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VOLUNTEERS WERE THE KEY TO NYC-DSA’S SOCIALIST SWEEP  
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Ashley Bishop
August 31, 2026
Jacobin
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_ Lost in conversations about New York socialists’ charisma or
social media prowess in recent electoral victories is something
simple: boots on the ground. New York City DSA mobilized thousands of
volunteers and is poised to do so again in the future. _

You can’t understand how the New York City Democratic Socialists of
America have become a major force in New York politics without
understanding their massive volunteer canvassing operations. ,
(Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)

 

Since the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) swept the New York
primaries in June, conservative and liberal media alike have tried to
make sense of DSA’s meteoric rise by tying them to ascendant New
York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his “kingmaking” abilities.
Beyond a cursory nod to the army of volunteers knocking doors and
making phone calls, far less has been made of the why behind the
volunteer effort that propelled these candidates to victory.

Across NYC-DSA’s slate of endorsed candidates, roughly 8,500
volunteers showed up to knock more than 750,000 doors, with over
810,000 attempted door knocks — for an off-year electoral cycle.
Many of these volunteers were part of Mamdani’s 100,000-strong
volunteer base, who, still electrified from last year’s win, rolled
right into volunteer work for the slate’s ten state-level campaigns.

“I canvassed for the slate in general because I was super excited to
capitalize on the momentum from last year with the Zohran primary and
general win. That’s how I got started in electoral work in the first
place,” said Caroline Hill, a field lead for Samantha Kattan.

But it wasn’t just Mamdani’s previous volunteers who showed up to
knock doors and make phone calls. New volunteers inspired by both
Mamdani’s successful campaign for mayor and this new slate of
candidates grew its ranks. By May, the largest source of new
volunteers came from those who were neither DSA members nor previous
Mamdani volunteers.

Jacobin spoke with some of the most prolific door-knockers and most
highly engaged volunteers from NYC-DSA’s slate of endorsed
candidates to find out why they continued to show up for their chosen
candidates and how they think we can keep the wins coming.

People Power

The two highest-profile races for NYC-DSA were for congressional
seats: Claire Valdez’s run for Nydia Velázquez’s vacated seat in
New York’s Seventh Congressional District (NY-7) and Darializa Avila
Chevalier’s run against incumbent Adriano Espaillat in the
Thirteenth District (NY-13).

In NY-7, Valdez brought out a whopping four thousand volunteers for
her race — nearly half the total number of volunteers that showed
up for the whole slate.

By May, the largest source of new volunteers in socialist campaigns
came from those who were neither DSA members nor previous Mamdani
volunteers.“Something we kept telling our canvassers, the
establishment wants everyone to believe that Zohran was a moment —
just a flash in the pan, viral social media, charismatic
personality — and not about the substance and the politics and the
policy,” said Christian Long, a field lead for Valdez. “This was
our statement to say, no, this is for real. This is a movement, and
we’re growing — and this is the next step.”

Across the river in NY-13, with one full-time field staffer, Avila
Chevalier’s campaign organized 3,500 volunteer shifts with over a
thousand canvassers, averaging three shifts each — roughly a
quarter of whom were not previously affiliated with DSA.

“There was a sense on this campaign that the volunteers were the
ones who were driving it, were the ones who are crafting the strategy,
who were ultimately responsible for its success,” said Andrew Basta,
a volunteer for Avila Chevalier’s congressional race. “I think I
took a lot of ownership as well as many, many other people on the
campaign to say that this has to be a success.”

During the campaign’s final four days of get out the vote (GOTV)
alone, volunteers knocked over 155,000 doors and made roughly 250,000
calls — a level of grassroots mobilization more typically
associated with statewide or presidential campaigns than a single
House primary. For perspective, during the last weekend of October
before the 2024 general election, Kamala Harris’s campaign reported
knocking one hundred thousand doors across the entire state of
Georgia.

“We relied heavily on what makes NYC-DSA campaigns so impactful: a
mass volunteer-led apparatus,” said Sebastian Leon Martinez, the
sole field staffer for Avila Chevalier’s campaign. “It was the
field program that benefited from trusting volunteer leaders with new
responsibilities.”

