Twenty-Six Hours

On Friday, June 20th, 2025, I took the train to Hillside Heights in southeast Queens. I was headed to the Daruus Salaam Masjid, for the last Jumaah prayer before New York City’s mayoral primary. As we opened our folding table and put out literature about ranked choice voting, a taxi driver walked up — he wanted to show us videos from his “Yellow Cabs For Zohran” group chat. They’d recently had a procession through the city — honking their horns, blasting music, waving signs. The energy was electric.

Later, there was a kid in his early twenties. He wanted to vote, but couldn’t figure out where to go. We pulled up his address, but we were having trouble, too. Before we could figure it out, he had to go in for prayers. While he was inside, we googled the address he’d given us — a men’s shelter. So now we had to google one more time: how do you cast a ballot if you don’t have a permanent address? When he came back outside, we told him what we’d learned. He surprised me by asking for my phone number — said he was interested in getting involved with the campaign. Two days later, on Sunday, he texted me out of the blue. To let me know he’d voted.

The election was still two days away.

For fifty years, the Cuomo name was an integral part of New York City politics: Andrew’s father Mario even had a bridge named after him. And in 2008, his son made a dynasty of it, serving in the governor’s office for three terms. Except by the time Andrew left office, there would be no bridge named in his honor. Facing impeachment over a series of investigations into sexual misconduct, he resigned in disgrace in 2021. But after his resignation, no charges were ever filed — leaving the door cracked open for a comeback. Just barely, but enough — that four years later, a wide open race for the Mayor of New York would provide Cuomo an opportunity for a political comeback for the ages.

Welcome to The People’s Republic of Astoria. This is Episode 05: Twenty-Six Hours.

It’s June 24th, 2025, and Zohran Mamdani is trying to win his party’s primary for mayor. If he can pull it off, he’ll have the inside track to the mayor’s office — in New York City, Democrats outnumber Republicans seven to one.

I was awake early that morning, too. Not quite at 4:30, though — I’d set my first alarm for 4:45.

I’d never done anything like this before in my life. Just four months earlier, I’d signed up to volunteer for a canvassing shift — knocking on strangers’ doors. A local state assemblyman in my neighborhood, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, was running a longshot campaign for mayor of New York. I went to a Thursday shift in Astoria. We climbed staircases — by 9 pm, we’d met back up at a local bar to hand in our materials. I was feeling awkward, massively overstimulated, and bought a pitcher of beer for the table. My way of saying “hi,” I guess. Magdalena Moranda was the field lead that day. Her energy was infectious.

I had a good time. Pretty soon, I was going most weeks. By late June, it had taken over my life.

I got to the Zohran materials hub in south Brooklyn by 5:35 a.m. There was no traffic, but I remember that it was already getting light — that time of year, the sun comes up so early. I’d stopped for a huge coffee from Dunkin Donuts, my Boston roots showing through.

In Brooklyn, we were loading up my car with water, Gatorade, posters, tape — the works. And then a campaign staffer asked if I was comfortable taping signs to the outside of my vehicle. We covered every surface with posters: every door, the hood, the back fender. Everything. I took a few pictures for posterity, and then I was off.

About a week before the election, that’s how I met Helen Ho — showing up on her front porch. I was going there a lot in the days leading up to the election. Always unannounced. Back then, we didn’t even have each other’s phone numbers. By election day, her whole house had been converted into an emergency cooling station for the campaign.

A few months earlier, the campaign had put out a call for volunteers for a morning Eid prayer in Astoria Park. Of course, Magdalena was there that morning. I tagged along, too. As we’re handing out literature, a campaign staffer comes around, asking if any of us drove to the event that day. I hadn’t, but I tell him I have a car. And just like that, I’m officially a member of the Zohran Mamdani Volunteer Drivers group.

That’s Daisy Larom. In November, we spoke about the primary election.

You had an army of 50,000 volunteers throughout the entire city of, you know, 8 million people, and they needed stuff. Election Day was big for us, the volunteer drivers, because there was a lot of need because of the heat wave. It was the hottest day of the summer — like 103! Because I’d done a lot of work, they knew I was credible, responsible, whatever, and they knew I was going to be doing it all day. They gave me the west side of Manhattan. Basically, every single poll site on the west side of Manhattan, from Canal Street up to Inwood — I was going to go to one at a time and check in on our volunteers.

Early on, like six, seven AM, it wasn’t that bad yet. It was, like, survivable. So I had a Gatorade and water in coolers. I had ice. I was going to bodegas as the ice was melting in the car, because even with the air conditioner on maximum, it was so hot it only did so much. So I was dumping the water out of the side of the car and refilling it with ice that I was buying at bodegas as I was stopping.

Part of the role of these cars was being mobile cooling units — where you would have people sit in your car and you give them the water, and you’d be like, you’re taking three minutes. I would play the song “Nani”—

And that’s like the amount of time you’d get to cool off, because we can’t have you in here for too long — the shifts are only like two hours.

There were a couple of people who, when I got to them, I was a little worried about how they looked. You could see — they were probably five minutes for them — because it’s like, you’re not getting out of the car until you look better, I don’t care how long I’m supposed to leave you in here. But you could see the color come back — they would look much, much better. And then, you know, get back out there.

You know, I ended up overheating. I think it was because I was coming in and out — because I was drinking tons of water and Gatorade and I was pouring water on my head. I was really trying to actively keep myself cool. But the thing is, because of what my role was, I was constantly going from the air conditioning in my car to the car’s off and I’m out in the heat and then I’m back in the air conditioning and then back in the heat. And my body could not handle it. So I was almost the whole way to Inwood. You know, like 190th Street or something — and my body was just shutting down.

