To the Field First, Comrades!
The NYC chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America has pulled off another stunning upset through Zohran Mamdani’s campaign. An insider shares DSA’s grassroots strategy.
To the New York Times, Zohran Mamdani’s insurgent mayoral campaign was “built from nothing in a matter of months.” For the Washington Post, he was “a political upstart with fresh ideas coming out of nowhere.” Even MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, who has covered left-wing movements more than most, told Ezra Klein that Mamdani “genuinely came out of nowhere.”
What makes these declarations of spontaneous inception so remarkable is not merely that they are wrong, but that they get it entirely backwards. While Mamdani’s ascent may have bypassed the traditional Democratic Party machinery, his campaign didn’t achieve this through individual genius, but through a decade of methodical collective effort.
A close look at the rise of Mamdani and the movement behind him yields both good news and bad news for a restless Democratic base looking to copy his success. The bad news is that there is no shortcut available: Mamdani’s rise was only made possible by a ten-year-long, door-to-door slog in the political trenches. The good news is that there’s no secret to it: It can be done; it just takes doing.
Mamdani’s success, according to mainstream narratives and prominent pundits, is due to a mixture of individual political acumen, social media savvy, a talented video production team, and his appealing message of a more affordable city for all New Yorkers. All of this helped, but the fact that Mamdani secured the most total votes in a primary in New York City’s history marks the culmination of a grassroots political project that began at least back in 2015, when the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) announced a “New Strategy for a New Era,” energized by the early days of Bernie Sanders’s first presidential run
Over the past nine years, NYC-DSA has built a field organizing machine that is arguably the strongest electoral operation in municipal politics nationwide. Through wins and losses in local, state, and federal elections, NYC-DSA has learned strategic lessons, developed significant logistical capacity, created a volunteer base for canvassing and outreach, and nurtured a cadre of experienced electoral campaign workers who work on endorsed campaigns.
NYC-DSA’s grassroots strategy began in the heart of what NYC political analyst Michael Lange calls “the commie corridor,” outer-borough neighborhoods stretching from Astoria, Queens to Sunset Park, Brooklyn. These areas are increasingly populated by younger leftists. NYC-DSA first organized Bushwick to help tenant organizer Debbie Medina’s State Senate campaign., Coming on the heels of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 primary campaign, Medina’s campaign received 40 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary, despite a tragic family scandal that forced the candidate to stop campaigning months before the primary. The extremely real estate friendly incumbent, Martin Dilan, remained a target for NYC-DSA, but would survive one more term before his eventual defeat by DSA-member Julia Salazar in 2018.
Next, NYC-DSA set its sights on the City Council, with the 2017 campaigns of then-teacher Jabari Brisport in Central Brooklyn and Palestinian Christian pastor Khader El-Yateem in South Brooklyn. Notably, El-Yateem’s campaign was the first NYC-DSA campaign that Zohran Mamdani supported by working as El-Yateem’s paid canvassing manager. This primary was an early expression of the alliance between Muslim immigrant communities and radical politics that contributed heavily to Mamdani’s primary win.
This coalition between democratic socialists and immigrant communities was not yet powerful enough to upend the existing South Brooklyn political scene. El-Yateem won 31% of the vote, but lost by eight points to the Working Families Party (WFP) candidate, current City Council Member Justin Brannan. NYC-DSA was then still an untested force—seen as too radical and impractical to be trusted by the institutional left of the WFP.
Meanwhile, up in Central Brooklyn, Jabari Brisport’s campaign continued to focus on opposing the designs of the real estate industry, hinging largely on his opposition to the controversial Bedford-Union Armory redevelopment project, which activists and many residents considered a giveaway of public land to a Trump-supporting developers for pennies on the dollar. Despite running as a Green in heavily-Democratic New York, Brisport secured 30% of the vote in the general election compared to 62% for the Democratic incumbent. Still, second place doesn’t get you a seat on the City Council, and the Bedford Union Armory project went through, with many of the promised community benefits never materializing.
What Works in New York: Primary The Democrats
Since then, NYC-DSA has exclusively run our candidates in Democratic primaries for several reasons.
First, many reliable New York voters are still loyal to Democratic party brand and can only be persuaded to vote for a candidate if they are nominally a Democrat. In New York, most of the “triple-prime” voters who vote in every primary are conditioned to see the Democratic primary as the only election that matters. In most cases, it is. Likewise, in most neighborhoods, most debates, policy conversations, and controversies happen in the runup to June, not November.
