DSA’s Electoral Horizons
NYC-DSA endorsed mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani at Trump counter-rally, 10/27/24
By: Wes Higgins
NYC-DSA’s 2024 convention culminated in a debate many of us did not expect to have for at least another decade: should our chapter run a candidate for Mayor? The candidate in question, Zohran Kwame Mamdani, is well known in the chapter as a relentless organizer for working class power, a highly skilled communicator of socialist values, and an experienced legislator who delivered material gains for New Yorkers. But running for any citywide office—let alone mayor—would be a major shift in our strategy, which generally focused on down-ballot races where the odds are more in our favor and the scale of voter outreach is more manageable. For six years, we had been patiently and carefully solidifying socialist territory district by district. After deliberation, the endorsement passed overwhelmingly and our fight for New York City began.
Our endorsement of Zohran, along with resolutions updating our electoral strategy, means that our approach to building power is entering a new phase. But we have yet to fully paint a comprehensive picture of our vision for NYC-DSA’s electoral project going forward. This essay is a first sketch based on my own involvement in our electoral program for over 6 years. I also draw from conversations, retrospectives, strategy meetings, and the collective experience of dozens of NYC DSA organizers who have led multiple DSA campaigns, played key roles across all areas of electoral work, and spent countless hours on the doors and phones bringing socialist politics to New Yorkers. We’ll review the history and lessons of our campaigns so far, and argue that it’s time to level up our campaigns. We need to intentionally build up political infrastructure and a mass comms apparatus so that we can organize the millions of multiracial working class New Yorkers in class struggle.
Most importantly, we need to fundamentally reframe how we relate to the world around us. We can’t keep waiting for external flag bearers like Bernie and AOC, or spontaneous social mobilizations like the uprisings over George Floyd and Gaza. We need to create our own political conditions for mass politics.
That is why I am running to be the Electoral Coordinator on the NYC-DSA Steering Committee.
Zohran’s campaign is an opportunity for us to engage millions of New Yorkers in class struggle politics, reassert left political power that the corporate Democratic establishment no longer takes seriously, and accelerate a realignment of organized labor and the organized left. It’s an opportunity for us to become the mass socialist party that the United States needs. We can revolutionize what we’ve built over the half decade into a political force that will transform the shape of socialist politics to come.
A Brief History of NYC-DSA Electoral
The night Julia Salazar won her insurgent campaign for the State Senate in 2018, I was doing poll site visibility in Greenpoint until the minute the polls closed. I had been a field lead in the campaign since petitioning, and thanks to the leaders who mentored me on that campaign I learned the fundamentals of what a socialist campaign could look like. I met hundreds of volunteer organizers even newer to the left than me, and I took seriously the idea that my primary job was to recruit them further into the organization. But here I was, after the last vote was cast, alone in a dive bar drinking a beer to calm the nerves, taking a moment to process all that I had gone through that summer before hitching a ride to the election party in East Williamsburg. I had turned off my phone, and had no clue about the results until I approached the venue and started to hear rapturous shouting. I walked into the industrial dance hall and saw the projection screen — Julia Salazar had won, in a landslide. That night we laughed, we cried, and most of all we felt hope that we had started something big—even if we didn’t know what it was yet. That campaign changed my life, and changed what socialist electoral politics could become.
Prior to the rebirth of DSA in 2016, electoral politics on the left was bleak. On the “left” side of the spectrum, there were third parties like the Green Party, who ran perennial candidates for higher office and risked spoiling elections. Well intentioned volunteers were sometimes misled to think that candidates with no chance could in fact win. At the very least their gambit would “change the conversation” (this was back when the left often mistook discursive politics as politics-in-itself). These left third parties unsurprisingly remained marginal in public consciousness except when they became detrimental, the 2000 election of George Bush being the prime example.
The “right” side of the spectrum was also bleak. Reform-minded candidates, with occasional support of the Working Families Party, would successfully primary Democrats. But without a strong political base to uphold standards, and without an organized force to counter conservatising incentives, these reform candidates would soon turn into the very figures they had run against in the first place. Hakeem Jeffries, the epitome of establishment democrats who would one day become NYC-DSA electoral’s final boss (until Eric Adams I guess), was originally one of these reform-minded candidates.
