How Zohran Mamdani’s Campaign Crafted a Winning Message

I joined DSA in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election in 2016, like many other people trying to find a place to put their energy and focus. I wasn’t a super active member early on, in part because I was so used to the UNITE HERE New Haven organizing culture. If you don’t attend a meeting, you’re getting phone calls. And if you don’t pick up the phone, your door is getting knocked on, and you’re gonna have a conversation about how you’re prioritizing your life and what you’re putting first. NYC-DSA doesn’t work that way. So when I joined and skipped my second branch meeting, I was disappointed when no one came knocking on my door saying, “Where are you, Andrew?”

I was something more than a paper member but not somebody who was on any organizing committees or deeply involved in any working group stuff. It was in 2018 that I started canvassing. I actually started with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, mostly in Elmhurst, Queens. I was there on primary night in her Elmhurst office when she won. I looked back years later at photos, and I was like, “Oh, there’s Jabari Brisport in that photo,” and there’s all these other people I’d come to know later on. And then, there was Julia Salazar‘s campaign later that year. But this was always something I did on the side here and there. About a year later I was between jobs. I had left a job thinking another one was lined up and it fell through. I was unemployed, and I really wanted to do the kinds of things I’d seen happening and had only dipped my toes in with the New York City DSA electoral project.

At the time, there was a buzz around New York City politics at the time — the defeat of the Independent Democratic Caucus, the challenge that Cynthia Nixon gave to Andrew Cuomo. It felt like things were in motion in a real way for the first time in a long time in New York City and New York State. So when I was unemployed in summer 2019, I was looking to work in politics and kind of just raising my hand and saying, “What can I do? Where can I go?”

I think it was through a combination of Nikhil Goyal, who I knew from Twitter, and Seth Pollak, an NYC-DSA member, that I was put in touch with a Greenpoint community activist named Emily Gallagher. She was looking to run against a forty-eight-year incumbent named Joe Lentol and was looking for a campaign manager. This was somebody who had gone through the waves of millennial left politicization. She was very involved with Occupy and community organizing and all the rest of it.

She had come to this moment where she wanted to actually run for office and challenge power in a direct way. I joined her campaign about two weeks before NYC-DSA officially declined to endorse in that race. I had signed up thinking, “Okay, this is going to be a DSA race.” They declined. But Emily and I had already found a connection around politics and sensibility.

For me, this district was an early lesson that I took to the Mamdani campaign: not believing what passes for commonsense wisdom among consultants and political writers. To the degree that anybody was thinking about Joe Lentol and that assembly seat, the assumption was that he was untouchable. He was an institution. But I was looking at a district that went for Bernie, went for Cynthia Nixon. Most eligible voters in the district didn’t even know what the New York State Assembly was. If we ran on a real agenda in a really energetic way that used every kind of comms tool available to us and took nothing for granted, we could break through.

And we did — without, in that case, NYC-DSA. Actually without a single elected official endorsing us. The Working Families Party had endorsed the incumbent. No labor union, nothing. It was a core group of organizers and a district that was ready for it.

Then COVID-19 hit. It upended the field program. The George Floyd uprising and protests were also, I think, crucial to the surge in turnout that eventually led us to win. It was on the course of that campaign that I met a young man named Zohran Mamdani. We shared an election lawyer, the great Ali Nazmi. I remember meetings in Ali’s office: Zohran coming out, us going in, probably around petitioning. I immediately thought, this guy’s got rizz — who is this guy?

We weren’t part of the same slate. But in some ways our race in 2020 was not totally dissimilar from his. He was also running against an incumbent who was understood to be good enough for New York State politics. It wasn’t somebody who was considered a big, bad enemy of progressive groups or the Left. But people like Emily and Zohran wanted to raise the expectations people had about what politics and government could deliver. Good enough wasn’t good enough.

Both races were extremely tight. They were won in the recount phase — fighting over ballots with gloves and masks on in the summer of 2020 at the Board of Elections. We had that shared affinity.

In the months between the Democratic primary win in June and July 2020 and Emily being sworn in in January 2021, we started having conversations with leaders in New York City DSA about Emily joining the Socialists in Office committee. That was driven in no small part by my relationship with Tascha Van Auken, which had developed even though she was managing Phara Souffrant Forrest’s campaign, which was part of the DSA slate, while we were not.

Emily and Phara had become friends. That led, in the fall, to conversations with a whole number of people: Cea Weaver, Jeremy Cohan, and others. By January 2021, Emily was sworn in and almost immediately joined the Socialists in Office committee — the first iteration of it in Albany. That included Emily, Marcela Mitaynes, Phara Souffrant Forrest, Julia Salazar (who had been there for a couple of years), and Jabari Brisport.