It’s just after sunset on Halloween evening in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope, and Zohran Mamdani is booking it up Seventh Avenue as if he were a costumed eight-year-old who’d just heard there was a house giving out full-sized candy bars a few blocks away.
The 34-year-old Democratic mayoral candidate—dressed in his usual non-costume of a navy suit and dark striped tie—is surrounded by his aides, two security guards, and hundreds of shrieking, delighted onlookers. He gamely greets and poses for photos with as many of them as he can: a Michael Myers, a Cher Horowitz, a pair of Ghostfaces, several Princess Elsas, countless KPop Demon Hunters. As he makes his way up the street, a teeming crowd forms in his wake.
At one corner, when a curious passerby inquires (as many others are doing), “Who is that?” a member of his team begins to reply, “the mayor,” before she catches herself and clarifies, “Zohran Mamdani, candidate for mayor.”
A little earlier, Mamdani draws a similar—if slightly more contained—swarm just down Seventh at Community Bookstore, the borough’s oldest operating bookshop, for a Halloween meet-and-greet pit stop that had been planned by Moms for Mamdani, a local organizing group. A quintessential kissing-babies photo op, it’s one of many New York City micro-locales that Mamdani has visited in the last 48 hours, among them a hospital in Elmhurst, the taxi-driver queue at LaGuardia Airport, and a senior center on the Lower East Side.