In a revitalized DSA, electoral organizers carved out a new path. To avoid the pitfalls of self-marginalizing leftist third parties, our electoral program decided to run on the Democratic ballot line. Political parties in the US were (are still) so hollow and decentralized that running on the Democratic line did not mean compromising our vision. On the contrary, we demanded that our candidates run as open socialists and pledge to be accountable to DSA after they were elected, thus keeping us from falling into the same trap as progressive reformists turned accommodationists. We staffed the campaigns with DSA members and the majority of volunteers were mobilized from our ranks. We also recruited cadre DSA members as candidates, so that our electoral standard bearers had their political home in DSA and saw their future as members of our organization. This innovative strategy worked to an incredible effect. In 2020 NYC-DSA swept our races, electing four DSA members to the state legislature. We had done the impossible. We had revitalized socialism as a serious political player in New York City, the center of global capital at the heart of the empire.
But in 2021 things took an unexpected turn. Our endorsed candidates won only 2 of 6 city council races. The pattern repeated in 2022 and 2024, where in total only 3 of our last 8 insurgent candidates secured seats in the state legislature. Our approach to running campaigns remained steady, but the results took a significant turn for the worse. What happened? And how should we adjust as our climb to electoral power gets steeper?
To understand our shifting fortunes in the electoral arena we have to look beyond our electoral strategy to the broader political context. Our early electoral program benefited from a seismic political event — the emergence of Bernie Sanders as the standard bearer of a reinvigorated left in the US. Within this context, voters were primed to receive socialist candidates warmly. Bernie and then, shortly after 2018 AOC, opened doors. Often it was enough to say our candidates were the “Bernie-style” candidates to secure a vote. If our candidate was endorsed by AOC, many voters didn’t need to hear anything else. People were excited to support our insurgent candidates who shared the same populist vision that was in the air during those heady days. I traveled to Iowa for Bernie, and marching through the snow and ice I was ignited by the fact that there were thousands like me right then all pushing history forward.
The unprecedented crisis of the pandemic alongside the nationwide George Floyd uprising further predisposed voters to far-reaching reforms that seemed impossible a few years earlier. But with Bernie’s loss in 2020, the “socialist brand” ceased to function as a friendly letter of introduction on the doors and the phones. As backlash against the Floyd uprising and pandemic social welfare measures took hold, there was a profound chilling effect on the reach of our races, through ideological shifts and depressed voter turnout. Furthermore, the victory of Joe Biden meant that left leaning voters became either more complacent or resigned than they were under Trump. Since infrequent and younger voters tend to favor our candidates, a depressed turnout environment made conditions much more difficult.
The NYC-DSA electoral strategy, developed in 2017 and only formally updated this year at city convention, paid massive dividends for the socialist movement. Many of its elements, such as the emphasis on intensive field operations and highly stringent selection of races, will remain crucial for all of our electoral efforts. But it is clear that our strategy must respond to and evolve with the changing political terrain. It is in that spirit that we offer the following core principles for an updated strategy.
The Strategy Must Adapt to Build the Party
A few months ago, as the Secretary of the Citywide Electoral Working Group, I got an early word that Zohran was considering running for mayor. “What the fuck,” was my response, “that’s not our strategy.” It seemed like a desperate hail mary at best. One of those dreaded organizing “short-cuts” talked about by the late Jane McAlevey. We had been carefully building for years, but to what end exactly wasn’t always clear. While there was no doubt of his potential as a candidate, there were a series of challenging questions to address. Should we run in a race where the odds are significantly longer than our typical campaigns? Is it a good idea to shift our attention from the state to the city level? What could we make of running such a longshot campaign? Oh god, what if we win?
Ultimately I and NYC-DSA as a whole came to support the endorsement for one overarching reason: the race offers a new strategic direction for the chapter that rises to the challenge of the political moment we are in. For the time being, we appear to have reached a plateau in state legislative elections, where we can continue to pick up seats but are unlikely to have another massive breakthrough like 2020, at least over the next few years. While our chapter has avoided membership losses through a challenging year, we are not currently growing as much as we need to level up our local and regional power and enact our larger scale ambitions. And due to Israel’s expanding genocide on Palestinians and neighboring states, along with an all-too-close presidential race, politics is heavily focused at the federal level.
Zohran for Mayor could open up a new struggle with important pathways for breaking through to a socialist resurgence. The excitement of contesting one of the most powerful offices in the country with a cadre socialist can rapidly grow our membership and reestablish democratic socialism as a credible political alternative to centrist liberalism and vague progressivism. And by fielding a candidate who is unafraid to speak up against war and empire, we can continue and expand our fight for justice in Palestine and in the world.
