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NYC-DSA STRATEGY IN ZOHRAN’S RACE  
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Grace Mausser
November 5, 2025
Convergence
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_ Shows the Path to Mass Municipal Governance _

, Kimmie Dearest

 

On September 6th, Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani packed a public
school auditorium in Brooklyn. When asked what to do to make their
vision of politics successful, Zohran answered, “Join DSA.” As
those paying attention to New York City and State politics know,
Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the NYC mayoral primary did not emerge
solely from a savvy media strategy and a likeable candidate. Zohran
proudly calls NYC-DSA [[link removed]] his political home,
and we worked hand-in-hand to develop the campaign strategy, culture,
and day-to-day execution to make him the Mayor of the largest city in
the United States.

Now, New York City’s left finds itself in thrilling but unchartered
waters. As Ralph Miliband
[[link removed]]
reminds us, “electoral victory only gives one the right to rule, not
the power to rule.” Our path forward, to governing in New York City,
must build upon the electoral and co-governance strategy that NYC-DSA
has been developing and refining for nearly nine years. We have a
model for winning mass campaigns; we have a model for true
co-governance with legislators; now we will bring our experience to
City Hall.

Zohran Mamdani became an active member of the NYC-DSA chapter in 2017,
during a period of tremendous growth for our project. Inspired by the
surprise success of Bernie Sanders’ socialist message in the 2016
Democratic primaries and hardened by Donald Trump’s harrowing
victory, socialists and leftists across the country felt inspired and
compelled to become a more effective force. In New York City, NYC-DSA
tested our theory that socialism could win by experimenting in two
City Council races in Brooklyn: Khader El-Yateem and Jabari Brisport.
In both races, NYC-DSA organizers, including a young Zohran Mamdani,
built independent field operations that recruited hundreds of unpaid,
highly motivated volunteers. Though we lost both races, we learned
that our model, which demands that volunteers be trusted with campaign
leadership and strategy decisions, is highly scalable, and if the
conditions are right, we can win.

That ethos has guided every NYC-DSA race, including Zohran’s initial
race for State Assembly in 2020. All 11 of our elected socialist
officials (“Socialists in Office,” or “SIOs”) have won their
seats thanks to the commitment to distributed leadership and
invitation into strategic decision making that our campaigns
prioritize. As observers look to Zohran’s race to see the future of
the Democratic party, we know the reason he won and it is simple:
trust the volunteers.

Unlike traditional, establishment campaigns, we intentionally
identify, train, and elevate people who have the capacity, interest,
and potential to lead canvasses themselves. These highly-skilled field
leads ensure canvassers are trained, manage canvass materials, and
handle any on-the-ground issues or questions. Some field leads are
brought into even higher-level strategy. Known as field coordinators,
these volunteers manage other field leads and have input into key
decisions about where, when, and how a campaign canvasses.

It would have been impossible for staff to personally manage the
amount of canvassing that was happening. There were dozens of events
every weekend; staff 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, and as a result, they tell themselves: “field
doesn’t scale in a citywide or statewide race.” That is true—if
you don’t trust your volunteers.

Though canvassing is at the heart of every NYC-DSA campaign, this
commitment to the political development and strategic acumen of our
core volunteers expands beyond the field into other tactical areas,
like communications, fundraising, and policy. Establishment campaigns
and the professional political class want us to believe they have
inimitable skills. NYC-DSA believes that everyday New Yorkers have the
ability and power to run our own political operation, and Zohran’s
campaign put that belief into action. The breadth and excitement of
the campaign also brought more organizations into this campaigning
style. Organizations that have invested years into the political
development and leadership of their members—like CAAAV: Organizing
Asian Communities [[link removed]], DRUM – Desis Rising Up and
Moving [[link removed]], Jews For Racial & Economic Justice
(JFREJ) [[link removed]], and United Auto Workers Region 9A
[[link removed]]—were able to seize this mentality
and deeply activate their members on not only canvassing, but campaign
strategy.

A truly powerful political operation, however, goes beyond simply
winning elections. We are not interested in simply electing
politicians who self-identify as socialists and relying on their
individual principles to guide them to the right choices. Individuals
falter—a stronger force is necessary to grapple with the
complications of governing as socialists. So, in 2020 after five
socialist won New York State legislative offices and joined State
Senator Julia Salazar in Albany, we formed the Socialists in Office
Committee (SIO); it would soon be joined by the City Socialists in
Office Committee (CSIO) the following year. These committees were
designed to enable NYC-DSA to strategize alongside our elected
officials. The elected officials and their staff meet with NYC-DSA
leadership every week to share information, collectively choose
priorities, and cohere on key votes. The primary purpose of this
co-governance model is to enable an inside/outside strategy, where
elected officials and staff with inside information and access can
inform organizers on the outside about how they can best apply
pressure to achieve our collective goals. This strategy has been used
to implement some of the most transformative state policy in the last
decade, including tax increases on the wealthy in 2021 and the Build
Public Renewables Act
[[link removed]] in 2023. Both
efforts paired inside organizing and information-sharing with a robust
outside pressure model, including canvassing in key legislators’
districts and holding citizen lobbying meetings.

The principle that guides our campaigns—that anyone can and should
be empowered to control their political reality—is present in our
SIO project. The NYC-DSA representation on the SIO Committee is made
up of elected, unpaid NYC-DSA members. DSA representatives on the
committees are determined through internal elections, and any member
could run for those spots. We do not treat working with elected
officials as a sacred job, available only to political elites; it is a
job for any serious organizer who wants to put the time and energy
into our co-governance work.

