The mayor-elect’s address pulled from socialist titans, Astoria’s uncles and his rival’s father. Julian Gerson explains how the two collaborated on the ‘love letter to New York’
In his victory speech after winning the New York mayoral election last week, Zohran Mamdani came out swinging.
The speech included, among other dramatic flourishes, a reference to the socialist titan Eugene Debs, shoutouts to the city’s “Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses”, tributes to Jawaharlal Nehru and Fiorello La Guardia, sprinkles of Arabic – and it was all delivered with the cadence and command of a hip-hop emcee. Many who were listening could not help but wonder: how the hell did he pull that off?
A healthy portion of the credit should go to Julian Gerson, the speechwriter on the Mamdani campaign who typifies the young, leftwing lieutenants powering this insurgent operation – a 29-year-old outer-borough dweller (in his case, Brooklyn) with unerring message discipline. He is especially unabashed when it comes to the words he puts in his boss’s mouth that draw inspiration from socialist greats and the multicultural city that the Mamdani campaign holds dear.
“When this campaign has sung the most is when it feels like a love letter to New York,” Gerson told the Guardian.