Second, running as a Democrat allows the campaign to compete for endorsements from advocacy organizations, labor unions, and elected officials who would otherwise rule out supporting an insurgent candidate. While Jabari was able to get endorsements from smaller organizations and a small labor union local, even ideologically aligned big players would rarely endorse a non-Democrat.
Third, primaries in New York have notoriously low turnout. Even last week’s high-profile mayoral primary garnered around 30% of eligible Democratic voters. While democratic socialists benefit from expanding the electorate, it’s easier to meaningfully expand an electorate of 1 million people rather than an electorate of 3 million people, especially through field organizing.
The successful campaigns of New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York State Senator Julia Salazar would demonstrate proofs of concept for these premises, creating a playbook for future grassroots campaigns including Mamdani’s.
In February 2018, I was brought on as the second staffer for the longshot congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. One of the organizations that formed in the aftermath of Bernie’s failed Presidential bid was Brand New Congress, which sought to run hundreds of candidates who had signed on to Sanders’ platform in both Republican and Democratic primaries. This organization eventually folded into the Justice Democrats. In 2018, they had recruited 12 candidates, including Ocasio-Cortez, and endorsed 79 others.
At that point, NYC-DSA had not yet endorsed Ocasio-Cortez, and there was some hesitation from the Justice Democrats about the baggage that comes along with the “democratic socialist” label.
Ocasio-Cortez, nonetheless, had been regularly attending meetings of both the Queens and Bronx/Upper Manhattan branch in hopes of gaining the NYC-DSA endorsement. Some DSA members were suspicious of whether her primary allegiance was to the more ideologically conventional Justice Democrats and wondered about her commitment to democratic socialism. Also, unlike the Justice Democrats, we weren’t supporting a large stable of endorsed candidates and would have to live with the consequences of our probable failure against one of the most powerful men in New York State politics. While they had races all around the country they were supporting, for us, this was a significant political risk: a low-probability but high-impact long shot. If we came at the king and missed, Crowley could easily bankroll our opponents in future electoral cycles, pressure influential organizations to blacklist our candidates, or even try to derail our tenant organizing and labor organizing efforts through his local political connections.
Despite these ideological and practical differences, there was also considerable ideological overlap between both groups, and the only two full-time staffers on the ground (Vigie Ramos-Rios and myself) were DSA members. Since we are a democratic organization, our endorsement process took some time. Ocasio-Cortez filled out policy questionnaires provided by DSA; attended endorsement forums where members asked her questions; and by April, she won the endorsement vote from both branches, unlocking NYC-DSA’s citywide network of volunteers, donors, and supporters.
In that race, we applied an early version of our “field-first” playbook using a volunteer force made up of NYC-DSA members, Justice Democrats, and local residents inspired by our message, especially immigrant communities. NYC-DSA’s Queens branch alone knocked more than 13,000 doors (while the Bronx/Upper Manhattan branch also did their part, their separated door count is sadly lost to time). We also hired two separate paid canvassing operations that contributed to extensive door-knocking operations across two boroughs, one of which was led by Rob Akleh, who went on to lead the paid canvassing effort of the Zohran Mamdani campaign. We won, precisely hitting our “win number” of 15,000 votes (57% of the vote). It greatly helped that we caught the Queens machine napping, with more than $1 million left in Crowley’s campaign account. As with Zohran, our coalition was much broader than just NYC-DSA, but it’s notable that among the 12 candidates recruited by Justice Democrats in 2018, she was both the only DSA-endorsed candidate and the only victor among them.
Over in Bushwick, our chapter had not forgotten about Martin Dilan and his coziness with the Real Estate Board of New York. At that time, congressional primaries were in June and state primaries were in September, so we had several months to take advantage of this momentum. We were already running DSA tenant activist Julia Salazar for the seat using this field-first approach, with campaign manager and DSA member Tascha Van Auken at the helm. Van Auken, who has bounced back and forth between politics and working in production for the Blue Man Group, is currently Zohran Mamdani’s field director and is probably the most well-respected field operative in NYC-DSA.
