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PARTYISM WITHOUT THE PARTY  
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Chris Maisano
December 25, 2025
Dissent Magazine
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_ Zohran Mamdani’s victory was rooted in organizations that took up
the base-building and mobilization functions that once fell to
parties. When was the last time being on the left was fun? It was a
year-long act of collective joy. We actually won. _

Zohran Mamdani at a dinner with supporters in March., Photo credit:
Jack Califano / Dissent Magazine

 

When was the last time being on the left was fun? Even in the best of
times, supporting socialism in America can feel like performing a grim
duty in the face of almost certain disappointment. The chapter titles
in _Burnout_
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Hannah Proctor’s investigation of the emotional landscapes of
leftist militancy, are revealing: Melancholia, Nostalgia, Depression,
Burnout, Exhaustion, Bitterness, Trauma, Mourning. One of the many
virtues of Zohran Mamdani’s remarkable campaign for New York City
mayor was that it never felt this way, not even when he was sitting
near the bottom of the polls. It was a year-long act of collective
joy. Real joy—not the brief sugar high that surged when Kamala
Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the Democrats’ 2024 ticket.
Volunteering for Mamdani never felt like a chore, even when the
weather was bad and fewer canvassers showed up for their shift than
expected. It was a blast from start to finish, and we didn’t even
have to console ourselves with a moral victory. This time, we actually
won.

We tend to speak of voting as a civic duty, and of boosting voter
participation as a high-minded, “good government” concern. The
nature of mass politics, however, has often been anything but staid
and responsible. Michael McGerr begins his book _The Decline of
Popular Politics_
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with a colorful account of a Democratic Party “flag raising” in
New Haven in 1876. It was a raucous affair, complete with torchlight
parades, street corner speeches, brass bands, fireworks, and rivers of
booze courtesy of local party notables. Political spectacle hasn’t
gone away, but since the advent of modern communications technology it
has become enormously mediated. By contrast, historian Richard Bensel
has described
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the “sheer physicality of voting” and party politics in the
nineteenth century. People flocked to the polls, Bensel writes,
“simply because they were exciting, richly endowed with
ethno-cultural themes of identity, manhood, and mutual recognition of
community standing.” It was party politics, in both senses of the
word.

This era should not be romanticized. Aside from the fact that only men
could vote, the atmosphere of drink-soddened masculinity that pervaded
election campaigns kept most women away even when it did not descend
into partisan and racial violence. Even so, it is hard not to agree
with political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld that
America’s early mass parties “bequeathed a genuinely popular and
participatory” culture whose “promise still haunts American
politics.”

Much has been made of Mamdani’s extremely effective use of social
media, short-form video, and other digital formats that speak to the
younger and disengaged voters many other campaigns struggle to reach.
There’s no doubt this was a major ingredient in the campaign’s
success; historically high rates of participation among Gen Z and
newly registered voters testify to its effectiveness. But the sheer
physicality of the Mamdani campaign, and the ways it used digital
media to bring people together offline, has been underrated.

Consider the citywide scavenger hunt in August. A call went out over
social media on a Saturday night, and thousands of people showed up
the next morning to race around seven stops across the boroughs, each
one connected to the city’s history. Disgraced incumbent mayor Eric
Adams denounced the frivolity: “I’m sure a scavenger hunt was fun
for the people with nothing better to do. . . . Mamdani is trying to
turn our city into the Squid Games.” One competitor offered a
different perspective
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“I think actually trying to have fun in politics and do a little bit
of a community building exercise, a way to actually learn about our
city—I’ve never known another politician to do it.”

The scavenger hunt was just one example of the campaign’s popular
and participatory culture. So much of the campaign was in public and
in person: mass rallies, a walk through the entire length of
Manhattan, unannounced appearances at clubs and concerts, a
100,000-strong army of volunteers who braved countless walk-ups to
knock over 1 million doors. From early spring through November’s
general election, the campaign assumed the scale and spirit of a
social movement, or a Knicks playoff run. There was a palpable buzz
around the city—not just in what New York electoral data maven
Michael Lange termed the “Commie Corridor
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neighborhoods, populated by young college-educated leftists, but in
Little Pakistan, Little Bangladesh, Parkchester, and other places
where nary a _New Yorker_ tote bag can be found.

