The Room Got Bigger
Zohran Kwame Mamdani's New York
Editor’s note: The author serves as co-chair of NYC-DSA’s Electoral Working Group Research & Data Committee. Since NYC-DSA endorsed Zohran Mamdani for mayor in October, she’s been part of a broader volunteer team supporting the campaign’s data, field, and logistical work. The views expressed here are her own and do not reflect her organizational role or the campaign.
After his stunning first-place finish, it’s no longer just a possibility. We wake up in Zohran Kwame Mamdani’s New York— and it feels different. Most of this was written before the polls closed. It’s not a comprehensive analysis, just a snapshot from before the math confirmed what we now know: he wasn’t just viable— he dominated.
A popular narrative is being stitched together by consultants, columnists, and those eager to claim credit using the numbers we have seen. Enough of it will be true. It’ll define the coming days, be the buzz of social media, and then get flattened even further in public memory as time elapses.
Before the story hardens into consensus, I want to name a few things that may otherwise get lost. Not exactly a campaign diary, at least not in the traditional sense. Any campaign detail left in here is either ancient or public. And most of what I want to name didn’t happen in the Zohran campaign. It happened around it, between the lines, in moments that never make the after-action report. But they were real. And they don’t fit neatly into the concise story we tell about a race.
The universe where it could happen
Much ink has been spilled about internal doubts over Mamdani's viability when the idea of a run was discussed last summer. That seems to be a rather strange takeaway. This primary was expected to include— ultimately did include— several high-profile citywide and statewide figures. Despite the idealism often projected onto socialists, we rarely let ourselves believe in miracles, though some of us did anyway.
Even then, I often found myself making the case for a Zohran campaign in terms of energizing political engagement in a relatively sleepy offyear and the bully pulpit of the debates. It was less starry-eyed to talk about shifting the landscape than reaching Gracie Mansion. The phrase I kept using was: we’re still in the universe where it could happen. Turns out, we were in the universe where it did.
A path was relatively clear to second place— but there was also the fear that once there, the moment might slip away. It didn’t. The deeper, structural concern was whether the non-DSA professional left— what Ross Barkan calls the Alphabet Left— would actually break for him, especially with explicit first-rank endorsements. State Senator Gustavo Rivera broke that barrier by endorsing Zohran in April. When Zohran announced, he wasn’t even included in the first poll. In January and February, he was barely registering at 1%. The final independent poll of the race is also the first to show Zohran leading Cuomo in the final round, up by 3.6 points. At time of writing, Zohran has defeated Cuomo in the first round 44-36.
Viability, in the end, is a kind of narrative fiction, a fuzzy construct enforced by poll exclusion, club slates, editorial boards, press silence, and donor lists— designed to tell anyone with too much drive and too little pedigree to stay in their lane. It feels a bit navel-gazing to declare that our city’s politics is becoming a cage match between NYC-DSA and the county boys’ club, but a coalition to win power citywide was nonetheless built and that genie is not going back in the bottle.
Coverage of Zohran paints him as a TikTok genius— understandable, given his campaign’s standout video team. But Zohran caught fire because his policies speak to the demands of this moment. In a greatly disillusioned period in American politics, one does not get 50,000 people to knock over 1.62 million doors for you because you have flashy videos, they come for the alternative vision of democratic socialism and relentless economic populism. Even the most niche policy prescriptions from bringing down halal cart prices to baby baskets for new parents are rooted in that core vision.
Zohran has also notably made a point of coming to various trans rights rallies hosted by NYC-DSA and other organizations, while Andrew Cuomo has hired an alum of last year's anti-Equal Rights Amendment for his campaign, accepted the endorsement of culture warrior PLACE, and bemoaned that Kamala Harris lost because she was talking about bathrooms and “woke” culture. Despite what punditry seems to believe, a bold economic agenda does not require abandoning the marginalized to appeal to voters.
Voting like a human
Ranked choice voting had widely been seen as the only means to defeat Cuomo's first round victory, a universal presumption that has clearly been blown out of the water. There’s been plenty of messaging around it, but beyond the broad strokes of fill your ballot, don’t rank Cuomo, what strategy is actually best?
