The quintessential disaster film often features scenes of frantic New Yorkers fleeing the city, desperate to avoid impending catastrophe.

Alternatively, it might depict a post-apocalyptic scenario where society has crumbled entirely, with tumbleweeds rolling down Fifth Avenue and wild animals prowling through Central Park.

Some residents of New York City are bracing for what they perceive as a looming disaster of another kind, potentially arriving next week. This potential upheaval comes in the form of a fresh-faced, 34-year-old political contender whose mayoral bid is causing quite a stir, with implications that could rival any cinematic threat to the city or nation.

Zohran Mamdani, an avid cricket enthusiast and Arsenal football fan, is less fond of Israel and the ultra-wealthy. He has surged ahead in the polls through a savvy campaign leveraging viral TikTok videos and the energetic efforts of some 90,000 volunteers, captivating the younger electorate.

The support of high-profile figures, such as supermodel Emily Ratajkowski who sported ‘Hot Girls For Zohran’ T-shirts, certainly adds to his dynamic appeal.

Emerging from relative obscurity to secure the Democratic nomination, Mamdani is largely predicted to triumph in Tuesday’s election, facing off against New York’s former Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, now running as an Independent, and Republican challenger Curtis Sliwa.

His Millennial and Gen Z groupies hail the idealistic, charismatic, self-confident but painfully inexperienced Mamdani – who won the ‘biggest smile’ prize at middle school – as a populist saviour who can reinvigorate a party that’s lost its way. 

Inevitably, he’s being breathlessly compared to Barack Obama.

However, the prospect of victory for his radical, unashamedly socialist agenda of squeezing the rich to pay for sweeping handouts – Mamdani’s battle cry is ‘affordability’ – as well as controversial initiatives such as replacing police with social workers, freezing rents for millions, setting up government-run grocery shops, not to mention his vitriolic attacks on Israel, have horrified many New Yorkers. 

A man who has described capitalism as ‘theft’ and the city’s police department as ‘evil’, could soon be dictating the fortunes of its 8.5million residents.

Corporate business leaders are threatening to flee the home of Wall Street for lower tax alternatives such as Florida and Texas. 

The Lone Star state already boasts more bankers than New York.

The real estate industry, which has put many projects on hold, has forecast meltdown in New York with cash-strapped landlords leaving swathes of buildings empty amid soaring costs. 

Estate agents in affluent suburbs outside New York already report a significant rise in wealthy people leaving the city. 

Florida estate agents have reported a similar increase in interest from well-heeled New Yorkers.

A poll last week claimed 26 per cent of New Yorkers would consider leaving if he won. 

They are likely to include many Jews – 12 per cent of the city’s population – who’ve said they fear that Mamdani’s history of anti-Israel activism will make them less safe amid rising anti-Semitism.

But almost nobody’s more dismayed by the prospect of a Mayor Mamdani than moderate Democrats. 

Not only are they convinced that he’s making ridiculously unaffordable promises that will backfire on them when they inevitably aren’t delivered, they also fear his victory would lead to a takeover of the rudderless party by the hard Left, destroying any hope of vanquishing Donald Trump and his MAGA cohorts.

Given the weight of evidence indicating Democrats handed the 2024 election on a plate to Trump because they came across as an out-of-touch and obsessively woke party, they’re right to be worried.

Americans who don’t live in New York are usually at pains to point out how unrepresentative it is of the rest of the US, but this particular Big Apple squabble has implications that go well beyond the city limits.

Mamdani (who’s benefited considerably from facing unappealing rivals) has called the election a ‘battle for the soul of the Democratic Party’ while his main rival, Andrew Cuomo – who resigned as New York governor in disgrace after a string of sexual harassment allegations (that he denies) in 2021 – this week admitted that Mamdani’s rise has sparked a ‘quiet civil war’ within the party.

Now, nobody would deny the Democrats desperately need to perk themselves up, just as few would disagree that New York – where I’ve lived for 20 years – could usefully do the same. 

Its public services are generally dismal while the disparity between its rich and poor neighbourhoods is so stark you can feel you’re in South Africa or Brazil not the United States.

And yet, plead older and more experienced voices, Zohran Mamdani and his wackadoodle ideas are not the answer.

‘[Mamdani] really could lose us the House [of Representatives], perhaps even the White House,’ a well-placed Democrat insider told me. 

‘If he wins in New York, people will assume he’s the future and many more progressives will run for office. But his ideas will horrify voters in the Midwest and South.’

Or as Hank Sheinkopf, a former adviser to President Clinton, puts it: ‘Every time Zohran opens his mouth, he creates another suburban Republican.’

Mamdani sceptics have another lurking fear – that he will spark a bloody confrontation with Trump that would only hurt New York.

The President, who’s called him a ‘100 per cent communist lunatic’ and ‘total nut-job’, is clearly relishing a fight if Mamdani wins. 

He’s threatened to withhold federal funding from the city and send in National Guard troops to patrol the streets.

So how has America’s biggest and most important city likely fallen into the hands of a politician who’s never run anything and until only a year ago was an obscure member of the New York State Assembly?

Previously notable only for being the son of a celebrated filmmaker, his Oscar-nominated mother Mira Nair, the well-connected Mamdani first made headlines in 2019 when, as a wannabe rapper, he persuaded India-born TV cook and actress Madhur Jaffrey – a family friend, naturally – to appear in his music video.