When the polls closed, more than 2 million voters had cast their
ballots, the highest turnout in a New York City mayoral election since
1969. More than 1 million voters, just over half the electorate, voted
for Mamdani. At the same time, over 850,000 voted for Andrew Cuomo,
who successfully consolidated many Republican voters behind his
second-effort bid to return to public office. Another 146,000 voted
for the official Republican candidate, the perennial also-ran Curtis
Sliwa.

Mamdani’s shockingly decisive win in the Democratic primary had been
powered by his core constituencies: younger voters, college-educated
renters, and South Asian and Muslim voters, many of whom participated
in the electoral process for the first time. He carried these
constituencies with him into the general election, but he may have
struggled to win the final contest without rallying large numbers of
working-class Black and Hispanic voters too. As Lange has shown
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shifted most strongly toward Mamdani from the primary to the general
election were Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in the Bronx, Brooklyn,
and Queens. Many Black and Hispanic voters under forty-five were
already in Mamdani’s column in the primary, but his numbers then
were far lower among their parents and grandparents. After securing
the Democratic nomination, his campaign made inroads by building
relationships with Black church congregations and community
organizations, as well as labor unions with disproportionately Black
and Hispanic memberships. By cobbling these disparate constituencies
together in the general election, Lange concluded, Mamdani
successfully renewed the promise of the Rainbow Coalition for the
twenty-first century.

 

NOT BY BREAD-AND-BUTTER ALONE

Explaining how Mamdani did this has become something of a Rorschach
test for pundits. Much of the commentary has focused on his
campaign’s affordability agenda, which targeted the city’s
cost-of-living crisis through proposals for freezing rents,
eliminating fares on city buses, and implementing universal child
care, among others. While Mamdani’s emphasis on affordability was
necessary for securing the victory, and his economic proposals were
popular across his constituencies, he would not have been able to
mobilize the coalition he did on the strength of bread-and-butter
appeals alone. Mamdani’s unequivocal stances on “non-economic”
questions like the genocide in Gaza or the ICE raids terrorizing
immigrant communities built trust among precisely the people he needed
to join his volunteer army or turn out to vote for the first time.

Support for Palestine dovetailed with Mamdani’s vocal opposition to
the Trump administration’s assault on immigrants, which came
together in an impromptu confrontation with Trump’s “border
czar” Tom Homan last March. A video of the encounter
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challenged Homan over the illegal detention of Palestinian solidarity
activist Mahmoud Khalil, circulated widely on social media and in
immigrant communities. All of this helped Mamdani link his economic
program with opposition to the president’s authoritarian lurch. In
doing so, he appealed to immigrant voters worried about both ICE raids
and making the rent, as well as voters who want their representatives
to stand up to masked federal agents snatching people off the streets
and whisking them away in unmarked cars. Moreover, Mamdani’s
identity as a Muslim of South Asian descent undoubtedly activated
demobilized voters excited by the idea of seeing someone like them in
Gracie Mansion. The historic turnout surge that swept Muslim and South
Asian neighborhoods in the outer boroughs is inseparable from
Mamdani’s faith, his cultural fluency, and his outspoken defense of
fellow Muslims against the Cuomo campaign’s Islamophobic bigotry.

While Mamdani’s emphasis on affordability was necessary for securing
the victory, and his economic proposals were popular across his
constituencies, he would not have been able to mobilize the coalition
he did on the strength of bread-and-butter appeals alone. Mamdani’s
unequivocal stances on “non-economic” questions like the genocide
in Gaza or the ICE raids terrorizing immigrant communities built trust
among precisely the people he needed to join his volunteer army or
turn out to vote for the first time.

The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America
(NYC-DSA) has received a lot of credit for Mamdani’s victory, and
rightfully so. Mamdani is a DSA member, as are his chief of staff,
field director, and other key advisers. The campaign’s field leads,
who organized canvassing shifts, were disproportionately members (I
co-led a weekly canvass in my Brooklyn neighborhood during the
primary). But organizations rooted in South Asian and Muslim
communities deserve their fair share of the credit, including Desis
Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) Beats, the Muslim Democratic Club of New
York, Bangladeshi Americans for Political Progress, and grassroots
affinity groups like Pakistanis for Zohran and Bangladeshis for
Zohran. The mobilization of these communities transformed the
electorate and helped Mamdani offset Cuomo’s strength in
neighborhoods that shifted sharply to the former governor in the
general election.

