The 33-year-old Democratic Socialist lawmaker, who has electrified young voters with pledges to freeze rents, free childcare and taxing the rich, spent his formative years at a $60,000-a-year progressive private school on Manhattan's Upper West Side. 

Former classmates describe him as charismatic, confident and adored - a far cry from the struggling working-class narrative that has fueled his meteoric political rise.

His upbringing, stretching from Uganda to Manhattan's cultural heart, has become a fresh line of attack from opponents in a race already defined by identity and class. 

Born in Kampala, Uganda, to renowned academic Mahmood Mamdani and film director Mira Nair, Mamdani moved to the United States at age seven when his father joined Columbia University's faculty. 

The family settled into university housing on the Upper West Side, one of the city's most desirable neighborhoods.

It was there that Mamdani enrolled at Bank Street School for Children, a private, ultra-progressive academy long favored by Manhattan's liberal elite. 

Tuition now costs more than $66,000 per year with teachers addressed by their first names, classes have without grades and students encouraged to develop their own 'leadership voices.'

Mamdani stood out within the school walls classmates say, even as a child.

'It was so obvious this guy was going to be some sort of leader of people,' recalled Evan Roth Smith, a former schoolmate to the Daily Telegraph.

Mamdani's early political instincts were obvious even in middle school when he ran in a 'mock election'. 

At age the age of 12, frustrated that only eighth-graders could run as Democrats or Republicans, Mamdani led a breakaway campaign under a self-created third party - and won in a landslide.

The are echoes of his mayoral campaign two decades later with Mamdani, a state assemblyman representing Queens, upending New York's political establishment in much the same way. 

Mamdani's campaign videos have flooded TikTok feeds while his insurgent style have drawn both supporters and haters.