Salazar’s successful race is a telling case study of the power of a strong field operation, even in the face of scandal in the press (full disclosure, I was Senator Salazar’s Communications Director during her first term). While Ocasio-Cortez’s stealth victory was barely covered by the press , after she won and endorsed Salazar, the media grew much more interested in investigating democratic socialist candidates for office . Both mainstream and right-wing press hammered Salazar with a series of scandals. The mainstream publications uncovered inconsistencies with Salazar’s personal narrative, while The Daily Caller callously outed her as the victim of sexual assault.
Despite this steady drumbeat of negative media attention, NYC-DSA displayed a ruthless pragmatism and stuck by our candidate, determined to defeat the real estate-backed incumbent. We had chosen our candidate; we believed in her commitment to the cause; we knew that she would fight to protect our communities from further gentrification-driven displacement. The rest was noise. She won with 58 percent of the vote, underscoring the power of field organizing over the media narratives that obsess establishment politicians.
When asked by The Nation about how they had overcome these scandals, Van Auken pointed to NYC-DSA’s field operation, saying: “In all, 1,883 volunteers signed up for 4,663 canvassing shifts. Over the course of the campaign, supporters knocked on over 120,000 doors and had conversations with over 10,000 voters. That was a huge increase from the El-Yateem and Brisport campaigns, during which NYC-DSA knocked on about 20,000 doors for each.” By talking with neighbors anxious about their rent, canvassers foregrounded Salazar’s commitment to fighting for tenants, and NYC-DSA was able to neutralize the media narratives focused on discrediting Salazar as an individual. The movement was broader than any one person, so the media’s attempts to discredit her were ineffective. Our faith was rewarded the next year when Salazar was a key socialist voice in Albany during the intense struggle to pass 2019’s “Housing Stability and Tenant Support Act,” which finally made rent stabilization permanent in New York City and allowed upstate cities to institute rent stabilization. The New York Times called the legislation “a seismic shift…in the relationship between tenants and landlords.”
This result points toward one of the biggest tensions present within NYC-DSA. While it’s true that our chapter includes newcomers to the city—as shaped by decades of gentrification, and reinforced by NYC’s current political leadership—our electoral operation and legislative strategy consistently prioritizes fighting for longtime residents against further gentrification and the displacement pushed by the landlord lobby. While this coalition of transplants and longtime residents is not always comfortable, it has represented the foundation of our electoral and policy success, despite the bad-faith smears of establishment politicians whose decisions led to the gentrification they decry.
Organizing Toward the Mayoral Seat
Meanwhile, there was a broader struggle developing. The Independent Democratic Conference (IDC) was an organization of eight ostensibly Democratic lawmakers who caucused with Republicans in Albany. Despite public denials, it was an open secret that Andrew Cuomo created and sustained this conference, both to cement his near-absolute power in Albany and to allow him to blame the Republican-led Senate for the relatively conservative policies he supported. Cynthia Nixon was running for governor against Cuomo alongside a slate of challengers to the IDC backed by the Working Families Party. After an advisory vote of the membership, NYC-DSA’s Citywide Central Leadership Committee (CLC) voted to endorse Nixon for governor and Jumaane Williams for Public Advocate. This was somewhat controversial: some members felt that a millionaire celebrity without a strong attachment to NYC-DSA would not serve as an authentic representative of our politics. Nixon lost, but six out of eight of the IDC challengers she supported (as well as Julia Salazar) all won.
During this cycle, Mamdani was working on yet another South Brooklyn DSA member’s campaign. He worked first as the field director and then the campaign manager for writer and novelist Ross Barkan. Unlike the other campaigns featured in this article, however, Barkan did not obtain NYC-DSA’s endorsement, falling short of the internal vote threshold required to win endorsement. This was most likely due to concerns about capacity, as NYC-DSA was going all-out for Julia Salazar and had never before run two candidates for the same election date. Barkan is a self-described “Israel-skeptic Jew,” and was running in a district with both large numbers of Muslim voters and Orthodox Jewish communities. Barkan fell short, putting Mamdani at zero for two, but in both races he had shown an impressive organizing and managing capacity that marked him as a rising talent.
Mamdani’s two experiences running campaigns in relatively conservative South Brooklyn likely honed his ability to bridge the divide between Jewish and Muslim New Yorkers, which was exemplified by his successful alliance with Brad Lander in the June primary and his success among significant numbers of Jewish primary voters. The intensifying genocide in Gaza likely cemented this alliance as growing numbers of Jewish voters have become disillusioned with Netanyahu’s increasingly brutal government and even the Zionist project itself.