Back in Astoria, Magdalena was taking a break from running the staging location. Her idea of a break, of course: knocking on more doors in the 103-degree heat.

—put it in your phone, put it on your alarm—

And luckily I found an Irish pub — like old-style Irish pub — and it was dark and the air conditioner was on blast and had a couple of single bathrooms, large with locks. And I basically was just like, I had my phone on me and I was very much aware: if this gets basically any worse, I’m texting my wife to let her know what’s going on and I’m calling 911. Because I’m like, I’m not going to risk my actual health, you know? But I kind of — I never crossed that threshold.

—Oh no, I was really, really close. So it was like two hours in that Irish pub, drinking water before I was able to kind of even like function enough to get back in my car.

Yeah.

Yup. When I finally felt better, I’d lost hours of driving time. But I’d been communicating with the campaign staff in Brooklyn the whole while — and other drivers had immediately stepped in to fill the need, help finish the turf.

And then I went to the Bohemian Beer Garden. I didn’t even have my phone on me — the heat in my car was messing with it. So it was kind of beautiful, because I wasn’t able to record the whole thing. I just had to fully experience it in that moment. I had to be in the moment.

—Completely drenched in sweat—

The official campaign watch party that night was in Long Island City, right on Astoria’s southern border.

The election was going to be decided tonight. And absolutely no one saw it coming.

DSA are the sponsors and so they’ve got a whole lineup of speakers — activists, volunteers, people in DSA. And nobody thought Zohran was going to win that night. Nobody. His most optimistic supporters did not think it — everyone kind of thought it was going to take like a week because of the whole ranked choice thing. If it doesn’t happen early, it takes a long time for them to count. So they had all these speakers planned.

And the timing was such that once the speakers came on, they muted the TV — it just had the closed captions at the bottom of the screen, and everyone’s kind of standing in front of it, you can’t really see them that well, the speakers are speaking, you kind of focus on that. And the timing was such that as the final speaker was finishing, Andrew Cuomo had just appeared on the TV — which is a very strange thing to happen on the night of an election. And if you’re the kind of politics psycho nerd who would volunteer heavily in a mayoral primary, you’re probably the kind of person who’s going to put two and two together pretty quickly. The most common reason someone would show up at that moment would be to give a concession speech. And people started looking at the closed captioning, and you could almost, for a moment, start to almost hear the murmur through the crowd as people start realizing.

The whole crowd was already standing because we had these local politicians giving these speeches. Everyone’s already amassed by the stage, but no one is expecting to be celebrating or doing anything — until this kind of murmur starts. And then the person with the mic goes, “Andrew Cuomo just conceded! Zohran’s won!” And the whole place just explodes — like you’re in the clubhouse after your team has won the championship, where every beer is being thrown in the air and you’re just being covered in a rain of beer and everyone’s jumping up and down and hugging and it’s like a mosh pit. I wish there had been more beer.

In Long Island City, at the real election party, Magdalena was walking in — just in time to see a similar scene unfold.

That night, spread out across New York, watch parties spilled onto warm city streets as supporters celebrated. You could hear the cheering everywhere.

What had started just seven years earlier as ten perfect strangers in Astoria Park had transformed — into fifty thousand, citywide.

Just five years earlier, Zohran was another rank-and-file member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He’d worked on a handful of losing campaigns, was always at rallies, marches, and meetings. Organizing. Activating. The grassroots had made Zohran — and now, he was on the precipice of bringing democratic socialism into the mayor’s office itself. The movement was growing.

Zohran hadn’t even written a victory speech on primary night. By the time he was ready to get in front of the cameras, it was almost a new day.

“I’ve been up 26 hours.”

I wasn’t ready to let it end, either. If the election was over, then… now what?

After the primary ended, I still had about a hundred small business posters in the back of my car — on the volunteer driver WhatsApp channel, we were told to recycle them, or just keep them as souvenirs. But I kept thinking back to the people I’d met the week before, at Daruus Salaam Masjid. So much had happened in the few short days since I’d made that trip to Hillside Heights. So that following Friday, I took the train back. My bag filled with posters, I waited outside at around one p.m., just as Jumaah prayers were ending. I could have brought 200 signs — I gave them away so quickly.

But there was one kid, young, about ten years old, who I’ll never forget. He was there with an older boy — maybe a brother or a cousin. Shyly watching me give out posters, until the other kid prompted him to step forward. He approached hesitatingly, and asked if he could have one, too. Of course, I told him, and handed him a sign, trying not to let on that my heart was melting. I turned back around quickly, and continued offering posters to the men leaving the masjid. But behind me, I could hear him reading the simple planks of Zohran’s campaign — slowly, to himself, out loud.

I took the train home — hopped on the F at Sutphin Boulevard to Jackson Heights/Roosevelt Avenue. Transferred to the Seven to Queensboro Plaza. Took the N train north back to Astoria, looking out the window along the way at the stout houses and walkup apartments of my neighborhood. These days, I just want to be a body. Climb staircases. Knock doors. There’s always more to be done.

[Whispering.] It’s never that easy…

The People’s Republic of Astoria is written, narrated, and produced by Tim Donovan. If you’re enjoying the show, please subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. For show notes, more information, and episode transcripts, visit our website at peoplesrepublicpod.com. Music by Pyrosion. Special thanks to my wife, Alice, for all of her great ideas, her endless support — without her, none of this is possible. Thanks to Daisy Larom, Helen Ho, and Shawna Morlock.

[Faintly.] Yesssssss.

See you next time, in the People’s Republic.