Because of this, NYC-DSA’s SIO project is perhaps the most
successful leftist governing project in the country. Though only a few
years old and far from perfect, it has kept socialist elected
officials connected to an organized base of activists, and has helped
insulate them from legislative leadership’s pressure tactics. A lone
progressive may have all the right ideas, but when the Speaker of the
Assembly threatens to cut money from their district and staff? Without
an organized group to strategize with and rely on for support, it
becomes all too appealing to make questionable compromises. This
pattern helped solidify the left’s long disillusionment with
electoral politics, an orientation we are just beginning to move away
from.

Through the later part of the 20th century into the 2010s, the left
embraced a protest model. We were outsiders only, and our job was to
apply pressure on the decision makers. This model can result in some
success, but rarely has it resulted in sustained power. In some ways,
being an outsider is more comfortable—you can focus solely on the
demand and leave the messiness of implementation to those with power.
But we all know remaining outsiders to policymaking power is
insufficient to achieving any socialist goal within our lifetimes. The
SIO projects make significant headway toward breaking the left’s
outsider orientation. NYC-DSA takes collective responsibility for both
the success and failures of our socialist elected officials.

Developing a co-governance structure

SIO should be the model we build on to develop a co-governance
structure with the Mamdani mayoral administration. NYC-DSA has
demonstrated that we can scale a radically open campaign model from a
state Assembly race to a mayoral campaign; and we have shown that it
is possible to hold a bloc of leftist elected officials together and
connected to a mass base. Now we must combine and evolve the two
ideas. Doing so will require three things: bringing more organizations
into the structure, developing beyond an inside/outside strategy, and
ensuring everyday New Yorkers have ways to engage in all levels of the
work.

Bringing more organizations into the structure

First, we must include more groups in co-governance with the Mamdani
administration. NYC-DSA is the only organization in the SIO projects.
While this has worked so far, the geographic scale and unilateral
power of the mayor demands a wider base. Zohran has already united
community organizations and unions across the city with his campaign.
Importantly, many of those groups also have organized, active bases
that were excited and engaged in the campaigns. Now is the time to
form a left-labor coalition; an opportunity to collectively enact a
populist agenda is a great incentive for these groups to put their
differences aside and strategize together.

Beyond an inside/outside strategy

Second, we must evolve our inside/outside strategy. The inside/outside
strategy is primarily about extracting as many victories as possible
from an ostensibly resistant leadership and administration. But we
will soon have a mayor from within our movement. There will certainly
still be enemies to pressure both at the city and state levels
(Governor Hochul is certainly not excited to implement the Mamdani
agenda), but mobilizing and preparing lower levels of government to
support and enact policy goals from the top is different than
pressuring high-level decisionmakers. We cannot fall into the left’s
comfort zone of protesting power.

This dynamic was part of hindering Bill de Blasio’s administration.
Most advocates chose an oppositional approach to the de Blasio
administration (mainly looking to maximize their leverage on
single-issue campaigns), and this orientation ushered in a collapse of
that coalition. The young idealists who had entered the de Blasio
administration on the inside took different tacks—some left the
administration disillusioned with the mayor, others felt he had gotten
a raw deal and became disillusioned with the left. None had the power
to use their relationships to change the underlying dynamics facing
the left or the administration. The inside portion of the
inside/outside strategy under de Blasio had little to show for itself
after 8 years, and the outside portion was not in a stronger position
either. This time, we must utilize the Mamdani coalition’s
membership and the massive volunteer base to create mass mobilization
to enact Mamdani’s agenda, contesting opponents within and without
the government itself.

Call it mass governance.

Ensuring everyday New Yorkers have ways to engage

This is why the third piece is key.

Just like in every NYC-DSA campaign, we must ensure that regular
supporters have clear ways to engage in all levels of this work. This
will mean creating active policy campaigns that will enable the 50,000
canvassers and 500 field leads from Zohran’s campaign to put their
door-knocking and field strategy skills to use. Additionally, we must
ensure groups engaged in co-governing leadership are also mobilizing
their members to knock doors and lobby for the changes necessary to
enact Zohran’s agenda.

Further, we must plug Zohran organizers and supporters into lower
level City institutions en masse. New York City has hundreds of small
semi-governmental bodies that are typically ceded to less progressive
forces, such as Community Boards, and Parent Teacher Associations and
Community Education Councils. The City also has hundreds of
opportunities for people to volunteer, including at libraries and
parks. Both the Mamdani administration and groups organizing with it
should work to encourage supporters to engage in these spaces. We have
the opportunity to create a sense of mass ownership over the city and
build support for Zohran’s agenda from the bottom of City government
to the top.

Winning this election was shocking, but NYC-DSA has shocked before.
Winning is hard, but we know from experience that governing is harder.
The same forces that fight leftists in elections fight us in office,
and we must continually organize and mobilize to beat back those
powers, even when press and public attention is turned elsewhere. We
must use this victory and the strength of the Mayor’s office to
build the power needed to reshape the city—into a city by and for
the working class.

Grace Mausser is co-chair of New York City DSA
[[link removed]], the largest chapter of DSA. She has worked
on dozens of democratic socialists’ campaigns in New York, building
robust canvassing operations, creating broad left coalitions, and
raising millions of dollars from grassroots donors.

_Convergence Magazine_ a magazine for radical insights – helping
people who animate movements for social, economic, & environmental
justice understand the balance of power and asking crucial strategic
questions about what we need to do _today_ to make the impossible
possible tomorrow.

* DSA
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* Zohran Mamdani
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* electoral strategy
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