I suppose the most utilitarian thing would have been to rank the most viable five candidates in your preferred order. At the most extreme end of this is AOC’s slate: Zohran, Adrienne Adams, Brad Lander, Scott Stringer, and Zellnor Myrie line up perfectly with their order in a poll released immediately prior to her endorsement. But voters are not machines, and invariably we will see a lot of ballots that don’t make sense.
Even knowing the math, few of us vote as pure utilitarians. Plenty ranked Blake third prior to cross-endorsement despite it being unlikely he’d outlast Zohran and Lander because it felt right. Plenty bullet voted for Jumaane Williams because parsing which opponent was marginally better wasn’t worth the energy. Much has been made about Wiley voters spoiling it for Garcia in 2021, yet 49,852 votes for Maya Wiley went to Eric Adams in the final round, especially in majority Black neighborhoods. Among these Wiley/Adams voters was Hakeem Jeffries. Ballot rankings reflect far more than cold math; they reflect vibe, identity, gut discomfort. Voters aren’t irrational, but macro narratives come second to the quiet unease of filling a bubble for someone you don’t quite trust.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics
Let’s talk about the polls for a second. Compared to 2021, there has been an incredible belt tightening at polling firms. This is due to many factors, austerity at the news agencies and academic institutions that sponsor and conduct independent polls, their perceived inaccuracy among the general public and even the pundit class, but the outcome has been staggering: there were 12 polls of the 2021 mayoral race that came out in May. This cycle, there were three.
This had been of great benefit to the Cuomo campaign, which was able to flood the zone with overly favorable Honan polls sponsored by pro-Cuomo Tusk Strategies that showed him with an insurmountable lead, a baseline that was ten points higher than when measured by other pollsters. Other campaigns polled the field with regularity— campaign finance disclosures prove this— but stagnant in the single digits, they had good reason to keep the results in-house. This flooding of the zone created a sense of inevitability that allowed Cuomo to rapidly consolidate endorsements, pushing Eric Adams out of the race entirely and disillusioning much of the splintered opposition.
With that said, this strategy appears to have caused a self inflicted mortal wound: they believed their own hype. They stopped preparing for a serious opponent and instead sat around waiting for their coronation. Andrew Cuomo was the very sun around which the City of New York rotates… until he was not. A major optimism I expressed throughout this race is that ranked choice voting polls, in March showing Cuomo beating Zohran by 40 points, 32 points, and 40 points again, were heavily distorted by name recognition, which was in the teens to twenties for Zohran until incredibly recently.
If I asked a random NYC voter back in March to rank five people in order of how much they want them to be mayor, I would have gotten a list of the most well-known people in the race, probably less than five overall, and unless they knew the names of five of his opponents, almost certainly including Andrew Cuomo, governor from when I was in second grade through my first year of college. In eliminating all undecideds and considering ballots in these polls from voters unaware of Zohran but aware of Cuomo to be Cuomo votes in the final round, Cuomo’s strength in ranked choice voting was wildly overstated.
This was not limited to this cycle either, check out this Data for Progress poll from the same time in 2021. Andrew Yang 59% over Eric Adams 41%, 61-39 against Stringer, 68-32 over Wiley. He ended up peaking at under 15% of the vote in RCV. This is even more absurd in the Comptroller race, which clocked Speaker Corey Johnson getting 71% of the vote to Councilman Brad Lander’s 29%. After an effective advertising blitz, Lander won 52-48. RCV polls are not entirely useless early on, they can and did reveal interesting patterns if you knew where to look and what noise to filter out.
These were not wild swings in voter preferences— these were statistical hallucinations treated as gospel. Zohran is poised to win the final round by double digits over Cuomo.
