How to measure success in Zohran Mamdani's run for NYC mayor?
The U.S. electoral system may be designed to prevent fundamental change, but election campaigns offer an opportunity to build long-term transformative mass organization
There’s an understandable and infectious frisson of excitement running through the ranks of a New York City progressive community still traumatized by Trump’s reelection and the shock-and-awe brutality it has unleashed. A gloomy political horizon has been unexpectedly illuminated by Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialists of America state legislator and son of the legendary post-colonial scholar Mahmoud Mamdani and the famous filmmaker Mira Nair, making a strong bid for the Democratic Party’s nomination for New York mayor. “Breath of fresh air” doesn’t even begin to capture the vibe of an unapologetic socialist son of Africa campaigning with desi flavor on the priorities of the city’s working class — rent, housing, public transport and minimum wage — refusing to bow to Zionist demagoguery, championing immigrant rights in the face of a vicious central government attack, spreading renewed optimism that ordinary people can build a different world, and giving the Democratic Party establishment nightmares.
As the dark clouds of a militarized authoritarian white-nationalism gather over Los Angeles, New Yorkers know they can be next. So, it’s not surprising to see the anti-fascist energy pouring into the campaign to elect a fighter for the vulnerable, unafraid to speak truth to power.
These excitement levels, translated into mass canvassing, remind me of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 run against the same Dem establishment. The young New Yorkers out working to elect Zohran have no energy for the decrepit status-quo managerial politics of Obama-Clinton-Biden-Harris. To those who fret that Mamdani “doesn’t have the experience” to run City Hall, they’re unmoved; they don’t want City Hall being run in the way it has been for decades.
And against all expectations of the Democrats ancien regime, Cuomo has reason to fear an upset — and his team knows it.
Still, all the energy and enthusiasm notwithstanding, many know from bitter experience that the machine often finds a way to prevail. The name recognition of his prime opponent, disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo, may prove decisive – although if turnout, as expected, is low, Mamdani’s more committed base give him a fighting chance.
It’s easy to understand why anyone who seeks genuine, systemic change in the U.S. has doubts about the prospects of progress via an electoral system so heavily rigged in favor of moneyed interest, and which usually manages either to sideline or else defang radical challengers. (Bernie always said as much, making clear his purpose was not simply to sit in the Oval Office, but to mobilize a “political revolution” to break the stranglehold of moneyed interest over U.S. politics.) Still, there’s something different about an election the space to cast a vote for genuine, systemic change and to rebuke a Democratic Party establishment beholden to a billionaire class whose interests are not those of the majority. That’s an important opportunity, regardless of the outcome of the vote. And as Bhaskar Sunkara reminds, years of patient work lie ahead to win the trust and engagement of major sections of the NYC working class.
Zohran, like Bernie, stresses that the project he’s promoting relies centrally on community-based organization building the collective power of ordinary people to wrest power from the elites that have long held Democratic Party politics captive.
I wrote in the Guardian back in 2016 that:
“Sanders’ campaign looks more like an extension of the extra-electoral politics of phenomena like the Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Fight for $15 and Dreamer movements, small-d democratic citizen activism bypassing political institutions beholden to narrow, moneyed interests. Those movements are based outside the Democratic party – as was Sanders himself before he decided to seek its nomination – but through grassroots activism they have forced their issues on to the party’s agenda. Sanders has taken that same disruptive spirit into a national campaign to restore the Democrats’ New Deal values, and reverse their capitulation to the Republican fiscal agenda that began with the presidency of Bill Clinton.
“He grounds his campaign in the time-honored tradition of America’s progress towards social justice – whether on race, women’s equality, labor rights and LGBT equality – being driven not by elected politicians, but by the willingness of ordinary women and men to take action that eventually compels political elites to respond. He’s not promising to solve problems himself, as much as to use the White House as a bully pulpit to mobilize citizens against the forces that keep the status quo intact.
‘You have to develop grassroots organizations,’ he told an interviewer questioning how he’d deliver with so little support for his positions on Capitol Hill. ‘You have to bring the grassroots in much closer to what’s happening in Congress.’ …
A ‘movement’ campaign for a ‘movement’ presidency, then, in the tradition of America’s social justice history of which Sanders was a part, as a young activist against segregation and war.
These goals are generational, and achieving them isn’t dependent on winning the Democratic nomination. We won’t know whether the campaign succeeded or failed in this longer game for many years to come. But given its movement-building goals, we know that it will not necessarily have failed if he doesn’t secure the Democratic party nomination.”
The same is true for Mamdani. He clearly personifies the long-term project of using an election campaign as a platform from which to advocate for and engage working people, build mass organization that empowers them, and puncturing the utterly vacuous narratives of the establishment with the moral clarity of historical necessity. It’s the work of his 15,000 volunteers, allied with a savvy social media campaign that reaches many voters where they are (i.e. on their phones!) that have made him a serious threat to Cuomo. And that work will pay long-term dividends.
