Zohran Mamdani is a longtime member of New York City Democratic Socialists of America, and the organization played a key role in his victory. We spoke to NYC DSA’s cochairs about how it happened.

NYC Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani holds a press conference outside of the Jacob K. Javitz Federal Building in New York City, New York, on August 7, 2025. (Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)

Zohran Mamdani’s historic victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary makes it clear that New York City’s chapter of Democratic Socialists of America (NYC DSA) is the most dynamic and powerful left-wing organization in the country. Since winning their first state legislative race with Julia Salazar in 2018, NYC DSA has methodically built out an electoral juggernaut, winning multiple state house, state senate, and city council races. Now, with an incredible communications operation and a massive volunteer army, they’ve won the Democratic primary for mayor.

The Democratic establishment still wants to pretend that somehow they could generate this kind of mass enthusiasm themselves. But that is not going to happen for a centrist political program. The Left has the opportunity to become the real opposition party, to lead the fight against the rising authoritarianism of the Donald Trump administration. To govern, though, the Left needs many Zohrans. Figuring out how to do that, studying NYC DSA’s achievements and considering what can and can’t be replicated elsewhere is key.

For the Jacobin podcast The Dig, Daniel Denvir interviewed Gustavo Gordillo and Grace Mausser, cochairs of NYC DSA and key architects of the chapter’s electoral program and of Mamdani’s victory. Gordillo is a union electrician and started the campaign to pass the Build Public Renewables Act. Mausser is cochair of New York City DSA and has been a member of DSA since 2018, working on dozens of democratic socialist campaigns in New York, building canvassing operations in broad left coalitions, and raising millions of dollars from grassroots donors.

Daniel Denvir: What are the ramifications of Zohran Mamdani’s extraordinary upset win, both for New York politics and for American politics as a whole? I’m still absolutely astounded and in a more profound state of political ecstasy than I can recall being in since I first joined the American left as a teenager in the late 1990s.

Gustavo Gordillo

It’s not an exaggeration to say that this is one of the greatest accomplishments of the Left and of the socialist movement in the United States in the last century. We have accomplished something that so many campaigns and so many organizers have been trying for years.

Chief among those has been building a working-class coalition that expanded the electorate, that brought in people who had never voted, that increased political participation in a way that no one thought was possible anymore. This had been the biggest goal for Bernie. It was his theory of change over two presidential campaigns that by inspiring nonvoters to vote, he could defeat the political establishment. We’ve really shown that a working-class economic agenda is the key to activating so many people who don’t feel represented by mainstream politics, and that we can actually build a majority to fundamentally change the political and economic system.

Grace Mausser

This is a huge lesson to the political class in the establishment Democrats. After Trump won in 2024, there was a lot of discussion about how Democrats needed to focus more on affordability, on cost of living, on the material issues that affect working-class Americans. And then no one did it — except for Zohran.

This has been what socialists have long said. It certainly is what the NYC DSA political project has been hammering on in our modern iteration: that if we speak directly to the material concerns of working-class New Yorkers, we can get them to vote for socialists and to organize for socialists. This shows that that is exactly true. Thirty percent of the districts in New York City that went for Trump in 2024 went for Zohran in this primary. And it speaks to the fact not only that Democrats are coming out, people who are already registered, but also people who are not registered and are newly activated. They’re the ones who are excited, who want new ideas, who want fresh perspectives.

Daniel Denvir

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of the campaign, I want to put Zohran’s victory in the longer sweep of New York histor, and note the important place that that has in the larger sweep of American history. New York was the city that, really unlike any other, became a working-class social democracy. That social-democratic order was then spectacularly smashed in one of the very opening scenes of the neoliberal counterrevolution, during the city’s fiscal crisis and the new neoliberal, real estate, and finance economy that was that was imposed in the wake of that crisis — a crisis that, among other things, gave birth to none other than Donald Trump as a wealthy, powerful celebrity. The contradictions and misery of that brutal new system were then policed by Giuliani’s law-and-order regime, which became a model for law-and-order reaction nationwide in the 1990s and beyond.

And now that very same city is on the verge of electing an open socialist to the mayor’s office on a message that has been all about making New York once again work for working-class people. How was the Zohran campaign able to speak so powerfully to the social-democratic heritage and aspirations of New York City?

Gustavo Gordillo

It’s definitely true that for us as New York City DSA, the fact that in New York we have so many robust public programs; that our public sector plays a much larger role in the economy than anywhere else in the United States, and we have a huge public hospital system, we have more public housing than anywhere else in the United States, over four hundred thousand units in the state; a fourth of our energy generation is publicly owned and controlled by the New York Power Authority; we have the largest public transit system. This has always been an important foundation for us to build on, and it helps us to sell our ideas to the working class, because, to some degree, much of what we’re proposing exists in some form, even though it’s been greatly diminished. So it’s not like we’re asking people to dream of something from zero.

Zohran’s campaign didn’t really root itself that often in New York’s social-democratic history. But he did, toward the end of the campaign, speak to the achievements of the LaGuardia administration, which occurred simultaneously with the New Deal in New York. We have the highest unionization rate in the United States, and more working-class people are accustomed to fighting for their rights. Tenants know that they have rights. The “freeze the rent” demand wouldn’t be possible at all without our existing system of rent stabilization. Tenants in New York usually know that they can’t just be evicted if they’re in a rent-stabilized apartment.

But the dominant message of the campaign is that all of these historic accomplishments have been eroded, because of mayoral regimes like Bloomberg’s and Giuliani’s. New York has become a playground for the rich. And this is a campaign about fighting back and turning New York into a city for the working class.

Grace Mausser: While Zohran may not have evoked the long history of social-democratic New York or talked about the fiscal crisis of the 1970s too much, his campaign imagery was deeply rooted in in New York and what it is like to be here and live here. From the very beginning, he pulled his design from bodega imagery. All of his videos and ads are him walking around the streets of New York, speaking to New Yorkers, out on the streets, walking in front of rent-stabilized buildings, going on the subway — public assets that New Yorkers have and depend on and rightfully feel entitled to. That spoke to them on a material and emotional level.

Nuts and Bolts of a Socialist Mayoral Campaign

Daniel Denvir: Take us behind the scenes. What did the structure of the campaign look like? How did you build it so that it could recruit and deploy such a giant number of volunteers, more than fifty thousand? What was the relationship between the campaign proper and NYC DSA?