Frozen in place
Until recently, Cuomo seems to have barely even thought about Zohran. Before announcing, he was mainly telegraphing to future donors that only he could defeat Lander. Even in this month’s debates, many of Cuomo’s attacks were focused on Lander, who is in a distant but fairly consistent third place in the polls. Said attacks— railing against the Adams-Lander Administration for instance— seem more detailed and scripted than his attacks on Zohran, suggesting a degree of rigidness in his strategy and an unpreparedness to land attacks on— or even understand Zohran. When his camp did reference Zohran, it was almost as a punchline, a dream candidate to make it to the final round with. After $35 million in vitriolic spend against him and a first round rout of eight points, I imagine it’s more of a nightmare to Cuomoworld.
One lesson from 2021 is that candidates are incentivized to form alliances, yet I was skeptical any concrete ones beyond the then-abstract WFP slate would materialize. Cross-endorsements make the most sense when two candidates are neck-and-neck for second place, and you’re willing to gamble you’ll be the one slightly ahead. But when you’re further back— like Andrew Yang’s unilateral rank Garcia second messaging in 2021— it’s less about boosting your own chances and more about playing kingmaker. Aside from those who never gained traction (Michael Blake, Jessica Ramos), I wasn’t sure if anyone in the distant second tier would be willing to enter what the media would frame as a junior partnership or worse— stepping aside— especially with Zohran. Brad Lander did.
Plan A
A quick note: I’ve had some incidental social overlap with Brad Lander through someone I’ve come to know this cycle, unrelated to politics. It’s not the lens through which I came to understand him— years of following his political career did that— but it’s part of the context now, and worth naming. Brad’s navigated that overlap with sincere grace and good humor, even knowing I was working to elect someone else.
Brad Lander, founder of the Progressive Caucus of the City Council and sitting Comptroller, was presumed to be the candidate for the left lane of this primary. Long before this race, Brad Lander built real progressive infrastructure— on the Council, he helped make policy expertise and organizing fluency feel like they belonged in the same room. He had shocked before, eeking out a win in his bid for Comptroller after Corey Johnson’s late entry seemed to doom his chances. His was the first name I ever bubbled in on a ballot. He entered early, lining up institutional support— especially from Democratic clubs and a constellation of major elected officials— and seemed poised to absorb both the bold activists of Maya Wiley’s base and the steady-handed technocrats of Kathryn Garcia’s against a greatly diminished Eric Adams and a field of worn-out names and longshots.
Lander’s signature “plan-for-that” progressivism— technocratic, deliberative, soft-spoken— has found itself increasingly squeezed in the Adams era— caught between a nimble, ascendant NYC-DSA and the swagger centrism of the county parties, each highly adaptive in their own way. He’s navigated the shifting terrain cautiously, occasionally endorsing DSA candidates in low-stakes primaries. His early equivocation on a rent freeze— “if the data supports it”— was emblematic: details-oriented, but inaccessible in delivery. By the time he assessed the theory and offered support, few on either flank were moved.
Lander’s effort to balance public opinion with his progressive reputation left one flank wide open— an ideological vacuum the left was initially reluctant to seize— and this cautious strategy failed to move moderates long wary of him. This is a tension Stringer attempted to navigate in his 2021 bid, but with the benefit of a style of governance progressive in messaging, but soft on power. That vaunted Garcia bloc? They seem to have split two-thirds for Zohran’s bold agenda and one-third for Cuomo’s heavy hand.
Although both candidates raised $1.7M, Lander received only a quarter of the $335k raised by donors who contributed to both his and Zohran’s campaigns. And more than half of them gave to Lander before Zohran even entered. Zohran stopped fundraising on March 24th and was matched 8-to-1 up to the legal cap of $8.4 million. Lander’s final payment didn’t arrive until June 20th.
Even here, retail politics mattered: my first donor map showed that the Park Slope faithful came through, and there are blocks in the 11215 where every other brownstone chipped in $250, $500 to Brad— by far the most donors and dollars for any candidate in any ZIP code. Many of those came through while he was still nominally running a noncompetitive re-election bid for Comptroller. But by March, Zohran had pulled ahead in total individual donors there, even as Lander still held a two-to-one edge in dollars raised.
