Will Mamdani's Movement Avoid "the Obama Trap"?

A deep dive conversation with Marshall Ganz, veteran organizer, trainer and strategist, on what he's learned from past experience down this road and what he's telling the Mamdani team now.

I’ve now seen multiple suggestions from a variety of pundits all saying that what Zohran Mamdani just did has no national implications. That New York City is just a very liberal town and a democratic socialist to winning there is an outlier event, of little relevance to politics in normie America. Ross Douthat, one of the New York Times’ rightleaning correspondents was out of the gate quickly, arguing that “Mamdani’s Victory is Less Significant Than You Think” because his left-wing politics won’t be popular in swing states.

But while Mamdani’s message on affordability and solidarity mattered a lot to New Yorkers, commentators like Douthat are missing the other dimension of Mamdani’s win: how he ran—as a people-powered, not money-powered, candidate. That model is very different from how Democrats everywhere – with some notable exceptions – have built their path to victory. And it is eminently replicable everywhere, not just in left-liberal cities like New York.

This is why, I think, many of us are wondering about what will happen next not just with the Mamdani administration, which is slowly taking shape as his transition team sets to work, but with the 100,000+ volunteers who knocked on more than 3 million doors in neighborhoods across the city and simply out-organized the Democratic establishment on his behalf. (Harley Augustino of Base Building for Power has posted a lively short video about his experiences doorknocking for Mamdani showing what their training was like and how they emphasized creating community among volunteers.)

Mamdani volunteer appreciation party, November 15, 2025

Two days after the election, a partial answer came with the launch of OurTime.NYC, a new organization that describes itself as “building on the grassroots momentum” of his campaign aimed at delivering on “the promise of a more affordable New York City. The group says it will be “doorknocking, phone-banking, communicating at the neighborhood, city and state level” in tandem with other local orgs, movement groups and unions. According to the New York Times’ Nicholas Fandos, it plans to buy the Mamdani campaign’s volunteer database—something the campaign is under no obligation to make widely available.

But details on OurTime’s operations are slim, other than the fact that it is structured as a 501c4 nonprofit—which means it can take unlimited but non-tax-deductible donations to support its work and it doesn’t have to disclose its donors. Just six people are listed as founding staff/board members. All of them are active members of Democratic Socialists of America-NYC and mostly from its “Socialist Majority Caucus”—a large faction within the organization that developed its increasingly successful approach to local electoral campaigns over the last few years. (I emailed OurTime’s press contact for more info but as of today had not gotten a response.)

A Field Campaign That Built a Movement

On the same Thursday that OurTime.NYC launched, DSA-NYC held a mass Zoom attended by about 1,000 supporters to celebrate Mamdani’s victory and to talk about what comes next. I tuned in for the first half hour. Tascha Van Auken, a DSA member since 2017 and the mastermind of Mamdani’s massive field campaign, had the most interesting things to say from my point of view.

First, she described where she had first gotten involved in electoral politics: the 2008 Barack Obama campaign. As she noted, it “had a really incredible field campaign, and it really shaped a lot of the ways that I think about field.”

Second, she shared that since her own experience of becoming political active started in an electoral fight, “I’ve always seen electoral politics as an on-ramp for people into a longer road of being political.” For that reason, she said, “the experience that people have when they join a campaign has always felt really, really important to me.”

Third, she reiterated how important it was for the Mamdani campaign to make leadership development central to the effort. “We invested very early on in volunteer leadership development.” That’s because, she argued, “there is no path to victory through field, on a campaign of this size, without a massive, massive volunteer operation. And you don’t have a volunteer operation that can onboard tens of thousands of people without lots and lots of people who step into leadership and are trained to lead campaigns and run campaigns and welcome all of these people into the movement.”

She contrasted this with the way most Democrats typically campaign for office. “If you join a typical, conventional campaign out there in the world, you might hear, ‘Ah, you don’t need to canvass early. You don’t need to talk to voters early. It doesn’t matter as much.” By contrast, because they knew they needed to build a people-centric effort, the Mamdani campaign started the process of training volunteers early. She added that the “core piece of any campaign that is going to scale and be big and have a mass action component is leadership replication. [That means] going into it figuring out how you can replicate yourself as fast as possible.”

She ended her comments with this revealing note.

