How Zohran Mamdani's "Tremendous Force" is Remaking New York Politics
With NYC's mayoral election a week away, the upstart democratic socialist has built a movement that is already changing the status quo.
Yesterday, I went to Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, N.Y., to attend mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s final big campaign rally featuring Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I got there early, around 4:00 pm, so I would have plenty of time to talk with attendees and soak up the vibe of the event. It got dark around 6:30, about the same time that a series of opening speakers—youthful representatives from many local unions, a cluster of elected officials who are members of the Democratic Socialists of America, and NYC Comptroller Brad Lander—took the stage. (More on all these folks in a moment.)
By 8:00pm it was cold, and I was shivering from the autumn chill. The floor in front of the stage where I had been standing along with other “invited guests” was now packed with at least a thousand people, complementing the ten thousand or so ringed above and around us in the cozy stadium. It was a delightful mix of people mainly in their twenties and thirties of all races but with far more south Asians than you might typically see at a Democratic rally in NY. There were also a few grey-hairs like me and a healthy smidge of high-schoolers. I’m mildly claustrophobic in crowds, so I started to move to the back and was thinking about leaving, given the thin jacket I was wearing and my dying cell phone battery. I figured I could catch the keynote speeches live online from the warmth of my car before driving home.
But just as I was starting to walk to the exit gates leading out of the stadium, I bumped into Andrew Epstein, Mamdani’s communications director and one of the campaign’s key strategists. He had been quietly working the floor for most of the afternoon. We chatted about state politics for a bit, and I mentioned that we could use more of the grassroots energy on display here in the suburbs that ring the city, because the real powerbrokers in Albany—like my state senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins, who is the Senate Majority Leader—were often wary of doing anything bold that might tip those districts into Republican hands. He smiled and said that she’d soon be speaking at the rally. Along with the state’s Governor Kathy Hochul and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie.
My jaw dropped. The presence of the “Three Men in a Room” who hold nearly all the governing power in New York State (yes, now it’s two women and a man) at a rally filled with Mamdani, Sanders and AOC supporters? This was not to be missed.
Sure enough, a few minutes later, Sarah Sherman, the SNL comedian who was MCing the event, said, “Please give a warm welcome to our greatest allies in Albany, partners in delivering our affordability agenda.” As she read their names, I sensed a bit of shock go through the crowd, which had not been told in advance that these pillars of the state Democratic establishment were going to appear. But as Hochul, Heastie and Stewart-Cousins strolled onto stage to the opening sounds of Alicia Keys’ “This Girl is on Fire,” the chant “TAX THE RICH” quickly spread through the capacity crowd.
I’ve teed up the above video to the moment when this all starts, and if you watch closely you can see Stewart-Cousins, who is arguably the most progressive of the three, grinning widely and clapping along with the chant. (Heastie is much less progressive, and after you recall—gift link—how he emerged into power from the bowels of the Bronx political machine you’ll understand what he’s about.) Despite the crowd noise, Governor Hochul gamely plowed through her prepared remarks and won some over by reminding everyone of Trump’s many horrors. “I’m going to be working closely with Mayor Zoran Mandmami,” the governor from Buffalo declared, mangling his name multiple ways. The crowd corrected her, chanting “Mamdani, Mamdani.”
At one point, after declaring her support for more affordable housing and universal childcare—two of Mamdani’s key planks—Hochul made the mistake of saying, “So here’s what we’re going to do…” The crowd didn’t miss a beat: “TAX THE RICH!, TAX THE RICH!” thousands started shouting. The atmosphere was carnival. The crowd only quieted after Hochul gave up trying to steer against the wind and said, “All right. I can hear you.” Mercifully, she finished a minute later, and Mamdani bounded out to grab her hand. The crowd erupted at the sight of its champion claiming victory. And I felt the tectonic plates that determine who get what when in the oh-so-aptly named Empire State shift, tilting perceptively to the lesser-haves.
Who is Organizing What?
That was the highlight of the rally. But the whole thing was impressively well organized and staged, ending almost exactly on time at 9:00pm. And with all such political events, you can learn plenty from who got minor but highly visible speaking roles. First came people from the unions who have backed Mamdani from early on: the United Auto Workers (which represents many hospital workers), 1199 (also many health care and social workers), DC 37 (art workers), CIR/SEIU (interns and residents at city hospitals), PSC-CUNY (staff and faculty across the city college system), Starbucks Worker United, 32-BJ (tens of thousands of doormen and low-wage security officers), and the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council. (The latter two had originally endorsed former Governor Andrew Cuomo, but they switched their support after Mamdani won the June primary). New York City is still very much a union town, with nearly one in five workers in a union.
