socialists established a foothold in the New York City Council. In August 2021, in what now feels like a taste of things to come, Zohran talked to us just after Andrew Cuomo resigned as governor and explained why he was hopeful about New York State’s post-Cuomo future, when he told us that “so much more is possible now that we have a New York without Andrew Cuomo as its governor.”