Message meets messenger
Everyone with a cable box remembers the AOC ads from Lander’s 2021 Comptroller race, but the one that stuck with me most was the spot with his daughter Rosa— equal parts sincere and self-effacing, in essence: my dad’s a geek, but that’s kinda the point. It worked not just because it humanized him, but because it made fun of his brand while affirming it: he’s unflashy, policy-driven, and deeply earnest. To include your kid in an ad is to say, this matters to me beyond politics.
Several non-Cuomo candidates misread Zohran’s viral breakout and rushed to replicate it— churning out jump-cut, man-on-the-street style videos and praying for virality. But Zohran’s appeal wasn’t just aesthetic: he’s a fluent communicator with a clear message. His video strategy worked because it was rooted in who he is, not what looked trendy.
This cycle, after a stint of Zohran-style direct-to-camera policy videos that missed the mark, Rosa returned— this time in short-form, lightly-scripted Instagram reels. The vibe hadn’t changed: the earnest, slightly awkward dad who never quite got the memo on being cool, and the daughter who is, effortlessly. It was sweet— not cloying, but genuinely affectionate in a way few political ads ever manage. It worked because it didn’t pretend Brad was someone he wasn’t. It leaned into the self-deprecating sincerity that has always defined his public persona and, in doing so, softened the stiffness that weighed down his more conventional messaging. In a field where many candidates came off as overproduced or overcoached, the Rosa ads stood out for their authenticity.
Leap of faith
Brad Lander took a real risk: the only candidate to forgo re-election to his current job. Zohran’s seat isn’t up until 2026, Adrienne Adams is term-limited, Andrew Cuomo and Scott Stringer are out of office— but there is going to be a new Comptroller on January 1st. There’s always a particular kind of dread that sets in when a politician is staring down the end of their time in office. But it’s sharper still for those who gamble on a promotion and find their reach exceeds their grasp. There have been more extreme cases.
Now that the stakes are clear, it is interesting to note the timely Honan RCV poll released just two days before the cross-endorsement: in the seventh round, Cuomo led with 47%, Zohran trailed at 28%, and Lander sat at 25%. The eighth round showed Cuomo defeating Zohran 56-44. For those arguing behind the scenes that Zohran was playing spoiler in a race Lander could win, this was catnip— a ready-made talking point to blow up the informal non-aggression pact. Back in April, Cuomoworld was already stirring the pot— Bradley Honan, with a touch of schadenfreude, quipped: “I don’t know if Brad Lander … [is] going to like being second fiddle to Mamdani.”
The absence of any comparable polling only deepened the skepticism. A Data for Progress survey showed Cuomo at 46%, Zohran at 39%, and Lander at just 15%, with Cuomo narrowly defeating Zohran in the final round. Cuomo’s internal numbers had Lander even lower, at 10%, with Adrienne Adams in the final three. Lander’s camp seemed to treat the Honan poll with caution— just a little too convenient to be taken at face value.
What Brad Lander knew
Ranked choice, at its core, is about permission structures. Some Lander voters were wary of Zohran. Others, backing Zohran, were wary of Lander. For anyone hoping to stop Cuomo, ensuring as many votes transferred cleanly between these two camps as possible was critical. Explicit rankings— a trusted voice that says this person can do the job— make that more likely to happen. Lander’s co-endorsement— timed after a strong debate performance and aimed at his base of reliably voting, civic-minded liberals in brownstone Brooklyn and Manhattan— is of more significance than the short media cycle it got, particularly given the institutional crosswinds it faced. While he ran an active campaign to the end, he made a point to defend Zohran publicly— and the last slice of his war chest went into anti-Cuomo TV ads that did not say the name “Lander” except in the paid for by disclaimer.
At a time when all campaigns were focused on the GOTV scrum, Lander’s arrest by ICE while accompanying immigrants from court drew widespread solidarity. It was a rare, unscripted moment of moral clarity for our entire city— one where he made a point not to center himself or his campaign. For those familiar with his history— Brad is the rare pol who can appear at a meet-and-greet fundraiser or a JFREJ meeting and seem out of place at neither— it reflected the side of his politics steeped more in personal conviction than institutional habit.