Grace Mausser

The structure of this campaign and the ethos of this campaign was born out of how we’ve run all of our campaigns since Julia Salazar in 2018, and the core of New York City DSA campaigns is a deep belief that anyone who is interested in the campaign is able to do almost anything for that campaign. So obviously, we want as many people as possible to knock doors to phonebank. But when someone wants to give more time, has skills to share, has the ability and bandwidth to learn more skills, DSA campaigns want those people to level up. We’ve done that in every single campaign we’ve run since 2018, which is near two dozen campaigns. And that’s how we had the leadership layer that we needed right out of the gate for a campaign of this size.

I think the first three hires of the campaign were all DSA members and people who had been central to building this model, so they had connections with the organization. They knew other leaders in the organization who could be pulled in to do things like field coordination, volunteer coordination, and scale up at an incredible pace. The structure was iterative as it grew, in ways that were beyond expectations.

From the very beginning, field was central, which made sure that people who wanted to get involved in this campaign had a way to do so. That entry point for DSA campaigns is knocking doors. And then making sure that you had leaders at those canvasses who could identify people who had a lot of time, had a lot of interest, had a lot of potential could then become field leads. Field leads can become field coordinators. You can scale people up in this way. That allows us to run a campaign as big as this. Next year it will allow us to have a whole new leadership layer of people to pull from, to run even more campaigns.

Gustavo Gordillo

There is a difference between New York City DSA and the Zohran campaign. There were two different entities and remained so. But as Grace said, many of his first hires and top hires were DSA cadre members. Our members were embedded in every aspect of the campaign. The major departments of the campaign, as Grace said, were field. Then there was a communications department, which was headed by Andrew Epstein and another staffer, and later added toward the end of the campaign, for example, Spanish language media staffers. There was political work, some of it dealing with coalition-building, working on endorsements, some policy work. There was a fundraising department, which after Zohran reached his max that he could fundraise also dealt with operations and setting up large events and rallies. The campaign staffer at the top of all of this was Elle Bisgaard-Church, who now might be the most powerful person in New York City. She is a total genius of political strategy and administration, and allowed for a lot of this to happen.

To get a little bit more into the field strategy, initially they started out mapping the city and identifying where the base is and where are areas where we think we’re going to do well. And a lot of those were existing districts with socialists in office: places like Sunset Park, where we have Alexa Velis, the city council member, and Marcella Mitaynes in the state assembly; places in central Brooklyn like Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy, Clinton Hill, where we have Phara Souffrant Forrest and Jabari Brisport; North Brooklyn, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s district, the Bronx and Parkchester have a very large South Asian population; different parts of Queens, including Zohran’s own district.

Then as the campaign moved forward, they saw that actually we were getting support all over the city. So they started to expand where the canvasses were happening. Most DSA electoral campaigns have a four-tier structure in the field department. It creates a lot of opportunity for intermediate leadership, which is essential to making a huge volunteer operation work.

So we have the canvassers and the general field of volunteers, anyone who just shows up and wants to knock on a door or participate in any of the other fieldwork. Anyone can get plugged in and do that with one training. And then, when they’re actually going to those events, there’s going to be a field lead who is running that event. So that’s the second layer of the hierarchy. The first one being the canvassers, then there’s the field lead. And the third layer is the field coordinator. Field coordinators are overseeing teams. A field leads in a district and makes sure leads have everything that they need, that they have their turfs, clipboards, literature. The field coordinators are usually the staff, a field director. In a smaller like assembly race, there might just be one field staffer. In this campaign, there were many more.

To give a sense of the scale here: in a state assembly campaign, we might have one, two, or three field coordinators. But here, like in the neighborhood of Flatbush alone, we had two field coordinators. So there were dozens of field coordinators throughout the city. And when we started field lead training, there were thirty to forty field leads. And by the end there were 430 who had been trained up.

Daniel Denvir: This is a rather skilled leadership position.

Grace Mausser

Yeah. Field leads need to know quite a bit about Zohran and the campaign. They’re also managing logistics on the day, so you need to be able to train people on how to use the canvassing app Minivan, you need to be able to hand out literature in the right amounts, you need to be able to manage canvassers. These are trusted people who think on their feet.

It’s worth talking about some of the origins of this. Despite Obama being such a massive disappointment, his 2008 field campaign is a big part of what inspired this model. And that’s actually where Tascha Van Auken, who was the field director for this campaign, cut her teeth. I consider her a mentor. In many ways, she’s the godmother of how we approach field in New York City DSA. She brought that ethos and mentality to this campaign.

It would have been impossible for staff to personally manage the amount of canvassing that was happening. They could not. There were dozens of events every weekend. They couldn’t physically be in all those places. So you have to train people. And then you have to trust them. There will be some mistakes. But traditional political campaigns do not have this trust. They don’t believe that regular people who are excited by a political movement can handle this level of responsibility. That is a key difference about a DSA campaign.

Daniel Denvir

Typically, electoral campaigns focus on what are called “triple prime” voters — voters who have voted in all three of the last Democratic primaries and are the safest bet on actually voting in the upcoming election. Which makes a certain sort of sense. You have a limited amount of capacity and you want to focus that capacity on people who are going to actually show up and vote on Election Day.

But this campaign did something different. And, as you mentioned, the Bernie theory of change that didn’t quite cash out in 2016 and 2020, to all of our great frustration and disappointment. But it worked here. Where did the emphasis fall on persuading typical voters versus mobilizing new ones. And how did this campaign finally make that Bernie theory work?

Gustavo Gordillo

First of all, in campaigns, we call the people that you’re trying to talk to directly at the doors the “universe.” In the Democratic establishment’s typical field operation, the universe is only people who vote every single time in the primaries, in every single election. In our campaigns, our universe is broader than that, but does still include triple primes, double primes, and single primes — people who voted in the past three or two primaries, or one.

But in this race, like in other DSA races, the campaign included young voters, including people who had never voted, and South Asian and Muslim voters, even those who had never participated in elections. There was always an attempt to reach out beyond the typical electorate.

Some of the first hires the campaign made were a Muslim and South Asian constituency organizer that was focused on organizing existing institutions in the Muslim and South Asian communities — going to mosques and different political organizations — and also a separate organizer that was focused on South Asian and Muslim fieldwork, which was more bottom-up, going to people directly rather than to organizing institutions.

