How We Won

Mamdani’s twelve-point win over Cuomo was a watershed moment for the socialist movement. Mamdani crushed Cuomo at the ballot box by running on an unabashedly left-wing economic populist agenda and mobilizing 50,000 volunteers — the largest volunteer operation since John Lindsay enlisted 25,000 volunteers in his bid for mayor in 1965.

As much as the political class attempts to chalk up Mamdani’s success to the candidate’s charisma and slick TikTok videos, the backbone of this campaign is a mass-membership socialist organization. Mamdani is a product of NYC-DSA’s nine-year electoral project and our mass-membership nature.

Since 2017, our chapter has endorsed dozens of city, state, and congressional races, winning almost half of those elections. Through this process, we’ve managed to build a large cadre of electoral organizers and an organization that has figured out how to take advantage of political openings. During this race, those conditions included liberals’ and progressives’ increasing dissatisfaction with the mainstream Democratic Party in the face of Donald Trump’s reelection, the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and the political weakness of the neoliberal coalition in New York City, which offered a tired and uninspired Cuomo as their messenger.

The campaign launched several large early canvasses in December and January, with the goal of identifying and training a layer of new field leads, on-the-ground organizers responsible for their local neighborhood-based door-knocking shift. From December to May, we knocked on half a million doors, building an organizing infrastructure that ballooned in size once the race kicked into high gear. From May to June, we knocked on 1.1 million doors and trained almost five hundred field leads, most of whom were not yet members of NYC-DSA.

At the heart of the campaign’s field operation was an inviting, festive, and energetic environment where volunteers took ownership of the campaign’s messaging. This ethos encouraged ad-hoc affinity groups like “Hot Girls for Zohran” and led to cheeky community-building events like a Mamdani look-alike competition at Prospect Park, which attracted hundreds of people.

It was a fundamentally positive campaign, which encouraged volunteers to return weekly to spread Mamdani’s message and to build community links. More than 17,000 canvassers came back to do another door-knocking shift. In an increasingly undemocratic, politically alienating, and atomized society, these canvasses are spaces to practice mass civic participation and continue to offer thousands of New Yorkers a concrete action that builds a left-wing political project.

When Mamdani confronted Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, during a visit to New York’s state capitol — thanks in part to the organizing of our socialist-in-office New York assemblymember Marcela Mitaynes — the Mamdani campaign broke into the mainstream, making his primetime debut on Fox News and netting over three million views on Twitter. Mamdani positioned himself as the fighter New York City needs, and people showered the campaign with a record number of small donations.

Building on this momentum, the campaign continued benefiting from grassroots organizing efforts in unions like American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) District Council 37, which endorsed him, and the United Federation of Teachers, which at the time remained neutral. These results, along with the early endorsements from United Auto Workers Region 9A, Teamsters Local 804, Professional Staff Congress CUNY, and International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 161, among others, helped legitimize the Mamdani campaign as it slowly rose in the polls.

Along with rank-and-file union organizing, a central part of our path to victory was focusing heavily on door-knocking in neighborhoods where NYC-DSA currently has an electoral base and targeting disengaged voters in those districts. The goal in these parts of the city was to boost turnout in these favorable districts. The campaign also targeted Muslim and South Asian neighborhoods, rent-stabilized tenants in progressive-leaning districts, and communities with a high percentage of renters. This resulted in Mamdani winning eight out of ten districts with the largest number of rental units and increasing voter turnout in these renter-dense areas by 7.5 percent.

Mamdani’s focus on expanding the electorate by reaching Muslim communities is notable. The campaign canvassed over one hundred mosques, reaching out to over 200,000 Muslim voters in the process and bringing the candidate’s affordability platform to a segment of the population often left out of politicians’ calculus. In a referendum on a message that both resonated with voters and reshaped the electorate, over 37,000 people registered to vote fourteen days before the primary, a twelvefold increase from the 2021 race.

Growing NYC-DSA symbiotically with the Mamdani coalition was a key factor in our success. Since launching the campaign, we’ve seen an 80 percent surge in membership, driven in part by members-only town halls and by training members to make meaningful recruitment pitches. The fact that we are Mamdani’s political home helped make the case for socialist organization to newly politicized Zohran volunteers. Most importantly, endorsing a winning campaign led to our largest membership bump, as people tend to want to be a part of a successful movement.

