We Need a Strategy to Win Zohran’s Agenda. Call It Plan Z.
Electing Zohran Mamdani is just the beginning. To actually win his agenda against billionaire opposition, we need to build popular power — permanent grassroots organizations that can mobilize tens of thousands to have his back when the fight gets real.
Zohran Mamdani participates in an endorsement event with Congressman Adriano Espaillat at the United Palace Theater in Manhattan, New York, on July 10, 2025. (Kyle Mazza / Anadolu via Getty Images)
In February 2020, the insurgent left was on top of the world. Bernie Sanders had just won the Nevada caucuses, solidifying his status as the front-runner in the Democratic presidential primary. A month later, the Democratic Party had consolidated behind Joe Biden, who won South Carolina and dominated Super Tuesday, and the pandemic had set in. Sanders soon demobilized his historic campaign infrastructure and joined a series of committees under Biden in a quixotic attempt to pull Biden left. The Sanders movement dissipated overnight.
Zohran Mamdani’s grassroots campaign and Democratic primary victory feels a lot like February 2020. To avoid the disappointments that followed, we must chart a new path. Luckily, Sanders’s tenure as mayor of Burlington in the 1980s is a master class in just the style of politics we need to be building today.
According to Sanders in his book Outsider In the House, when he was first elected mayor in 1981, the “Democrats’ strategy” was to “tie my hands, make it impossible for me to accomplish anything.” The board of aldermen (Burlington’s city council) fired Sanders’s secretary and denied his proposed appointees. Mayor Bernie’s response was, first, to “do everything a mayor could possibly do without the support of the City Council.” Second was to “expose the local Democrats and Republicans for what they were — obstructionists and political hacks who had very few positive ideas.” Third, and in his view most important, was to “build a third party in the city to defeat them in the next election.”
In that first year, Bernie and his “shadow cabinet” organized grassroots “Mayor’s Councils” to inform his administration and bypass the city council, and established a “parallel city government” while waging a “civil war” inside city hall.
They formed the Progressive Coalition, which, “while not a political party under state law (because it is not a statewide organization) … operated in Burlington as if it were exactly that.” The Progressive Coalition fielded six candidates the following year, winning three races outright, forcing two runoffs. The board of aldermen finally had to play ball, and Bernie’s famously successful tenure as America’s socialist mayor began.
A likely future Mayor Mamdani can learn more from this outsider approach to politics than the more insider approach Sanders took under Biden.
To win Zohran’s agenda in New York, we believe a strategy relying on popular power outside of city hall is needed: the permanent mobilization of ordinary working-class people in their workplaces and neighborhoods pressuring the city, state, and federal governments to make New York truly affordable. In other countries facing political crises of the center left, new left parties can emerge to fill the void — think of recent developments in Mexico, France, and the United Kingdom. But in the United States, institutional barriers are too high in many places for new parties to succeed. Thus, in those places, we need to work on building grassroots political organizations that act like parties without formally bearing that status, so-called “proto-parties.”
In order to sustain and deepen the incredible energy of Zohran’s election campaign, we propose the formation of a proto-party like what Mayor Bernie Sanders built in Burlington — a place where tens of thousands of volunteers can go to keep organizing beyond the November election. Indeed, many of us wished Sanders had continued party-building after 2020, and we hope that this approach replaces individual candidate–focused politics for the Left going forward.
Three P’s of Electoral Politics
Typically in American politics, when elections end, all but a tiny core of activists go home and become spectators rooting for our leaders to win for us. There’s no clear way for volunteers to continue using the infrastructure they’ve built for organizing efforts beyond election day. Consequently, progressive promises often fall by the wayside as politicians get mired in insider politics.
To understand this frustrating dynamic, we can look to what we call the three P’s of electoral politics: personality, policy, and power. Mainstream media presents politics as a contest between personalities. Liberals know Barack Obama is charming and benevolent, while Donald Trump is insane and corrupt. (Vice versa for conservatives.) Progressives tend to push for something more substantial: policies. The progressive credo is, “I want to vote for a platform I believe in, not just a charismatic candidate.” Sadly, however easy it might be for candidates to campaign on progressive policies, it’s quite challenging to implement them once in office.
That brings us to power. Progressive policy founders on the shore of capitalist power. Billionaires have inordinate influence in the political system through legal channels of corruption like unlimited donations. Billionaire-backed media shapes the narrative for millions of voters. Understaffed lawmakers rely on corporate-funded lobbyists and think tanks for basic legislative support. Most profoundly, corporations can punish progressive governments through capital strikes — withholding or offshoring investment and tanking the local economy. Most people are smart enough to see that the game is rigged, so they disengage from politics entirely, which only reinforces elite control. As a last resort, the capitalist class is even willing to use illegal obstruction and violence, as demonstrated in, for example, Jim Crow–era Mississippi and 1970s Chile.
