There are some things you don’t think will become politicaltalk. The height of a man is often one of them. But Zohran Mamdani isn’t really a normal politician, either. The internet did what it always does when he won the canary race in New York City in November 2025. He became the city’s first Muslim and Asian American mayor. It looked in the footnotes for them. It looked on TikTok and found one.
A woman posted a video saying that she had matched with Mamdani on Hinge years ago. The video has since gotten hundreds of comments, most of which are not very nice to her. She didn’t answer him because, as she said in text over the video, his listed height of either 5’10” or 5’11” meant he was probably more like 5’9″ in real life. Everyone who has used a dating app before will understand this right away. It’s not clear if it’s fair.
The part she added after is what’s interesting. She said it was honest. They said that the man who is now mayor of New York City was “more honest than most guys on there.” Even though it’s a small thing, it makes more sense when you understand the bigger picture. On the same app, Mamdani met his wife, the artist Rama Duwaji. They popped the question in October 2024 and got married in February 2025 at City Hall, which he now runs. That kind of story sounds like it was made up.
There was a wide range of rude, funny, and really hurtful comments under the Tickle video. Someone told him he had skimmed something. If she had made a different choice, she might have been sitting next to the man who stands next to Governor Kathy Hochul at press conferences. That man’s mother, filmmaker Mira Nair, would have been her mother-in-law. Whether or not that’s a selling point depends on how you like your movies, but the point was made.
It’s worth taking a moment to think about what the whole episode quietly shows. People are squished into a few data points by dating apps. Length, width, a few photos, and a short bio. There’s a strange irony in the fact that a man who became a politician on promises of fair housing, free bus rides, and a $30 minimum wage was once filtered out of someone’s morning scroll because of two inches of doubt. It doesn’t really say anything important about politics. But it does say something about how we quickly decide what to do when we don’t have all the facts, both on apps and probably other places too.
In almost every frame you look at Mamdani through, his background makes him seem like an odd person. Born in Kampala, raised for a short time in Cape Town after apartheid ended, and then in Morningside Heights, Manhattan. Afterwards, he went to Bowdoin College to study Africana studies and rapped under the name Young Cardamom. He then unexpectedly won election to the State Assembly in 2020. He’s 34 years old. Most people would say that his biography doesn’t quite fit together, but here he is.
As for his real height, it has not yet been officially confirmed. The Hinge ad said 5’10” or 5’11”. She thought she was 5’9″. There is no one with a tape measure in front of them. There’s a chance that this doesn’t matter at all, but for some reason it does now, at least for a few news cycles.
This story has a lesson in it, but it’s not a hard one. The woman in the video raised her hand to say, “Don’t forget about the medium-sized kings.” Even though it’s not quite Socrates, it’s pretty good for TikTok relationship advice based on mild personal regret.
