In the small hours of Wednesday morning, a 33-year-old man of South Asian descent walked out into a crowded bar in Long Island City to announce that he had achieved the unimaginable. Zohran Mamdani had just been elected Democratic nominee for the mayor of New York — a jaw-dropping achievement for a politician who most voters in America’s most populous city had barely heard of a few months ago.

“In the words of Nelson Mandela, it always seems impossible until it is done,” he told ecstatic supporters. “My friends, we have done it.”

A self-declared democratic socialist whom President Trump has branded a “100% Communist Lunatic”, Mamdani had beaten the man who polls suggested would sail to the nomination — Andrew Cuomo, scion of a political dynasty and governor of New York state from 2011-21.