Zohran Mamdani once walked the length of Manhattan. He took Broadway. It was nighttime.<\/p>\n
To hear him tell it, he \u201cset off\u201d on the campaign trek \u201cas the sun began to drop in the sky,\u201d beginning \u201cin Inwood, where music played and neighbors set out dominoes on the sidewalk,\u201d making his way downtown to the sounds of rattling subway cars and instruments tuning at Lincoln Center, past waiters juggling plates, garbage trucks weaving through the streets and fishmongers carrying in \u201ctomorrow\u2019s wares.\u201d<\/p>\n
The sun is always rising and setting in Mamdani\u2019s New York. His day does not merely start and end. Rather, dawn breaks \u2013 its light pouring in the windows of his still-new home on the East River \u2013\u00a0falling hours later on the Hudson, slowly dimming Riverside Drive and the West Side streets he once flew down on a Razor scooter.<\/p>\n
Mamdani \u2013\u00a0at opportune moments, and more than many of his predecessors \u2013\u00a0does not speak. He speechifies.<\/p>\n
The New York City mayor has been vaunted as a generational political communicator over his near-year in office and for much of the campaign season that preceded it. But it\u2019s often his short-form videos and digital strategy, seen as load-bearing pillars of his campaign\u2019s success, that are shown as the primary evidence of that talent.<\/p>\n
More quietly, from campaign hotel rooms to the City Hall bullpen, from pen-streaked rough drafts to final text scrolling on teleprompters, Mamdani has sought to resurrect a more old-fashioned style of political communication: Oratory, or the capital-S Speech.<\/p>\n
You hear it, of course, in his election night victory speeches, his inaugural address, his 100 days address. All built-in landmarks in which his predecessors, too, reached for slightly loftier language, dug for slightly richer imagery.<\/p>\n
But you also see it in moments Mamdani has created. A July 3 video address<\/a> with new American citizens. A treatise on Irish republicanism<\/a> rich with references to James Connolly and The Pogues that helped clean up a flubbed off-the-cuff answer<\/a> on Irish unification. And in his most personal speech<\/a>, a reflection of growing up Muslim in New York, delivered amid Islamophobic attacks on the campaign trail.<\/p>\n In all of these moments, Mamdani, the son of a film director and a college professor and published author, has crafted a distinct style that borrows from history, leans heavily on rhetorical devices like alliteration and parallelism, and stretches metaphors to satisfying completion. He often seems to be directing scenes of New York like a movie, speaking to all five senses and reaching for whatever sixth sense is closest to the heart.<\/p>\n \u201cFingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery bike handlebars, knuckles scarred from kitchen burns. These are not hands that have been allowed to hold power,\u201d Mamdani said during his general election night victory speech last November, reading intently from a teleprompter. \u201cAnd yet over the last 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater. Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it. The future is in our hands.\u201d<\/p>\n A short-lived rapper, Mamdani\u2019s voice doesn\u2019t beat so much as it lilts. But his message is often bracing. He seems more comfortable advancing a broadside if it\u2019s prewritten. No off-the-cuff comment has riled his doubters and critics as much as the celebration of the \u201cwarmth of collectivism\u201d written into his inaugural address<\/a>. He\u2019s never cut as deep at President Donald Trump as when he told him last November to \u201cturn the volume up<\/a>\u201d in his prepared general election victory remarks.<\/p>\n How much Mamdani\u2019s formal speechmaking resonates compared to his other tools of communication is unclear \u2013\u00a0though his ode to the Knicks was heard round the world<\/a>. But the overwhelming impression these speeches leave is that Mamdani would like to be known as a great American orator \u2013\u00a0harkening back to an older, possibly hibernating, political tradition.<\/p>\n Speechwriters for former mayors and other elected officials across the ideological spectrum believe he is on his way. \u201cI think he understands the fundamental essence of what it means to make a good speech, which is that it needs to be grounded in language that is ambitious, but also language that\u2019s beautiful,\u201d said Camonghne Felix, a poet and former speechwriter for politicians including ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren.<\/p>\n Felix argued that former Gov. Mario Cuomo\u2019s oft-quoted refrain, \u201cYou campaign in poetry; you govern in prose\u201d is often misunderstood. \u201cGovernance is a poetic tool as well. I think politicians who are best at governance understand that beauty as an oratory tool is not just a tool, but it is the essence of why people are attracted to things. It\u2019s the essence of what makes people pay attention to things. People want to respond to beauty.\u201d<\/p>\n Let it still rhyme<\/p>\n Calling the elder Cuomo a \u201cgreat New Yorker,\u201d Mamdani referenced that famous line in his general election victory speech: \u201cIf that must be true, let the prose we write still rhyme, and let us build a shining city for all.