Zohran Will Need a Coalition to Govern

Volunteers at a Zohran rally

In less than three months, Zohran Mamdani will be the 111th mayor of New York City. His campaign posters affix windows, signs adorn yards, and thousands of volunteers are knocking doors preaching his platform of affordability across the five boroughs. This reality is forcing political actors across the spectrum to reassess the organizing terrain. Formerly disinterested unions are lining up to endorse Zohran, liberal think tanks praying to get a word in with his transition team, and even some groups on the left that have previously avoided running on the Democratic Party line are calling public meetings to jump into the fray.

While Zohran and many of his staffers hold NYC-DSA as their political home, the movement behind this campaign—soon to be administration—reaches beyond NYC-DSA members. Our organization needs to be ready to work with moderately aligned unions on tax increases to fund pay raises, hold the support of liberal city bureaucrats performing day-to-day administrative work, and keep the NYC electorate buzzing with the possibility of real change. 

Zohran Mamdani wouldn’t be the Democratic Party mayoral candidate without NYC-DSA, but launching a campaign is not governing a major American city. Even by the middle of the primary, when polling showed him coming second to Andrew Cuomo, the base of volunteers and future voters at the doors reached beyond a single socialist organization, community group, or labor union. NYC-DSA’s role with the Zohran administration should be collaborative towards seeing his vision for working class people fulfilled by campaigning to tax the rich and continuing to challenge rightwing democrats. Will we use this as an opportunity to remain organized at a scale we’ve not seen in decades, or shrink from that responsibility and turn inward? 

Marxist Unity Group (MUG), a caucus within DSA influenced by the German Social Democratic thinker Karl Kautsky, who’ve written extensively on the Mamdani campaign, recently published an essay on organizing under a Mamdani administration. The first section, geared towards MUG members, concerns long-standing issues they’ve held with perceived lack of "transparency and accountability” across leadership bodies in the NYC-DSA. This sentiment can be found in many forms across the organization’s self-defined ideological spectrum. MUG’s fixation on moving decision-making from elected leadership to deliberative bodies is framed as increasing organizational democracy but reflects self-admitted lack of buy-in internally for their politics (“we must recognize our small faction’s relative lack of access to the levers of power in the chapter.”). Over the next year, these organizational concerns can be addressed and discussed; while supporting elected leaders and empowering them to make grounded assessments of what is and isn’t working. The continued electoral victories of the chapter and growth to over 10,000 members shows the success of mass politics and a need to maintain the infrastructure that produced such historic success. 

The prospect of a socialist mayor in NYC amplifies MUG’s aversion to holding executive power. The essay suggests that NYC-DSA make demands of Zohran that aren’t about policies that impact working people but instead bully pulpit proselytization. Zohran is called to be an “Organizer in Chief,” a callback to Bernie Sanders’ self-positioning during his 2020 presidential campaign. Certainly a fine goal for a socialist executive, but Zohran telling New Yorkers to join a union feels underwhelming when he’s got millions of city contracts and various city agencies that could be used towards creating strong union jobs. 

Their political analysis is that when Zohran faces pushback from the capital and other parts of the state, NYC-DSA’s orientation should be towards an unorganized mass for legitimacy and strength for his agenda. They suggest town halls or other public assemblies where an undefined mass of people could voice their concerns that would filter through NYC-DSA back into the Zohran administration. That approach would abandon solidifying the coalition that both elected Zohran and already understands itself in a shared project to win Zohran’s agenda. NYC-DSA should not be placing the governing responsibility of 8 million people onto our relatively small organization, then abdicating it.  

The authors gesture towards a mistrust of the elected Steering Committee in communicating with the Zohran administration and suggest that it should be done through “democratic decision-making of the membership.” MUG suggests criticism of current leadership be addressed by new internal processes that even they’d like to admit requires more internal support than exists within the chapter. Our comrades allege the “DSA Right” lacks both a mandate and theory to govern; but a Zohran victory called early on November 4th would be another step towards affirming the legitimacy of this political work. 

MUG’s plan for NYC-DSA doesn’t include demands around public sector bargaining, housing, social safety net increases, or even affirming the campaign’s core three demands—a rent freeze, free and fast buses, and free childcare—as sites of struggle. While the policies proposed here are laudable, they represent a significant retreat from the focus on material needs and class struggle that Zohran ran on. For example, MUG demands that the NYC City Council adopt proportional representation, which has been backed by the newly formed NYC-DSA Democracy Working Group and connects to DSA’s national platform, but there’s been little external campaigning around it. A retreat from the core issues that animated Zohran’s now year-long campaign of affordability for city charter reforms would be a strategic mistake.

Field leads across the city and Zohran himself at rallies stress that this struggle for an affordable New York isn’t over on election night. I wrote after Zohran’s Democratic primary victory emphasizing the need to maintain fighting with, and within, the Democratic Party. That’s why NYC-DSA is already preparing a slate of state legislative races and building out campaigns that will push Zohran’s agenda. The fight in 2026 won’t pitch the unorganized bases of Zohran’s support and the administration—it’ll be between an organized left and capital. The tens of thousands of people activated by this historic campaign should be welcomed to become the leaders of these exciting new projects that build upon all of the work done in 2025. NYC-DSA must be ready to support Zohran, grow our organization, and cohere the coalition that’s about to put Zohran into power.