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NEW YORKERS SAY YES TO MAMDANI, THAT’S SPELLED M A M D A N I  
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Whitney Curry Wimbish
November 5, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ Volunteers and advocates said the best thing to do today is
celebrate, rest—then keep organizing. Several organizations that
helped elect Mamdani were already organizing for policy changes
similar to his major planks _

Zohran Mamdani speaks during victory speech at a mayoral election
night watch party, Tuesday, November 4, 2025, in New York., Credit:
Yuki Iwamura/AP Photo // The American Prospect

 

The watch party was packed full of Zohran Mamdani supporters, some of
whom had just finished a canvassing shift that ended when the polls
closed. When the results were announced, sooner than expected, the
room broke into excited screams, hugs, and chants of “Fuck you,
Cuomo.” Some were in tears. Many seemed relieved and ready for
sleep. But as the evening’s speakers said, the fight isn’t over.

Rest? “No, there’s too much to do. We’re facing the national
guard, and ICE,” Jews for Racial & Economic Justice
[[link removed]] organizer Lexi Sasanow told me an hour
earlier in Manhattan, 11 miles away. Standing with two others outside
a polling place off 110th Street beneath the bright full moon, Sasanow
described what people should do today: Find a political home, be it a
nonprofit, mutual aid group, or a community garden, so you “have a
network of people you want to be with as things get harder.”

JFREJ, for example, is hosting a mass call tomorrow
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to talk about what comes next. Sasanow and fellow organizer Alessia
Milstein, the organization’s digital and communications fellow,
urged people to sign up. “We don’t elect saviors,” Milstein
said. “We elect comrades.” And while progressive organizations may
have more power under a Mamdani administration, the city is going to
face real, material threats from President Trump that must be fought.

Mamdani beat former governor and sex pest Andrew Cuomo, 50.4 percent
to 41.6 percent [[link removed]] as of late
Tuesday night. The 8.8-point lead meant that even if Republican
nominee Curtis Sliwa had dropped out and sent his 7.1 percent to
Cuomo, Cuomo still would have lost.

“We are breathing in the air of a city that has been reborn,”
Mamdani said in his acceptance speech. “We won because New Yorkers
allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made
possible.”   

_MAMDANI’S 104,400 VOLUNTEERS TOOK NOTHING FOR GRANTED, CANVASSING
UNTIL POLLS CLOSED._

More than 735,000 people cast ballots during early voting alone,
quadruple the number of voters who did in 2021. By 3 p.m., voters had
already surpassed the turnout of any mayoral election since 2001,
casting 1.4 million votes. By the end of the night, the tally was up
to two million
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the highest mayoral race turnout since 1969.

At the Synod Hall polling site, where JFREJ organizers were getting
out the vote, a poll worker said the turnout was the most intense
she’d ever seen in her 15 years on the job, and that it was
especially busy at lunchtime. “It’s like five times the amount of
people coming out,” she said shortly before polls closed, as voters
stood beneath the prayer house’s vaulted ceiling and candelabra.

Mamdani’s 104,400 volunteers took nothing for granted, canvassing
until polls closed. The campaign knocked on another 1.4 million doors
across all five boroughs as of 2 p.m. yesterday, on top of the 1.6
million during the June primary. Now they vow to continue organizing
to help Mamdani achieve his agenda.

ELECTION DAY WAS CLEAR AND COLD. Mamdani’s army of volunteers began
before dawn, turning out for 6 a.m. shifts near polling places, subway
station entrances, and cafés across the city. Some supporters had
already been thinking about the day after the election, and were
intent on heeding the lessons from other headline-grabbing campaigns
built by volunteers.

Obama for America, for example, organized 2.2 million volunteers
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to get Barack Obama to the White House in 2008. But in the months
after he became president, volunteers said they felt discarded and
disenchanted
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because he had no further use for them, even though they wanted to
keep fighting for health care and other policy proposals.

“The failure of the Obama era was , ‘Oh, he’ll take care of it
from here,’” David Duhalde, former political director of Our
Revolution, said ahead of the election. A better move is to keep
organizing. Duhalde suggested that anyone who volunteered to get
Mamdani elected should rest first, then keep pushing. “You want to
keep fighting the hard battles,” he said, such as flipping seats to
progressive candidates, and continuing to agitate for progressive
policies until they are implemented. Much of Mamdani’s agenda hinges
on cooperation with the state legislature and Gov. Kathy Hochul, and
persuading Albany will be instrumental to the mayor-elect’s success.
But Hochul herself is up for re-election next year.

“It’s not lost on her that a mandate for a Democratic Socialist
agenda focused on affordability has grown in the city,” said Gustavo
Gordillo, co-chair of NYC Democratic Socialists of America. “I think
that will be on her mind when she’s campaigning, that hundreds of
thousands of people have made their views clear and will be expecting
the governor to deliver.”

Several organizations that helped elect Mamdani were already
organizing for policy changes similar to his major planks, and leaders
told the _Prospect_ yesterday that they intend to keep going.

That’s the plan at CAAAV Voice [[link removed]], a New
York Communities for Change [[link removed]]
coalition member that organizes to build working-class power for Asian
immigrants, tenants, and young people. Speaking on Election Day, CAAAV
Voice organizing director Alina Shen said her group decided to help
get Mamdani to Gracie Mansion as a tactical move in the long battle to
make New York more affordable, especially on housing.

His candidacy was an opportunity for CAAAV Voice to highlight its
priorities, and engage community members who didn’t previously want
to get involved in politics. One of its first volunteer efforts for
Mamdani was canvassing small businesses in Chinatown, Shen said, where
multiple owners were initially not all that interested in what they
had to say. But because some of the volunteers spoke Fujianese and had
lived in the neighborhood for years, it was possible to build small,
skeptical interactions into trusting relationships.

“We had to earn people’s trust,” Shen said. “There are
instances where we’ve had to transform and move people, because we
need every single person in this city to move towards this vision
together.”

Isaac Kirk-Davidoff, a DC 37 union member and Crown Heights Tenant
Union [[link removed]] volunteer, also has
housing on the mind. Like CAAAV Voice, volunteering for Mamdani was a
chance for him to advance his goals of activating renters and getting
closer to the goal of organizing across the entire city.

“We don’t just need a new mayor, we need a new system,” he said
yesterday. “It’s a window of opportunity and I really want to
seize it and see what we can push through.”

Continuing to organize is not as simple as just saying you’ll do it,
he said; long-term organizing takes time and stamina. His day-after
suggestion is to find or stay with a group and to talk to neighbors,
especially for those living in a building with problems.

“My advice is to find that space where you can think, act, and do
politics,” he said, “and build from there.”

_[WHITNEY CURRY WIMBISH is a staff writer at The American Prospect and
can be reached at [email protected]__. She previously worked in
the Financial Times newsletter division for 17 years and before that
was a reporter at The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and the Herald
News in New Jersey.]_

_Read the original article at __Prospect.org. _
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_Used with the permission. © __The American Prospect_
[[link removed]]_, __Prospect.org, 2025_
[[link removed]]_. All rights reserved.  _

_Support the American Prospect_ [[link removed]]_._

_Click here_ [[link removed]]_ to support the Prospect's
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* Zohran Mamdani
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* New York City mayoral election
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* Andrew Cuomo
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* Democratic Party
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* DSA
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* WFP
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