“I want to talk about one other thing that I think is really, really important for this campaign and for our whole movement. I don’t know if any of you have experienced campaigns in the past that had some energy and may have felt like a bit of a flash in the pan. There’s all this energy, there’s all this excitement, and then it goes away, because people don’t know what’s next. That’s something that I experienced early on in politics, when I first started getting involved, and the sort of experiencing the shift from something with so much energy to them, like not having a place to go, was something that is like, it’s a pretty upsetting experience. And the thing that I want to say about this campaign is that we know that this is not a flash in the pan.”

What could she have been referring to, other than her Obama 2008 experience? Which as longtime Connector readers know was shared by far too many people.

Finally, and most interesting to me, she told the thousand or so people listening that this is where DSA-NYC mattered most. She said that she was “just so thankful of the continuity of an organization where you have enough structure and enough belief in all the people that you’re working with, to withstand the really hard moments so that you can get to the really high moments, because you learn from all of it. And I think that having a long-term organization, is really, really a huge and crucial piece to the success of this campaign and to what comes next.”

That in a nutshell, is the promise and peril ahead for Mamdani’s movement. Much of its organizational backbone is rooted in DSA-NYC, which has a genuine membership base and a thick calendar of events involving everything from local chapter meetings, political talks, running clubs, a singing club, coffees and cocktail nights. But most of the 100,000+ people who volunteered for the campaign are not members of the group, which is about one-ninth that size. Nor are many, if any of them, much interested in participating in DSA’s intellectual hothouse culture, which is highly factionalized.

Can Mamdani Avoid “The Obama Trap?”

So while Mamdani, top campaign staff and many DSA-NYC organizers appear committed to keeping his massive movement going to support his governing agenda, how to do that remains a giant open question. To get some more clarity about all of this, I called Marshall Ganz, one of the most experienced organizers in America and someone with deep experience at the intersection of movements and political campaigns. He learned the craft as a deputy to Cesar Chavez as they built the United Farm Workers union over the course of 16 years, and then brought his knowledge into the arena of electoral politics on behalf of a variety of Democratic candidates including Nancy Pelosi, Alan Cranston, and Tom Bradley in California and then Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign and Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. With Obama’s campaign, Ganz built an internal organizing program called “Camp Obama” that trained more than 23,000 volunteers in the art of community organizing. Not surprisingly, he’s been advising the Mamdani campaign since this summer. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.

---

Micah Sifry: I actually found a YouTube video from 16 years ago of a conversation that you and I had in your office. It was just a few weeks after Obama had won the 2008 election and we were talking about what would happen to his grassroots movement. I’m not sure if the complete smothering or dismantling…

Marshall Ganz: Or abandonment…

Micah Sifry: …if it was completely apparent yet, but we were absolutely engaged in that conversation. And here we are again. I’m just as intrigued by the Mamdani movement as we were back then when it was the Obama movement. I didn’t know until recently that you were involved with Mamdani, though, of course, it makes sense. Then someone sent me the piece in the Harvard Crimson about your involvement where it says that in addition to helping train some of the staff, that you were also involved in discussions with them about how do you keep a grassroots movement going once you’re in office. You used the phrase, “how to avoid the Obama trap”—which is that once you’ve built a really great organizing vehicle you just dissipate it. So can you can share anything more about that engagement? Did you give them some ideas on how they can avoid that problem?

Marshall Ganz: Well, this has been a live discussion there for some time, because they’re very aware of what happened before. We had a couple of sessions, and one in particular that I’m thinking of, with Zohran, about this question. They were already actively engaged trying to figure it out. So now, does everybody go into government? Okay, well if not, if there was a real party, they could go in the Democratic Party, right? And then you’d have an organized entity, which is how European or Canadian parties work, where you have an organized constituency, and you have elected leaders, but we don’t have that.

So, then it puts a much greater burden on civil society kinds of entities. So, then the conversation was on how to how to do that, how to set something like that up, that would be in ‘relationship with,’ but not a ‘tool of.’ That’s sort of the challenge, because with Obama, we were stuck in ‘tool of’ because of the way it was built. It was built within the Obama campaign setting, but also there was no commitment, no interest in sustaining it beyond the election. That was became painfully obvious very quick.

Micah Sifry: As I ultimately found out later, when I got my hands on the internal emails, there was an effort to keep it going, which people like Mitch Kapor tried to move forward. The party regulars killed it. They said, in effect, ‘We’re not going to let you plan for anything like Movement 2.0 because it would conflict with the DNC’. And then they gave the reins to both Rahm Emanuel, who is totally an insider kind of politician, and David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager who was, in theory, supposed to keep the thing going. We can see where that all went. But it’s great that the Mamdani people are cognizant of past history.