In every cycle after 2018’s watershed success, we have made steady progress iterating on this playbook, running several candidates for state or local offices while successfully defending our existing elected officials. In addition to those already mentioned, our victors include State Senators Kristen Gonzalez and Jabari Brisport State Assembly Members Phara Souffrant Forrest, Marcela Mitaynes, Emily Gallagher, Claire Valdez, and Zohran Mamdani; and City Council Members Tiffany Cabán and Alexa Avilés. All of these elected officials are what we used to call “open” socialists, as our membership does not usually endorse those who refuse to identify as such. The state-level electeds in this group are organized into a "Socialists in Office" committee (SIO) that coordinates our independent state legislative strategy.
We have also lost our fair share of races, but even the losses have built our capacity, created volunteer networks in new neighborhoods, trained new staff, and spread our ideals from the Bronx to Bay Ridge. We have developed an internally democratic endorsement process and political culture that ensures close organizational alignment between our membership and our candidates, especially what we call “cadre” candidates like Zohran, meaning candidates who have become politically active through their engagement with NYC-DSA.
To date, NYC-DSA has not only elected the first socialist State Senator in a century, but also can now claim a nationally famous congress member. Naturally, most DSA members became more concerned with ensuring that our elected officials authentically represent our movement. Joining the campaigns of inauthentic candidates who opportunistically seek endorsement to get a modicum of power became even less attractive to the membership, as we had shown the ability to elect candidates who consistently identified as democratic socialists. As a result, after 2018, our chapter moved away from endorsing candidates who primarily identify as progressives. While in this recent cycle, Mamdani’s alliance with Lander and the WFP slate speaks to our chapter’s willingness to strategically ally with other groups, the days when NYC-DSA would endorse a liberal candidate like David Dinkins as a junior coalition partner are now over.
Trust the Process, Trust the People: DSA’s Support Is Conditional
In our internal process, candidates submit questionnaires on their policy positions to the Electoral Working Group, then attend forums with the membership of the geographic branches they hope to represent in government. In these forums, rank-and-file members ask candidates questions. After this, the membership has an internal discussion (without the candidate present) to debate issues of organizational capacity, alignment with our principles, and any issues members might have with their questionnaires or answers.
One of the unique reasons our field operation is effective is that we don’t do “paper” endorsements, meaning that our endorsement is a commitment to an all-out field organizing effort aimed at winning the election. In these discussions, one of the perennial questions is whether we have members who are willing to regularly volunteer or become a canvassing lead. This means that we largely avoid the problem wherein a candidate receives an endorsement from an organization but the rank and file don't fully and materially support the effort. This also means that connected insiders aren't able to game the process easily because of individual personal relationships and obtain endorsements without being largely accountable to our membership.
These organizational structures have been built by our now nearly 10,000 citywide members. By incorporating the lessons from each cycle, we continue to expand our ambitions to the scale of our abilities. This organizational culture and structure is the incubator from which the Mamdani campaign grew. Mamdani filled out his questionnaires, spoke at a citywide town hall at the Church in the Village, and we voted to endorse him last October. He won endorsement with around 80% of the vote, with a turnout of around 6,000 people. As the campaign’s often-mentioned 50,000 volunteers started to sign up, a ready-made, citywide network of experienced field organizers were ready to help train them, dispatch them, and manage the logistics that made them so effective. It’s notable that, in Mamdani’s questionnaire, he said that he would not run at all if he did not receive our endorsement. While the coalition that coalesced around his campaign was much broader than NYC-DSA, in this very direct sense our organization is responsible for his mayoral run.
In making this commitment, Mamdani’s organizational discipline points toward one of the most important parts of this organizing machine: the big, scary “S” word, socialism. A membership-run democratic organizing machine works best because all of us are accountable to a specific approach to politics, a specific ideology of democratic socialism, and an ongoing historical tradition much broader than any individual. Our members insist that our candidates identify as democratic socialists not as a purity test, but as an accountability test. We largely avoid the issue of a charismatic person with vague positions and ideals hijacking our organizational power and betraying us, because they must remain accountable to our membership's collective understanding of what democratic socialism means and how it should be practiced.
Because we stand for specific principles, we can mobilize members to act en masse for those principles. Our volunteers aren’t told to come out: they want to come out because they believe in our collective political project and they participated in the process that led to the candidate’s endorsement. Our collective wisdom has decided that while certain compromises need to happen in government, the candidate will fight hard for us and our movement while communicating the reasoning behind their decisions.
