One compelling way to make electoral prognostication more authoritative is to incorporate historical precedent: Donald Trump is the second coming of Andrew Jackson; Bernie Sanders is continuing the work of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal; X is possible because Y already happened. But what about those who seek to do the unprecedented? What can, say, a socialist seeking the office of New York City mayor look to in their quest for victory?

The city’s 2025 mayoral election invites comparison to two previous races: 1977’s race, when weak incumbent Abraham Beame was primaried by a pack of ambitious Democrats led by Ed Koch and Mario Cuomo, and 1993’s, when David Dinkins, the city’s first and only black mayor was defeated for reelection by Rudy Giuliani and a wave of white resentment.

As models, neither 1977 nor 1993 suggest much success for Zohran Mamdani, the state assemblymember from western Queens who in October became the first major socialist to contend for citywide elected office in recent memory. Though Mamdani’s push for executive office marks a new endeavor for the city’s resurgent socialist movement — which has elected eleven total city and state legislators endorsed by the local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) since 2018 — he is far from the first socialist to run for mayor in New York.

The record of those candidates is of course flush with defeat. But Mamdani can still learn valuable lessons from the most successful of these runs: immigrant labor lawyer Morris Hillquit’s 1917 campaign, in which he garnered nearly 22 percent of the citywide vote, about half the winning candidate, defeating the incumbent mayor in the Bronx while running even with him in Brooklyn and Queens. That race, which the New York Times trumpeted as “the most extraordinary in recent memory” and an unpredictable “puzzle without parallel,” bears striking similarity to the one ahead of Mamdani and DSA next year.

Though in 1917 Hillquit received the highest percentage of votes of any socialist candidate in New York City history (and running again in 1932, he received the highest raw vote total), it must be noted that technically New York City has had more successful socialist mayoral candidates. First among them: Dinkins, who held membership in a much weaker iteration of DSA during his one term as mayor of New York City and even spoke at DSA cofounder and longtime socialist public intellectual Michael Harrington’s funeral. But milquetoast liberal Dinkins certainly never ran on or governed with socialist bonafides.

Following his defeat in 1993, the Democratic nominee, Manhattan borough president Ruth Messinger, was endorsed by DSA in a dismal chapter-wide membership vote of nine to eight (you read that right: only seventeen total votes were cast). Giuliani shellacked Messinger by nearly 20 points while pestering her throughout campaign media appearances about her former membership in the organization. She hardly embraced the socialist left, slouching off the organization’s politics as no different than liberal Democrat Hubert Humphrey’s.

Despite taking place over a century ago, the dynamics of Hillquit’s first race look far more similar to Mamdani’s run than Dinkins’s or Messinger’s. In 1917, incumbent mayor John Purroy Mitchel faced deep unpopularity due to budget cuts, preference for privatized transit, and constant partying with the city’s upper crust. Sound familiar? Mitchel’s unpopularity ran so deep that he lost in the Republican primary, and instead was forced to campaign as an independent — certainly in the realm of possibility for Eric Adams. International political affairs loomed over the local election — as American entry into World War I sparked both explosive nativism and support for American militarism, and pacificism in many immigrant communities. Accordingly, the election occurred during a stark period of political realignment.

“While for a generation in this city there has been an ever-lessening tendency of voting along party lines, there has been in some other years what might be termed approximately a ‘solid’ Democratic vote, a ‘solid’ Republican vote, a ‘solid’ Socialist vote. Apparently there will be no solid Democratic, Republican, or Socialist vote” this time around, the Times wrote just days before the election. With chaos in the air, “even the Socialists are in a position to predict victory for their candidate with apparent plausibility,” they begrudgingly added.

Running on the slogan “The city for the people,” Hillquit and the socialists leaned aggressively into voters’ major causes of discontent. On the municipal front, they sought to establish programs to bring down cost-of-living expenses. Newspaper ads trumpeted an effort to control the price of household goods like milk and bread by creating a city agency charged with buying directly from farmers and bakers and distributing the goods at cost, nodding to European cities already running similar programs.

Strong municipal programs were a feature of successful socialist mayorships elsewhere at the time, like Milwaukee. But Hillquit had broader political ambitions. He would later allegedly coin the term “sewer socialism” to denigrate socialists solely focused on local issues, lacking solidarity with the international working class fighting revolutions across the globe. Running for mayor of the country’s largest city, Hillquit became one of the most visible leaders of the American antiwar effort.

He characterized the war as an effort to benefit aristocrats and industrialists in which rural peasants and urban workers would suffer greatly, opposed the purchasing of Liberty Bonds by which citizens could finance the war effort, and any American intervention in World War I. For this, he was slandered by Mitchel, who called into question the foreign-born candidate’s loyalty to America. Ex-president Theodore Roosevelt even said Hillquit “stands as an aid to the Prussianized autocracy” and “a Hun inside our gates,” while the sitting attorney general clamored to prosecute the socialist.

Hillquit’s pacifism held both electoral benefit with immigrant groups as well as these drawbacks, but crucially it also gained him national influence — he served as part of a delegation of antiwar advocates who met with President Woodrow Wilson, and even after the election he remained one of the country’s more prominent socialists, alongside Eugene Debs.

