Desi voters are flexing power — and Zohran Mamdani wooed them hard

Zohran Mamdani owes his spectacular political rise to one New York City demographic above all others: South Asians.

And while they make up only 5% of the city’s population, this rapidly growing ethnic group is making itself heard.

South Asian turnout in June’s Democratic primary increased by 40% compared to 2021.

This was no accident. Mamdani’s strategy included a series of direct appeals to Desi New Yorkers — underscoring the increasing importance of these voters to the future of both NYC and the country.

On Feb. 5, when Emerson College released its first mayoral primary poll, a plurality of Asians (20.8%) named former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who had not yet officially entered the race, as their first choice — while just 2.6% listed Mamdani.

But subsequent polls showed the Democratic Socialist making steady gains, and by May, Emerson found the Asian vote split evenly between the two.

Clearly, the politically adroit Mamdani had found a lane to exploit.

How did he do it? With relentless, culturally sensitive outreach to the city’s South Asian Muslim communities — particularly its Bangladeshis, Indians and Pakistanis.

He is, after all, South Asian and Muslim himself, born in Uganda to a Punjabi-Indian mother and a Gujarati-Indian father.

Mamdani has been courting South Asian communities since his first run for the state Assembly, crediting its low-propensity voters with delivering that initial victory.

“We spoke about issues that disproportionately impact our community,” he said in August 2020, “such as the economic plight of taxi drivers — and did so in the languages of our homes, sending mailers in Urdu, Hindi, Nepali, Tibetan, Punjabi, Gujarati and Bangla.”

He wooed them even more fervently in the months leading up to the Democratic mayoral primary.

In January, Mamdani released a social-media campaign ad that invoked the struggles of halal cart vendors to argue for streamlining small business permits. It racked up close to 20 million views.

A few months later, he posted an ad in which he spoke easily in Hindi, featuring images of South Asian grocery stores in Queens, scenes from Bollywood movies and plastic cups of mango lassi, which he used to illustrate ranked-choice voting.

Two days before the primary election, Mamdani and Shahana Hanif, a Bangladeshi City Council member from Kensington, filmed a similar ad in Bangla, this time using Bengali sweets called “mishti” to explain ranked-choice voting.

In the primary, he defeated Cuomo by 35 percentage points in this Brooklyn neighborhood, known as “Little Bangladesh.”

All through the primary campaign, Mamdani visited organizations like the Sikh Cultural Society and Baba Makhan Shah Lubana Sikh Center in South Richmond Hill and Makki Masjid, a mosque and Muslim cultural center, in Flatbush.

His identity-based appeals — as well as his open hostility toward the state of Israel and Zionists — were a constant feature of both his primary and general-election campaigns.

In fact one of his final ads, released just this week, had him speaking in Arabic — and featured a Palestinian flag.

South Asians are hardly New York’s largest demographic group, but they are growing fast — from 330,000 in 2019 to about 450,000 today.

And while not all of them are eligible to vote, Mamdani’s ability to mobilize large swaths of these low-propensity voters is impressive.

His performance offers two valuable lessons for Republicans and Democrats alike.

First, take South Asian voters seriously. Their votes may soon become decisive: New York City’s Bangladeshi population, for example, has tripled in the last decade.

Second, don’t treat South Asians as a monolith. This broad category can obscure important cultural, religious, and linguistic differences among subgroups.

Indian voters differ from Bangladeshi voters — and Bangladeshi voters differ from Pakistani voters.

Mamdani was masterful at appealing to each of these subgroups with tailored messages.

These intra-racial distinctions can be politically significant: In the mayoral race, Mamdani engaged heavily with Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and Indian Sikhs, but less so with Indian Hindus, many of whom strongly oppose him — in part because Mamdani has denounced India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a “war criminal.”