It was October 26, six days before polls open on November 4, more than 13,000 people filled Forest Hill Stadium in Queens, New York City. Zohran Mamdani posed a question that has preoccupied United States politics since its founding, “Who is allowed to be free?” The speech carried the same theme that had defined his campaign from the first day: dignity, affordability, and a belief that political authority should be earned through conversation rather than patronage.Mamdani began with a reminder of how the campaign started.“When we launched this campaign one year and three days ago,” he said, “there was not a single television camera there to cover it.” Pollsters had placed him at one per cent. He noted, with a humour his supporters now expect, that he had been “tied with noted candidate ‘someone else’.”That early indifference from the political class became a recurring point in the campaign. In the months that followed, he refused to build his visibility by courting the usual gatekeepers. He insisted that endorsements did not decide elections. “Politics is obsessed with endorsements. That’s what made Cuomo seem inevitable in the primary,” Mamdani told Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. “But we’ve shown that the days of endorsements deciding elections are over. It’s the people who build a campaign that win it.” By June’s primary, those people had delivered. Mamdani won by 13 percentage points, claiming the most votes in any citywide primary in New York history. The result challenged long-held assumptions about how power is assembled in the city.The Mamdani campaign operated on a fundamentally different architecture. Rather than aligning with senior figures of the Democratic Party, Mamdani built his candidacy around a volunteer force that, by his own account, grew to more than 90,000 people. In his interview with Jon Stewart, he described how “canvassers knocked on doors after 12-hour shifts” and “students persuaded neighbours who had never voted before,” adding that the campaign “had to tell supporters to stop donating because small contributions had surged beyond capacity.” In his address to supporters in Queens, Mamdani framed this grassroots mobilisation as evidence that “New Yorkers knocked doors between 12-hour shifts at work and phone-banked until their fingers were numb,” asserting that “this, my friends, was your movement, and it always will be.”This method shaped the campaign’s encounters with sceptics. Mamdani did not avoid those who had questions and concerns. In the speech in Queens, he described visiting streets that had swung to the right after the 2024 presidential election. “They told us they felt disconnected from a Democratic Party that had grown comfortable with mediocrity,” he said. “They told us rent was too expensive. So were groceries. So was child care.” He did not dismiss their grievances. He used the same canvassing teams to return to those blocks week after week, explaining policy details, correcting misinformation, and setting out the commitments he would keep if elected.Some New Yorkers had been exposed to months of attack ads that cast him as unsafe, inexperienced, and irresponsible. During a radio appearance, the disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo laughed when a radio host Sid Rosenberg, who had earlier labelled him an “animal” and a “jihadist” — ended the show by branding him a “terrorist.” “God forbid, another 9/11. Can you imagine Mamdani in the seat?” Cuomo commented.“He’d be cheering,” Rosenberg reacted and both laughed. The attacks did not shift the focus of his campaign. He returned, again and again, to affordability figures and policy detail and his response in public stayed fixed on what he called “the work of dignity,” not the insult.Speaking to Stewart, he described, “I don’t blame New Yorkers who are wary” he said on Stewart’s programme. “They’ve seen millions of dollars in ads telling them to fear me. So, when they meet me and I don’t strangle them in the first 30 seconds, it’s already a surprise.”He then listed the policies he would enact: “I’ll freeze the rent… I’ll make buses fast and free… I’ll deliver universal childcare… I won’t make halal food mandatory.”The detail of these exchanges mattered. Throughout the campaign, he argued that public safety was inseparable from affordability. “People have to be safe — but safety isn’t just the NYPD,” he told Stewart. “It’s jobs that pay enough to stay, homes that keep you stable.” When Mamdani invoked Bernie Sanders in his final election campaign speech, it was genealogical. He said: “I stand before you tonight only because the senator dared to stand alone for so long. I speak the language of democratic socialism only because he spoke it first.” He also distilled the lesson he carries forward, that for Democrats to win, Democrats need not become Republican.The mayoral race tested that premise. After Donald Trump returned to the presidency, party officials said the only path to victory was to mimic Republican messaging. Mamdani rejected this approach. “This was a moment where it seemed our political horizon was narrowing,” he said. “And in this moment, New York, you had a choice — a choice to retreat or to fight.” The choice, in his telling, was to stop listening to consultants and to start listening to people. The campaign’s growth unsettled high-profile donors who had grown accustomed to shaping citywide races. “The Hamptons was basically in group therapy about the mayoral race,” he said, citing the New York Times. Mamdani’s political vocabulary often returned to freedom. Not as metaphor, but as an administrative principle. “Dignity is another way of saying freedom,” he told the crowd at Queens. What the campaign ultimately demonstrated was a model of political work that moved against the grain of the city’s usual patterns. It relied on people rather than patrons. It treated disagreement as part of the civic process.When Mamdani walked off stage that night in Queens, the chant echoed the campaign’s central promise, that New York belongs to those who build it. He had opened the evening with a line directed at the crowd: “A politician is only as good as the team around them.” The team, by then, was enormous. And it had put him within reach of City Hall.Pius Fozan is a photojournalist, researcher at the Media and Journalism Research Center, and regular contributor to The European Correspondent, Scroll, and The Wire.