On the evening of June 24th, Zohran Mamdani’s campaign shocked the world, in a surprise first round victory that caused the establishment favorite, Andrew Cuomo, to concede the race. As Zohran Mamdani took the microphone, nearly an hour after Cuomo’s concession, he spoke of his monumental walk across Manhattan, describing the workers he saw across the island still hard at work running the city that never sleeps. One of the most profoundly working class speeches the US has ever seen a political candidate given. In this late evening hour, Zohran’s victory seemed to have always been an inevitable certainty.
But in October 2024, when the debate on running Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York City was discussed at the New York City DSA’s convention, there were many questions about whether DSA was prepared for this campaign. Zohran Mamdani, a DSA organizer who had already been elected to the New York State Assembly in 2020, was an ideal, cadre candidate to represent the organization, but the sheer size of the effort was unlike anything a DSA chapter, even a behemoth like NYC, had taken on before. And there were deep concerns about the ability to convey an unfiltered socialist, working class message in a race as widely scrutinized as that as for the mayor of New York City.
Now we see that New York City DSA has shocked the world. Zohran’s victory in the NYC mayoral primary is the hugest electoral victory the socialist left has ever achieved in US politics, and in the end, it wasn’t even close. Despite all polling to the contrary, Zohran resoundingly crushed Cuomo in the first round of ranked choice voting, leading to a near immediate concession by the up-to-then assumed victor of the election.
How did such a seemingly impossible moment instead become an incredible victory? There are multiple elements to this. Zohran Mamdani is a generational talent, with a seemingly unshakeable charisma and ability to stay on message and inspire hope in his audience. And Cuomo’s reputation did him no favors-the more voters learned about each candidate, the further Zohran’s odds rose and Cuomo’s fell.
But the real source of this victory is the organizational weight behind Zohran Mamdani as a candidate. Over 60,000 volunteers knocked over 1.6 million doors in possibly the hugest field operation NYC has ever seen. The campaign maxed out potential fundraising early due to an unprecedented amount of committed small donors throughout NYC, enthusiastic about Zohran’s campaign. And the campaign’s Democratic Socialist politics, one that stubbornly insisted on the importance of reducing costs of living and making NYC a city for everyone, successfully captured both the media spotlight and importance among voters by sheer insistence.
Behind all these remarkable successes stands the crucial point, the thing that decided this race years before it even happened: Zohran Mamdani was a committed member of Democratic Socialists of America, an organization committed to developing the power of every day working class people to change politics in this country, and an organization that decided months before that this fight was one we could win. With this victory, there is no doubt that Democratic Socialists of America has become a historic force in US politics, one based in a kind of politics that has largely disappeared from the United States: democratic, grassroots organizations driven by regular working class people.
Steering the Ship
Seeing this huge success in New York City, what is there for us to learn in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky? While there are a number of contextual differences between ourselves and New York City, there are some core things anyone who wants a socialist left to succeed everywhere should take away.
Firstly, what Zohran successfully did was offer a politics based in hope and sincerity for the future of New Yorkers. While the fascist right has embraced cynicism as an organizing tool to encourage the US public to abandon the marginalized and oppressed, cynicism has also broadly infected politics in our society, to insist that winning better things, even if it’s what we want, is strictly impossible. Zohran’s campaign refused to cede an inch to this, insisting instead that New Yorkers “deserve to be free and fed”, that we can have everything that we deserve to lead a good life. This politics of sincerity and optimism must be the politics of Democratic Socialists of America.
Secondly, it has been common with the ebb and flow of DSA in the wake of the Bernie 2016 and 2020 campaigns to view political and historic events as something that simply occur to DSA, that we have to simply ride the waves and resist the regressions as well as we can. But Zohran’s campaign was a homegrown DSA campaign, intentionally chosen by NYC DSA to intervene in the political moment, and it is irrevocably changed the direction of politics both in New York City and across the country. While we certainly cannot control every political event that comes our way, we have the power to make our own mark on history, and we should take the opportunity to do so when we have it.
Finally, it is crucial to understand from this that power resides where we can bring people together. The powers that be rely on an increasingly common sense of powerlessness derived from us experiencing world events alone via computer and phone screens and a 24/7 stream of deeply evil events. But when we are able to come together as an organization, we transform from the framework of an individual victim of history, to a collective actor. To borrow from an excellent article on Zohran’s election:
In 2017, a DSA organizer and philosopher named Michael Kinnucan said: “US civic culture is so hollowed out at the grassroots level that in any city in the US if your organization can get 40 to 50 committed people in a room occasionally you’re probably operating one of the five or six most potentially powerful grassroots organizations in your city.
This idea was foundational to DSA, especially in New York City, and shaped Mamdani. For many, it seemed a fantasy. Five hundred thousand votes later, across nearly every language and nationality in the world, it’s a warning. To defeat the right, the left must learn from Mamdani and the DSA and rebuild mass working-class organization.”
Now is the time, in the wake of Zohran’s victory, to carve our path to power as DSA Cincinnati. While there are many differences between Cincinnati and New York City, so many of the crises Zohran plans to fight-affordability, housing, the lack of a real opposition to the Trump admin’s evil policies on immigrants, trans people and more-are crises we recognize right here in Cincinnati. It is time for us join the fight to make DSA a mass organization for millions of people, one that will take up the mantle to defeat the far right, and make Democratic Socialists of America the future of US politics.
DSA Cincinnati has already proven what it can do even with a fledgling canvassing operation. In a mere two months in 2024, DSA Cincy knocked nearly 10,000 doors to oppose Amendment 2, a Kentucky ballot measure that would have provided public school funding to private schools (the ballot measure was soundly defeated thanks to the work of unions and working class people, including DSA, across the state). Now, DSA Cincy looks to the future of Cincinnati and what can be accomplished. Democratic Socialists can take real power in Cincinnati, the same as we have in New York City. DSA has a vision of the future that meets the needs of the working class
It’s always been up to the working class to make a better future. Now it’s clear: DSA can win it. Join the fight and make it happen.