Then came a slate of DSA members who hold state or local office, all from NYC. They were led by State Senator Julia Salazar, who was the first of the group to run and win in 2018, later joined by Mamdani in 2020. It was of course significant that the Mamdani campaign gave DSA a big slot on stage, but also notable that each time this group of speakers urged the crowd to join them in becoming DSA member, only a fraction—perhaps one-eighth—of the audience cheered.
Then came happy warrior Brad Lander, the city comptroller who had also run for mayor but came in third in the June primary. The crowd loved him, even before he repeated his primary night declaration of “good fucking riddance” to Cuomo. Lander is doing a fantastic job of teaching people, by word and example, that “Politics is a team sport,” as he put it. He wore his Jewishness proudly, drawing on it to explain his moral compass, using it to explain his progressivism at home and his opposition to the “genocide” in Gaza abroad. Most important for NYC’s future, he reinforced the importance of Jewish-Muslim solidarity at a time of rising hate, whether it is antisemitism or Islamophobia. The last days of the mayoral election have been marred by many ugly statements and ads not-so-subtly attacking Mamdani because he is a Muslim (one of the million who live in NYC), and Lander was not the only speaker to call them out. But what impressed me, again, is how the whole political movement on display last night did not wallow in the negativity that can come when victims of discrimination emphasize their victimhood. Instead, many, Lander included, spoke of building “the city of our dreams,” a positive vision if you’ve ever heard one.
If you are an AOC or Bernie fan, they came next after a trio of religious figures. You can watch their speeches, which didn’t cut any new ground in my opinion—though I was at least glad that Sanders mentioned campaign finance (since New York City public funding matching system is a huge reason for Mamdani’s success, though no speaker at the rally bothered to note that.) If anything, as I watched the video montages that preceded AOC and Sanders, only one observation felt true: with Mamdani we are seeing the first major fruit of Bernie’s two presidential bids.
Bernie, we should all remember, is not interested in organizing a mass movement, just getting to be its figurehead. Despite promises last spring that his “Fighting Oligarchy” barnstorming tour, which has brought more than $18 million into his Senate campaign coffers, would be hiring many state organizers—which I duly reported at the time—my reading of his FEC filings for the first six months of the year show only four people being paid to organize in the states. It looks like he’s spent more on private jet rentals than local organizing. And AOC, whose congressional campaign does do some local organizing year-round in her district, also has just four people paid to do so. The millions that these two progressive icons raise mostly go to pay for big digital media and fundraising teams.
But Mamdani, so far, is different—and if he wins as expected, he will steward a megacity with a $120 billion a year budget. For me, two things stand out about Mamdani’s rise. First, that it is the product of many previous local electoral and organizing campaigns, many of them also led by DSA members and chapters—all of which was sparked by Bernie’s first presidential run in 2016. And second, that Mamdani thinks about power differently than most politicians. When he first ran for state assembly, he was forced by the outbreak of COVID to pivot from a traditional community organizing model to seat-of-the-pants improvisation (which he talks about here on a podcast with his childhood friend Daniel Kisslinger). One big thing he did was join up early with an Astoria-based mutual aid group, and for the first few months he built relationships with local voters by being directly involved in reaching out to thousands of people to help them get vital medicine and food. He is a fan of participatory budgeting and knows about alternative democracy models like citizen assemblies. So, while some may think he’s going to govern like some kind of neo-Stalinist manager of the means of production, I think he’s likely to be much more creative and experimental, an FDR for the current century.
When Mamdani finally came on stage, he reminded the crowd of how he had come from nowhere a year ago, barely registering at one percent in the early polls, only above a candidate he jokingly referred as “Someone Else.” And yet, he said, when former governor Cuomo called him at 10:15pm on primary night (early!) to concede, he said that Mamdani had “created a tremendous force.” I was astounded to learn from Andrew Epstein that on top of a backbone of just a couple dozen paid field staff, that force now has 90,000 volunteers helping to knock on doors and phone voters.
To put that achievement in context: in 2008, at the end of a long primary fight and general election, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign had two million volunteers organizing on its behalf. I remember well what that felt like—a muscle that had activated people everywhere and that was moving the country to break one of its oldest barriers. That two million represented about 2/3 of a percent of America’s population at the time. Ninety-thousand, by comparison, is just over one-percent of NYC’s population. Per-capita, Zohran Mamdani has more people actively volunteering for his election than Barack Obama did in 2008.