On one of the last days of the campaign, I was canvassing in Bushwick, which is a heavily Latino neighborhood in Brooklyn that also has a lot of young transplants. You get a list in Minivan, the application to canvass the neighborhood, and it gives you certain doors. Those are the doors that are in their universe. And I kept accidentally knocking on the next-door neighbor’s door that wasn’t in the universe. Often I would get people who knew all about Zohran and were going to vote for him, or already had voted for him, but they weren’t in the campaign’s universe.

So I think it was all these different tactics that were reaching people in different ways and bringing them into the political system in a way that had never happened before. And especially among the South Asian community, immigrants. I don’t think there’s any precedent for a campaign that’s tried to organize this part of New York at this level. This is basically a community that’s been totally ignored.

Daniel Denvir: One factor here that we shouldn’t skip over is the question of candidate recruitment. Finding the right candidate doesn’t automatically win you an election. But you also probably can’t win an election without the right candidate. And Zohran is and was the right candidate. He is truly a generational political talent, an Obama-tier political communicator — but with good politics, unlike Obama. How do you think about finding the right candidate?

Grace Mausser

Both Gustavo and I have spent time doing candidate recruitment. I was our chapter’s candidate recruitment chair for two years. Finding the right candidate is extremely difficult. NYC DSA tends to start with the district. Does the district have any progressive voting history? Is there a base of membership there that we can build on?

One thing that’s really exciting among a hundred other things about Zohran’s race is that running a race citywide gives us citywide data. We now have data about literally every district in the city, on who is willing to vote for a socialist, and that’s going to inform what districts we focus on in 2026 and every year moving forward.

So Zohran is certainly a generational political talent. Not every candidate needs to be. It’s really hard to build a movement if you’re only looking for people who can communicate at that level and operate with that level of political savvy. I am proudest of DSA’s recruitment efforts when we have been able to recruit and run people who would be overlooked by other political organizations — certainly by the Democratic establishment. I’m really proud of when we’re able to recruit from unions, from rank-and-file workers, when we’re able to recruit from housing organizers like Marcella Mitaynes and Phara Souffrant Forrest. Jabari Brisport was a union teacher. These candidates might otherwise not have the opportunity to run for office.

One of the first things mainstream Democratic party operatives think about a prospective candidate is, can this person raise $50,000 or more? We don’t ask that question, because DSA can raise money, and we can teach people to raise money also.

At this point in our history, we have a pretty developed apparatus for figuring out if a candidate has some core qualities that we feel good about, then teaching them how to fill the gaps on the qualities they may be lacking. So, training them on public speaking, making the connections they need to have with other political organizations or neighborhood organizations, training them on how to do the fundraising work that is central to being a candidate. We’re really looking for candidates who are organic leaders in the spaces that they’re in, whether it’s a union or neighborhood networks and organizations.

For example, last year we ran a candidate, Eon Huntley, who was the president of his daughter’s parent–teacher association and had a lot of connections that way. We’re also looking for candidates who are really committed to a project. That doesn’t mean they have to be cadre already. But they do need to be a socialist. They need to run as a socialist. And they need to demonstrate and understanding that we are building a movement project. And they won’t go to Albany or to city hall or wherever we’re sending them and operate completely autonomously; they are expected to be organizers within the legislative body that they’re in, but also organizers within DSA and participate actively in our inside-outside strategy.

Daniel Denvir: Zohran, though, is a cadre candidate. And that seems very important to me about what makes this victory so spectacularly important and unlike anything else we’ve seen in this country.

Grace Mausser: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, before he ran for assembly, he was deeply involved in other DSA races and was a well-known entity in the chapter. And then he’s also been a leader in our Socialists in Office committee with other state-level legislators. You can’t disentangle Zohran from DSA at this point.

Gustavo Gordillo

For me, increasingly, some of the qualities that I focus on and DSA in general focuses on in candidate recruitment are: do they have experience in working-class political institutions? Do they have experience in organizing as a political collective and exercising leadership in a political collective? Do they have an appetite for class conflict? Do they have experience in class struggle?

One of Zohran’s really exceptional qualities is that he is extremely committed to collective organization. Grace and I were both involved in the DSA slate that ran in 2020, the first time he was elected to the assembly together with four other socialists. That cohort formed the first iteration of our Socialists in Office (SIO) committee, which is a body that we use to coordinate with our electeds and cogovern. Zohran’s role in the SIO, his most memorable interventions, were often about highlighting the need for collective action. That meant that there might be a decision where there’s a majority and a minority, and the majority gets to set the course because we’re democratic, but that we also have to be sensitive to the minorities. And I think that made him a really powerful coalition candidate. We were his political home. The fact that he had this experience and valued collective organizing has made him uniquely suited for this kind of role that he’s taking now, together with being a really good communicator.

A Boon for Socialism in New York City

Daniel Denvir: Grace, you said the Zohran campaign developed and expanded NYC membership and leadership in a pretty profound way. How much bigger is NYC DSA going to get as a result of this victory? How will this victory change the size, capacity, and power of NYC DSA?

Grace Mausser: The ceiling is high. We’ve now reached ten thousand members. But another important component of capacity is how many of those members are not only active, but ready to be leaders. This campaign has dramatically increased the number of people who are ready to be leaders and take on projects. Sometimes it’s been already-established members who were reactivated or were excited to get involved and leveled up through the campaign. But we’ve also seen a pretty large influx of people who were field leads who were not already DSA members, and through their positions, saw what DSA was doing and how central we were to the campaign and have now decided to join DSA.

Gustavo Gordillo: Some of these members might continue down electoral leadership paths. Many of them will stay engaged through the general election. But this is also a whole new cohort of people to tap for things like a “tax the rich” campaign that will be focused on Albany; other issue campaigns, running more defensive measures against the Trump administration, “know your rights” trainings. There are so many projects that DSA has going on, and the skills that you gain as not only a canvasser, but a field lead, a field coordinator, or a myriad of other volunteer positions can be applied to a number of different organizing campaigns.

Daniel Denvir

What do you make of the tremendous groundswell of immigrant support for Zohran? How organized was that vote already? What role did immigrant community organizations play in the campaign? These were some of the communities in New York that were most identified with turning rightward towards Trump just last year. What happened?