Bernie Sanders understood that the political system was rigged for the wealthy, to prevent any transformation that impinged on their greed. But he also understood that such rights as most American enjoy today (many of which Trump seeks to reverse) have not come as a result of ruling class epiphanies; they’ve been won by ordinary people acting collectively to force those in power to yield.
Running for election in a system designed to stymie democracy and keep power in the hands of the ruling class nonetheless offers unique opportunities for movement building. The U.S. political-media ecosystem treats elections as yet another spectacle on which to engage the public — a spectacle, then, that provides a platform for popularizing ideas that resonate with working people, raising the possibility of building a different reality if the grip of the 1% on the levers of power could be broken. He may have been thwarted by the machinations of the Wall Street-Democrat establishment, but Bernie Sanders was wildly successful in popularizing socialist and social-democratic ideas — ideas he knew would transcend his campaign, on a scale that would have been impossible to match without the media exposure that came with running for election.
“A campaign has got to be much more than just getting votes and getting elected,” Sanders said soon after declaring his candidacy. “It has to be helping to educate people, organize people. If we can do that, we can change the dynamic of politics for years and years to come.”
Given his age, Sanders wasn’t anticipating being involved in politics for “years and years to come”. Nor could the “political revolution” he proclaimed be achieved in a single election cycle; it was a generational project.
And the key source of its power would be mass organization built outside of the electoral system. There’s nothing sadder than the demoralized leftist lament that “we came sooooo close to having a socialist president”. Imagine what would have followed had Bernie, miraculously, won election to the White House. What power would he have had to implement his agenda, in the face of a powerful pushback from the military and security establishment, and from the business interests that dominate both parties and for whom any redistributive social-democratic policies to make life easier for the struggling majority would have been viewed as the equivalent of a Soviet invasion? As an unholy alliance mustered to exorcise the specter of a President Bernie, what sources of power would he have been able to enlist to push back? The legislature? Nah, mostly owned, on both sides of the aisle by the economic interests looking to destroy a Bernie presidency. The mass media? Same. The courts? Largely representative of the same. Law enforcement or the military? You get the picture. Power is a far more complex matter than what’s taught in America’s civics classes.
The left would have had no organized base of power to deploy in protecting a President Bernie from the inevitable bipartisan counter-revolution to his “political revolution”. Mustering such power would have required years and years of patient mass organization outside of the electoral system, with power capable of pressuring it to change course.
“We can elect the best person in the world to be president,” Sanders warned in 2016, “but that person will get swallowed up unless there is an unprecedented level of activism at the grassroots level.”
A key purpose of Bernie’s campaign was to build that movement.
Zohran Mamdani could face a similar scenario as mayor. Remember the police strike that helped tank David Dinkins’ mayorship three decades ago? The corporate interests most threatened by Mamdani’s class politics would mobilize the City Council and the media. So, could the left muster the organized strength to protect a socialist mayor? That would be the challenge.
Thus the importance of his campaign, reminding young people in the city that they can make a better future for themselves, together, by organizing to challenge the power that sustains a status quo which offers them nothing. What they do in the months and years after the election matters as much as what they do on voting day — if not more.
Mamdani’s campaign reminds them that far from neoliberalism’s core mantra that “there is no alternative”, the policies that hurt them are political choices made on behalf of the 1% by the political class funded for that purpose. Instead, he offers a vision — a vision that highlights the superpower of their own collective effort, visible in a political elite visibly terrified by the democratic power they’re mustering simply by going out and persuading people to vote for Zohran, denying consent to Wall St-Democrat business as usual, and signaling that change is coming. Mamdani is their inifintely charismatic happy socialist rebel leading the charge, but they are all Spartacus.
Will Zohran Mamdani win on June 24? Hard to know. But maybe that’s not the most important question. That his campaign has rattled the elites is unquestioned. Electioneering builds power through organization – the most important metric of success will be what happens to that organization after election day. Does it translate into a sustained structure of mutual aid and collective struggle building community power for the challenges that lie ahead? Zohran Mamdani’s track record suggests that whether as mayor or as state legislator and grassroots organizer, he will be out front mustering community power to wage the struggles of the people of New York City for a decent life against the ravages of neoliberalism, and against the mounting attacks on its most vulnerable communities. And if he’s been successful, then many of those 15,000 volunteers who’ve campaigned for him will be out there, too.
They’re doing generational political work in a struggle that won’t be won in a single election cycle or two. But it’s a struggle born of necessity.
P.S. Mayor Dinkins could rely on the late, great Phife Dawg inserting the rhymes to get him elected, (at 2.28 in “Can I Kick It”) but Zohran (A.K.A. Cardamom) has his own history in the game — as the video below demonstrates! And the one below that with the legend Madhur Jaffrey!!!