….Back when we talked about this in late 2008, you said it didn’t make sense to expect that Obama would keep his movement going, because if the movement is going to actually be a real thing, it’s got to be independent of the politician. It can’t be if it’s just his vehicle. And we’ve seen this too with Bernie Sanders and Our Revolution. Bernie is not building anything other than the Bernie vehicle.

Marshall Ganz: You know who was better? Howard Dean.

Micah Sifry: Yes, after he lost, he did build Democracy for America, though I’m not so sure they did that much in terms of sustaining and supporting local leaders and local chapter development. It’s incredibly hard to sustain anything across this gigantic country of ours. What makes Mamdani so much more interesting to me is New York City is a really compact place. And over the course of this campaign, they built all these little local nodes of regular activity. People were showing up in a field team leader’s living room week after week, as the staging site to go out to canvass and then to come back and talk with each other, and build connection and build community. These are things that 99% of your traditional Democrats, whatever their politics, when they run for office, they’re not interested in any of that. That’s a waste of people’s time, as far as they’re concerned.

Marshall Ganz: Well, it’s also a waste of money.

Micah Sifry: They’re completely about how many doors did we knock today. Not how many relationships did we build today.

Marshall Ganz: Those paid canvas operations--what they’re doing is trying to ID voters. In other words, they’re not efforts to learn.

Micah Sifry: So, as you’re in discussing this with the Mamdani folks. What is your advice to them in a nutshell?

Marshall Ganz: That it would be beneficial for there to be an organization committed to the values and goals of the campaign that could operate not as his tool, but in dialogue with him. We would go back to Franklin Roosevelt, and that famous phrase he supposedly said to labor, “make me do it.” When we were negotiating the farm labor law in California, that was exactly the game we were playing with [Governor] Jerry Brown.

I’m really interested to learn more about what’s possible, but clearly [in setting up OurTime.nyc] they made a choice to undertake this. It was clear DSA wasn’t going to be able to absorb all these people and there were other groups involved and so forth. And you know, if it was just an extension of the mayor’s office, well, then that was going to be that. So I think it’s a really significant effort.

We don’t have real parties. We have marketplaces and candidates that compete for the brand. But in terms of something like--I’m a member of this and I go to this thing and I have a vote on who the candidate is going to be, or I also go to this thing and I vote on who the leader of the party is going to be—that’s a real political mechanism. We don’t have that.

Micah Sifry: New York City is a little bit different in a number of ways. In some parts of the city, you have genuine political clubs, some with a more of a reform bent, some that are more part of the establishment. There also are county level machines in that are stronger in Queens or in the Bronx, built on old-fashioned patronage tied into the county courthouses. All of that is still part of the lifeblood of a decent chunk of local politics in New York City. And then there’s this whole other layer of independent civic and political groups. In many ways, parts of New York City are real hothouses, in that you can probably find every flavor of leftism that has a section in the Dewey Decimal System. They probably have a corresponding group that you can join if you want.

We should talk a little bit more about how you see DSA-NYC in this whole picture. My impression is that, of course, it makes sense for them to try and absorb as many of these newly activated Mamdani volunteers as they can. But last I checked, they had about 12,000 members in New York City and he had more than 100,000 volunteers. I went to his big rally in Forest Hills at the stadium the week before the election and spent some time talking to random people as we were waiting on line and going in. I did see some people wearing DSA T-shirts, but the majority of people I spoke to had brought themselves to the event on their own, and what got them there was social media, not belonging to a group,

Marshall Ganz: There’s the middle ground, though. Social media is being part of a relational network. A genuine relational organization or network can use social media, but it doesn’t work the other way around. Some of the pundits are so obsessed with the “means” of communication, especially the digital, that they ignore what is actually being communicated - a candidate who actually listens to what he hears, and responds. That was how Mamdani’s whole volunteer effort was built--in other words, the meetings, the getting together, was creating the texture or the fabric from which the movement grew. Relational stuff was so much more important in that campaign.

Micah Sifry: That’s absolutely why they were able to scale up to 100,000 volunteers. But here’s a difference compared to 2008 with Obama. There was a transparent and accessible structure to the Obama movement, because they had built something that anybody could join, called Organizing for America. It had an online platform (MyBarackObama.com or MyBO for short) that people signed on to, where they could then independently do all kinds of things, including set up a fundraiser, host a house party, or affiliate with each other.