These volunteers weren’t only knocking doors and making calls. For
Avila Chevalier’s campaign, a dozen regular volunteers fulfilled
responsibilities typically doled out to staff like training field
leads who assigned turf to canvassers, handling peer fundraising,
reviewing campaign data, working on video production, serving as
points of contacts for other volunteers, and creating campaign
merchandise.

“That layer of leadership was the strongest I’ve seen in a
campaign beside Zohran’s and builds up the confidence to take
ownership of projects that lead to potential future staffers,” Leon
Martinez said.

For downballot races, these campaigns were drawing in hundreds to
thousands of volunteers — rivaling, and in some cases exceeding,
some of the best-known insurgent campaigns of the past decade.
Archival records suggest Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018
congressional campaign involved roughly 500 active volunteers, 103 of
whom were Queens DSA members.

Aber Kawas’s campaign for state senate alone mobilized more than
1,100 volunteers to knock over 104,000 doors. Christian Celeste
Tate’s campaign for state assembly drew in roughly 315 volunteers
who knocked nearly 45,000 doors in his district.

In the “Commie Corridor,” a moniker coined by political writer
Michael Lange to designate the zones of Queens and Brooklyn that came
out the strongest for Mamdani during the mayoral race, multiple
DSA-backed candidates were running in overlapping or adjacent
districts. Claire Valdez was running at the top of the ticket, while
Kawas, Samantha Kattan, David Orkin, and Tate were running downballot
races, alongside Diana Moreno’s campaign for reelection in
Mamdani’s old assembly seat.

Organizational emphasis on ushering in a socialist bloc up and down
the ballot — rather than electing individual candidates — helped
turn out volunteers to canvass for multiple candidates at once and
pool resources.

“Just the idea that we can elect an entire slate that is unified in
our goals to make our society work better for the masses — that was
an opportunity that I think we all knew we couldn’t let that slip
by,” said Sara Abiboutros, an attorney and field lead for the
“Sunny Slate” in Sunnyside, Queens.

That the candidates were running on nearly identical platforms made it
easier to say to perspective voters, “If you like Valdez, you’ll
like Kawas and Kattan, too.” The trust by association that came with
Valdez running at the top of the ticket — in the same way an
endorsement extends trust from current electeds to candidates —
proved an advantage at the doors.

“There was a lot of joint canvassing happening. And it just felt
like coming off of Zohran’s win, it was the perfect opportunity to
carry that momentum, and this would be the next step, the next phase
of the movement,” Abiboutros said.

Part-Time Door-Knockers

When it came to knocking doors, some of these volunteers spent more
time on their turf than the candidates themselves. Bao, a volunteer
for Illapa Sairitupac’s campaign for state assembly and resident of
an adjacent district, knocked roughly 1,450 doors — surpassing
Sairitupac himself. Despite coming out two to three times a week for
six months to canvass, Bao, who asked to be referred to by his first
name only, said this came as a surprise: “I always assumed that I
was one of the least active volunteers.”

Jon Williams, a volunteer for Christian Celeste Tate’s campaign
knocked over 1,500 doors, behind only Tate himself. Working from home,
Williams saw the additional benefit to canvassing as an excuse to get
his daily steps in. “I think I need new shoes, though,” he added.
“I’ve totally burned through them.”

For field leads, the commitment extended beyond knocking doors and
making calls. “It’s not just the time that goes into the canvass
itself, but prepping for the canvass,” said Abiboutros.

Hill, a twenty-five-year-old stationery printer, commuted an hour and
fifteen minutes each way from her home in Sunset Park to Ridgewood,
where she worked her field lead shifts for Kattan. She spent her
commute reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

“It just became easier for me to stay in Queens and pick up a double
shift instead of going back home at, I don’t know, four in the
afternoon and not getting home until nearly dinner time.” She said
“the best day of her life” was when she got to a volunteer shift
in less than an hour.

Many of these volunteers reported time commitments closer to a
part-time job than volunteer work, with some saying they worked twenty
hours a week or more.

Basta reported spending between twenty and thirty hours each week on
Avila Chevalier’s campaign. “It was a big commitment. I think it
was probably the hardest I’ve ever worked on a campaign,” he said.