Hillquit also crisscrossed the boroughs speaking in support of Irish independence, once garnering a crowd of a thousand in Coney Island. Raucous rallies were a feature of the campaign. More than three thousand supporters, with “at least 90 percent of the audience [being] evidently foreign-born,” attended a preelection rally at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, with hundreds more turned away. Another preelection “monster meeting,” according to the New York Tribune, packed Madison Square Garden with 14,000 supporters for an event “marked by the frequency and fervor of the interrupting enthusiasm” such as “thousands of hats thrown in the air” and multiple twenty-five-minute standing ovations. Partway through the rally, half a dozen federal agents even walked up to the stage to intimidate the candidate, though they were roundly ridiculed by the audience.

In the end, Hillquit quintupled the previous socialist vote total. The Times characterized the race’s crucial swing voters, who broke for Hillquit as well as the victorious John Francis Hylan, as “the Irish vote, the German vote, the Catholic vote, the pacifist vote, the malcontent vote, the vote of an element whose hostility the Mayor has incurred.” The combination of his nuts-and-bolts governance and internationalist stance strengthened support in immigrant communities, and especially Jewish strongholds (though more bourgeois Jewish New Yorkers opposed his radicalism), while making inroads with black voters in Harlem, where he won a quarter of the vote.

Though he was defeated, the coordinated citywide socialist effort helped elect a record number of socialists — ten state assemblymembers, seven city alderpersons, and a municipal court judge. Despite the subsequent Red Scare, which saw some of these elected officials expelled from office and the broad crushing of the Left, programs popularized by those winning socialists, including public ownership of mass transportation, were eventually implemented.

The parallels to the current moment are obvious. Mamdani, also an immigrant socialist, faces a corrupt and unpopular incumbent amid a changing electoral landscape. In the 2024 presidential election, voters of color swung away from Democrats (both toward Trump as well as out of electoral participation altogether) at record numbers. And though it may not prove to be the number-one issue in the 2025 election, the specter of Israel’s genocide in Gaza will loom over the race. Top right-wing donors have already shown a willingness to spend big on libelous attacks of antisemitism against the Left, and the American support for Israel remains a top issue for many Jewish and Muslim voters.

Like Hillquit, Mamdani has centered his campaign on winning disaffected voters of all stripes. Targeting the cost-of-living crisis, he has promised to implement a rent freeze on the city’s million-odd rent-stabilized apartments, make buses fast and free, win state funding for free universal childcare, and create publicly owned grocery stores — the latter a proposal similar to Hillquit’s own. Mamdani has also consistently spoken out against Israel’s genocide, introducing a bill to cut off American financial support for illegal Israeli settlements, criticizing Mayor Adams’s use of the New York Police Department to crack down on student protesters, taking arrest at civil disobedience actions against the war, and pledging to arrest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he ever visited New York City. For his efforts, he has faced Islamophobic attacks, more of which are likely to come in slanderous mailers and attack ads by the thousands.

Mamdani’s hope lies in forging a wide coalition of the disaffected: existing progressive and left-wing areas (where he will have competition from a number of liberal candidates), Muslim voters and those otherwise outraged at American support for genocide, swathes of the cost-burdened working class whose votes have recently swung between parties, and of course “the vote of an element whose hostility the Mayor has incurred,” whose ranks are swelling in response to Adams’s flagrant corruption.

So far, his campaign seems targeted on this strategy. In a particularly compelling early campaign video, Mamdani interviewed pedestrians on Fordham Road in the Bronx and Hillside Avenue in Queens, working class, heavily non-white neighborhoods that saw some of the largest shift toward Trump (and nonvoting) in the city. Interviewees consistently cited groceries, rent, and other rising costs as well as Democrats’ support for Israel, as reasons that drove them away from liberals and toward the Right. Each responds glowingly to Mamdani’s platform, and many pledge to vote for him.

Why did so many working class New Yorkers vote for Donald Trump last week — and even more not vote at all?

I went to Hillside Ave in Queens and Fordham Rd in the Bronx to find out. pic.twitter.com/1dXmnP01A4

— Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@ZohranKMamdani) November 15, 2024

The campaign would also be smart to focus on spreading this message in New York City’s plethora of local ethnic media outlets, too. Though the city’s once dense civic and associational life has been decimated compared to a century ago, Mamdani will have far more resources at his disposal than Hillquit did even relatively, having raised over $350,000 in just over two months, plus a knack for social media videos. For all his shrewd politicking, Hillquit never went viral.

Mamdani has made clear he is in the race to win, not just proselytize. But should he fall short, the race could still have long-lasting impacts for the Left. His candidacy has already helped reframe the race away from questions of technocratic competence and toward material politics. His early embrace of a rent freeze, for example, has already pushed multiple other candidates to adopt the policy themselves. More broadly, DSA’s focus on using the race to build membership in traditionally weaker areas will build strength for future battles. And though he would not have the same access to the levers of power, the massive spotlight on the election can catapult him to the status of a national voice against Israeli genocide.

Following in the footsteps of socialists from 1917 is always an exciting prospect for the Left, but in this case, the footsteps are a mere suggestion. Much more will be required to actually win. Socialists now need not just a strong platform, charismatic messenger, and sizable piggy bank, but countless volunteers organizing, doing outreach, and converting the undecided in diverse neighborhoods across city. The 2025 election portends to be another “puzzle without parallel,” but the socialist left’s return to this level of contention marks a historic opportunity nonetheless. It’s up to New Yorkers to decide what to do with it.