How Zohran Mamdani Bucked the Establishment and Won Election — in Middle School

In the fall of 2004, with the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Iraq War fresh in their minds, middle-schoolers at New York City’s Bank Street School for Children held a mock presidential election. 

The rules were simple: Only eighth-graders could run. Seventh-graders could vote, but “had to just sit and watch,” as former student John McAuliff remembers, playing as special interest groups.

The seventh-graders weren’t having it.

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Eighth-graders that fall “weren’t interested in politics,” recalled classmate Evan Roth Smith. “Meanwhile, our year was just chock full of, as it turned out, people who were already obsessed with politics.”

Among them was a bright, charismatic, soccer-loving 12-year-old named Zohran Mamdani. That fall, he, McAuliff and Smith plotted a stealth campaign that would overturn the game’s political establishment. Smith would be Mamdani’s running mate, McAuliff their campaign manager.

Among their key plays: Appeal to the youth vote, said McAuliff — in this case “eight-year-olds to 12-year-olds, basically,” who felt they were being taken for granted by the simulation’s two major parties.

After persuading teachers to let them run an independent-party primary — other kids ran as Greens, Libertarians, Communists and the like — Mamdani and his friends created their own entity: the COW Party, promising free chocolate milk at lunch. They created posters that riffed on the “Got Milk?” ads and, after persuading a classmate representing the National Organization for Women to endorse them, adopted the slogan, “I Want a COW Right NOW!”

“We were all sort of trying to poke holes in the world around us and trying to make it a more fair, caring place,” said McAuliff. 

Twenty-one years later, teachers and classmates who watched Mamdani campaign in 2004 — and who saw him advance through Bank Street more broadly — say the storied, progressive private school, located since 1970 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, played a key role in forging his public personality and nurturing his love of politics. They say it also informed the improbable insurgent campaign in which the avowed Democratic Socialist state assemblyman became New York City’s mayor on New Year’s Day.

“The school did the right thing by letting a bunch of kids who were really into something play a bigger role in it than the kids who weren’t,” said Smith, now a pollster and political consultant. “That was prescient in terms of exactly what Zohran did over this last year.”

In its wisdom, Smith said, the school in 2004 enabled Mamdani and his pals to engage in a timeless political maneuver: If the establishment isn’t delivering, “someone has to beat down the door.”

‘The fifth-graders loved him’

Founded more than a century ago in New York’s West Village, the school, part of a larger graduate school of education, has long espoused a hands-on philosophy of learning. First-graders, for instance, spend their entire year exploring how people are connected, starting in the classroom and expanding to the neighborhood via field trips and interviews. In a culminating project, they build a detailed neighborhood out of materials like cardboard, wood and clay, and create original plays that explore the life of the city.

Fifth-graders spend the whole year studying China — its geography, culture and history. The year culminates in a wide-ranging debate around Mao Zedong’s leadership and impact on Chinese society.

During last year’s New York mayoral campaign, Mamdani’s connection to the school surfaced only occasionally, most notably in a classmate’s remembrances of 2004. Otherwise the school served almost entirely as a stand-in for Mamdani’s perceived privilege and elitism: The New York Post dubbed it “posh” and a lengthy piece on the mayor in Britain’s conservative Spectator devoted exactly nine words to Bank Street, calling it “a pricey private school known for its progressive commitments.” 

The Daily Mail called it “a private, ultra-progressive academy long favored by Manhattan’s liberal elite” and noted both its high upper-school tuition — now north of $66,000 — and the fact that students address teachers by their first names.  

More often, Mamdani’s championing of Democratic Socialism simply drove conservative Republicans and moderate Democrats crazy: After he won the city’s Democratic primary in June, President Donald Trump called Mamdani “a 100% Communist Lunatic.” 

In November, after Mamdani beat his nearest opponent, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, by more than 200,000 votes, Trump invited the mayor-elect to the White House, where he changed his tune, saying, “We have one thing in common: We want this city of ours that we love to do very well.”

Born in Uganda, Mamdani arrived in New York City when he was 7, the child of high-flying intellectuals: His mother, Mira Nair, is a well-known Indian-American filmmaker whose credits include Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding and The Namesake. His father, Mahmood Mamdani, is an anthropology professor at Columbia University.