At one point, there were 20,000 people on MyBO who were upset at Obama’s position on state surveillance. [Oh look, the Internet Archive saved the page!] He had flipped his position on something called FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Inadvertently, by channeling everyone into this online platform, the campaign had given people the ability to, in effect, organize inside the campaign across the whole country to demand that Obama explain why he had flipped on this (which he eventually had a group of his top advisers to do). As far as I can tell, the only thing similar here with Mamdani would be these WhatsApp groups that the field team involved people in [DSA itself has a members-only online discussion forum]. Those 700 field team leads who did so much to scale the volunteer movement don’t sit in a Congress with each other where they can talk to each other about what they’d like to see happen now, right?

Marshall Ganz: That’s true.

Micah Sifry To me, that’s a missing piece.

Marshall Ganz: With Obama I think the uniqueness was that you became part of the group, you became part of a team. And there was real training, and you actually did stuff. And it mattered. In other words, it was built right into the campaign. It wasn’t a sideshow. Not everywhere, but places where it was a kind of experience of not just of ‘I was active,’ but ‘I was working with these other people and we’re making this stuff happen.’

So there was the groundwork there for something real, but they didn’t want something real. And I think of it as the difference between campaigning and trying to maximize support and governing by minimizing opposition. There was a strategic shift that was quite evident. And so then you bring Larry Summers, and you set up the tables they had in DC with [Obama’s top White House staffers] Rahm Emanuel and Jim Messina going around and saying, ‘Don’t do this. We’re in charge. If you challenge us, you’ll lose access.”

Right now with Mamdani there’s all this potential, and the fact that the 700 team leaders and so forth, they actually were trying to do leadership development. There were actually people recruiting other people. And it was in a structured way. It wasn’t just like, you know me, and it wasn’t just, gee, we’re turning out a lot of people. There was a relational infrastructure that they were building, and that makes all the difference in the world, because then you’re part of something that won.

It seems to me that so much of the problem with so many groups is that they’re so invested in their own distinctiveness, which also has a great deal to do with funding, and their leadership has to maintain that, so you wind up with a lot of fragmentation. And in coalitions everyone’s own organization comes first.

Micah Sifry: So let’s talk a little bit more about the opportunity with Mamdani’s movement. I’m glad you’re continuing to advise and consult with them. I took a look at OurTime.nyc. There’s very little detail but from what I understand, first of all, they come right out and say, we are going to be a 501c4. They have six people on their website. Two are listed as advisors. Jeremy Freeman is the executive director, and then they have two people who are listed as board members, both of whom are easy to look up. All are very active DSA members and organizers.

So, from the start, this is a DSA-run organization, because boards are in charge of governance. That’s all we know about how OurTime will make decisions. It’s a c4 which means it can take unlimited amounts of money and not have to disclose who is supporting it. We’ve talked about this before. You’re very critical of the role of money in politics in how it distorts the all the work of organizing. And this seems to me like a, at least a blinking yellow light. Why is it a c4, and why isn’t there any sort of visible accountability structure to this? Supposedly they are buying or renting the Mamdani volunteer list, and the campaign, the Mamdani campaign, doesn’t have to let anybody get that list, so choosing to let them get the list is a clear choice.

Marshall Ganz: I am curious exactly about all of this, Micah, exactly because the dearth of self-governing organizations, We’ve been doing a project with the Girl Scouts for the last year. They have 1.9 million members, and they’re supported by member dues. They elect their leadership. It’s a democratically governed organization. There was some group within it that was trying to turn them into an NGO, and the leadership didn’t want that. They reached out to us, and that’s why we’ve been involved. It’s committed to the development of young women and girls for public leadership. They figured out that if they were going to run like a firm, that that was not how to do it.

Micah Sifry: Plus the experience of being member-owned and driven—that’s leadership development in the first place, right?

Marshall Ganz: Yes, and that’s why it’s really been interesting. I’m really impressed with a lot of their people. It’s kind of a white bread volunteer organization. So many people say, ‘Oh, I was a Girl Scout.’ So yes, I hear exactly what you’re saying about OurTime and I have exactly the same questions.

Micah Sifry: This is a work in progress and it’s quite possible it will evolve. I do remember vividly, in the months after Obama won, that there were some efforts, not enough, but there were some efforts coming up from a lot of the trained volunteer field people to ask for more than you’re going to give me a T-shirt and a mug. But the Obama charisma and also the opportunity to go work for him in Washington meant that many of the best people did not want to stick around to try to fight that fight. Plenty of people were more interested in in jobs and contracts, and maybe they also saw the writing on the wall.