There are nearly 1 million Muslims in New York, but until Mamdani’s
campaign they were a sleeping giant in local politics. Roughly 350,000
Muslims were registered, but only 12 percent of registered Muslims
turned out to vote in the 2021 mayoral election. Mamdani’s campaign
turned this dynamic completely on its head. DRUM Beats, which has
organizing bases in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens spanning a range
of South Asian and Indo-Caribbean diasporic communities, played a key
role. Their organizers are committed and tenacious, and many of them
are women. “We’re like a gang,” the group’s organizing
director Kazi Fouzia told a _Politico _reporter
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last summer. “When we go to any shop, people just move aside and
say, ‘Oh my god. The DRUM leaders are here. The DRUM women are
here.’” When Mamdani recognized “every New Yorker in Kensington
and Midwood” in his victory speech, he had in mind the scores of
aunties who ran themselves ragged knocking doors, sending texts, and
making phone calls.

In their post-election analysis
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of the voting data, DRUM Beats detailed an enormous increase in
turnout in the communities they organize. Based on Board of Elections
data and their own models, they estimated that from 2021 to 2025 South
Asian turnout exploded from 15.3 percent to nearly 43 percent, while
Muslim turnout went from barely 15 percent to over 34 percent. While
representing just 7 percent of New York’s registered voters, they
accounted for an estimated 15 percent of actual voters in the general
election. Nearly half of the city’s registered Bangladeshi and
Pakistani American voters participated in the election, outpacing the
overall participation rate of roughly 42 percent. This historic
development didn’t materialize out of thin air. Mamdani’s faith,
identity, and raw talent certainly didn’t hurt, but people on the
ground have been quietly building civic infrastructure in these
neighborhoods. In his assessment of the South Asian surge, electoral
strategist Waleed Shahid noted that the places with the biggest gains
were precisely “the places where DRUM Beats and allied organizers
have spent years knocking doors, translating ballot measures,
convening tenant meetings in basement prayer rooms, and building lists
through WhatsApp groups and WhatsApp rumors alike.” I had the good
fortune of getting to know some of these organizers during the
campaign. Their capacity to mobilize working-class immigrants who had
been overlooked for too long is formidable, and Mamdani’s victory
cannot be explained without it.

Mamdani claimed the legacy of Fiorello La Guardia and Vito Marcantonio
in the campaign’s final days, and the historical resonances ran
deep. Shahid drew a parallel between the current moment and earlier
realignments in the city’s political history “when groups written
off as threatening or foreign became disciplined voting blocs: Irish
Catholics moving from despised outsiders to Tammany’s core; Jewish
and Italian workers turning the Lower East Side into a labor/socialist
stronghold.” I am a product of New York’s twentieth-century
Italian American diaspora myself. In rooms full of South Asian aunties
for Zohran, wearing headscarves and plying everyone with plates of
food, I saw people who in a different time could have been my own
relatives stumping for the Little Flower, the legendary figure who was
once told New York wasn’t ready for an Italian mayor. Turns out it
was ready for an Italian mayor then, and it’s ready for a Muslim
mayor now.

 

A TEST FOR PARTYISM

Donald Trump’s return to the presidency set off a war of white
papers on Democratic Party electoral strategy that shows few signs of
a ceasefire. There are a variety of strategic prescriptions, but many
of them fall into two broad and infelicitously named camps:
popularists and deliverists. Popularists tend to hail from the
party’s moderate wing, but not always. There is a leftist variety of
popularism, for example, that finds expression in projects like the
Center for Working-Class Politics. Ezra Klein has offered perhaps the
clearest definition of the popularist persuasion: “Democrats should
do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and
which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular
stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.” Deliverism, by
contrast, focuses less on campaigning and more on governing. As Matt
Stoller summarized it in a tweet: “deliver and it helps you win
elections. Don’t deliver and you lose.” When Democrats are in
power, they should implement bold policies that improve people’s
lives and then reap the rewards from a satisfied electorate.

There is an element of “duh, of course” to both schools of
thought, but the weaknesses are easy to spot. Popularism seeks to
mirror the current state of public opinion for the sake of electoral
success, but public opinion is malleable and sometimes quite fickle.
One need only look at the wildly fluctuating data on immigration
attitudes since the 2024 election to see how quickly chasing public
opinion can become a fool’s errand. Deliverism, by contrast,
presumes “a linear and direct relationship between economic policy
and people’s political allegiances,” as Deepak Bhargava, Shahrzad
Shams, and Harry Hanbury put it
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that’s not typically how real people operate. The Biden
administration was, in many respects, an experiment in deliverism that
failed to deliver. It implemented policies that brought tangible
benefits to millions of people but still couldn’t prevent Trump from
returning to the White House.