And given what happened, should DSA or the Zohran campaign be considering non-English language clubs, to go back to the old school New York socialist traditions of a century ago?

Gustavo Gordillo

This is one of the most heartening results of this election. Zohran won College Point. He won so many parts of eastern Queens, he won Bensonhurst and even Brighton Beach — many areas that are associated with East Asian communities, South Asian communities, Latino communities, and also white working class communities — all of which had seen turns toward Trump in the last general election and that have actually not often voted for a leftist candidate.

It was the economic agenda. That made it possible.

Among the Latino community, he had the endorsement of Make the Road and New York Communities for Change (NYCC). NYCC was one of one of the first endorsing organizations together with DSA, and they were among his top supporters. They organize Latinos in in Bushwick and East New York, in East Harlem — all areas where Zohran did really well.

He also worked closely with our city council member, Alexa Aviles, whose district is in Sunset Park, which is a heavily Mexican area in Brooklyn. She was facing a challenge from an American Israel Public Affairs Committee–backed establishment Democrat who ended up losing very badly. She also has Brooklyn’s Chinatown in her district and from the start, from pretty early on in the campaign, we were doing joint canvasses in those areas for Alexa and Zohran and Marcela Mitaynes, our assemblymember in that area of the city, was also a huge supporter.

So I think that organizing helped quite a lot with the Latino community. Later on, Zohran got very high-profile endorsements from Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nydia Velázquez. He was able to turn those into TV commercials, kind of iconically. He participated in the Puerto Rican Day Parade with both AOC and Nydia, and some of that footage was turned into pretty successful videos. Gustavo Rivera in the Bronx is a state senator who endorsed Zohran. I was with him at this tiny little Mexican market on one of the last days of the campaign. Before that, we had been canvassing a Mexican concert for Fuerza Regida in Madison Square Garden. Young people knew him.

It was pretty amazing to see with the South Asian community. There was dedicated staff. There were also dedicated staffers hired for Spanish language press and some fieldwork. The last weekend of the campaign, I went to Kensington a few times. That’s a Bangladeshi area of Brooklyn. And the level of support there was something I had never really seen before. I’d never seen an immigrant community in New York so politically organized and activated. There was serious political leadership in the campaign coming from South Asians who were canvassing and campaigning, just like all of the young people.

Grace Mausser

It was so amazing. In Kensington, you would knock doors, and someone would come out and say, “Oh yeah, don’t worry. My plan is to go at 10:00 a.m. on voting day, and I’m bringing my whole building. It was really fun to canvass those areas. Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), a South Asian community organizing group, really led the way on that type of work.

To your point about DSA having other languages, it’s definitely something we want to build toward. But we’re also very lucky to have all these partners that are organizing these communities. And as we build out a coalition of groups that are not only going to lead Zohran to victory in the general but also be the army he needs to enact his policies, I think we’re only going to build closer bonds with these groups and have more crossover, dual-member situations.

Gustavo Gordillo: I’m Peruvian. Spanish is my first language. I helped start a group in our chapter called Latino Socialists. It takes a lot of resources to develop a Spanish language branch of DSA. It’s something that we can aspire to in the future. But we want to do it right. And I think it’ll be kind of a step-by-step thing. Sometimes people think that translation is all you really need, and that’s really the least of our problems. Also, we’re a pretty young organization, and I think monolingual Spanish speakers in the city tend to be older. So DSA faces some challenges in organizing in other languages.

Daniel Denvir: Gustavo, in terms of activating immigrant communities in New York, you mentioned that laser-focus, that message discipline, on economics and the cost of living. But all of that disciplined emphasis on class struggle happened without retreating on “woke.” And this is really in strong contrast from what we hear from all of these centrist weirdos who argue that the way that Democrats can win back the working class from MAGA is by becoming more reactionary on immigration or trans issues or other “social issues.” All while conveniently sticking to neoliberal economics.

Gustavo Gordillo: A friend of mine was saying that maybe one of the reasons that Zohran’s focus on an economic agenda was more believable or one could buy into it, is because he also was not really throwing anyone under the bus. He was showing that he’s willing to fight for everyone.

Grace Mausser: As a deeply committed socialist, I think Zohran knows that enacting populist economic policies in a serious way is impossible if you throw other people under the bus. And I think sometimes liberals or fake progressives know this too. They’re using it as a cop-out. But if you say you want to make things more affordable, better union jobs, free transit, but if you say “except for immigrants” or “except for trans people,” that’s actually going to be a hook to make sure that those things never happen for anyone. You can’t have good union jobs if you allow immigrants to be constantly exploited, because that will always be a loophole for people not to hire union workers. Zohran knows this as a deeply committed socialist. I think that makes him extremely unwilling to budge on those issues.

If you say ‘except for immigrants’ or ‘except for trans people,’ that’s actually going to be a hook to make sure that those things never happen for anyone.

Daniel Denvir

One of the most remarkable things that happened in the race was Brad Lander and Zohran cross-endorsing each other. I found that so striking, because it was the precise opposite of what happened in 2020, when Elizabeth Warren refused to endorse Bernie Sanders, even as the entire establishment powerfully coalesced behind Joe Biden. I am struggling to recall any moment when the socialist left has had this experience of a left liberal siding with us against the neoliberal center. Brad really did an amazing job.

This question of left-liberal coalitions is a really important one, because on the one hand, pragmatically assessing the balance of forces in this country, we need that coalition to win. But on the other, those coalitions have in recent years become harder than ever to build, because first and foremost, so much of the possibility for left-liberal coalitions was smashed by Biden’s and so many Democrats’ enthusiastic support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Is what happened with Brad and Zohran, just something we can chalk up to ranked choice voting, which encourages cross-endorsement? Or is there something about what happened there that could orient us across the country? I think it’s pretty clear that at the base level liberals recognize Trump’s fascist and authoritarian threat, that they are furious that the Democratic establishment is unable and also unwilling to confront that threat, and that they’re looking leftward for leadership. We’ve seen this with the AOC and Bernie rallies, and now, very powerfully, with Zohran.

Grace Mausser

I’ll start with ranked choice voting (RCV). It is a relatively unique form of voting in the United States. And it’s great. It’s more democratic. It allows people to express more of their preferences. In this race, Zohran would have won if it was a first-past-the-post system. He had the plurality of votes. But RCV did change the framework that people were using to campaign. I think it helps enable the non-Cuomo candidates to have a more united front and refrain from attacking each other. It helped stop people from punching left. Zohran’s incredible popularity also stopped people from punching left. But was structurally helped by RCV.

