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HOW ZOHRAN MAMDANI CAN WIN THE WAR  
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Eric Blanc, Emily Lemmerman, and Wen Zhuang
August 28, 2025
The Nation
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_ Winning in November isn’t enough. A Mayor Mamdani will need a
mass movement behind him to overcome an establishment that wants to
crush him. _

Zohran Mamdani talks about affordability, billionaires, and fighting
hate on Morning Edition, NPR, July 1, 2025, screen grab

 

The prospect of Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who has said
billionaires shouldn’t exist, becoming the mayor of New York City
has the ruling class in a tizzy
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But Kathryn Wylde, head of one of the city’s most powerful business
lobbies, has a message for her rich friends: Don’t worry so much. 

Wylde, _Vanity Fair_ reported
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month, “has been tamping down the hysteria by reminding the city’s
titans that many of Mamdani’s proposed policies would need the
approval of state government, and that Governor Kathy Hochul, who is
up for reelection in 2026, has already shot down the idea of raising
taxes.”

Wylde isn’t wrong. There are indeed powerful obstacles standing in
the way of Mamdani’s ability to fulfill many of his highest-profile
campaign pledges. When you’re up against some of the world’s most
powerful CEOs and politicians, just getting elected and pursuing smart
insider politics isn’t enough to pass ambitious policies—and
Mamdani’s camp knows this.

So what will it take to turn Mamdani’s agenda for an affordable New
York into a reality?

In our view, what’s needed is a mass campaign that seizes
high-attention moments—like a November election night victory—to
onboard large numbers of volunteers, that sustains widespread
organizing after election day, and that trains working-class leaders
to analyze the power of their opponents and to develop a targeted
strategy to push recalcitrant elected officials to fund Mamdani’s
proposals.

Mamdani has already shown his ability to build a mass movement. Over
50,000 people have already volunteered to help get him elected. By
expanding and deepening this grassroots machine after November,
Mamdani can forge an organized people’s fightback powerful enough to
oblige Hochul and Albany to fund his core agenda. Here’s our
proposal for what this could look like.

A Plan to Win

Imagine it’s election night this November. The eyes of New York and
the country are on Mamdani, who has just decisively defeated all the
establishment candidates. In his victory speech, watched by millions,
Mamdani not only thanks his supporters and lays out his agenda for
change. He also explains that the only way he can pass his agenda is
if everyday New Yorkers join the fight—starting by collecting one
million signatures from constituents calling on their state
representatives to fully fund public services statewide.
And_, _perhaps most importantly, he repeatedly provides a catchy URL
(or number to text) where supporters can immediately sign up to get
involved.

The goal here would be simple. Rather than disbanding his massive
volunteer machine after November 4—as is the norm in electoral
operations—Mamdani’s team could transition it into a broader
organizing apparatus to help secure his agenda under the banner of a
broad new campaign, something like a Movement for an Affordable New
York (MANY).

Workplace and neighborhood MANY hubs could coordinate petitioning
efforts, hold potluck socials, and develop creative ways to reach
peers. And a statewide version of Bernie Sanders’s hugely successful
Fighting Oligarchy tour could play a central role in building momentum
and recruiting volunteers for this campaign.

This can’t be yet another traditional pressure campaign. Such
efforts have three major limitations. First, they’re generally very
siloed, with organizations pushing their distinct agendas and tactics
with little to no coordination. Second, they aren’t laser-focused on
expanding their base beyond self-selecting activists who already feel
strongly about the issue. Finally, they normally lack a clear power
structure analysis
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Who are the decision-makers? Who influences the decision makers? How
can we split and surmount the opposition?

Overcoming both billionaires and the establishment politicians who
love them requires launching a united campaign oriented to building
power more broadly and more deeply. That’s why the campaign’s
remarkable distributed field operation
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with its huge number of volunteers and volunteer leaders, should be
maintained past Election Day—so that there is a foundational
structure in place to take the fight to the next level.

Though Mamdani’s campaign can’t realistically coordinate a
coalition, an early strategic lead from the campaign would go a long
way toward aligning our state’s normally fragmented unions, Left
organizations, and community leaders around a shared effort.
Otherwise, the centrifugal forces of organizational habit and turf may
remain the unfortunate norm.

But even if all of New York’s progressive organizations unite,
we’re still not anywhere near influential enough to win Mamdani’s
agenda. Our memberships—or our _active_ memberships in the case of
unions—are far too small to convince a supermajority of New York
politicians that we pose a legitimate threat to their continued grip
on power.

With billionaires and political hacks breathing down their necks, we
should expect that a good number of establishment politicians won’t
budge even in the face of a million-strong petition and a mass march
to deliver it. _Their_ own constituents, they’ll insist, are not
on board with Mamdani’s “pie in the sky” policies. Overcoming
such stubborn opposition requires targeted campaigns in pivotal
districts and constituencies that leverage existing social ties and
that grow our reach beyond self-selecting volunteers.