Matching funds for the mayoral race will allow us to reach New Yorkers at a scale beyond anything we have imagined so far. The campaign can hire staff to build support and relationships in strategic areas of the city, and use paid and earned media to bring a socialist vision for the city to literally millions of New Yorkers. And the implications of the race will go far beyond NYC: a socialist agenda can reach all Americans. When I lived in Florida, a thousand miles away from New York City Hall, I had never heard of stop-and-frisk or broken windows until during Bill De Blasio’s mayoral run. We shouldn’t squander the opportunity to once again shape the national consciousness like Bernie before us, but this time even more so on our own terms.
By embracing Zohran’s candidacy, we are attempting a strategic paradigm shift. Throughout the history of NYC-DSA's revival, we depended on external political events to drive influxes of members and buoy our state and local candidates. By seizing the initiative in a high profile, heavily polarized citywide election, we are taking the first step in creating our own political context and turning the tables on enemies who have grown accustomed to our standard playbook. In doing so, we hope to take a significant step towards our ultimate goal of establishing DSA as an independent left-labor party. To be clear, we cannot entirely predict the effects of this pivot, just as we did not fully understand the political questions and challenges that would follow electing Julia Salazar back in 2018. When pushing the boundary, it is often impossible to see what is on the other side. But we are being exhausted within our soon to be former parameters, and even if we fail in many of the above ambitions, we will have learned lessons that can put us on the path towards socialist hegemony.
Had we tried to run a mayoral campaign in 2019 or even 2021, the effort would have fallen flat immediately. We simply did not have the collective experience or sophistication as an organization. But after 6 years we have a developed Socialist in Office project, a battleworn organization, and hardened organizers who can run a mayoral campaign while also recruiting a new generation of organizers into our thriving membership that is at the core of our organization.
Democratic Strategy Making
The endorsement process for Zohran was built on tradition of our chapter’s collective democratic decision-making–typically exercised yearly before campaign season. In August 2019, NYC-DSA members filled the pews of First Unitarian Church to decide whether the chapter should endorse three candidates. This was Brooklyn Electoral Working Group’s first experiment with membership democracy on this scale. As a freshman Organizing Committee member, I had a notch on my belt leading canvassers but I was still green as an organizer. I proposed that the endorsement be not one, but two forums to give the process enough time for members to hear out candidates, ask questions, and then come back a week later to deliberate and vote on what direction we’d be taking our electoral project next.
The idea made me nervous. A lot could go wrong: members could endorse candidates who were unserious or unstrategic, or not endorse promising candidates that the Electoral Organizing Committee had spent months recruiting in key districts. That’s not what happened. Jabari Brisport, Phara Souffrant, and Marcela Mitaynes won their races in Brooklyn, along with Zohran Mamdani in Queens, and they continue to be committed socialists dedicated to advancing the movement. I take from this the lesson that our success as a project depends on member led democracy. Our organization is at our strongest when our membership is engaged in substantial collective decision making. When people have a real stake, it creates the shared knowledge and purpose necessary to advance the socialist project. A project, that at its core, holds the belief that ordinary working people can and should be the ones to shape their own future.
As we take on new challenges, with potentially higher risks and rewards, we must go further to involve chapter membership in developing our electoral strategy. Citywide membership polling for endorsements, piloted in the Jamaal Bowman endorsement process and now codified through the One Member One Vote constitutional amendment, will spur more widespread political debate among members and deepen the chapter’s commitment to our chosen races. Chapter-wide electoral forums, developed this year to integrate our electoral program with the chapter’s overall strategic priorities, have already engaged hundreds of members. As part of the new Electoral Working Group structure that I co-authored, there will be a coordinator whose job is to engage membership through these continual forums to deliberate our direction in the Zohran campaign. The intensive endorsement process for mayor, beginning with branch discussions and culminating with a chapter-wide vote before convention, has already created a level of excitement and commitment that is near unprecedented in the chapter. To overcome the longer odds we face in a reactionary political moment, we must continue along this path to create a more engaged, party-like membership with a stronger stake in the outcome of our elections.
Integration into Chapter Strategy
Zohran for Mayor is also an opportunity to better integrate our electoral work into the overall strategy and priorities of the chapter. We made an earlier attempt at this kind of integration in 2022 when our candidates ran as part of a Green New York slate. We used a slate with shared messaging and priorities to transform climate into a campaign issue, and pass the Build Public Renewables Act over the objections of a conservative Governor. I first joined NYC-DSA as a member of the Ecosocialists, and always wanted to develop a plan to electoralize climate, long relegated to an unimportant topic in state government. The strategy used the aggressive and urgent communications of an electoral campaign to push climate as a top-tier issue. If politicians didn’t pass BPRA, we wanted them to understand they could lose their office to a socialist insurgent, something we were happy to do. We went so far as to primary the bill's own sponsor, Kevin Parker, through the David Alexis campaign on which I coordinated field. The strategy worked, Sarahana defeated Kevin Cahill, one of the bill’s most prominent opponents. We didn’t beat Parker, but we held him to under 50% of the vote and scared him enough to advance our bill. BPRA was signed into law the following year; it was a good after party.