[Hasan Piker at a canvass for Claire Valdez.]

Hasan Piker at a canvass for Claire Valdez. (Claire Valdez for
Congress / X)

Christian Long, a field lead for Valdez, said his initial commitment
of one shift every other week quickly became two to four shifts per
week.

“If you told me two years ago, ‘You’re volunteering twenty hours
a week,’ I would say, ‘You’re crazy, that’s so much time.’
But it doesn’t feel like work.” said Long. “You don’t want to
miss that rally where 200 people came out because Zohran was there or
the rally where everyone got a bandana — that’s a signifier that
you were there.” As the campaign went on, Long said that feeling of
not wanting to miss out on the defining moments of each campaign only
increased.

What Brought the Volunteers Out

While the number of doors knocked and volunteer hours worked explains
how DSA swept the primaries, it does not explain why working people
were willing to give so much of their time to seeing their candidates
across the finish line.

“It just felt like a generational opportunity to have a seat like
this open up,” said Long, in reference to Valdez’s race to fill
long-time congressional Representative Nydia Velázquez’s seat.

NY-7 is one of the most left-leaning districts in the country, and
Mamdani carried it with 67 percent of the vote, his strongest
performance in any district. “It just felt like such an urgent
opportunity to put a socialist in this seat versus just a regular
Democrat.”

Hill attended Kattan’s campaign launch in February and says she was
struck by the level of excitement she was generating so early in an
off-year election. “I centered all my focus on Ridgewood, because
even though I was pretty certain that she was going to win in that
district, one thing that people were talking about with the slate,
especially with ‘safe races’ like hers, is that we’re not taking
the voters for granted. That’s one of the ‘DSA difference’
things.”

Beyond ideological commitment to building a bloc of socialist
legislators, the affordability crisis proved highly motivating for
volunteers.

“If we’re focusing on just Samantha,” said Abiboutros, “she
was a tenant’s rights organizer for over ten years. And I feel like
that’s something that’s lacking in a perspective in the state
legislature. We have such an affordability crisis right now, and she
can really speak to that.” Adding, “We just got a rent freeze, but
it’s because of people like Samantha who have been organizing for
that for so long.”

Miriam Bensman, sixty-eight, a veteran of the electoral movement and
the most prolific door-knocker on David Orkin’s campaign, also
expressed economic precarity as motivation for volunteering her time.
Though concern over the cost of living was focused more on her adult
children.

“My kids feel like they can barely afford to live in New York,”
said Bensman, whose daughter lives in East Harlem. “She got a tiny
little room in a two-bedroom that was turned into a three-bedroom for
close to $1,000 a month, and that takes a lot out of her,” she said.
“I want them to — my kids and everybody’s kids — to be able
to have decent wages and a nice, dignified job, and home. . . .  I
feel like we’re leaving them a terrible world, and this was not what
we wanted to do.”

According to volunteers, economic insecurity emerged as a top concern
for voters at the doors too. “What I heard repeatedly was affordable
housing. I think people are realizing that yeah, rent is just too
high. And unfortunately, when you’re a renter, you’re either
beholden to infinite rent hikes in the future or you eventually get
priced out. Because the costs always go up, but your income
doesn’t,” said Bao.

Taxing the rich proved another policy with popular support at the
doors. “People are sick and tired of all these tax cuts that
they’ve been getting,” said Bao. “They’re sick and tired that
the wealthy keep getting richer, while everyone else’s quality of
life has gone down.”

Sean Hansen, a founding member of the affinity group Labor for Claire,
shared similar experiences with voters. “People are struggling to
make ends meet, and they want fighters in the halls of power to make
their lives easier.”

Labor for Claire was established shortly after Valdez announced her
campaign as a way to foster and organize labor support. “You could
see her at almost every picket line in New York City,” said Sean
Hansen, who first met Valdez at an event for federal workers.
“Claire showing up constantly — I mean, you heard it with
‘Claire was there, Claire was there, Claire was there’ — it’s
not just a slogan, it’s a reality, and it pays off.”

