This post was originally published on Truthout.org under a Creative Commons 4.0 license.
Zohran Mamdani’s historic mayoral victory on November 4 created a political earthquake both inside and outside New York City. With bold policies aimed at challenging the status quo in the U.S., a once obscure, long-shot democratic socialist candidate has become a celebrated new star of the Democratic Party — a party whose leaders continue to remain reluctant to endorse him.
As the dust from this earthquake settles, Mamdani’s team now faces the challenge of transitioning from the campaign trail to governance. Mamdani recently unveiled an all–woman transition team that includes both municipal executives and former Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission Lina Khan, a leader in investigating antitrust and enforcing financial regulations who has taken on titans from Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
The transition team choices suggest that Mamdani is juggling the desire for an experienced inside team with the need to take on entrenched capitalist interests who seek to thwart his agenda.
Meanwhile, organizers who supported Mamdani are figuring out how to channel the grassroots energy of the volunteer mobilization that swept him into power into an ongoing movement to achieve his campaign promises of fast and free buses, freezing the rent for rent-stabilized apartments, and providing free universal child care.
Since Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state legislators in Albany hold crucial purse strings for the funding of these priorities, analysts have rightly noted that a grassroots movement to reshape state-level politics and take on Wall Street will be necessary to realize Mamdani’s campaign promises.
Grassroots Organizing Can Change What Is “Achievable”
From the start, skeptical observers and political rivals dismissed Mamdani’s clear and digestible affordability platform of free buses, free child care, and freezing the rent as unrealistic and dangerous, but their considerations fail to understand the transformative and bold commitments of the Mamdani campaign and its associated movement.
Just as it was incorrect to write Mamdani off as a long-shot candidate for mayor, it is incorrect to write off his platform as unachievable: Grassroots political methodologies such as canvassing, public assembly, mass mobilization, protest, and political organizing that operate outside of of formal electoral politics make these ambitious policies more than a pipe dream.
Most political commentators have a conventional understanding of politics: They expect elected leaders to engage in negotiations, based on political capital and personal relationships, to create outcomes.
In this frame, power can come from formal and informal institutional structures, relationships, one’s ability to tap into networks, moral positions, or certain kinds of momentum.
According to this conventional understanding, someone like Mamdani, who polled at 1 percent at the start of his campaign, would not be considered a viable candidate for mayor.
He suffered from low name recognition and had little visibility as a city-based player, and his focus on redistribution and taxing the wealthy made him seem unlikely to succeed in the fundraising game.
His detractors also crowed about his relative lack of experience: his chief rival Andrew Cuomo continually pointed out that he had only passed three bills while in office.
Yet there were many examples in Mamdani’s relatively short but impactful political career that demonstrated his skill in effecting change by reaching beyond conventional and institutional means of legislative change.
For example, Mamdani’s orientation toward constituent services in his first years in office was the idea that nothing was “outside his lane.” Despite serving as a state assemblymember who focused on state-level issues in Albany, his office routinely helped constituents calling about municipal-level issues like traffic safety.
Mamdani and his office didn’t just tell constituents who to call in City Hall — his office helped turn constituents into organizers.
Mamdani’s brand of constituent services was aptly described as “sewer socialism,” as it focused on changing the political terrain in the community rather than only delivering services.
To get a traffic light installed in a deadly Astoria intersection, Mamdani and his office didn’t just tell constituents who to call in City Hall — his office helped turn constituents into organizers and to build their own organizations to become effective citizens in their community.
This type of political power moves beyond the traditional understanding of influence: it builds new sources of power rather than working around it. Political power is thus a renewable resource, not a zero-sum competitive one.
Lessons From Mamdani’s Role in Winning Debt Relief for Taxi Drivers
Perhaps the most notable example of Mamdani’s transformative view of political change was his work in 2021 on New York City’s taxi medallion debt crisis.
