Twenty-Six Hours

It’s June 24th, 2025 — primary day in New York City — and it’s 106 degrees outside. Magdalena Moranda is out the door at 5 a.m. in her Zohran GOTV shirt and friendship bracelets. Tim Donovan is covering the west side of Manhattan in a car plastered with campaign posters, running Gatorade and ice to volunteers and playing “Nani” as a three-minute cooling-down timer. By midafternoon, his body is shutting down from the heat.

This episode follows election day from the ground up — through the eyes of the people who made it happen. The staging locations and poll sites. The Bangladeshi uncle who voted and came back twenty minutes later with pretzels. The first-time canvasser who was an EMT, and who found Magdalena at the watch party to say thank you. And the moment — on a muted TV, in closed captions, while a DSA speaker was at the microphone — when Cuomo appeared on screen and people started to murmur.

What started seven years earlier as ten perfect strangers in Astoria Park had become fifty thousand volunteers across the five boroughs. This is the story of the day they won.

But the episode doesn’t end at the watch party. After the primary, Tim drives back out to the Daruus Salaam Masjid in Hillside Heights — the same mosque he’d visited the Friday before — with a bag full of leftover campaign posters. He gives them away as fast as he can. The last one goes to a ten-year-old kid who reads Zohran’s platform planks out loud to himself, slowly, as Tim turns back to the crowd.

Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old Democratic Socialist and State Assemblyman from Astoria, ran against former Governor Andrew Cuomo and a crowded field in the Democratic primary for Mayor of New York City. Polls consistently showed Cuomo as the frontrunner. The primary was held June 24th, 2025, in a heat wave. Cuomo conceded on election night. In New York City, Democrats outnumber Republicans seven to one — winning the primary is widely considered tantamount to winning the general.

Andrew Cuomo served three terms as Governor of New York before resigning in August 2021 amid investigations into sexual misconduct. No criminal charges were ultimately filed, and four years later he entered the mayoral race positioning himself as a centrist alternative. His concession on the night of the primary — appearing on a muted TV while a DSA speaker was at the podium — was the moment the episode is built around.

On election day, the Zohran campaign deployed a citywide network of volunteer drivers to run water, Gatorade, and ice to poll site volunteers, and to serve as mobile cooling units in the heat. Tim was assigned the west side of Manhattan, from Canal Street to Inwood — every poll site, one at a time. He estimates he was close to needing emergency services by early afternoon, and spent two hours recovering in a dark Irish pub before returning to duty.

The Friday before the primary, Tim traveled to the Daruus Salaam Masjid in southeast Queens to table outside Jumaah prayers. A taxi driver showed him videos from his “Yellow Cabs For Zohran” group chat. A young man in his early twenties asked for help figuring out how to vote without a permanent address — his address on file was a men’s shelter. He texted Tim two days later to say he’d voted. Tim returned to the same masjid the Friday after the primary with a bag of leftover posters.