He was born in Uganda to parents of Muslim Indian descent.  

They came to New York when he was seven and his father, a prominent Left-wing academic, got a job at Columbia University.

At high school, the teenage Mamdani ran for student vice-president on a pledge to give everyone free ‘locally-sourced’ fruit juice every day. 

Of course, they never got it. ‘I promised things that were simply impossible,’ he admitted years later. If only he’d learnt his lesson, wail his detractors.

After failing to make it in the music business, he turned to politics. 

Mamdani polled close to zero per cent when he launched his mayoral bid last year but his popularity soared on the back of an adept social media campaign in which he showed himself to be a skilled communicator. 

Stunts helped, such as jumping fully-clothed into a frigid sea in a video titled: ‘I’m freezing… your rent.’

Earlier this year, he married Rama Duwaji, a Syrian-born illustrator he met on a dating app and who shares his trenchant views on Palestine.

Critics have pounced on disquieting past remarks that they insist reveal the real Mamdani. 

In a widely criticised 2020 tweet, he wrote that ‘Nature is healing’ after someone posted they ‘saw a cop crying in his car’. 

And in 2021, he gave a speech to the youth branch of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in which he said that the ‘end goal’ was – and he quoted Karl Marx – ‘seizing the means of production’. 

The same year, the DSA – of which he remains a member – issued a list of its policies that included nationalising vast tracts of the US economy; abolishing the police, prisons and border enforcement; and providing government funding for ‘gender-affirming surgeries’ for minors without parental consent.

How much of this political shopping list he supports he refuses to say, although his cheerleaders insist he has moderated his views.

And yet, as far as a growing number of young Americans are concerned, he probably doesn’t need to bother. 

A recent survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov revealed that 62 per cent of Americans aged 18-29 say they hold a ‘favourable view’ of socialism.

Even his opponents agree that, given the high cost of living in New York, he was astute to campaign on affordability. 

It’s his pie-in-the-sky solutions they take issue with.

Larry Summers, US Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, has accused Mamdani of promoting ‘Trotskyite economic policies’.

He wants to freeze the rent for more than two million occupants of apartments where rent increases are already tightly regulated. 

But pundits warn landlords will respond by keeping properties vacant, reducing the rental market housing stock, or could struggle to afford repairs.

Mamdani also wants to create 200,000 union-built, ‘100 per cent affordable’ homes, which would cost $100billion (£76billion) over ten years. 

He wants buses to be free for all, which will cost up to $800million (£609million) a year.

Mamdani intends to spend $60million (£45.7million) a year subsidising food in at least five grocery stores that will sell at wholesale prices. 

He also wants to almost double the minimum wage to $30 (£22.80) an hour. 

In both cases, say opponents, he’ll end up putting hundreds of businesses such as corner shops and restaurants out of business.

Crime is an issue that particularly worries New Yorkers but Mamdani, who has called violence an ‘artificial construction’, has minimised the importance of policing. 

Until recently, a vociferous supporter of ‘defunding’ the police, he has now apologised for previously calling the NYPD racist and ‘wicked and corrupt’. 

However, he still wants to shift $1billion (£760million) from policing to a new ‘department of community safety’ that focuses on ‘restorative justice’ and ‘violence interrupters’. 

The latter are social workers who’ll be sent out rather than police to deal with mental health emergencies. 

Mamdani, whose professor father argues that hate crime is a legacy of colonialism, has promised to increase funding of hate crime prevention by 800 per cent.

The strident pro-Palestine activist has also tried to move on from what he’s said in the past about Israel and the Gaza war. 

He’s denied claims he’s anti-Semitic and says he’s now the victim of Islamophobia – but the fact remains he has questioned Israel’s right to exist and refused to condemn the phrase ‘globalise the intifada’ even though many Jews regard it as an exhortation to extinguish their race.

And what of his expensive policies – how is he going to pay for everything? 

Naturally, for a man who’s said billionaires shouldn’t exist, the answer is to tax the rich and businesses. 

He wants to raise income tax for anyone earning more than $1million (£760,000) by two per cent and corporation tax from just over seven per cent to 11.5 per cent.

In fact, he actually cannot raise taxes or fulfil many of his other pledges without the support of New York governor, Kathy Hochul, and state politicians. 

Hochul is a centrist Democrat who doesn’t have much time for Mamdani, but she belatedly endorsed him and will feel under pressure to defer to his electoral mandate if he wins.

She knows, even if Mamdani supporters apparently do not, that politicians can’t get much done if they erode the tax base that pays for it.

In New York, about one per cent of taxpayers pay 40 per cent of the city’s income taxes but rich people – just like companies – can simply move to another state, a movement that’s already started.

A prominent Manhattan hedge fund manager has predicted that if just 100 of his industry’s highest taxpayers chose to live most of each year outside New York, it could reduce state and city taxes by some $10billion (£7.6billion).

Mamdani wasn’t around to remember it but New York very nearly went bankrupt in 1975 thanks to chronic overspending, an economic downturn and investors losing confidence in the city.

Experts have warned it could easily happen again – and that was even before the city that never sleeps faced the daunting prospect of having Mamdani at the helm.