A little after 9 p.m. on Tuesday night, just before the returns revealed Zohran Mamdani's shocking and convincing victory over Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary, many of the people milling around Mamdani's victory party were what you could call VIPs.
Local and national media outlets were overrepresented at this early hour (ahem, including Hell Gate), but there were also tons of bold-faced names who'd backed Mamdani's insurgent run for City Hall and who were there to toast their candidate.
It was a little surreal to see Kal Penn, Ella Emhoff, David Hogg, Anand Giridharadas, Kareem Rahma, Lina Kahn, Zephyr Teachout, and Cynthia Nixon, to name a few, all in the same room. These aren't A-list movie stars (sorry, Kal) or former presidents, but they are prominent members of the left-of-center firmament, who are capable of marshalling millions of eyeballs to a cause—in this case, getting Mamdani elected and overturning the establishment, and the candidate it spent tens of millions of dollars to get elected.