Not everybody in a community has the same amount of sway.
Power-structure analysis trainings with members of unions and
community groups—as well as new leaders identified through MANY’s
broader petitioning efforts—can help influential working-class
organizers map their opposition and their own communities. By
identifying and developing leaders with strong roots in institutions
like churches, ethnic associations, or unions, we can help them tap
their social connections to clearly demonstrate their community’s
support for Mamdani’s agenda and to move the powerbroking
intermediaries that state legislators cannot afford to ignore—e.g.
an influential pastor, a powerful local businessman, or a national
politician.

Ultimately, a powerful alignment
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community, labor, advocacy, and political forces can’t leave power
on the table. Every terrain of struggle—from neighborhood fights to
union contract bargaining—is a way to demand and win change.

A Lesson From Obama

Everybody understands that outside pressure is necessary for Mamdani
to pass his policies. But there’s a real danger that low organizing
expectations plus organizational inertia and divisions will translate
into a major missed opportunity for effective bottom-up organizing
after November.

Consider the experience of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, which was
memorably built around the vast “Obama for America” supporter
network. Even though senior adviser Christopher Edley Jr. had been
pushing for months for the campaign to develop a post-November 4 plan
to turn this network into a “Movement 2.0” which would provide
external political support for Obama’s presidency, no such operation
existed by the time Obama won. _The New Republic_ explains
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happened next: “On November 5, the day after Obama’s victory, his
headquarters in Chicago was deluged with phone calls and emails from
supporters asking for guidance on how to keep going. Exactly as Edley
had feared, no answers were forthcoming.”

A few weeks after the election, the campaign sent out a survey to its
supporters. Of the 550,000 people who replied, 86 percent expressed
their interest in joining a grassroots push for Obama’s policies.
Yet with priorities elsewhere, and afraid of challenging the
Democratic establishment, nobody pulled the trigger on the “Movement
2.0” proposal. This was “Obama’s biggest mistake,” notes
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New Republic_, and it “helped pave the way for Donald Trump to
harness the pent-up demand for change Obama had unleashed.”

Mamdani will face the same choice that Obama faced. Though Mamdani’s
campaign is, fortunately, far less tied to the Democratic
establishment, it’s likely that some operatives will advise him to
work exclusively through institutional channels. “Leave the
mobilizing to your grassroots coalition partners,” they’ll say.
“You’ll have your hands full just trying to govern.”

It’s true that Mamdani’s team in office won’t have the capacity
or political space to focus on bottom-up organizing—especially when
some of its targets may be colleagues Mamdani has to work with to
govern. A division of labor between movements and elected officials is
inevitable and, at its best
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fruitful.

But Mamdani is currently the figure with the most reach and legitimacy
to jump-start a campaign for an affordable New York. And though this
movement should be built no matter what, its chances of success will
be higher with an initial boost from the candidate himself. Since
there’s no realistic path to winning Mamdani’s planks with the
current balance of political power, the riskiest option is to pursue a
path of least resistance and minimal confrontation.

Doing the Impossible

New Yorkers will be waiting forever if they expect their new mayor to
deliver an affordable city from on high. It’s too often forgotten
that America’s most successful populist mayors—like Milwaukee’s
sewer socialists and New York’s Fiorello La Guardia, a hero of
Mamdani’s—leaned on powerful workers’ movements to counteract
employer and media scaremongering, to muscle through their policy
agenda, and to keep up morale in the face of setbacks. No such
movement exists today. Everything hinges on recreating one.

The good news is that popular initiatives that might have been
previously unachievable are now on the table during America’s
crisis. In fact, they’re likely the _only_ way to fend off
billionaire authoritarianism. Winning an affordable New York is our
best bet to demonstrate that there’s a viable alternative to both
Trumpism and decrepit Democratic centrism.

As Zohran Mamdani likes reminding us, a big leap forward always seems
impossible until it’s done. He has already done the impossible by
winning the primary. If we keep the pedal on the gas, we’re
confident he’ll do so again in November. And then the real fight
begins.

_Take a stand against Trump and support The Nation!
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_In this moment of crisis, we need a unified, progressive opposition
to Donald Trump. _

_We’re starting to see one take shape in the streets and at ballot
boxes across the country: from New York City mayoral candidate Zohran
Mamdani’s campaign focused on affordability, to communities
protecting their neighbors from ICE, to the senators opposing arms
shipments to Israel. _

_The Democratic Party has an urgent choice to make: Will it embrace a
politics that is principled and popular, or will it continue to insist
on losing elections with the out-of-touch elites and consultants that
got us here? _

_At The Nation, we know which side we’re on. Every day, we make the
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_Sincerely, _

_Bhaskar Sunkara 
President, The Nation_

_Eric Blanc [[link removed]] is a
professor of labor studies at Rutgers University. He writes the Labor
Politics [[link removed]] newsletter on Substack. His
latest book is We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is
Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big
[[link removed]]._

_Emily Lemmerman
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member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and formerly served as
Communications Director in Zohran Mamdani’s State Assembly office._

_Wen Zhuang [[link removed]] is a
union organizer with ACRE/Bargaining for the Common Good and
previously 1199NE._

_Copyright c 2024 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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* Zohran Mamdani
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* New York City
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* Grassroots Organizing
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* progressive politics
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