Notably, the issue that has come closest to requiring a complete break with DSA elected officials has historically been their commitment (or lack thereof) to Palestinian liberation and anti-Zionist politics. In 2021, after nationally endorsed Jamaal Bowman went to Israel with J Street, met with former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet, and voted for the Iron Dome, the National Political Committee debated expelling him from the organization altogether, ultimately deciding to allow him to remain but not to re-endorse him until he demonstrated solidarity with Palestine. However, in 2024, once Bowman was facing AIPAC-backed primary challenger George Latimer, he successfully made amends with NYC-DSA, though not National DSA, obtaining a last-minute endorsement around a month before the primary. This was partially because he reversed his position and agreed to support B.D.S. This was controversial because of the rushed nature of the endorsement and his past positions on the issue. Unlike Salazar, Brisport, and Mamdani, Bowman’s primary political home wasn’t DSA, but Justice Democrats. Bowman lost.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez faced a similar controversy in 2024 after she voted for a House resolution that labeled the “denial of Israel’s right to exist” as antisemitism and hosted a panel with Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, an organization that lobbies for a definition of antisemitism that includes anti-Zionism. The national press covered the fracas with AOC as an un-endorsement by DSA, but that wasn’t entirely accurate. After intense debate, DSA’s National Political Committee had decided to issue her an endorsement with strict conditions: opposition to all funding for Israel, support for the “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” movement, votes against all bills that conflate anti-semitism and anti-Zionism, and participation in a federal Socialists in Office committee.
By that point, Ocasio-Cortez had already won her primary in a landslide, and NYC-DSA’s leadership withdrew their request to national for endorsement, as these conditions had not been previously discussed with the candidate or the chapter. Some, moreover, felt that she would not abide by them, setting up an awkward conflict. The National Political Committee’s subsequent statement was widely covered as DSA’s wholesale rejection of Ocasio-Cortez, but NYC-DSA continues to have a relationship with her office and has not withdrawn our local endorsement. (DSA endorses at a both national and local level.) Some members still felt that she should have been censured or lost our local endorsement, and the next time she is up for reelection, they will no doubt voice their concerns.
Both of these incidents show a deep, and often justified, fear on the left that our candidates will accept our support only to betray us in office. DSA’s electoral political experiment is still young by historical standards. One day, one of our elected officials will stray so far from our principles that our membership will choose to actively oppose them. In that case, they may find themselves facing off against the very electoral field organizing machine that brought them to power in the first place.
Bowman, who did not come from our ranks and flip-flopped on whether he remained a member after the controversy, came to us seeking endorsement when he was in danger of losing his primary. If Bowman had been a more consistent and reliable member of the movement, he wouldn’t have needed to come to us last-minute, and he would have enjoyed the consistent and early support provided to candidates like Mamdani. While we endorsed Bowman as a tactical decision against a common enemy, the level of enthusiasm and support our members showed for his candidacy was limited by his own political history and decisions in office. Given the headwinds Bowman faced (particularly a much less favorably drawn district), it’s unlikely that deeper alignment between him and NYC-DSA would have put him over the top. However, his inconsistency certainly didn’t win him any friends in the Zionist lobby, and it’s hard to say that stronger support from NYC-DSA wouldn’t have helped his campaign.
NYC-DSA has created an organizing machine that does not just provide material support to our elected officials, but also places them into a political community that encourages accountability to our shared values. Candidates like Mamdani don’t just assume the democratic socialist label to get our endorsement: they practice democratic socialism as members of a broader organizational culture, making it a core feature of political life. Over the past nine years, we have worked together to radically change our city’s politics, bringing socialist ideals to the beating heart of U.S. capitalism and challenging the U.S. empire in the Empire State.
We also know that, even as a campaign ends, the fight is never over. The Democratic establishment is showing no signs of rolling over in the general election, which will require everything NYC-DSA has to give and then some. If, and when, Mamdani moves into Gracie Mansion, he’ll have a powerful array of forces lined up against him in the city, Albany, and the White House. Will it be enough to have the people with him? We intend to find out.
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Incredibly well-written article that describes an impressive long-term organizing effort!
Bravo! Inspiration and insight at exactly a time when we need both, thank you!