At raucous rally, Mamdani argues he’s leading a movement beyond the NYC mayor’s race

By Edward-Isaac Dovere, CNN

(CNN) — Declaring that he is leading a “movement that won the battle over the soul of the Democratic Party,” Zohran Mamdani used a raucous rally with over 3,000 supporters in Manhattan’s Washington Heights on Monday night to assert his mayoral campaign as proof of a politics much bigger than his bid for City Hall.

The Democratic nominee and proud democratic socialist, who almost overnight after his surprise primary win in June became a national superstar, has a wide lead in the polls. And though many who rallied for him on Monday to kick off the final stretch into November stressed to the crowd that they can’t take the election for granted, the candidate used his own time at the microphone to urge them to see what they are doing as rebutting what he repeatedly referred to as the “darkness” of President Donald Trump’s administration and the half-measures of years of Democratic leadership.

“Over the last nine months, we have watched the man with the most power in the world expend enormous energy targeting those with the least,” Mamdani said. “Our movement is a movement where we know exactly who and what we are fighting for. We are not afraid of our own ideas. For too long we have tried not to lose. Now it is time that we win.”

Mamdani connected what he is trying to force out of the Democratic Party to a tradition of forcing bigger change out of other moments that seemed hopeless to the organizers.

“The same questions asked of us were asked of organized labor, were asked the civil rights movement, were asked of any who had the nerve to demand a future they could not yet see. Could they not wait? Could they see that they were asking too much?” Mamdani said. “They knew that we do not get to determine the scale of the crisis that we face. We only get to decide how we respond.”

Mamdani only mentioned Andrew Cuomo, the former governor who lost to him in the primary but is running against him on an independent line, to slough him off as either the same as Trump or the same as years of failed Democratic thinking. That’s about as much mention as Cuomo got at the event, which also featured appearances from WNBA star Natasha Cloud and former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, beyond mocking like Brooklyn city councilman Chi Ossé calling him that “sad, sad, Rumpelstiltskin-like figure.”

Mamdani’s sights were set beyond the election, ripping into the billionaires who he said had described him as an “existential threat” to New York.

“I am here to admit something: They are right,” Mamdani said, to cheers. “We are an existential threat to billionaires who think their money can buy our democracy. We are an existential threat to a broken status quo that buries the voices of working people beneath corporations. And we are an existential threat to a New York where a hard day’s work isn’t enough to earn you a good night’s rest.”

But Mamdani clearly sees those existential threats as not limited to just New York.

“We are living in the times that we read about. I know that for many of us, when we look back at moments in history that rhyme with today, where tyranny loomed and the state-imposed violence with sinister glee. We ask ourselves what we would have done. We need not wonder. That time is now,” he said. “And I am proud to look out onto this crowd at New Yorkers who amidst this despair have continued to believe in a world better than this.”

Mamdani wasn’t the only one to use the night to address national politics. Letitia James, the New York state attorney general indicted last week at Trump’s urging, entered the theater to a two-minute standing ovation in what was her first public appearance since the president’s former personal lawyer brought charges against her.

For a few seconds, she held her fist in the air in resistance.

“I stand on solid rock. I will not bow, I will not break, I will not bend, I will not capitulate,” James said. “You come for me, you got to come through all of us. All of us. We’re all in this together.”

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