\u201d<\/p>\n A year before that, Mamdani launched his mayoral campaign in Long Island City with a brief speech. It didn\u2019t rhyme.<\/p>\n It was a perfectly serviceable address for the moment \u2013 it told his biography, laid down his three-part campaign platform and set forward a vision of lifting up working-class New Yorkers. But it didn\u2019t quote from history. It lacked the varied cadence that he\u2019d come to find persuasive in his later speeches. In it, Mamdani referred to New York as \u201cour wild, beautiful city,\u201d but skipped the scenes and characters he\u2019d later rely on to paint its wildness and beauty. Even his favorite oratorical stamp<\/a> \u2013\u00a0\u201cfor too long\u201d \u2013\u00a0was missing.<\/p>\n \u201cThere weren\u2019t even really a whole lot of opportunities to give proper speeches when you\u2019re fighting for attention and when your name recognition is so low. The pitch has to be very concise and grab people immediately,\u201d said Andrew Bard Epstein, who served as Mamdani\u2019s communications director on the campaign and co-wrote that launch speech with him. Though that first speech features lines Mamdani still uses today \u2013 \u201cwe gather in the wealthiest city in the wealthiest country in the history of the world\u201d \u2013\u00a0Epstein believes Mamdani\u2019s \u201crhetorical ability has developed tremendously since then.\u201d<\/p>\n Epstein credits that to Mamdani and to his director of speechwriting, Julian Gerson, who joined the campaign as political director in March 2025. Though speechwriting wasn\u2019t in his campaign job description, the team was aware of his past experience on Gov. Kathy Hochul\u2019s speechwriting team. Soon, Gerson was relied on to gut-check social media posts or phrasing in press releases.<\/p>\n As Mamdani\u2019s campaign gained momentum, the team aspired to loftier speeches. Gerson was brought in to work on a speech for a campaign rally at Brooklyn Steel in May, and then Epstein surrendered the pen to Gerson completely for a second rally at Terminal 5 in June.<\/p>\n \u201cWe created these opportunities to also make much bigger statements about the moment we find ourselves in, the politics that we\u2019re confronting, the spirit of this campaign,\u201d Epstein recalled. \u201cZohran and Julian just developed this flow where it could move so seamlessly between poetic reveries about New York City, but that ones that never got too saccharine or too cute, into the policies of the campaign, and I think also to make the cost of living crisis a human and emotional story.\u201d<\/p>\n Gerson, 30 years old, grew up in Greenwich Village, the son of a professor like Mamdani and a product of elite schools (Dalton and Middlebury College) like Mamdani. And like Mamdani, he became civically engaged early on, interning in Bloomberg\u2019s City Hall in high school, later working on Antonio Delgado\u2019s congressional race and in Rep. Jerry Nadler\u2019s office and on his 2022 campaign.<\/p>\n But Gerson, like every speechwriter, has to channel parts of Mamdani\u2019s background he isn\u2019t familiar with. Gerson doesn\u2019t have roots in the New York City Democratic Socialists of America. He\u2019s Jewish, not Muslim. Mamdani, it seems, is closely involved with his own speeches. Speaking to his alma mater\u2019s paper earlier this year<\/a>, Gerson described his working relationship with Mamdani as a partnership, and one that he told The Guardian<\/a> that Mamdani engages in \u201cintensively.\u201d Epstein, too, recalled Mamdani as \u201cintimately involved\u201d and a careful editor on not just the big speeches, but scripts for social media videos during the campaign. City Hall did not make Gerson available for an interview.<\/p>\n Gerson now leads a team of three other speechwriters, including Sarah Gouda, Ruthie Kornblatt-Stier and Rio DeMello. They work on the longer-form speeches, but also shorter prepared remarks at regular press conferences and even social media posts that dive a little deeper. The size and scope of that office doesn\u2019t differ much from past mayors. But Mamdani and his team are undeniably trying to do something new.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of the work we try to do with the mayor is to write different kinds of speeches, ones that speak intimately to what New Yorkers care about and draw on parts of history or the city that others might not invoke,\u201d Gerson told the campus paper.<\/p>\n Communicators-in-chief<\/p>\n \u201cTheoretically, you could lead from your desk without communicating with people,\u201d Mario Cuomo, the last great New York orator, was quoted as saying<\/a>. \u201cBut if you break that nexus, you are in great danger of losing power.\u201d<\/p>\n New York has had talkers-in-chief, explainers-in-chief and power-pointers. But most mayors appreciate the value of a stage and a lectern. \u201cTo have an opportunity to speak to an audience on a topic you care about in a way that is sort of uninterrupted \u2013\u00a0that\u2019s a little bit of a luxury,\u201d said Howard Wolfson, Mike Bloomberg\u2019s former deputy mayor of government affairs and communications.<\/p>\n