A Mamdani Mandate

Ensuring a successful first hundred days of a Mamdani mayoralty will involve keeping the pedal to the metal and scaling up our mass field operation. Mamdani’s record-shattering 573,169 votes for a Democratic nominee sets us up to fight for a historic million votes in November. A million votes will not protect a Mamdani mayoralty from capital strikes, a surprise blizzard, a potentially hostile New York Police Department, or all manner of Trump-induced chaos, but it would legitimize the ambitions of Mamdani’s agenda, build momentum from below to enact the campaign’s platform, and provide political capital and leverage for a socialist mayor that will be in the spotlight from day one.

As we restart our field operation, we will reach out to Democrats who supported Cuomo in the primary and continue targeting disengaged voters. Many older black working-class New Yorkers represent a loyal base of the Democratic Party and have the most to lose by taking a risk at the ballot box. These voters — unlike Rep. Hakeem Jeffries or Sen. Chuck Schumer — will vote “blue no matter who.” We’ll also reintroduce the campaign and its three planks — freeze the rent, fast and free buses, and childcare for all — and continue to seek opportunities to build more widespread support that both broadens our coalition and blunts opposition efforts.

Mamdani, as the Democratic nominee in a general election with over five million registered voters, and NYC-DSA, as a senior partner to the campaign, have a unique opportunity to reach a larger swath of the population — especially through expanding our field program. If victorious, we can show why democratic socialists are needed to upend our failing political system and to stand up to oligarchy.

The socialist values underpinning the Mamdani campaign’s narrative and platform will require mass-movement tactics to effectively communicate our vision and build a popular front against the Right. The playbook will include holding mass rallies against Trumpism and town halls on planks of his agenda, walking picket lines and supporting militant worker actions, organizing mass canvasses, and strategizing on how to keep canvasses and community-building events politicized after Election Day. Additionally, formalizing and giving political structure to the Mamdani coalition would allow for strategic planning, coordination, and the creation of access points to Mayor Mamdani.

Building Power From the Inside and Outside

A Mamdani mayoralty will be a crucial litmus test for the Left’s ability to govern and deliver. Like Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, we will have a united enemy trying to derail the administration and reshape the public narrative. A neoliberal coalition that includes the real estate industry, the finance sector, the charter school industry, pro-Israel forces, corporate Democrats, and the right wing of the city council (as well as Albany, and Washington, DC) will try to make an example of Mamdani’s New York City.

In the face of this opposition, enacting Mamdani’s agenda is the Left’s key task. Endorsing community groups, unions and networks of rank-and-file trade unionists, tenant organizations, progressive organizations, and NYC-DSA will need to work together with Mayor Mamdani to build mass action campaigns and use enforcement of aspects of the Mamdani agenda, like collecting fines from landlords, as components of a mass action political strategy, strengthening the outside in the inside-outside strategy.

As a socialist mayor, Mamdani will attempt to alleviate the affordability crisis while dealing with a government whose ability to provide public goods and services has been seriously eroded due to decades of budget cuts, privatization, and deregulation. This will be compounded by having to navigate working with a centrist stonewaller governor and a hostile federal government that has threatened to send the National Guard to “help with New York” as part of efforts to facilitate immigration enforcement raids on our churches, daycare centers, and schools.

Mayor Mamdani will need to turn these obstructions and attacks against working-class New Yorkers into mass politicizing events and use the constant media attention to shape public perception to his advantage. He will need to lean heavily on his knack for slick media production to counter elite narratives and his countless new organizers, who were initially mobilized to help him win election, to provide a rapid response to protect our communities.

The Left can use a Mamdani mayoralty to organize a mass base around enacting policy gains and long-term campaigns for the structural changes that would tip the playing field for working-class New Yorkers, such as increasing the corporate tax rate, making it easier for public unions to strike, securing childcare for all, and implementing government-owned grocery stores.

