Democratic New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani (C) raises his hands during a campaign event with New York City elected officials on November 1, 2025 in the Queens borough of New York City. Mamdani appeared poised to win the mayoralty over Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa with most of the vote counted. Liberal Hollywood has reason to celebrate, along with some choices to make.
Curtis Sliwa. Stephanie Keith/Getty Images Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment Here's how you know the ascent of Zohran Mamdani has captured national attention - voters in Kentucky had to be reminded they couldn't vote in New York. Yes, the Secretary of State in the land of bluegrass was forced to post a message Tuesday that "We're getting calls about polls being closed. They are closed because we do not have elections today....
You cannot vote today in Kentucky for the mayor of New York City." Gotham's mayoral contest, which with nearly all of the vote in Tuesday evening had the Democrat Mamdani leading by an ironclad nine percentage points, has reverberated throughout the country, as liberal Democrats scored the first major win of the Trump II era. And, needless to say, reverberated throughout Hollywood. Related Stories TV TV Ratings: '60 Minutes' Trump Interview Draws 14 Million Viewers News Dick Cheney, George W. Bush's Vice President, Portrayed by Christian Bale in 'Vice,' Dies at 84 The entertainment industry's liberal core has been divided over the candidacy of the Democratic Socialist and how much the ideology should be the face of the anti-Trump resistance. Mamdani's win should settle some of those divisions - maybe. It's hardly the only race that lands with media and entertainment pros - a governor's race in the suddenly hopping production area of New Jersey and the fight over Proposition 50 as an anti-Trump tool in California have also seized the town. Here's The Hollywood Reporter's breakdown of these three key races as their results come in Tuesday night. New York Zohran Mamdani came out of nowhere earlier this year to lead the Democratic field for New York City mayor just weeks before the crowded June primary. He won that the Oscar-esque Ranked Choice Voting race handily and never looked back. Though there was Meryl Streep-level drama as Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams entered the race (and in Adams' case, withdrew from the race) as independents, Mamdani never relinquished his hold on the lead. The 34-year-old Queens assemblyman (also of course the son of Monsoon Wedding and The Namesake director Mira Nair), put together a coalition of Gen Z, Muslim, South Asian and progressive Democrat New Yorkers to coast to a victory; with nearly 90 percnet of the vote in Tuesday night, he held a nine-point lead over his nearest challenger, Cuomo. All major news outlets called the race for Mamdani, and he hovered above the 50 percent mark, suggesting a popular mandate in the three-man race with Republican Curtis Sliwa. In addition to his film pedigree, (for how a Nair film was a formative influence on his politics, read THR's story here), Mamdani's trajectory carries a whiff of the Hollywood, the little-known figure suddenly surging to the fore the stuff of so many sports movies. And of course he shrewdly made use of both social media and Hollywood tropes; he and his young staff unleashed numerous popular TikToks, often on the streets of New York, while also running more traditional legacy ads playing off The Bachelor and other entertainment hits. And don't forget his Bollywood-style campaign visuals. Mamdani also provided a template of sorts for how to handle Trump and trolls in general, often smiling but rarely giving ground - and, with his affordability themes, rarely breaking message. Indeed of all the contrasts with the president who is his ideological foil, perhaps Mamdani's biggest is his approach: the leader who never met a tangent he didn't like versus the upstart whose rhetoric rarely took a step off the path. For all of Mamdani's skill and appeal, though, his win is a reminder of politics' constellative forces beyond any one person's control in politics. Trump's comeback (itself a function of a national Democratic party in disarray), a war in Gaza and an affordability crisis brought on by housing-market speculation and dynamics all gave momentum to Mamdani's candidacy in ways no elected official could orchestrate. As for Hollywood personalities, Mamdani has certainly become a hero to some of the more politically vocal entertainers. Spike Lee, Bowen Yang, Cynthia Nixon, Emily Ratajkowski and Lupita Nyong'o all endorsed him; Ilana Glazer and Mark Ruffalo phone-banked for him. Many of them are people who've supported other progressive upstarts in the past; the interesting question now, paralleling the interesting question in the broader political landsca