Also, though, the politics around who can lead a left-liberal coalition is shifting. The Democratic establishment wants you to believe that it can only be led by establishment Democrats, who are going to triangulate some position between fascism and progressivism that will reach an imaginary set of voters and turn the tide. But I think this election shows that socialists actually are best able to lead the way when we are talking about material, quality-of-life, affordability issues. Zohran was able to do that.

To speak to your point about Israel, even since the presidential election, we’ve just seen people’s politics and their opinions on the Israeli government continue to shift and become more and more critical of the Israeli government.

Daniel Denvir: The polls are pretty clear and pretty remarkable. And I think that’s a really key insight into why all the vicious, constant attacks on Zohran didn’t work. The people doing those attacks can’t just come to terms with the very empirically clear reality that the Democratic base does not like Israel very much anymore.

Grace Mausser: Yeah. And one thing that’s interesting about Brad Lander on this topic, he does identify as a Zionist, but he is critical of Israel. Which I think gives him more room to ally comfortably with Zohran and speak to the growing changes in this realm.

Gustavo Gordillo

We’ve sort of defied the conventional wisdom that a left-liberal coalition must be led by the liberals or the Democratic establishment. But in fact, the polls constantly showed that the voters wanted a socialist agenda, and the appetite for liberal policy just was not there in the base. Maybe it had to take a second Trump administration to make clear the failures of the Democratic establishment in order to have liberal voters finally vote for a candidate like Zohran. I also think that many Lander voters, in seeing his endorsement and in seeing the way the race was shaping up, probably ended up rankings Zohran first by the end, just because they thought that’s the way this was going.

We have a precedent for a left-liberal coalition led by socialists in DSA in many of our issue campaigns. I helped start a campaign for the Build Public Renewables Act that passed in 2023, for publicly owned, renewable energy. That was very much a left-liberal coalition that was driven and led by socialists. You could say the same about some of the rent law campaigns and some of our other legislative campaigns. You know, we have a socialist, materialist analysis that I think speaks to the majority. And that’s why we need to be centering that, that agenda.

Zohran’s Win and Organized Labor

Daniel Denvir

What about the political orientation in this election of organized labor? Labor unions largely lined up behind Cuomo, with notable exceptions like the United Auto Workers (UAW). But unions like 32BJ SEIU and the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, which were critical unions behind Cuomo, both enthusiastically endorsed Zohran for the general.

What do you make of the various ways that various unions have approached this primary? And do you think Zohran’s victory will change labor’s political calculus, in New York in particular but really, maybe everywhere over the months and years to come?

Gustavo Gordillo

I think that some of the larger unions in New York probably endorsed Cuomo thinking that he was unstoppable, like so many believed, so they needed to either bargain against him if they’re in the public sector, or they would need to wheel and deal and cut favors in order to maintain decent contracts. I think that was the internal logic driving many of those endorsements. They were less motivated by feeling inspired by or passionate for Cuomo. That’s probably why they’ve been able to align behind Zohran fairly quickly.

But just as we saw a large increase in voter participation by young people and immigrants in New York, Zohran was able to inspire many rank-and-file workers to self-organize in their unions to get endorsements for him in many more unions than DSA candidates are usually able to win. For the history of our electoral project in New York City, it’s been a challenge for us to win the endorsements of labor unions for our insurgent candidates. The incumbents are almost always endorsed by labor. So with Zohran’s campaign, the first union to endorse was UAW Region 9a. There are many DSA members who are in UAW. Of course, many of them were part of the organizing that elected Shawn Fain, the president of the international, and elected Brandon Mantia to be the director of our region here.

And a lot of those members who were newly active in their union saw in Zohran a candidate that aligned with the values of labor and workers. And there was a very large organizing effort within the union, I think to an extent that surprised most of the leadership. I spoke to friends of mine who are in UAW who helped lead some of this effort, and they were telling us that they actually didn’t even know what the processes were before to have an endorsement. They didn’t know who was in charge of making endorsements in the union. This was something that they all had to teach themselves. That’s a pretty amazing outcome of this campaign — that it’s increasing worker self-organization in their unions, increasing the Left’s preparedness to fight every attack we get and to fight for more and win more when workers are activated and participating in their unions.

There were many unions that did endorse. Perhaps the most important union endorsement was from AFSCME DC 37, the city workers union. Its membership includes some of the lowest paid city workers, like school lunch workers, school crossing guards, people who work in the parks department, foresters, people who do manual labor for the city. But it also includes clerical workers, accountants, health department workers. Similarly to UAW, there are many leftists who are in DC 37, though they had been fairly unorganized for a number of years.

There had been some locals where reform slates had formed and had some success, but largely the members of DC 37 who were excited about Zohran took a similar process as members in UAW: they got involved in the unions’ endorsement process. They turned out and also met allies in the unions’ existing leadership, who were also heartened to see the increase in young people participating in the union’s political processes. And that’s really what ended up leading to DC 37’s second-place endorsement for Zohran further on. I’m a union member, pretty active in the labor movement in New York. That second-place endorsement was beyond my wildest dreams of what could possibly happen when this campaign started. The organized left and organized labor have been systematically cleaved apart in the United States over the past hundred years. It’s a huge reason for our weakness on the left in the United States relative to the left internationally. So it was really an incredible moment when DC 37 endorsed Zohran and sent leadership to speak at all of the major rallies. And they all cited what we saw in the general public: that there was a groundswell of support for Zohran, and they were responding to their members in making those endorsements. The campaign will just keep raising these opportunities.

NYC DSA Elections Before Zohran

Daniel Denvir

Let’s get into some of the deeper history here. How did NYC DSA’s electoral project first take shape around you running your first candidate, Julia Salazar, for state senator in 2018? Salazar won and so did AOC. But while AOC was a DSA member and DSA endorsed her, AOC’s run was first and foremost a project of Justice Democrats. Salazar, by contrast, was recruited by DSA from DSA.

How did you all design this? This project beginning about eight years ago . . . And then how did it continue to take shape as you won more state senators, state reps, city council members, leading you to this point where you are today with NYC DSA able to mobilize this giant army to win the Democratic mayoral primary?