Liberals see the power of billionaires and ask for donations. Socialists know that, while the rich have money power, the working class has power only in numbers. Effectively organized, these numbers become popular power.
Building Popular Power
After democratic socialist Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile in 1970, United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger issued a then-secret memo arguing that “a successful Marxist government in Chile” and “the imitative spread of similar phenomena” was a grave threat to the US-led capitalist order. Kissinger argued for “oppos[ing] Allende as strongly as we can,” and President Nixon listened. The United States would spend millions of dollars to fund a domestic opposition, wage economic warfare (in Kissinger’s words, “make the economy scream”), and — when these failed to bring down the socialists — support the fascist coup that ended Chile’s socialist experiment in 1973.
We should assume that there are already multiple memos of this sort circulating among elite circles and the White House discussing the threat of a Zohran Mamdani mayoralty and their plans to ensure its failure.
Alongside “sticks” to crush popular movement that has cohered around Mamdani, Democratic Party elites will also offer “carrots” — “insider” access that promises a fraction of his agenda in return for abandoning the parts that actually threaten billionaire donors. Together, the carrots and sticks will mean immense pressure on Mayor Mamdani to reduce his ambitions.
Assessing the Allende experience, Marxist theorist Ralph Miliband explains that “electoral victory only gives one the right to rule, not the power to rule.” To obtain the power to rule, the Zohran movement must build popular power.
In Allende’s Chile, the Left quickly began building popular power to defeat capital strikes and US imperialism. Striking workers demanded factory nationalizations, peasants seized land, community committees confiscated and distributed goods hoarded by the rich, and democratic industrial institutions helped coordinate production and distribution. Zohran’s agenda could face comparable levels of obstruction, and our movement should look to the strategy of popular power to overcome this.
One of the organizers of a new left party in the United Kingdom, James Schneider, contends that the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn failed in part due to an “electoralist-only” strategy between 2015 and 2019. Schneider invokes the lessons from Chile by calling instead for the construction of “popular power,” to be attained by “building structured organisations that people can use to democratically control different parts of their lives, either by winning concessions from capital and the state, or by partially transcending them.” These include unions, cooperatives, tenant groups, and debtors’ unions, among others.
What would this look like in Zohran’s New York City? First, popular power will be critical in the offensive battle to achieve Zohran’s progressive agenda. To take one example, freezing the rent should be low-hanging fruit. But in response to a rent freeze, landlords may launch a form of capital strike by refusing to make mandatory repairs. Supporting Mayor Mamdani’s enforcement of tenant protections will require a grassroots effort of organized tenants to hold their landlords accountable across the city.
Many of Zohran’s campaign planks, such as universal childcare, will require increasing taxes — revenue that will be crucial for “Trump-proofing” the city — which means getting support from the state government and in particular from an unfriendly governor in Kathy Hochul. A $30 minimum wage likewise requires state support. Again, the solution here is popular power. As left-wing political scientist Norman Finkelstein put it plainly in a recent interview, to force state and city officials to acquiesce to Mayor Mamdani, “We’re going to bring 100,000 people to Albany and we’re going to surround the chamber… Zohran Mamdani said he had 50,000 volunteers. 50,000 is a lot of people to surround City Hall. That’s a very intimidating sight. That’s what the billionaire class is most afraid of.”
Popular power will also be necessary defensively. Trump has already threatened to deport Zohran, hardly an empty threat after unconstitutional detentions of political dissidents like Mahmoud Khalil and others. In this event, we must be prepared to mobilize en masse to physically protect Zohran and his administration.
We should also prepare for a potential Los Angeles–style military occupation in response to pro-immigrant or pro-Gaza protests, or in response to Zohran’s refusal to collaborate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids on schools or subway stations. Mass mobilization by Angelenos against the invasion seems to have won a reprieve from direct military occupation, for now. The victory of Zohran’s agenda in New York City, and the successful defense against Trump, will live or die by our ability to construct real popular power within and beyond the halls of city government.
Popular Power Needs Organization
While workers have power in numbers, that power only becomes real through permanent, democratic organization. Organizations pool resources like money, offices, and staff, making actions more numerous, powerful, and sustainable. They transform one-time protesters and canvassers into trained cadres through mentorship and education. Internal democracy allows on-the-ground participants to inform strategy while debates distribute knowledge, bolster member confidence, and multiply the group’s leaders and spokespeople. The movement strengthens its power in a virtuous cycle, increasing the chances of success and encouraging more participation by proving that real change is possible.
All sorts of organizations play this role, from labor and tenant unions to campus antiwar groups. But one type of organization is unique: the political party. Writing about the new UK left party, Richard Seymour explains that a broad “ecology of organizing” is necessary in all spheres of society — what we call popular power. In this ecosystem, “parties are the great generalists… They don’t have to do everything… [but] by working as hubs organising multiple relationships, they should help sustain the life of the ecosphere.”