It’s far from clear to me yet what this means, but I look at DSA with somewhat of a gimlet eye and wonder, because they are a very doctrinaire bunch. Ideologically, we’re talking about people who have ‘done the reading,’ and the language they use when they talk to each other internally is very much about building some kind of socialist cadre. I’m not saying there’s anything inherently wrong with socialism, but if this is democratic socialism, I don’t see where the democratic part is. It’s more like the tyranny of the people who can stay at the meeting longest.

Marshall Ganz: It is interesting, though, that the New York chapter embraced electoral politics early on, which requires a level of pragmatism and a level of pluralism that is not like, say, the Trotskyists. I was surprised when I started having meetings with them in New York, how open it was. I went through the whole period of the sects and all that stuff. It’s horrible. This didn’t feel like that.

We did a project a couple of years ago with Sunrise, ISAIAH and DSA, trying to look at the question of structure. Top people came. And yes, DSA is self-governing, which is different from the other organizations and most any community organization. Most are not self-governing now, they’re just donor dependent, right? But their problem was that they were fragmented and decentralized. And they had the affliction of ideology, ideological caucuses. And that’s what was getting in the way.

They went through that period where their membership just went through the roof after Bernie Sanders’ first presidential run, and the age of their membership dropped, but there was no capacity for coherence at a national level, or some cases even a regional level, because it was all so radically decentralized and then burdened with all these ideological caucuses.

Micah Sifry: So given all this history and all these challenges, why do you keep coming back for more? I think we both sense that the Mamdani movement has a lot of potential and that Mamdani himself, at least in the in the prose he’s using, is clearly historically grounded in other movements and an understanding the value of giving people a vision centered in values.

Marshall Ganz: You know his father was in Mississippi the same time I was. In 1964, in the Freedom Summer. We just realized this while we were talking, which is kind of wild. I didn’t know him then.

Micah Sifry: I did not know that. But, yes, but if you’re someone growing up in a household where that’s one of the things your father did, you’re already a very rare bird. So I do think Mamdani himself thinks that being politically engaged is a lifetime commitment and not something you just drop in and out of, you know, when the mood strikes you, or as something you do just to win an election.

Marshall Ganz: Yes, and the other thing is that he has transcended labeling. In other words, here’s a guy that has three labels that would knock anybody out: immigrant, Muslim and socialist. They tried to nail him for that, but his response was not to be defensive, not to apologize, to stand there and reveal himself to be a human and not just a label. And if you heard his talk to the Muslim community, this was on a few days before the election. He owns and has real depth of commitment to his faith and in a non-apologetic way, sure, but in a way that invites universal connection. That is really something.

Micah Sifry: The best version of Islam is that it’s a welcoming religion, not whatever the caricatures are. But I also think that he also evoked something that’s quite strong among New Yorkers, which Andrew Yang was doing four years ago when he had his moment running for NYC mayor and leading the field. He was running around New York City with this kind of ebullient personality. And it’s partly because he’s just optimistic about the future, and he’s a tech guy. And he had a big simple idea, which was universal basic income. Tell me that there’s not something socialist about that.

But Yang’s campaign was also tapping into this idea that New Yorkers have of themselves, which is where there’s a lot of pride in the cosmopolitan nature of the city, and that part of what you get when you become a New Yorker is you get all of that. You get to participate in that, and that it shouldn’t just be something that only millionaires and billionaires get to enjoy – a very powerful message. I think that the other thing that Mamdani conveyed is the idea that there’s a joy to being a New Yorker that he’s trying to make available to everybody. And that was infectious. It’s hard for some people to see it. You know, there’s other people invested in a different narrative about him…

Marshall Ganz: Well, the scavenger hunt and all that playful stuff… I hear what you’re saying. As a Californian, I’m not as plugged into New York, but it makes perfect sense.

Micah Sifry: Well, he now has to figure out how to govern and also how to keep co-opting his would-be opponents. And in all of that, the role of this grassroots movement, if it’s going to continue somehow, is the big wild card, because it could help. It remains to be seen. I’m with you. I’m intrigued and also a little bit nervous.

Marshall Ganz: Appropriately. You know, a certain healthy skepticism is part of wisdom, isn’t it?

Micah Sifry: Well, I would like, for once, to get to experience something better than that.

Marshall Ganz: Well, hopefully this could be such a thing.

Micah Sifry: We shall see.