Valdez and Kattan aren’t the only candidates who had “organizer”
featured prominently on their resumes. All of DSA’s candidates have
come from diverse organizing backgrounds. For volunteers, these
organizing bona fides were essential experience for a candidate.

“They’re all organizers at heart. That’s what they were doing
previously, and that’s going to be their perspective when they
govern,” said Abiboutros. “They actually made connections with
people, and because people trust them, people were able to look at
their message, speak to them one-on-one, and say I actually believe
that Samantha believes in A, B, C. I believe that Aber cares about
this. I believe that Claire is truthful when she says she wants to
revive the labor movement.”

At the Doors: Palestine, ICE, and Trump 2.0

If organizing experience was critical for volunteers’ support, those
issues candidates organized around proved equally determinative.
Support for Palestine was more than a bonus check in the green column
but instead another absolute prerequisite for support.

“I still think Palestine is the litmus test, whether one believes in
a collective project of humanity, and I think she passes with flying
colors,” said Basta, who cites Palestine as the issue that
radicalized him over a decade ago. “Seeing someone who for her whole
life has been kind of shaped by that issue, has really been a leader
on the campuses — both as a student and as an alumna — just
threw open the possibility of what she can do in Congress.”

At the doors, volunteers say the shift in public sentiment on
Palestine — and antiwar messaging more broadly — was clearer
than ever. “When you say money should be going to working families
here in NY-7 and other districts where people were canvassing, not
destroying working families abroad, that argument resonated far beyond
what I thought, and where I thought, it would work,” said Hansen.
“It’s a unifying issue that I did not expect to be quite as
unifying, but it definitely gave me a lot of hope for the future.”

Alex Nappier, a volunteer for Kawas, saw a similar shift in voters.
During the last six weeks of the campaign, they say, voters
increasingly saw DSA campaigns as opportunities to send a message to
Albany that working people want their tax dollars funding programs in
their communities — not sent “overseas to genocide.”

Fighting to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was also
viewed by volunteers as a winning issue, particularly in a city where
immigrants make up roughly 40 percent of the population.

[Darializa Avila Chevalier and Conrad Blackburn canvassing with
supporters.]

Darializa Avila Chevalier and Conrad Blackburn canvassing with
supporters. (Darializa for Congress / X)

“We have the army in the street, hunting down people just because
they were born in a different country or appear to have been born in a
different country. And Claire’s district has to be one of the most
diverse in the country — people who were born in every country
imaginable, people whose parents were born in every country you can
think of,” said Hansen. “People are in a very activist, agitating
mood, and Claire really met the moment.”

“I think a lot of people — like me, as an immigrant — we kind
of see America, at least [we did] in the past, as this bastion of a
place where you can come and make something better of yourself or
become an American. With the recent administration, it’s very
difficult for a lot of immigrants to see that weaponized against
them,” said Bao. “I really want us to be back in a place where
we’re really proud of this aspect of our culture, and I really want
someone in the state assembly to fight for us there.”

One of the hallmarks of the Trump 2.0 era is the growing disaffection
by voters with both establishment parties, as is a desire to be
brought back into the political process.

Nappier recalled several conversations with voters who described
feeling disenfranchised by parties they felt no longer represented
their interests. They described canvassing one “friendly” voter
who explained he had become so disillusioned with the Democratic Party
he had lost faith in the system altogether.

If people knew organizers were having the same conversations with
their neighbors, sometimes just one door over, says Nappier, we might
all have “a very, very different perspective on what the state of
this country and the state of this world is than you would see on
social media.”

Working a Queens poll site on Election Day, Nappier similarly recalled
being at the end of a long line of volunteers from different campaigns
passing out flyers. They watched one man, holding his child, turn down
the line of flyers, telling volunteers he voted early and was just
walking in this direction. “When he walked up to me, with the big
picture of Aber and Zohran signs, he goes, ‘Hey, I just lied to all
of them. I haven’t done my research. Who am I voting for in
this?’”

“The voters can tell when you’re talking to them and when you’re
BSing them, or when you actually believe in what you’re saying. And
I think we just have that, like, magic sauce with our candidates that
they truly believe in these things,” said Abiboutros.