The limitations of both popularism and deliverism have opened space
for a new school of thought, one that tackles strategic electoral
questions from a different angle (but also has a terrible name):
partyism. The political scientist Henry Farrell has usefully
summarized
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its premises: the Democratic Party’s fundamental problem is not its
ideological positioning but the fact that it’s not a political party
in any real sense. “If Democrats want to succeed,” Farrell writes,
they need to “build up the Democratic party as a coherent
organization that connects leaders to ordinary people.” In their
book _The Hollow Parties_
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Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld trace how the Democratic and
Republican parties alike have been transformed into rival “blobs”
of consultants, donors, strategists, and interest groups. Their
critique has been influential, and it has informed a spate of
proposals for turning the Democratic Party into a network of civic
institutions that engages voters between elections and mediates
effectively between leaders and the base.

The Mamdani campaign was arguably the first major test of the partyist
approach in practice. While there is no indication that campaign
leaders and strategists consciously appropriated these ideas, it is
not difficult to see the affinities between them. The campaign brought
new and disengaged voters into the fold through novel activities like
the scavenger hunt and the Cost of Living Classic, a citywide soccer
tournament held in Coney Island. Its sinew and muscle came not from
TikTok or Instagram, but rooted civic organizations like NYC-DSA, DRUM
Beats, United Auto Workers Region 9A, and the mosques, synagogues, and
churches that opened their doors to the candidate. Even four of the
five Democratic Party county committees in the city endorsed him,
despite their historic wariness of insurgent candidates from the
democratic socialist left (only the Queens county committee, a
stronghold of dead-end Cuomo supporters, snubbed him). Mamdani’s
victory was based, to a significant extent, on organizations with real
members who engage in meaningful civic and political activity.

Of all the organizations listed above, however, the least important by
far are the official bodies of the Democratic Party. The Mamdani
campaign may have embodied an emergent partyist politics, but this is
a partyism without the party. NYC-DSA’s electoral strategy, for
example, is grounded in the concept of the “party surrogate” first
proposed by _Jacobin_’s Seth Ackerman and developed further by the
political scientist Adam Hilton and others. Given the daunting odds of
successfully establishing any new party, Hilton proposes
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a network of chapter-based organizations “oriented toward building a
base within working-class communities and labor unions that can also
act as an effective independent pressure group on the Democratic
Party.” This is precisely what Mamdani and other socialist
candidates have done. Primary voters—not party
organizations—decide candidate nominations, which radically reduces
the incentives for transforming those organizations. Why fill in the
hollow parties when you can do much the same thing outside of them?

For now, at least, partyist projects like the one that catapulted
Mamdani into political stardom will continue to gestate outside of any
formal party organization. The NYC-DSA chapter has doubled in size to
13,000 members since 2024, and that number will likely continue to
grow. Organizers have established a new organization called Our Time
that is focused on mobilizing campaign volunteers in support of
Mamdani’s agenda after he is sworn into office. NYC-DSA, DRUM Beats,
labor unions, tenant groups, and other organizations that endorsed
Mamdani during the campaign have established a formal coalition called
the People’s Majority Alliance to do much the same thing at the
organizational leadership level. So it seems unlikely that Mamdani’s
coalition will demobilize the way Barack Obama’s did after 2008.
These are independent organizations, constituted outside of official
Democratic Party institutions, that assume the base-building and
mobilization functions a party would carry out directly in most other
political systems. This is the form popular and participatory politics
takes in the age of hollow parties, raising the possibility that a
lost culture once sustained by precinct captains, ward heelers, and
saloon keepers could be reborn in a new way.

Rolling back MAGA will require speaking to popular needs and
aspirations and delivering on them. It will also require developing
our capacities to work together in a spirit of democratic cooperation
and public exuberance. The Mamdani campaign laid the foundations for
this in one city, but here and elsewhere much more reconstruction
remains to be done.

_[CHRIS MAISANO is a trade unionist and Democratic Socialists of
America activist. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.]_

 

* Zohran Mamdani
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* left electoral politics
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* Left Electoral Strategy
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* 2025 Elections
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* Elections 2026
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* 2026 Midterms
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* DSA
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* democratic socialist
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* Democratic Socialists of America
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* Working Families Party
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* WFP
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* New York City
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* Left Politics
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* DRUM
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* Palestine solidarity
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* Mahmoud Khalil
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* Immigration
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* ICE
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* ICE Raids
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