Taxi drivers in New York City were suffering from devastating debt because of the way that taxi medallions (the transferrable license — literally displayed in the form of a metal medallion — that a yellow cab driver must acquire in order to pick up passengers hailing a cab from the sidewalk) had lost value in the age of ride-sharing apps.
Since 1937, New York City had tried to evenly match the supply of taxis to the level of demand from passengers by limiting the number of medallions that authorize taxicab operation in circulation.
Drivers initially purchased their medallions from the city, but over the years the medallions became increasingly valuable commodities often sold through private auctions or leased for temporary use by brokers.
Many taxi drivers went into debt in order to purchase medallions, but the value of their investments suddenly dissolved when the city allowed ride-share apps to operate.
As a result, yellow cab drivers could not pay their debts, and the average driver had $600,000 worth of debt. Even with lawsuits and a progressive Democratic mayor, cab drivers could not get their debt renegotiated.
While Mamdani did not have a significant number of cab drivers in his assembly district, his connection to the New York Taxi Workers Alliance inspired him to get involved in the campaign to reduce the taxi drivers’ debt, with the hope that his participation would draw attention from more elected officials.
First engaging in civil disobedience and then in a public 15-day hunger strike, Mamdani and the other participants in this campaign ushered in a successful renegotiation of all taxi medallion debt to a maximum of $170,000. In total, New York City granted $450 million in debt relief to taxi drivers thanks to this renegotiation.
Mamdani’s participation in this massive debt relief victory was hardly congruent with Cuomo’s repeated attempts to characterize Mamdani as inexperienced and ineffective.
Perhaps Cuomo was actually incapable of understanding this win as relevant political experience: Mamdani’s role as an activist legislator made his accomplishments, and therefore his viability as a mayoral candidate, unintelligible for a conventional, power-brokering politician like Cuomo.
Mamdani did not have access to the billionaire funds that ran the Cuomo campaign. Rather, just as Mamdani helped constituents build power through political organizing and mobilization, he built his political power through a grassroots canvassing operation that knocked on 3 million doors, and through the mobilization of more than 100,000 volunteers who built support for his affordability agenda.
While his opponent Andrew Cuomo spent millions on ad buys, Mamdani’s field operation and social media team reached young voters, and many new voters, resulting in over 1 million votes cast in his favor, leading to the highest voter turnout in New York since 1969. Mamdani transformed the political playing field, and in creating new voters and energizing less likely voters, he rejected the zero-sum approach of the conventional politician.
It remains to be seen whether the grassroots upswell that voted Mamdani into office will be powerful and enduring enough to reshape New York politics sufficiently to make Mamdani’s affordability platform become a reality, but Mamdani’s background as an organizer is clearly informing his efforts to fuel that momentum.
Mamdani has also indicated that he’s already thinking about the potential tensions that could arise as he transitions into a role where he wields even more direct power.
“I think that protest is a healthy part of any democracy and I think that, you know, I’m looking forward to being the mayor that doesn’t require people to go on a 15-day hunger strike to wipe off nearly half a billion dollars in debt relief,” Mamdani told the news outlet THE CITY on the eve of the election, in reference to the taxi driver movement.
“But I know that there will be protests while I’m the mayor. My job is to ensure that those First Amendment rights are protected and that we are able to keep New Yorkers safe without having to violate those rights, and I look forward to doing that.”
His victory speech hinted at the importance of continued collective shared action, and a new coalition of Mamdani’s supporters has emerged to continue building power and mobilizing to support his economic justice agenda.
This coalition, called the People’s Majority Alliance, connects key community, advocacy, political, and labor groups, and seeks to mobilize voters and community members to resist Donald Trump’s agenda and fight for Mamdani’s policy platform.
(I am currently volunteering on a casual basis to support some of these grassroots efforts as a New York City member of the Democratic Socialists of America.)
Because of the Herculean task that Mamdani faces — from the hostile federal government to institutional challenges at the state and city levels — this multiracial and community-based coalition has announced that it will continue organizing from the outside to build power for Mamdani’s policies through lobbying, mobilizing, canvassing, and engaging in protest.
