How Mamdani’s campaign put politics to work in NYC

To the beat of music and chanting slogans, students celebrate Zohran Mamdani's victory as the new mayor of New York in Washington Square Park, one the most important parks in Manhattan. Photo © Maria Ruiz.

Opinion • Susana Draper • November 13, 2025 • Leer en castellano

Electoral processes, as we know them, are something of a non-starter. It often feels as though things are decided in advance, or immediately after elections take place.

For too long, we’ve gotten used to avoiding fear by choosing the lesser evil or conforming to what’s called political realism. In this way, life goes on. And decades pass.

Within this ocean of electoral disenchantment, what happened in New York City in recent months, which was consolidated on Tuesday, November 4, still feels a bit like a huge miracle: the emergence of the supposedly impossible in the context of our daily lives.

No less than 90,000 people mobilized for Zohran Mamdani's campaign, taking actions that might otherwise seem insignificant: talking to neighbors, knocking on doors, going into the hair salon or the grocery store, and striking up a conversation, laughing, kidding around, bringing together those who are often on their own. We interrupted the mechanical flow of coming and going (and getting nowhere), through a process of connecting and building other places for the possible.

We wove a NO into the huge YES of that which is ever more destroyed: the possibility of a dignified life for all people. We dismantled the notion that doing so is a privilege, and based the campaign on making life in the city affordable, poetically approaching doing so as a way to live together.

While the other candidates' campaigns focused on spreading fear, Mamdani focused on undoing the threat that paralyzes people. We live in the presence of ever-growing horror, the responsibility for this lies in part with the powerful interests that financed the other campaigns. 

We managed to anchor ourselves in a different perspective, refusing to collude with the predatory policies that enrich the few, and in doing so violate and hijack people’s lives.

Building community, building polities 

In recent weeks, every event in the city became an excuse to continue the campaign. On the weekend of Mamdani's birthday, we celebrated in community with our neighbors, knocking on more doors, and singing to him together. We “metaphorically” participated in New York City's historic annual marathon with a marathon of canvassing.

That weekend, we set a new record: we knocked on three million doors.

In one of the most important cities for global financial capitalism (that numerical abstraction that over/determines the material lives of people and communities), we came back to what matters: the everyday politics of those who inhabit and rebuild an increasingly fractured social fabric.

In order to be in conversation, we were clear about not actively replicating what we are rejecting. We avoided taking arbitrary positions, fighting to be “right,” or raising our voices. We developed clear strategies to prevent situations from escalating toward violence, something that’s necessary in these confrontational times.

In that sense, a very important point in the campaign process was to be clear about our common position: sustaining life in the city.

That, and nothing else. But that is, in essence, everything.

Close to midnight on election day, students listen to the victory speeches of Zohran Mamdani's campaign team in Washington Square Park in New York City. Photo © Maria Ruiz.

Knocking on doors

When the campaign fundraised enough, Mamdani released a video asking people to please stop sending money. Instead, he said, sign up to canvas.

The campaign broke with corporate organizational logic in many ways. It forged alliances between different types of organizations based on shared convictions, the very foundation of any coalition working on certain principles.

It focused on three key issues that are central to the material aspects of the reproduction of life: housing, care work, and transportation.

Within these, there is a whole series of issues linked to food and community safety. As feminists, we are well aware of the relationship between territory, body, and care, which is something that permeates everything and allows us to establish practical and non-literal ways of understanding safety.

Security is having a place to live, having enough food to eat, being able to get to work, having access to care for your children, and being able to enjoy yourself. Security is about stopping the feeling of absolute insecurity and impunity that has been on display in recent months.

It was interesting how the central point of Mamdani’s campaign was security without that being explicit or literal, because it was talked about without referring to the meaning imposed on us in an automatic way (more police, more prisons, and even more repression).

When the other candidates talked about “security,” they proposed to expand the police and prison system, seeking to make the problem disappear from sight.

They also went after Mamdani for his age.

Mayoral candidate and former governor Andrew Cuomo used his age and experience as virtues that established him as a “strong man” who would be able to stand up to the other “strong man” who rules the country. What he failed to mention was that both were financed by the same interests.

In one of the debates, Cuomo asked Mamdani how he was going to govern the largest and most important city in the country, being that he was so “young and inexperienced.” Mamdani snapped back: fortunately, he said, he had no experience in cases of sexual abuse, nor was he responsible for the deaths of many elderly people in nursing homes during the pandemic.

“What I lack in experience, I make up for with integrity,” Mamdani told Cuomo. “But what you lack in integrity, you could never make up for with experience.”

Students follow the poll results of the city elections live while doing their homework in New York University’s library. Photo © Maria Ruiz.

The wrongfooted right 

Mamdani’s campaign put the entire right wing, including the Republican Party and much of the Democratic establishment, in check. Amidst a landscape of death, fear, and war, he launched a proposal for a liveable city where people can lead meaningful lives.

Democratic capital went to Cuomo, a candidate accused of abuse and former New York governor who presented himself as the only one who could stand up to President Donald Trump. 

Mamdani did not have the same level of funding, but he did have the honesty of having fought and defended fair housing and free transportation. He participated in a hunger strike as part of the historic struggle of the taxi drivers' union, which sought to cut the impossible debt imposed on cabbies by the city. During the process, some of the strikers took their own lives in despair. It seemed hopelessly impossible, but the drivers and their allies turned it around to win.

During months of campaigning, we saw the emergence of a kind of mirror image of the kind of politics that’s based on division and the promotion of hatred. Instead, it became a movement across generations, diverse backgrounds, sexualities, genders, religions, and organizing methods. It danced to a different tune, proposed new ways of life, and was based around a desire to fight for a different kind of city.

Against all the predictions by political realists who would prefer for us to waste our lives choosing the lesser evil, a thread of hope materialized out of the strength of our interdependence. Our certainty is that we feel more fear and powerlessness when we are lonely and isolated.

We are at a moment when dispossession—embodied in historic cuts, unemployment, homelessness, and mental health crises—goes hand in hand with authoritarian policies reminiscent of practices that characterized the dictatorships in our countries, in the Southern Cone. People are kidnapped and disappearing, private armed groups are sent out to kidnap, detain, relocate, traumatize, threaten, and persecute, and then to file reports on their activities.

We found power in our awareness of our interdependence, something that became central to our understanding of our capacity for collective survival.

We learned there are many ways of organizing, and that alternative timelines that can coexist with the historic nature of our present moment.

This experience is an example of how fighting for life remains at the center of our politics in a moment in which the very possibility of living in the present and the future is in doubt.