As the hours tick down to the Nov. 3 midterm elections, Anna Eskamani continues her methodical, grassroots campaign for Orlando mayor in next year's election. If Eskamani wins, progressive Democrats will have another municipal toehold in the largely red Sunbelt. Numerous U.S. mayors and would-be mayors aspire to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s mantle, marketing themselves as “another Mamdani” or “the next Mamdani.”

Term-limited after eight years in the Florida House of Representatives, Eskamani, 36, also hopes to replicate Mamdani’s victorious 2025 campaign, applying his organizational playbook. For Eskamani, a progressive Democrat and child of immigrants, a victory in the diverse 340,000-people resort city would culminate a nearly decade-long march. “Power matters only if you use it to make life better for people and close the gap between what people earn and what it costs to live here,” she said after Orlando magazine recently named her the third most powerful person in the city.

“That’s the work I’ve done in Tallahassee, and it’s the work I’ll bring to City Hall.”She is hardworking, upbeat and relentlessly optimistic, which energizes volunteers and supporters. By January 2026, her campaign had knocked on more than 33,000 Orlando doors and raised a $1.4 million war chest, mostly in small $50 and $100 donations. “I’m definitely an optimist and believe there is good in people and that people can change, that you can persuade people,” she told me in a telephone interview.

Volunteer Elly Kennedy, 50, now a realtor, met Eskamani in the mid-2010s when both worked at Planned Parenthood. “She was a real hard-working woman in a field that wasn’t the easiest," Kennedy said. "She always had smile on her face.”“I am a fan of her philosophy that we build from the ground up. It’s really a good feeling to have hope,” said Kennedy.

Longtime Orlando Democratic political consultant and former Florida legislator Dick Batchelor was impressed when first encountering Eskamani in 2018: “Even then she had firm grasp of the legislative issues. She had basically prepared herself for the legislative race, unlike other first-time candidates.”Eskamani is both team player and insurgent. Even though she is not on this cycle's ballot, she mobilized her network to canvas for Democratic turnout Nov. 3, and hosted a University of Central Florida candidate forum featuring Angie Nixon, a Senate hopeful who is affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, as well as more moderate statewide candidates.

“She is very generous with her political capital,” said Batchelor. University of Central Florida political scientist Aubrey Jewett taught the undergraduate Eskamani and served on her doctoral dissertation committee. “She is the kind of person that you want to help,” he recalled. “My first impression was that she was especially bright and energetic … [with] tremendous people skills.”As a mayoral candidate, he said “she has, as the young people say, the ‘rizz’ — charisma. She’s good at explaining things in a non-technical way. She has a magnetic personality and a compelling personal story. ... She is very positive and optimistic and hopeful.”

Eskamani was one of 48 first-time women candidates pictured on a 2018 Time magazine cover. The New York Times featured her as well. She was also featured in a prescient profile in The Atlantic by David Graham, complete with her smiling photo, headlined, “Hundreds of progressive, state-level candidates running in 2018 could pull the Democratic Party leftward for years to come.”“If Eskamani beats her Republican opponent in November,” Graham wrote in 2018, “she’ll join a class of progressive candidates whose elections will reshape the Democratic Party. … Once in office, they will pull the Democratic Party leftward for years to come.”

And so she has, winning her initial legislative race — endorsed by Barack Obama, Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer and the state AFL-CIO — and then reelected three times by healthy margins, until term-limited this year. Mamdani and Eskamani do have differences, however. Eskamani eschews ideological labels and is not a Democratic Socialists of America member.

She supports a two-state Israel/Palestine solution but characterizes the Israeli war in Gaza as genocide. She recognizes the latter position creates “a difficulty for my Jewish brothers and sisters.”Unlike Mamdani, Eskamani has had few campaign trail questions on the divisive issue, which has bedeviled numerous other Mamdani wannabes. Growing up in working-class circumstances deeply affected Eskamani’s progressive politics.

Her immigrant parents fled Iran separately as teenagers, Baha’i faith members, and met in Orlando. Their mother's cancer death when she was 13 deeply impacted Anna. “I had a very challenging but loving childhood,” she recalls. “I grew up watching my parents work multiple jobs just to keep up, and too many families here are living that same story right now.”“Deep within me [lies] a source of focus and energy and determination” that comes from her parents, especially her mother, Eskamani said. “That was the unshakable core for me, the level of love she had for me.”

Her father supported his University of Central Florida electrical engineering studies by table waiting and often left the country working for long periods during their youth. Later he worked weekends as a Disney customer rep. In each campaign, she focuses on economics, jobs, health care, homelessness. She also champions the local gay and transgender community. Conventional wisdom is that her relentless campaigning has so far preempted the field for the 2027 mayoral election. How would Eskamani compare herself to Mamdani?

“We are both happy warriors, both committed to our communities in New York and Orlando. We believe in mass public engagement as the most effective way to govern, and we believe that poverty is a policy issue.”Mark I. Pinsky is a journalist and author based in Durham, N.C.