Jeremy Corbyn echoed this last week in an op-ed about the new party, writing that “a democratic party is necessary: to link up campaigns across society, and help people win power in their localities, workplaces and neighbourhoods.” Corbyn lauds the “extraordinary fightback from trade unions, tenants’ unions, disability justice campaigners, anti-racist campaigners, climate activists and a global movement for peace.” But, he concludes, “these groups can only achieve so much on their own. Think of what we could achieve together.”
Through their platforms, campaigns, and mass media operations, working-class parties form a coherent working-class identity. To paraphrase Karl Marx, parties are necessary for transforming a class in itself into a self-conscious class for itself. Class dealignment — the drift of workers away from the neoliberal Democratic Party and toward Trump’s xenophobic nationalism — makes this task of class formation all the more urgent. As do growing numbers of disaffected people who would rather not vote than support two billionaire-owned parties.
In 2020, we argued that Sanders’s two presidential runs were so impactful precisely because they played the role of a mass workers’ party, if only temporarily. The Zohran campaign has had a similar impact in 2025. Both Zohran and Sanders won over Trump voters because of this working-class identity independent from, and in opposition to, the elites’ status quo. The challenge now is to extend the campaign beyond the November election and transform it into a permanent and democratic institution.
A formal independent party is, however, not on the horizon right now in New York. The legal and political barriers to forming a new party are high, and neither Zohran himself nor many in his movement are committed to breaking from the Democrats and forming a new ballot line any time soon. Whether progressives will realign the Democratic Party by kicking out the billionaires and warmongers or will need to break away and form their own independent left-wing party is a debate for another time. Those of us in Zohran’s movement can all agree, however, that we must keep the fight going after November.
That is why we advocate in the near-term for the creation in New York City of something along the lines of what Sanders created in Burlington in the 1980s — or, to use another successful example, what the Richmond Progressive Alliance built in California. We see a need for a nonpartisan proto-party organization that supports candidates inside and, when it makes sense, outside the Democratic Party. In all other ways, however, this organization can act like a political party: recruiting and supporting candidates who embrace our platform and being a hub for movement activity, political education, and debate.
This political formation should bring together the organizations that supported Zohran in the primary, as well as Zohran supporters not yet organized. This includes progressive unions and networks of union members like Educators for Zohran, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), tenant organizations, and a variety of community organizations like Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence (CAAAV), and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). (We are members of DSA, JVP, and, as teachers and United Federation of Teachers members, Educators for Zohran.) As Seymour says, each of these organizations has an important role to play in their own ecological niche. But only a broader party-like organization can connect them all.
A proto-party would be a space for the rank-and-file members of these groups to work closely together, instead of being linked only through occasional coalition meetings by each organization’s staff and leaders. It should run mass media projects, building on the excellent work of Zohran’s campaign so far. It must be a democratic organization: democracy builds broad buy-in and participation for a group’s strategies, creates pathways for supporters to become activists and for activists to become leaders, and protects representatives like Zohran from isolation in the heat of conflict. In short, democracy is power. After the election, Zohran activists can build the base for this grassroots democracy by organizing outreach- and action-oriented meetings in every neighborhood. Finally, it would help sustain mobilizations against Trump’s authoritarian onslaught and the genocide in Gaza, linking existing activist energies with each other and with Mayor Mamdani’s political power.
A new mass and democratic party organization will take time to construct, as we’ve seen with the Corbyn movement in the UK. Over the next few months, we will be laser-focused on winning the November general election, and the natural inclination will be to avoid thinking about what comes after. This is what makes openly discussing next steps right now all the more important. Hence we aim to promote discussion about how the campaign’s staff, donors, volunteers, and supporting organizations can pivot toward building popular power after election day.
Win or lose in November, Zohran’s movement should plan a series of participatory conferences after the election to figure out the details of a new democratic organization. Exactly what form that organization will take is up to participants to decide over the following months and years — the key is that it is an inclusive process.
In the meantime, there’s much we can do to keep the fight for Zohran’s platform going right now, first by building a social movement–style campaign to win the general election by a crushing margin. We can then begin laying the groundwork for post-election organization by growing the ecosystem of resistance: continued organizing in workplaces and communities, campaigns that unite Zohran’s volunteer and support bases to win his campaign platform, rallying to oppose Trumpism and the genocide in Gaza, and supporting more left-wing candidates prepared to join Zohran’s fight for an affordable New York in the 2026 elections.
In his 2020 election campaign, Bernie Sanders proposed something radical: “Not Me, Us.” He argued that, even if elected, he could not achieve his goals alone. Only a “political revolution,” in Sanders’s words, or the construction of what Allende called popular power, could win popular demands like Medicare for All. We have the opportunity in New York City to prove that “Not Me, Us” was more than just a slogan. It is the only real strategy to win a government and society by and for working people.