Grace Mausser

I would actually start the history at least one year earlier. A lot of cohesion happened post-Bernie. That’s when New York City DSA formed our electoral working group, which set forward a strategy document that we still reference today about identifying and recruiting candidates and running those campaigns.

In 2017, we ran two races. We ran Pastor Khader el-Yateem for city council in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. That’s particularly interesting for this conversation, because Zohran actually worked on that campaign and was very involved and did a lot of fieldwork and learned a lot about how to run a campaign. We also ran Jabari Brisport for city council. Both of those campaigns were unsuccessful. Yateem ran as a Democrat in the Democratic primary, Jabari ran as a Green and on an independent socialist line in the general, where he performed very well for a third-party candidate. Jabari is now a state senator; he got elected in 2018 as a Democrat.

El-Yateem and Jabari were experiments in building our muscles. But DSA did not own those campaigns. We ran more parallel operations, built leaders, we built skills. And that enabled us in 2018 to totally own Julia Salazar’s race. She was a cadre candidate. She was recruited from leadership and our socialist feminist working group. She was in a Jacobin reading group when those were extremely popular in the wake of 2016. And she was recruited by DSA members, DSA members staffed her campaign. DSA members were field leads and field coordinators and really ran the operation up and down. That was transformational for the organization and showed us that we could really run and win, almost by ourselves. Julia, of course, had other endorsements, but there was not significant institutional support from anyone besides DSA following that.

So that was 2018. In 2019, we endorsed Tiffany Cabán for district attorney of Queens. That was actually our second-biggest race.

Daniel Denvir: It got really damn close.

Grace Mausser: Really close. It was sixty votes.

Gustavo Gordillo: Zohran was one of the top volunteers for that.

Grace Mausser

And Tascha Van Auken also was field staff for that campaign. So we really have leaders leveling up over and over again. But yes, we lost Tiffany’s race by sixty votes. I actually always have that in the back of my head when I’m tired of knocking doors or something: wow, if we lose by sixty votes, I’ll feel really stupid if I didn’t do this canvassing shift.

But Tiffany did run and win for city council with DSA in 2021. So just two years later, we scaled by a lot. We ran a much larger slate of candidates. We ran four socialists across the city, including Mamdani and Jabari Brisport, whose campaign I was actually on staff for that year, as well as Phara Souffrant Forest and Marcela Mitaynes — all of those campaigns were staffed by DSA members. We used the same model, and we were able to scale in a way that was really incredible. We went from running one race to running many across Queens and Brooklyn, and because of the infrastructure we set up, we were really able to capitalize on the energy of 2020 in the wake of the George Floyd protests, in the wake of a lot of thinking and agitation around the Covid lockdowns.

And we won all those races, and all of a sudden we had a Socialists in Office project. It’s hard to have a committee when you only have one elected, as was the case when Julia was up there by herself from 2018 to 2020, but now we had five. So we had a much bigger cogovernance project on our hands.

Following that, we ran six candidates for city council in 2021. That was a harder year for us. The macro political conditions were less favorable. There was a lot of leftist energy that came out of 2020, and there was a hard right swing against that in 2021. And we were only able to win two of the six races, including Alexa Avilés and Tiffany Cabán. So we’ve kept building. We’ve run slightly fewer races post-2021. We still have run slates, but not quite as big of slates as we did in 2021. We’ve been a little more cautious about our capacity. Losing is hard and can be immobilizing. So we try to be very careful about picking our races, and that doesn’t mean we always win or we don’t take big swings. We certainly have. And we’ve made steady gains every year. We have won at least one race every single year, and we haven’t lost any of our seats either, despite some really significant challenges and a lot of money being spent against us attempting to unseat our elected officials.

So our SIO committee in Albany, the state-level one, now sits at nine. Nine electeds across the state assembly and the state senate. And then our city council Socialist and Office Committee is at two. They have four-year terms rather than two, so there’s fewer opportunities to grow that body. But we’ve really been able to scale up. We’ve only gained ground. We haven’t lost any. And it’s very exciting to be part of the project in the years where it can feel like a little bit of a slog just to win one race. We know we’re building the capacity and the skill set to take advantage of huge political moments.

Daniel Denvir

NYC DSA definitely held its ground, but the winning streak slowed down a bit, at least at the state legislative level, after 2020. What I’ve heard is that a bit of a theory emerged that DSA’s Albany-focused strategy was hitting, at least for that moment, a bit of a ceiling — that it was showing the strongest success in districts where the institutional basis of the Democratic Party was at its weakest point, these districts in the “Commie Corridor”:, educated white-collar workers who’ve been shaped by this resurgent left and social movements that have emerged since Occupy — that demographic, plus areas with large numbers of immigrant workers on the lower rungs of the labor market. But then in other sorts of places in New York, where a local Democratic Party machine remained more powerful, usually perhaps a black or Dominican- or Chinese-American party machine was still strong. Those places seemed harder to win.

What made Zohran’s race so different and successful, including in these places, where down-ballot races seemed to be so tough? Is this the magic of a top-of-the-ballot race, with the higher levels of engagement and visibility that can be built? Is it just a better cycle for the Left? And does Zohran’s victory change the sense of where NYC DSA believes that it can win in New York City? Are there suddenly a ton of city council, state-legislative, and even congressional districts that are suddenly possible targets?

Gustavo Gordillo

When I was first told about this idea, to run a socialist for mayor, my very first instinct was: wow, that sounds crazy. That totally defies our entire strategy. I think most DSA leaders had that same initial response. I changed my mind pretty quickly. We had identified that our strategy was made up of contesting low-level seats in local government and state government, because it was a manageable scale where we could win. And then we could use a group of those assembly members or state senators to win reforms at the state or local government.

But a problem with that is that many working-class people do not know what the assembly is, have never heard of their assemblymember, are only faintly aware of what happens in Albany or the budget. Meanwhile, everyone knows basically who the president or the mayor is, or who’s running for those positions. The working class, where they’re politically engaged the most, is in these top-of-the-ballot races. And after seeing the failures in the 2020 presidential, the 2024 presidential cycle, where the Left had no candidate in the primary and there was no candidate putting forward our agenda at that level…

Daniel Denvir: It was disastrous. It dragged the whole debate, all the politics far to the right.