Zohran for mayor can take this approach even further. Tactical pressure points can only go so far. We were limited in our Green New York campaign by state level races that aren’t on the average person’s radar. For the mayoral race, we can go big — really big. We will have the opportunity to propagandize, show our ideas are popular, and share the shit out of politicians and the capitalists they are most accountable to.
This strategy will only work if the Zohran for Mayor campaign is fully integrated into our chapter’s organizing and strategy. The defining feature of all of our campaigns has been that they are staffed by DSA through and through with the majority of staff, leaders, and volunteers drawn from our organization. But a mayoral campaign is a different beast. Zohran will be bigger than all of our previous campaigns combined. The campaign itself will have dozens of staffers in specialized roles. While the trend in NYC-DSA is toward stronger integration with our electoral campaigns over the years, we will need a level of strategic cooperation and focus much higher than before in order to pull our weight around and respond to the needs of an incredibly dynamic and complex campaign that even Zohran himself cannot completely control.
Zohran for Mayor cannot just be one of NYC-DSA’s many projects, it must be the project from now until election day. Our elected leadership must be in constant contact and we must base our strategic priorities around the momentum and timeline of the campaign cycle just as Public Power did. But this does not mean subsuming everything into Zohran for Mayor. Just the opposite. This campaign is a golden opportunity to reach millions of working people across the city. Priority campaigns should start thinking now about how they can integrate into the campaign and use its incredible reach to bring the fight to millions of people who will hear our message. What do we want to say? What is the shape of the fight that we want them to join?
Embrace Mass Communications
Our chapter’s initial electoral strategy laid out a detailed, comprehensive vision for field operations but had comparatively little to say about campaign communications, or political communication more broadly. There has often been somewhat of a disconnect between our field and comms, something that a centralized Electoral Working Group can bridge. To clarify and popularize DSA’s political vision, and establish DSA as a viable political alternative to the capitalist parties in the mind’s of many, we must embrace a unified mass communications strategy through our electoral campaigns and in all of our chapter’s activities.
What do we mean by mass communications? Often, when we think of “comms” we think of campaign slogans, social media posts, and graphic design — the day to day materials of getting a message out. Traditionally in our elections we’ve been limited to social media posts, leaflets, and whatever short, simple tools we had cheaply at our disposal. Zohran for Mayor will receive millions of dollars in matching funds, allowing us to run a comms strategy more sophisticated than ever before. We will need a more sophisticated vision of campaign communications with a central message that cuts through on every level. We will also have to think bigger and bolder, creating an understanding of what socialism could mean in people’s lives.
Our communications should target a deeper emotional and experiential level by building a core narrative for our project. It’s not enough for our campaigns to communicate what policies we want to enact; they must also tell a compelling and relatable story about our movement. Our story must connect with the everyday experience and concerns of New Yorkers, which is rarely focused on the level of formal political institutions and abstract ideology. People must recognize their own struggles in a shared story, and understand what their own role could be within it so that working people may one day be co-authors in their own destiny. Then we will really get into the business of building a party.
The first step towards establishing ourselves within New York’s political imagination is to clarify what we stand for and consistently promote DSA as a political alternative and an accessible membership organization that can be a part of everyday life. Build DSA First, a resolution with overwhelming support at NYC convention, mandates that we not only communicate about our goals and campaigns, but also take credit for our work and invite people to join and take action. With chapter communications as the base, we must extend a consistent narrative across all of our campaigns, tying them together into a coherent vision for what New York can be when we overcome our class enemies.
Orient to Labor
Bernie’s mass politics was limited by the absence of an enduring organization and a large enough base of organized labor. By contrast, we have succeeded in building an enduring organization, but now we need to reach the scale of mass politics. However, we are still missing that last key ingredient. As I said, I don’t know what the future after the Zohran campaign will look like, but at least I know that it has to involve labor. I understand electoral and labor to be two sides of the same coin of any successful U.S. socialist long-term strategy. If we want to build a socialist party worth its name, we will need to grow an unbreakable and intrinsic relationship with unions.
