Zohran Mamdani and the Rise of the Renter Politicians

From city councils to Congress, homeowners have always dominated elected office. But after Mamdani’s victory, a slew of candidates want to follow in his footsteps.

In 2019, Aparna Raj was living with five friends in a group house in Washington, D.C., that had no shortage of problems. Half the house lost electricity for a time. Worse, there were rats running around. She said her landlord refused to do anything about it. “He couldn’t fix anything,” she said, “but he could send people around to collect rent from us.”

In March of that year, she and her roommates learned that even though they’d been paying their rent, the landlord hadn’t been paying the mortgage. The house was foreclosed on and then snatched up by someone who worked in real estate. The tenants tried to lobby their new landlord to fix the problems, but he was only interested in converting the house into condos and flipping it for a profit. A few months later, everyone had to scramble to move—including Raj’s downstairs neighbors, who hadn’t even been notified when the house went into foreclosure.

“It just opened my eyes, in that moment, I didn’t know what to do and I didn’t know who to turn to,” she said. “In D.C., we do have really strong tenant protections, but even so, we didn’t have any sort of say in what happened to us.”

After that, Raj began volunteering to organize tenants and helping them fight abusive and neglectful landlords. Through that work she realized something else, too. “Right now, there are only two renters on the [D.C.] Council, and so few of them understand the experiences that renters face and the instability that renters face, and the fact that we’re just at the whim of our landlords,” she said. “And so going into these meetings with council members, so many of them did not care.”

Now Raj, 32, is running to represent Ward 1 on the council, in part to give renters more voice in local politics. Around the country, other renters are doing the same, running for city, state, and federal offices. Like Raj, many of the renter candidates I spoke to have been shaped by their experiences as tenants. And their policy ideas are intertwined with how they believe the country should resolve the class divides that housing costs are exacerbating.

Almost all candidates and elected officials around the country have been homeowners, at least until recently. A 2022........

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