Gustavo Gordillo

So at that point, we thought there’s a narrow path to victory here, but we have to at least attempt to put forward our agenda at the largest scale possible in the city, because that’s how we can reach the working class and really do mass politics.

Another consideration: we did very well in our entire slate in 2020 when Bernie was at the top of the ticket and when the George Floyd uprisings were happening, when there was some of the largest voter turnout in the country. And meanwhile, the next cycle, 2022, we ran seven insurgent candidates and only two of them won statewide. That year, there was no inspiring top of the ticket. There was not really much left contestation there, and turnout was very low. In 2024, we had a similar situation again where turnout was low. Not much of a top of the ticket and only one of our three insurgents won. We also lost Jamaal Bowman’s race that cycle, which I was involved with.

So we need to increase turnout. That’s what helps us to win. I’ve concluded that many of the people who are the most loyal, consistent voters are often people who are embedded in local machine institutions. And there were two competing agendas of how we might win this race. One is to maybe change the minds, persuade the existing voters. And the other was to add to the electorate and expand it. It was the latter that won this race.

Grace Mausser

I do think our work down-ballot, even when it hasn’t resulted in electoral success, was building toward some of the outcomes we saw on Tuesday [June 24, 2025]. I’m thinking about two races in particular: in 2022 when we ran David Alexis for state senate against a really awful incumbent, Kevin Parker. Truly odious. An aside, but he needs to get out. And then in 2024, we ran Eon Huntley in Bed-Stuy against another incumbent, Stephanie Zimmerman. So, this district that we ran in may have had the highest margins for Zohran of any assembly district. I don’t think it would have been that high if we hadn’t been campaigning very intensely there just last year.

Similarly for David, who was running in Flatbush and East Flatbush: a core part of that district also went for Zohran by almost 60 percent, which is notable. These two neighborhoods are historically black. Bed-stuy is African-American, whereas Flatbush is Caribbean. So I think even when we’re not winning, we’re building toward something. We’re building capacity.

Top of the ballot is really important, but I don’t think we’re going to turn into a group that is always trying to run big top-of-the-ballot races. The capacity we built is so valuable, because it can be quickly utilized to capitalize on certain political moments. With the Zohran race, we accurately identified a political moment in the wake of Trump and the Palestinian genocide. We were able to build on a lot of anger, and we also had the right person to do that. We’re not going to run top of the ballot races ourselves just to do it, because a big loss would also be a big setback. And just like this win is being used to boost our power and talk about the strength of the Left, a big loss would be used to say, well, look, a socialist can never win. We’re still going to be very measured and very serious about winning and thinking about down-ballot.

Daniel Denvir: Does this top-of-the-ballot victory, though, change some of the down-ballot calculus moving forward, in the sense that NYC DSA had hit a bit of a wall in terms of what state legislative districts it could win? Are there now council, state, legislative and even congressional districts where Zohran won that are now plausibly winnable by NYC DSA?

Gustavo Gordillo

The advantage of a citywide race is that it gives us a map of new data for how our politics play everywhere in the city. We did very well in the North Shore of Staten Island, which is a very multiracial part of the city. That makes me wonder, could we run a socialist in the North Shore of Staten Island? We won every district in northern Manhattan where we’ve never run a DSA candidate and where we have thousands of DSA members. Many of the other districts where we did well we had already identified as potential growth areas in the past. We did beat Cuomo in a number of congressional districts including Hakeem Jeffries’s. Interestingly, though that’s not to say that he’s going to be a target.

But the candidate quality, the political moment, the fact that this was the top-of-the-ballot race — those are all conditions that will be difficult to replicate in the future. So I don’t think it means that we can win thirty seats next cycle.

Another surprising effect of Zohran’s landslide victory is that it has prompted a bit of a realignment in the political landscape, where we’re seeing politicians and groups that previously wanted nothing to do with us now are a lot more interested in what we’re doing. They at least have to acknowledge that there’s an electoral majority for taxing the rich, for freezing the rent, for universal childcare, for a working-class economic agenda. And that will help all of our campaigns, not just electoral campaigns. It’ll help our legislative campaigns. We are working on a different terrain of power than we were before.

Daniel Denvir: On the one hand, we’ve seen state-level Democrats, members of the congressional delegation, stop short of endorsing Zohran or, in some cases, notably Kirsten Gillibrand, say vile, racist, Islamophobic things about Zohran. We’re seeing Democratic Party leadership at the borough level, the actual city Democratic Party machine, fall in line pretty quickly.

Grace Mausser: Yeah, that’s right. As always, establishment Democrats are trying to triangulate rather than saying anything with their full chest. But I think we’re well on our way to that sort of realignment. Kirsten Gillibrand said vile things. And there’s an immediate backlash, forcing her to apologize. I think we’ll see congressional Democrats move in this direction. But definitely at the city level. People have acknowledged the victory more quickly than we were expecting. And we have a real window of opportunity here to forge alliances with people who may not have been previously interested in doing so.

Daniel Denvir: DSA, as many listeners no doubt know, is often badly divided at the national level and across so many local chapters. How might Zohran’s victory shape the organization on a national level and across chapters?

Gustavo Gordillo: There’s a lot of interest in replicating our work across the country. Many chapters have been trying to follow in our footsteps, try their own local versions of the proto-party-building project that we have here in New York. I would name Los Angeles as one of the most developed counterparts; a huge portion of their city council is made up of socialists. And in Minneapolis, there are a number of socialists in the city councils and in state legislature. Twin Cities DSA is currently running a DSA candidate, Omar Fateh, for mayor. That’ll be in November. Atlanta DSA is also running their chapter’s cochair, Kelsi Bond, for a city council seat and recently elected a socialist to the state legislature. Many DSA chapters, I think, are paying attention, are learning.

Grace Mausser: Every tendency in DSA wants to claim those wins. And that makes me hopeful. We in New York City welcome that. Much in the way that Bernie was unifying for a lot of DSA, I hope this becomes a unifying moment and encourages people to run campaigns that are designed to win, that are focused on winning and that also have a strategy in the case of a loss. I’m overall very hopeful that this might be a moment to mend some of the divides in DSA. And also this could be a moment for us in New York City to provide some tactical information, some resources, and some inspiration to our comrades in other parts of the country that are doing this work. Maybe they’re on their first year, their Julia Salazar year, or only a year or two behind us. But I think what we’ve done is chart a path that other chapters within DSA can then adapt to their local conditions.