Authenticity, coupled with canvassers and staffers’ high-level
understanding of the candidates’ policies, she says, helps to build
trust among voters. Abiboutros believes that if socialists want to do
more than merely win but govern effectively, that necessitates gaining
the trust of working people — and making them feel like they have a
stake in the movement. “And that’s the goal, right? To get more
people involved.”

“What Else Are You Going to Do on a Sunday Morning?”

When so much of our social lives and communities have moved online,
volunteers expressed difficulty in making connections and building
community in real life. One of the most overlooked rewards of giving
their time to these campaigns, said several of the volunteers, were
the connections they made with other volunteers.

“Everything has been kind of commodified. So, all your interests
cost money. Having a personality costs money, right?” said Bao, a
software engineer in his early thirties. “One of the beautiful
things about being a part of a political movement is that you have a
shared sense of values with a lot of the people that you meet.”

Bao says that he’s become good friends with many of the people he
volunteered on Sairitupac’s campaign with. “Honestly, what else
are you going to do on a Sunday morning?”

Long had a similar experience volunteering for Valdez. “A lot of
these people, a lot of the field leads in the canvasses, were people I
was meeting for the first time, and a lot of us are friends now. There
are bonds that are formed, and we kind of became a crew through it
all.”

“As someone who’s kind of introverted, the idea of canvassing was
so mortifying, and I’ve come around to being a huge field
evangelist,” said Long, who graduated from casual Mamdani canvasser
to field lead for Valdez’s race. Long added that Valdez, like many
volunteers who move up the ranks, was a reluctant candidate, that
“the movement called her.” Pulling people into the community while
encouraging them to learn new skills and achieve those things they
never thought were within reach, Long says, is one of the main tenants
of organizing.

“Everyone’s got a role to play; everyone’s got their own
strengths when it comes to making change. Not everyone can be the face
of a movement or have the charisma to be a politician or a head of
state.” said Bao. “I think part of this process is that you learn
more about how you can contribute your strengths to help make
change.”

Maintaining Electoral Momentum

While the general elections still loom ahead, one of the biggest
questions for the movement as we look beyond the gains of the last two
years, is how to maintain the momentum from our electoral successes
and grow the movement that made these wins possible.

“People keep asking, what are you going to do now that the
campaign’s over? You’re free,” said Long. “I’m like, no —
there are dozens of projects that DSA is working on that I want to be
involved in.”

Long, a member of the NYC-DSA antiwar working group, finds the lessons
of the Obama years instructive. “[Barack] Obama won, and everyone
was so excited, and everyone went back to brunch. . . .  And then
eight years later, we got [Donald] Trump. With Zohran’s win, and
with these wins, the answer is you keep organizing.”

Hansen shared a similar sentiment. “Politics doesn’t stop at the
ballot box. Politics is everywhere. Each industry, each local, each
shop floor — it’s an opportunity to get involved politically.”
He hopes to see the energy from these primary wins carry over into
fighting for the expansion of labor rights from the shop floor to the
halls of power in Congress. “I would encourage people to get
involved in their unions, get involved in local community groups —
whether that’s DSA, whether that’s something else, and really work
on building power where power needs to be built.”

Moving forward for Abiboutros means building a mass movement to
support our legislative goals. “Whenever these candidates are trying
to push a bill through Albany or they’re rallying around a certain
issue, we have to support them and back them up, so that it gives them
cover as legislators to say, ‘My constituents want this, and I’m
going to go to bat for them,’” said Abiboutros. “We really
can’t do that without a mass movement. I think that’s what the
mayoral victory showed us, and I think that we’re going to continue
that.”

And Hill issued a reminder. “It is really true that last year’s
field leads are this year’s candidates, are next year’s
electeds,” she said in reference to recently surfaced photos of
Avila Chevalier working as a field lead for Mamdani last year.

“There are people we worked with who one day might be running for
office, and so everybody, no matter what they’re doing, should
always be keeping an eye out for the people that they work with to
organize because when we work together, we win, and when we win, we
can have more power to actually make New York a place that we can live
in and enjoy and love.”

_Ashley Bishop is a New York–based journalist covering labor,
climate, and working-class politics._

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