As a student at the tiny school, Mamdani impressed just about everybody he met.

Classmate McAuliff recalled him as “extremely generous and, even at that age, extremely charismatic, which is an age where you don’t even really know what that is yet.” A bit of that charisma likely rubbed off on McAuliff, who’d go on to work in the Biden administration and win an upset victory in November for a Virginia state house seat long held by Republicans.

Brooke Nalle, Mamdani’s seventh-grade humanities teacher, recalled his “dimply, bright, sweet smile” and remembered him as “incredibly adept at speaking to adults.”

“He is truly the most charismatic person I have ever met in my life,” she said. 

Nalle still remembers the day in 2004 when Mamdani asked if she needed a personal email account. At the time, Google was offering Gmail, its new service, on an invitation-only basis. Somehow, Mamdani had invitations to share. Two decades later, Nalle laughed at the memory: “I am *******@gmail.com because of Zohran, which is just bananas.” 

She and others recalled him not just as charismatic but generous with his time and attention, especially with younger classmates. 

“You can always tell a kid is a good kid, a good egg, when they are nice to the younger children,” said Nalle. “The fifth-graders loved him, and he was really sweet to them.”

She noted that Bank Street, for years located in a six-story highrise off Broadway, in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights neighborhood, at the time required students to eat lunch in their classrooms. Most days teachers ate with them, and most days Mamdani brought “this delicious snack” in his lunch known as a kathi roll: One for him, another for her.

Striving to ‘live democratically’

Mamdani’s state legislative and transition offices did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Several who knew him in this period say the school played a key part in his personal and political development — not to mention his adventurous spirit, his ease with being in public and his ability to work both sides of an issue.

Founded in 1916 by philosopher and educator Lucy Sprague Mitchell, a peer of education pioneer John Dewey, Bank Street College of Education was among the first to champion child-centered learning as an alternative to the memorization-heavy rote learning in vogue at the time. 

Originally called the Bureau of Educational Experiments, it brought together educators, social workers and psychologists to study how children actually learn — rare for its time. 

That led to several overlapping missions, with Bank Street over the years training thousands of educators even as it turned to its School for Children as an in-house research lab for new ideas.

The school’s influence has been widespread, affecting even our popular culture: In 1921, Mitchell made the case, in a seminal book, that children’s stories should be anchored in the real world and familiar objects, not in fairy stories or fantasy lands. She created Bank Street’s Writers Lab, a workshop that nurtured the careers of many children’s authors, including Margaret Wise Brown, whose 1947 picture book Goodnight Moon turned the common objects of a child’s bedroom into a perennial bestseller. 

Another Writers Lab alumnus, author Maurice Sendak, once told an interviewer that the fearsome creatures in 1963’s Where the Wild Things Are aren’t fantasy characters — they’re his unkempt, Old World Jewish relatives, who’d “pick you up and hug you and kiss you. ‘Aggghh. Oh, we could eat you up.’” 

The school’s longtime credo aims not only to encourage children’s intellectual curiosity, flexibility and “gentleness,” but urges them to “live democratically” inside and outside of school.

Key to living democratically, said Shael Polakow-Suransky, Bank Street’s president, is the ability to understand different people’s perspectives.

A former senior deputy chancellor of New York City Schools, Polakow-Suransky said Mamdani’s experiences at Bank Street may well play a large role not just in how he campaigned but in how he governs: Education makes up 37% of the city’s budget, with “tremendous opportunities” to shape the lives of children and families. 

Mamdani has already put forth an early childhood proposal that promises free care for every child from six weeks to five years old, offering child care workers wages that match those of public school teachers. 

But he also faces the daunting task of educating a huge influx of migrant students that over the past several years have both challenged the system and, in truth, kept its enrollment from shrinking further.

Inaugurated on Jan. 1, Mamdani has moved quickly on education, naming a new schools chancellor a day before he was sworn in: Kamar Samuels currently oversees Manhattan’s District 3, which covers the Upper West Side, Morningside Heights and parts of Harlem. A former teacher in the Bronx with nearly 20 years of experience, Samuels also led school integration efforts and worked to scale back gifted programs.