What’s Next

Daniel Denvir: Are you concerned about November, that the Democratic establishment and the capitalist class will just stop at nothing to destroy Zohran? Will Zohran’s campaign keep moving full steam ahead, taking nothing for granted over the coming months to ensure a decisive victory over Adams, Cuomo, and Curtis Sliwa?

Gustavo Gordillo

We will definitely stop at nothing and we’ll take nothing for granted. Our coalition has shown that we can defeat the billionaire class and whoever their chosen candidate is. We’ve done it already, and we’ll do it again. And once Zohran is mayor, we’re going to keep fighting the billionaire class so that we can implement his agenda. And the campaign will not stop in January. It’ll keep going for four years and four more years if we have to.

I’m interested to see what they try to pull in the next couple of months. They’re also in disarray right now. They have multiple very weak candidates, in my opinion, that are going to divide the Right and the political establishment. Meanwhile, we get another bite at the apple, because of matching funds in New York City. This cannot be overstated as a factor in this campaign. We raised $8 or $9 million for the primary, a lot of that from public financing. We’ll be able to do it again in the general. It’ll give us another chance to try new tactics that we didn’t try the first time around in these next couple of months. I’m ready to keep fighting.

Daniel Denvir: And this time with a much larger share of normal Democratic officialdom behind Zohran, labor behind Zohran. He was able to beat them with very little of that behind him. Now he’s going to have a lot of that support.

Grace Mausser: To me, the general election campaign from now until November is an opportunity to cohere and solidify the coalition behind Zohran, which has just gotten a lot bigger. A lot of these groups have not really meaningfully worked together before. We’re in a very exciting moment for the organization, where we have the opportunity to work closely to organize openly with the leaders of the largest labor unions in the city, who often are politically conservative and we’re not always aligned in what we’re seeking on a ballot, even if we’re aligned in what we want for working-class New Yorkers. So it’s a really exciting opportunity for us to organize together through the general to solidify those bonds and prepare for four years of fighting to get what we deserve in this city.

Gustavo Gordillo

I was really involved in Jamaal Bowman’s reelection campaign and saw how the billionaire class could drop $15 million, $20 million in a race to buy an election. It was so incredibly satisfying in this primary to see them drop $35 million against Zohran and show that no amount of money could buy this election.

I’m a union electrician. I work in a plant right now. And even like in this plant with no reception, one day they were playing these attack ads about Zohran, and I couldn’t believe it — saying Zohran is going to destabilize New York, blah, blah, blah. And many of us were actually despairing in some of the final weeks of the election, because we thought we had seen how effective these ads could be against Bowman. And we weren’t sure if we could fight them in this primary. Turns out we can.

Daniel Denvir

Once you have victory under your belt, the big question is governance. How does that happen? There’s so much that needs to be done, but it will also be so hard to do so much of it. How does socialist governance work effectively amid all the contradictions of being mayor of New York City, and then being mayor of New York City with Kathy Hochul in the governor’s office and Trump in the White House?

Juan Carlos Monedero, a leading figure in Podemos in Spain, said that when progressive forces gain access to the governmental levers of power, they

enter into full possession of the state as if it were a new home. The rooms may be booby-trapped, the stairs barricaded. There may be snipers in the kitchen, shooters who are unseen because they are taken for granted, and all the more effective because unseen . . . money, property, superior education, knowledge of the “secrets” of rule, norms of organization, close connections with higher officialdom, and so forth. In liberal democracies. Enormous pressures can be brought to bear upon radical administrations, whether at municipal, state, or federal level. The mainstream media, the judiciary, the intelligence services, opposition parties may all come into play with scandals whipped up out of trifles, judicial harassment, dirty tricks, or political manoeuvres — and this even before market pressures are taken into account.

How is DSA, the campaign, and the wider movement thinking of navigating these challenges and ensuring that, though unquestionably Zohran will not be able to render New York fully socialist as mayor, that he have an effective and successful administration?

Gustavo Gordillo

It’s an amazing quote, and I think an observation we are pretty familiar with in our experience electing socialists to government. It’s not enough to elect someone and think that their position will give them the power to implement an agenda or actually wield power for the working class. It’s why we believe that it’s so important to build a movement outside of the halls of government, and to have extraparliamentary power and organization that we can rely on to force through an agenda that the capitalist class is going to oppose.

In New York City, after Zohran was elected the first time together with the slate, we set up a socialist, a Socialists in Office committee that became one of the coordinating hubs for organizing between the inside and the outside of our strategy, where the electeds on the inside of the halls of government were coordinating, trying to pass legislation, trying to raise taxes on the rich. And those of us on the outside were democratically deciding on an agenda that we fought for and organized for. We’ve built through mass participation and mass democracy, and that will be necessary to win his policy goals.

The rent freeze is kind of a genius demand, because it doesn’t require revenue and it’s a power that mayor already has in appointing the Rent Guidelines Board. So that is something that Zohran will be able to implement early on. There will be a massive attack campaign against the policy. So we will have to be doing defensive work to really popularize the agenda. But I think another feature of this campaign is that Zohran did not really campaign on making New York City into a socialist economy. Zohran and all of us are democratic socialists. But his agenda is made up of transformative reforms that will make further changes to the economy and the political system possible in the future. But right now, the scale of change that we’re after is something that we can achieve in four years.

Grace Mausser

Yeah, I agree with what Gustavo has laid out here. I feel very optimistic about our ability to govern. It boils down to two things. One, New York City is the largest city in the country, the cultural and financial center of the world. I think almost any leftist who is interested in helping govern, to bring ideas, to even directly govern as a commissioner or some appointee in the administration would be willing to do it. This is a huge opportunity for leftists, not just in New York City or New York State, but really around the world, to come in and try to put their ideas about municipal socialism into action.

The second reason I’m optimistic is because Zohran will be elected with arguably the most organized coalition of forces behind him in modern New York politics. He will have an army of people who are going to be ready to help him fight those forces that you were alluding to. Not only in DSA, but we across the broader left in New York City, have experienced those challenges of governing and are going into this eyes wide open. We know it’s going to be a challenge. We know it’s going to be a fight. And we know that Zohran, even as mayor, will not have a magic wand. So we’re already talking about how we cohere, how we organize together, not just through the general election, but for the next four or eight years.

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