That side of Brad also appeared on the debate stage, but did not carve out a coalition beyond his core base this cycle. As difficult as that was, he knew what mattered most— and acted accordingly. At Zohran’s victory party last night, a candidate has never looked more thrilled to lose.
Roti and roses
This campaign has knocked it out of the park. But what won’t be easily captured is the scale of volunteer commitment: the 50,000 canvassers, over 1.62 million doors knocked, the bedrock of this campaign is people who didn’t have to be here— and showed up anyway.
I think of the data crew. Some were recruited after saying too much about what they did for work over post-canvass drinks. Others stumbled into it— checked a box on a form and got pulled into projects that took over their weeknights. Some chased it down from the start, ready to throw their all into it. Most didn’t have formal experience in campaigns or data science. What they did have was curiosity, commitment, and the willingness to throw blocks of spare time at hard problems until we figured them out. All of them made it matter. They built out more tools than I can count— quietly, efficiently, and well.
From the start, this campaign dared to envision a tent larger than Zohran’s ideological affinity. Special efforts were made to reach out to Muslim and South Asian voters in the far corners of the outer boroughs. Those who did vote in 2021 overwhelmingly did so for Eric Adams, but an even larger contingent stayed home. We carried flyers in Bangla, Urdu, and Arabic to every corner of the city.
Some affectionate Desi slang diffused through the broader volunteer apparatus: uncles. Not literal relatives, but a term for the older men who kept showing up— slightly overdressed, always kind. The ones who handed you water before you asked and smiled at you like family even if you didn’t share a language.
They were cab drivers, corner pharmacists, auto mechanics, restaurant owners. Some hosted us at their mosques or gurdwaras. Others drove boxes of flyers across the five boroughs. They weren’t part of the usual progressive voter universe— not political partisans or even consistent voters. None of them have read Mark Fisher. But they showed up again and again for what this campaign stood for. Not out of ideology, exactly, but belief— in Zohran, in the people around him, in a kind of goodness that didn’t need explaining. That this was something worth fighting for. The uncles and aunties of Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens powered Zohran to resounding victories from Brighton Beach to Parkchester and lit up Hillside Avenue in Queens like a Christmas tree.
I wasn’t supposed to be in New York this cycle. My next sublet in Boston fell through last August right before Evan MacKay lost by forty votes in Cambridge, and I closed out that campaign couchsurfing in the suburbs, still trying to hold it together. Some people I barely knew offered me a spare room here and their quiet trust. When I returned to the city, I didn’t have a plan— just a duffel bag and permanent campaign mode. NYC-DSA folks I’d never met in person before slotted me in like I’d always been there. No hesitation, no orientation, no preamble: what do you know how to do, and when can you start? That’s the culture we’ve built— show up, plug in, and start building. That’s what this campaign is fueled by.
A bar in Queens
It is interesting to watch something break containment in the way it has. People I haven’t spoken to since high school were posting Instagram stories saying that they registered to vote for Zohran. I overheard conversations about him on a trip to Boston. A building on my block is wheatpasted with unofficial posters of his face.
It started with group chats, the endorsement vote at the Church of the Village, a field lead training at the Sixth Street Community Center, the office spaces, the rallies at Brooklyn Steel and Terminal 5, and overwhelming victory in Long Island City. Our Zohran is now the third most recognizable socialist in the country— and the Democratic nominee for the 111th Mayor of the City of New York.
Seven months before volunteers packed the debate watch party, Zohran walked into a half-empty bar in Queens, unrecognized by some patrons— most of them his own constituents. He slid into our booth, elbows on the table, as we tried to make sense of the grim numbers trickling in. It wasn’t a campaign moment. No press, no messaging, no titles. Just a few stunned faces lit by laptop screens doomscrolling as precincts swung 30 and 40 points to Trump— trying to explain it all with forced detachment. And someone who cared leaning in, grimacing, nodding along slowly.
It probably won’t ever feel that intimate again. That’s part of the trade. The bigger it gets, the less of it we get to hold.