Our tactics will be mass political actions that build and cohere our project and politicize working-class New Yorkers by centering their participation and involvement in the movement. NYC-DSA’s Budget Working Group and the Tax the Rich campaign — a grassroots effort in coalition with community organizations and labor unions, aligned with the Mamdani administration — are key contributors to building the movement needed to enact Mamdani’s agenda by taxing the wealthy in New York and pressuring power brokers in Albany.

By analyzing the relationship between organizations and stakeholders in the anti-Mamdani coalition, we can find opportunities to box out our opponents. NYC-DSA’s branches can use their expertise in local organizing conditions to connect newly politicized New Yorkers to concrete actions to defend the Mamdani administration. For instance: branch meetings pitched as “Inside the People’s City Hall,” where liaisons of the campaign can connect with our members and community on the daily happenings of the administration and how we can join campaigns or actions to help build our coalition.

NYC-DSA can strengthen its financial power, organizational infrastructure, increase its membership intake, and build its capacity to respond to chaos from the anti-Mamdani coalition by operating at a mass scale, constantly trying to organize new people into action. An ambitious local dues recruitment drive will allow us to grow our ranks, keep our coffers ready for a tenuous and unpredictable next two years, and build the Left of the growing and fluid Mamdani coalition.

Electoral Strategy for a Socialist Agenda

As corporate Democrats passively wait for Trump’s popularity to dip and for his base to fracture on its own, it will be up to the Left to offer a compelling alternative to the Right’s faux populism. Electoral campaigns that offer a popular vision for the Left and are rooted in mass-movement tactics can help us keep winning state power. NYC-DSA’s electoral project can continue making massive gains in 2026 by capitalizing on the corporate political class’s disconnect from ordinary New Yorkers and on their failure to effectively counter Trump’s assault on the working class.

As Democratic Party polling remains at historic lows, there is a strong case to be made that the neoliberal coalition, represented by the likes of Jeffries and Kathy Hochul, cannot be trusted to lead the resistance to the threats coming from DC. The challenge is for the Mamdani administration and the Left to prove in practice their fighting worth by delivering results and demonstrating leadership in response to attacks from the far right at a mass level that builds a majoritarian Mamdani coalition. That coalition can be the base for future electoral campaigns.

A key strategy involves NYC-DSA continuing to run socialists for office on the Democratic ballot line. This would help shape our political terrain, popularize our politics, and, most importantly, build institutional power by winning more seats in the state assembly. To achieve this, we could run an ambitious slate to enact the Mamdani agenda. Additionally, running a popular agitational race for a highly visible seat, like Congress, could serve as an anchor to our 2026 slate of insurgents and help propagandize Mamdani’s message across different levels of government.

The socialist movement in New York City finds itself in uncharted territory. At stake is the potential to build a generation-defining coalition that can serve as a base for democratic socialism in municipalities across the country. At the heart of this coalition is a mass-membership socialist organization, NYC-DSA. This coalition will have contending interests, constantly shifting dynamics, and a fluid nature. To successfully protect a Mamdani mayoralty and build institutional and structural power, we will need to seize this opportunity to rebuild powerful working-class institutions, empower community organizations, organize a mass base around popular left demands like taxing the rich, and continue using elections to reach millions with our message and shape public perception during a Mamdani mayoralty.

We should resist the mindset that sees our relationship with socialist elected officials as primarily one of holding them accountable to campaign commitments and socialist principles. Mayor Mamdani’s ability to fulfill his commitments will be, in part, a product of our success in building power and organizing a mass base behind his agenda. Naturally there will be moments of misalignment between the mayor and the movement that helped him get elected, but the Left’s approach to resolving this shouldn’t be maximalist demands or performative litmus tests but a mass co-governing structure that allows for cohesion, alignment, and generative conflict.

Building a political machine that can both win the mayoralty and spearhead mass action campaigns that allow us to co-govern can enable us to build a stronger left and the movement needed to stand up to Trump’s sinister intentions. By sinking deeper roots in the multiracial working class, seeking opportunities to mobilize as many people as possible to action, and positioning ourselves as the political home for thousands of working-class New Yorkers who want to fight for a better city, the Left can make transformative change.