On the first minute of New Year’s Day, Zohran Mamdani will quietly raise his right hand inside a circle of family while the rest of the city is still humming with midnight cheers. State Attorney General Letitia James will speak the oath that makes the 32-year-old from Queens the 112th mayor of New York, a private moment meant to honor the immigrant parents who raised him and the neighborhood friends who once handed out flyers on subway platforms. No cameras, no speeches, just the soft scratch of a pen on paper and the knowledge that the job he campaigned for is finally real.
A few hours later the same morning, the public party begins. Broadway below Canal Street will close to traffic and open to music, hot coffee, and folding chairs for anyone who wants to sit. Bernie Sanders, the white-haired senator who turned “democratic socialism” into a household phrase, will stand on the City Hall steps and give the ceremonial oath all over again, this time for the crowds. Sanders says he wants to remind the country that cities can still choose people over profit, and Mamdani—who grew up watching Sanders videos in college dorms—calls the moment “a promise kept to every kid who was told their dreams were too big.”
The promises that carried Mamdani to victory are simple enough to fit on a subway poster: buses without fares, childcare without bills, rents that stop climbing, and grocery stores owned by the city so fresh food stops feeling like a luxury. He plans to pay for these ideas by asking the wealthiest New Yorkers to pay a little more, the same way previous generations funded parks, subways, and public colleges when the city was bold enough to believe in itself. Critics call the numbers fuzzy, but supporters say they finally hear a politician speaking the language of their kitchen-table math: if rent, diapers, and MetroCards keep rising, paychecks disappear before the week is half gone.
The incoming team looks familiar on purpose. Dean Fuleihan, who helped balance budgets under Mayor de Blasio, will return as first deputy mayor, and dozens of former agency lawyers, housing specialists, and mental-health directors have signed on again. Mamdani jokes that he is “stealing the best players from the last season,” but allies say the real plan is to avoid the rookie mistakes that sink fresh administrations. Even the choice of midnight oath followed by a daytime festival copies de Blasio’s 2018 playbook, though this time the guest list is bigger: forty thousand tickets have been printed, with room for fifty thousand shoulders on the asphalt if the weather holds.
Between the brass band and the security barriers, the new mayor hopes people will notice one quiet difference. Past inaugurates reserved prime spots for donors, lobbyists, and celebrities; Mamdani’s team used a lottery to pick most of the four thousand guests on the steps, and the block party beyond needs nothing but patience to enter. Outgoing Mayor Eric Adams has not said whether he will attend—he was last spotted traveling in Georgia—but Mamdani insists the ceremony is not about handshakes with the old guard. “It’s about handing the keys to the city back to the people who actually live here,” he told reporters, voice cracking slightly after a long campaign. When Sanders finishes the oath and the confetti drifts onto Broadway, the new mayor will walk east toward the subway, swipe his own MetroCard, and ride home next to neighbors who finally feel like the journey belongs to them too.
