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A year ago, Zohran Mamdani was polling at one percent. Every pundit said his mayoral campaign in New York City was a sideshow — a socialist experiment that might play on Twitter but not on ballots. He wasn’t supposed to beat a legacy name like Andrew Cuomo, or the millionaires and billionaires who poured obscene amounts of money into trying to stop him.
But he did.
He won because people — real people — stopped listening to the noise. The attack ads calling him anti-police didn’t land. The attempts to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism didn’t stick. The voters didn’t care about the caricature. They cared that someone finally sounded like he gave a damn about the rent, the grocery bill, and the basic insult of trying to live in a city that rewards wealth and punishes work.
I know because I was there. I canvassed for him. And what I saw — in the hallways of walk-ups, on the stoops, in the cramped elevators of East New York — is what the DNC keeps missing about politics, even as the country slips further away.
So here are three things I think national Democrats could actually learn from Zohran Mamdani.
1. Stop Treating Voters Like They’re Data
When I showed up for my first canvassing shift, I expected the stereotype: a few twenty-somethings with DSA pins and ironic tote bags quoting Marx. Instead, I walked into a church basement full of America. There were retirees from Maryland who’d taken the train up to help, college students from Brooklyn College, a construction worker on his day off, two grandmothers who had never canvassed before, and a mother with her toddler strapped to her chest.
It wasn’t the algorithm’s version of a progressive movement. It was people who had decided that showing up mattered more than being cynical. They weren’t ideologues — they were exhausted. They were angry about rent, groceries, healthcare, and the feeling that nobody in power was fighting for them.
The national party still doesn’t understand how simple that is. Democrats talk about “reaching the working class” as if it’s a demographic to decode instead of a conversation to have. They commission more polling and focus groups, convinced that if they can just locate the perfect phrase, they’ll win people back. But voters don’t want to be studied; they want to be seen.
That’s what Mamdani’s campaign got right. It didn’t need a data team to tell it who mattered — it decided everyone did. It built community by hand, not by segment. And when you do that, you realize something the consultants can’t model: people will knock doors for a candidate who knocks for them first.
2. Say What You Believe — and Mean It
The safest sound in politics right now is silence. Candidates wait for the poll-tested moment to speak, then mumble their way through sentences that feel like disclaimers. Zohran refused that script. He didn’t apologize for wanting a city that’s affordable for the people who actually live there. He didn’t hedge when asked about policing or foreign policy.
He spoke like someone who knew what groceries cost — like someone who’s waited for the C train in February. There was no performance, no triangulation. Just the plain, risky truth that if a city is only affordable for developers and landlords, it isn’t a city anymore.
That kind of conviction is rare, and that’s why it resonated. The obsession with “electability” has made Democrats allergic to sincerity. But voters can smell fear — and they can feel authenticity. You can’t fake caring about people’s lives. You either sound like you live among them or you don’t.
Mamdani’s campaign didn’t run on charisma; it ran on coherence. The story he told about housing, healthcare, and public investment lined up with the life he led. That’s what credibility looks like — not the perfect message, but the consistent one.
If national Democrats want to learn from him, they should stop mistaking moderation for maturity. The real grownup thing is to stand for something and be able to explain why.
3. Let People Vote for Something Again
The most radical thing Zohran did wasn’t ideological — it was emotional. He reminded people how it feels to vote for someone.
Nationally, Democrats have spent years campaigning on fear: Vote blue or fascism wins. And while that’s not wrong, it’s not a vision. Fear can mobilize people for a season; hope can move them for a generation.
In East New York, hope didn’t look like a slogan. It looked like sweat — volunteers climbing five flights of stairs in apartment buildings that smelled like dinner and detergent. It looked like conversations that lasted longer than anyone planned. It looked like a sense of belonging that doesn’t trend online but keeps you coming back the next weekend.
After the election, pundits shrugged and said his campaign “doesn’t scale.” But maybe that’s the point. Empathy doesn’t have to scale to win; it just has to spread. Every conversation, every knock, every stranger who opens their door to listen — that’s democracy doing what it was designed to do.
The Hope that Won’t Trend
Maybe Zohran’s campaign won’t become a national model. Maybe it’s too local, too messy, too human for the consultants to replicate. But that’s what makes it worth learning from.
Because what I saw on those streets wasn’t a utopian fantasy — it was the outline of something better: people who have nothing in common except the conviction that they deserve more than this.
That kind of hope doesn’t burn out after one election. It doesn’t require perfect alignment or pure ideology. It just asks for faith in each other — the kind you build one doorbell, one conversation, one vote at a time.
Maybe that doesn’t scale.
But it wins.
And in a country this tired, that’s the most radical thing left to believe in.
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