7:26 P.M. Anticipating election results at a hotel near the Brooklyn Paramount, the site of Mamdani’s victory party: “Around that time, we started to hear a rumor of an exit poll that didn’t look as good as we’d hoped. Waiting for it to be called felt like an eternity.”
Photo: Sinna Nasseri
The final hours of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign were a blur of public speeches and private moments that capped a year of relentless work by the Democratic candidate and his team. Photographer Sinna Nasseri was with the assemblyman from morning to night on Election Day, documenting the whirlwind as Mamdani cast his own vote, got a shave, and made final pleas to voters on the street. Nasseri captured the anxious minutes after polls closed, when the candidate, his family, and his top advisers were holed up in a hotel, waiting for the results to come in. Then, joy. Shortly after 9:30 p.m., the Associated Press called the race for Mamdani, concluding a historic election marked by record voter turnout — a win that will make the 34-year-old New York City’s the youngest mayor in more than a century.
8:04 A.M. After voting at Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in Astoria, Mamdani heads to his campaign headquarters in Chelsea.
10:34 A.M. “I was trying to approach each part of the day in and of itself and not think too beyond it.”
11:27 A.M. En route to the barbershop with an egg-avocado- and-cheese.
11:44 A.M. “A lot of the day is trying to take in everything that it took to get to the finish line and knowing this was the final opportunity to speak to New Yorkers.” The barbershop offers a rare moment of quiet. “I usually fall asleep when I sit in that chair.”
2:32 P.M. At a stop near a Lower East Side polling site: “I ran into the comedian Tim Robinson, which I was just so excited about. I’m a huge fan, and I was quite starstruck.”
2:59 P.M. On the way to the Election Night war room the campaign set up at a hotel suite in Brooklyn.
7:00 P.M. “There’s a phrase I grew up with in Hindi that translates into ‘turning the key’ — when you’re really trying to make a point and you’re underlining it.” Mamdani, senior adviser Morris Katz, right, and speechwriter Julian Gerson make last-minute tweaks to his speech. Still hungry despite the jitters, he says, “I can always eat, unless it’s Ramadan.”
7:30 P.M. “The final hours of an election are oftentimes the worst ones, where you don’t have any real information so you’re looking to extrapolate from whatever little is being shared.”
7:39 P.M. “It’s a cocktail of exhaustion and excitement.”
9:12 P.M. Mamdani and his wife, artist Rama Duwaji, waiting for poll results: “It was surreal to think the work we had done for more than a year would come down to these 20, 30, 40, 50 minutes — and then it started to happen so fast.”
9:35 P.M. The Associated Press calls the race as the room erupts with “excitement and joy and gratitude. The team sitting around me is also the team that made that night possible.”
9:37 P.M. “It was a beautiful moment.”
9:41 P.M. “We tried in desperation to get New York 1 on TV, and we couldn’t pull it off. So we had it on a computer, and we were going back and forth between CNN and MSNBC on TV, then looking through Twitter and the New York Times on our phones.”
9:51 P.M. Mamdani with his chief aide, Elle Bisgaard-Church: “There were a lot of calls that came in.”
11:11 P.M. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez backstage at Mamdani’s official watch party at the Brooklyn Paramount: “To have had her support through the primary and the general, in small moments and big ones, has reminded myself and so many others who are part of this campaign that we are part of a larger struggle, and it’s a struggle focused on dignity for working people.”
11:38 P.M. “I was quite overcome by the faces of those that I saw in the crowd. There were people there who had helped to raise me. There were New Yorkers who had knocked on doors months before petitioning. There were so many who had believed in this when it was but an idea, and to celebrate their victory, our victory, all together at once — it was a joy.”
11:44 P.M. With his parents, Mahmood Mamdani and Mira Nair, after his acceptance speech. “I would not be the man I am without them. They were right there on that stage through it all, sometimes in view and sometimes out of view.”
Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism.
If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the November 17, 2025, issue of
New York Magazine.
Want more stories like this one? Subscribe now
to support our journalism and get unlimited access to our coverage.
If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the November 17, 2025, issue of
New York Magazine.