The big unanswered question of Zohran Mamdani’s quest to be a transformational mayor is what will happen to all those volunteers after November 4. Longtime readers of The Connector know this is one of my fixations, going all the way back to Rev. Jesse Jackson’s dismantling of the Rainbow Coalition after his 1988 presidential run and Obama’s smothering of Organizing for America after his 2008 win. I spoke to a number of people waiting to get into the stadium yesterday afternoon and not one said they had signed up because they were part of an existing group. Instead, the common thread was that they were inspired by Mamdani and had heard about the rally via social media. About one-third said it was their first Mamdani rally.
Inside the stadium’s outer gates, where people stood in line to buy food or go to the restroom, several organizations did have tables out seeking to sign attendees up (unlike all of Bernie Sanders’ Fighting Oligarchy rallies, to my knowledge). In addition to the Mamdani campaign itself, these included the Queens chapters of the Working Families Party and the DSA, AOC’s congressional campaign, the Riders Alliance (a grassroots public transit group), and oddly enough, AOC volunteers pushing her Green New Deal (which has no chance of consideration let alone passage anytime soon). Here and there I saw grouplets posing for photos together, like a “Jews for Mamdani” crew organized by JFREJ (Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, a close ally of Brad Lander). But other than the many DSA members I saw embracing each other, most of the other attendees were lonely boats in a vast sea, temporarily all rowing the same direction because of a brilliant campaign organization.
Breaking into the Halls of Power
Converting all of this into something ongoing that is rooted in local neighborhoods and ladders up to more will be just one of the Mamdani brain trust’s challenges after next Tuesday’s election. But that is a question for another time; now it is worth marveling at what is already on the verge of accomplishment. Former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, who for a time stood at the center of New York society, once told a young writer that the city’s status underground was made up of seven hypothetical rooms connected by secret doorways and that most aspirants, if they were lucky enough to make it to the first room, never made it further. Carter himself ran his restaurants and big Vanity Fair parties the same way, with concentric circles of access and power, the more refined and hidden the better. Finding the best bar or restaurant or hidden hangout in New York is indeed an obsession for some.
It could be said that Zohran Mamdani and his democratic socialist movement is now somewhere between the first, second, and third rooms of where power sits in New York and beyond, in the rest of America. Winning the Democratic primary only got him through the first door, as many national Democratic leaders and donors are still actively resisting his allure. But getting the Big Three Democrats of Albany to rally with him last night means he is now welcome in the first room. On the other hand, the glaring absence of New York Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand from the ranks of Mamdani endorsers, and the very late arrival of Representative Hakim Jeffries, means that Mamdani has yet to find the key to the second room—though Jeffries surely knows that had he continued to stay neutral, the odds of a strong primary challenge to his personal domain were going up. The bigger and more organized Mamdani’s base, the better his chances of conquering the second room. And then there will be the third, guarded by Wall Street and the real estate moguls who really call the shots in New York, and who will put Mamdani’s movement to the test.
Who knows, though. Because what is also coming assuming Mamdani wins is a big clash with Trump, who is paying inordinate attention to his former hometown and who could make life in the Big Apple quite complicated if he wants. Such a fight, which could be a tipping point in the current fight against rising authoritarianism, could also make Mamdani stronger. The only way we are going to defeat the populist right, which clearly has a hold on many Americans, is with a more compelling vision of a better America. And last night, in his closing words, Mamdani made that case. The speech was titled “We Will Not Bend.” It’s theme was who is allowed to be free, only the very rich or all of us.
“The truth is as simple as it is non-negotiable. We are all allowed freedom. Each one of us, the working people of this city, the taxi drivers, the line cooks, the nurses. All those seeking lives of grace, not greed, we all get to be free….No New Yorker should ever be priced out of anything they need to survive. And we believe then, we believe today, we will believe tomorrow that it is government’s job to deliver that dignity. Dignity, my friends, is another way of saying freedom.”
He then went on to salute the great accomplishments of FDR’s New Deal, and then closed with these words:
“Nearly eighty-nine years ago to the day, FDR spoke before a crowd of thousands at Madison Square Garden. He said, “I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.”
“My friends, I should like to have it said of our campaign that in it the forces of selfishness and lust for power met their match. And I should like to have it said of our city hall that in it these forces met their master. New York, our work has only just begun. On November 4th, we set ourselves free.”
Micah, it is extremely rare that when reading a political analysis these days, I smile let alone cheer. I think it's because optimism and hope are both on the same page in your piece.
"The millions that these two progressive icons raise mostly go to pay for big digital media and fundraising teams."
I'm reading the same complaint from Corbin Trent. It's hard to believe that these two progressive icons, who have contributed so much, are failing at this critical juncture.