NYC convention passed an overwhelming mandate to center a vision of merging the organized left with organized labor in the Orient to Labor resolution. This will have the chapter, including the Electoral Working Group, focus on labor unions as the primary organizations with whom we should develop coalitions. We will set up a candidate recruitment pipeline with allied labor unions to recruit a slate of labor organizers to run as candidates, as well as put forward strong labor policies along with a centralized strategy for securing our Socialists in Office (SIO) union endorsements. A happy marriage won’t happen overnight, but our goal is to lay the groundwork for a socialist proto-party by working in coalition with labor.
With the rank and file takeovers of both the UAW and Teamsters, as well as the explosion in Starbucks worker organizing, there already are exciting opportunities to work in coalition with unions. Claire Valdez’s campaign for assembly was a first step in working with UAW 9A to get a socialist labor leader elected. DSA members were inspired by canvassing alongside rank and file members of UAW 9A, who shared Claire as their comrade in struggle.
Zohran for Mayor is also a fresh chance to build on the work of Claire’s campaign and put Orient to Labor into action. Zohran must lead with a platform that specifically speaks to the needs of rank and file workers. And turn abstract political principles such as freedom into concrete issues such as workplace equality and protections. We should also develop training for DSA members to talk about Zohran in their workplace and ways for union members to organize their unions internally to vote for Zohran. In ten years time, when we are running a slate of union leaders, all endorsed by the city's major unions, we want to look back at Zohran for mayor as a key step on the road that got us there, the same way we look at Julia 2018 today.
Build Together with SIOs
We can do all these things and more even if Zohran is unlikely to win his race. But what if somehow he does win? Would we suffer more from success than from failure? All eyes will be on Zohran, and our enemies and even some ostensible allies will seek to sabotage his administration to discredit socialism once and for all. However, I believe that we can’t shy away from the contradictions of power. In fact, if Zohran's campaign is successful at getting ordinary working people bought into our project, we can highlight the contradictions inherent to the state within the capitalist system, and advance the necessity of working class power as a countermeasure to the constraints and death drive of capital.
As a representative of the Electoral Working Group in Socialist in Office committee, we have faced our fair share of contradictions that threatened to tear the ship apart. It is unsurprising that some of DSA’s strongest conflicts arise around the position of SIOs within both our project and the state. Often the discussion of the SIO project can assume two opposite positions: 1) SIOs should be subject to an instrumental and unilateral discipline of DSA; 2) SIOs as individuals should have the leeway to operate as they see fit to advance reforms. Both of these perspectives avoid the inherent contradictions that the SIO project must work through. The first position proceeds as if we already had a fully developed independent party that freely selects, deploys, and commands candidates entirely from our own ranks. The second position proceeds as if we have not yet begun the process of forming a party, and therefore must leave SIOs to be independent actors seeking to build coalitions. But the reality of our situation is that we are in the early growing pain process of forming a party that can’t be avoided, only collectively worked through. We will have to sooner or later, one way or another, or else be relegated to the dustbin of history.
For now, membership can justifiably be disappointed or even angry in the decisions SIOs make within the context of the state legislature or city hall. Conversely, SIOs can be frustrated by members' condemnation without there being many avenues to work together on charting a path forward. The way forward is to further integrate our elected officials into the life of the chapter and especially its strategic decision making. Through a more collaborative process between membership and SIOs we can collectively identify strategic priorities that are simultaneously true to our long term vision of a socialist society and workable in the short and medium term, such as transformative reforms that can meaningfully be put forth in the bodies where SIOs are seated. I have no doubt that if Zohran were to run for mayor that this organization would face unprecedented challenges and uncomfortable questions, but I also believe that through the membership democracy and structures we have built that we can collectively get through this process without falling apart.
Putting it all Together
Bernie Sanders was our last experience of mass politics, but it was not the end of the journey. We built our ship to ride on waves that he created, but the waves have receded and we need a new direction. Through Zohran’s campaign, we have an opportunity to sail into uncharted horizons. I want to help guide us there by becoming the Electoral Working Group’s first Steering Representative, a role that will also act as an electoral co-chair in order to cohere the politics of our electoral work under our chapter’s unified socialist vision. By the end of next year, I want to help bring new membership into our exciting democracy and party-like structure. I want the Zohran campaign’s vision to have reached millions in New York City, and countless more across the nation, by cohering a unified vision that points to an alternative future, instead of sinking into the feeling that our country is doomed to continually eat its own tail until it consumes itself. And lastly I want our electoral project to begin a left-labor convergence by politicizing labor and using state power to create the conditions under which working people take back control of their own lives by fighting for each other. I have been here since the start of this chapter in our electoral history, and I want to be there to help bring it to a close. Every ending is a new beginning, and I can’t wait to look back years from now to understand what this next year had begun.