Mamdani also reversed course on a campaign promise to end mayoral control of schools, saying he’d ask the state legislature for a continuation of the policy. New York’s mayor picks the chancellor and appoints most members of the Panel for Educational Policy, which oversees schools.

Mamdani on Wednesday promised to enact mayoral control differently: “I have been skeptical of mayoral control in the past,” he said, “even at times going as far as wanting to end the system entirely.” But he acknowledged that New Yorkers “need to know where the buck stops: with me.”

Notably, said Polakow-Suransky, Mamdani may well rely on his alma mater for help with one key task: Keeping schools in the nation’s largest district staffed and running smoothly: Bank Street is now the city’s foremost principal training program, minting as many as 300 new principals a year — and 500 to 600 teachers. 

‘A student who didn’t want to play the thing that was easy’

After Bank Street, the young Mamdani attended the city’s selective public Bronx High School of Science. He’d later earn a bachelor’s degree at Bowdoin College in Maine.

Asked whether it’s a bad look to have an alumnus of an exclusive private school become the new mayor, Polakow-Suransky shrugged. “A lot of our leaders go to private schools,” he said. “It’s rare to have a Democratic Socialist leader, and so that’s why people are asking that question.”

As New York City private schools go, he said, Bank Street is a bit different, not just in terms of philosophy and pedagogy. Students of color comprise a majority, and two-thirds now receive financial aid — far more than in Mamdani’s era. It’s also one of the most diverse private schools in the city, both racially and socioeconomically.

Much of the Bank Street curriculum still relies on immersing students in role-playing exercises, asking them to step into the shoes of people they might not always agree with.

Relying on simulations “creates a lived experience in a classroom setting that feels very real,” said Polakow-Suransky. “It sticks with you. It teaches you a lot of the dilemmas and questions and skills that you need to be an active participant in a democracy.”

Longtime humanities teacher Ali McKersie, who trained at Bank Street and taught there for 26 years, said founder Mitchell believed creative, experiential learning that fosters ethical development can help strengthen democracy. 

As the eighth grade humanities teacher in 2005-2006, McKersie introduced Mamdani and his classmates to the foundational principles of democracy in ancient Greece, then “fast-forwarded” to American democracy with an extensive judicial branch simulation loosely based on the First Amendment principles of the 1969 Tinker v. Des Moines case, which granted students the same free-speech rights in school as elsewhere. The case pitted junior and senior high school students against their school after they vowed to wear black armbands in silent protest against the Vietnam War. 

Mamdani, she recalled, argued on the side of the school board, which wanted to limit expression to minimize disruption.

From there they undertook a 12-week congressional simulation, taking on the roles of actual legislators. Mamdani, the scion of Upper West Side cultural royalty, played  Lincoln Chafee, the moderate Republican senator from Rhode Island. 

“I remember that being a really interesting choice,” said McKersie. Mamdani “was always a student who didn’t want to play the thing that was easy. He wanted to be challenged.”

More to the point, she said, he liked being a consensus-builder. 

McKersie recalled that the students that year in Room 420 — yes, they got the joke about the number associated with cannabis culture — were “really an exceptional group of young people. They wanted to dig into tax policy! I just remember being surprised that they were really interested in the mechanisms of funding around bills.”

So in addition to debating the usual suspects — gun control, abortion, the environment — tax codes were on the table, she said. “They were asking really fundamental questions around equity, and what’s what’s equitable. What does justice look like at the level of minutiae, at the legislative level?”

The simulation that year became such a part of the students’ fiber that McKersie would sometimes have to throw them out of the classroom at the end of class just to end debates. They’d carry it to lunch and would often still be discussing issues after school. 

One morning, she showed up to class expecting students to spend the day writing a bill, only to be presented with the finished version. They’d stayed up late, they said, hammering out the details over the phone. 

In that seminal 2004 mock election, classmate McCauliff recalled, the trio “got very granular” about the vote counting. Each class had only 40 or 45 people, so they were “able to figure out who Zohran needed to talk to, figure out what each person wanted to hear about.” 

In the end, the COWs won the independent primary and took on the establishment. The granular approach apparently worked: Mamdani and Smith won by a single vote.

For Smith, it was a confirmation, for all of the striving seventh-graders, “that you can just go for it and try it and beat down the door. And sometimes it works.”