Zohran Mamdani Is Winning the Battle. Here’s How He Can Win the War.

This can’t be yet another traditional pressure campaign. Such efforts have three major limitations. First, they’re generally very siloed, with organizations pushing their distinct agendas and tactics with little to no coordination. Second, they aren’t laser-focused on expanding their base beyond self-selecting activists who already feel strongly about the issue. Finally, they normally lack a clear power structure analysis. Who are the decision-makers? Who influences the decision makers? How can we split and surmount the opposition?

Overcoming both billionaires and the establishment politicians who love them requires launching a united campaign oriented to building power more broadly and more deeply. That’s why the campaign’s remarkable distributed field operation, with its huge number of volunteers and volunteer leaders, should be maintained past Election Day—so that there is a foundational structure in place to take the fight to the next level.

Though Mamdani’s campaign can’t realistically coordinate a coalition, an early strategic lead from the campaign would go a long way toward aligning our state’s normally fragmented unions, Left organizations, and community leaders around a shared effort. Otherwise, the centrifugal forces of organizational habit and turf may remain the unfortunate norm.

But even if all of New York’s progressive organizations unite, we’re still not anywhere near influential enough to win Mamdani’s agenda. Our memberships—or our active memberships in the case of unions—are far too small to convince a supermajority of New York politicians that we pose a legitimate threat to their continued grip on power.

With billionaires and political hacks breathing down their necks, we should expect that a good number of establishment politicians won’t budge even in the face of a million-strong petition and a mass march to deliver it. Their own constituents, they’ll insist, are not on board with Mamdani’s “pie in the sky” policies. Overcoming such stubborn opposition requires targeted campaigns in pivotal districts and constituencies that leverage existing social ties and that grow our reach beyond self-selecting volunteers.

Not everybody in a community has the same amount of sway. Power-structure analysis trainings with members of unions and community groups—as well as new leaders identified through MANY’s broader petitioning efforts—can help influential working-class organizers map their opposition and their own communities. By identifying and developing leaders with strong roots in institutions like churches, ethnic associations, or unions, we can help them tap their social connections to clearly demonstrate their community’s support for Mamdani’s agenda and to move the powerbroking intermediaries that state legislators cannot afford to ignore—e.g. an influential pastor, a powerful local businessman, or a national politician.

Ultimately, a powerful alignment of community, labor, advocacy, and political forces can’t leave power on the table. Every terrain of struggle—from neighborhood fights to union contract bargaining—is a way to demand and win change.

A Lesson From Obama

Everybody understands that outside pressure is necessary for Mamdani to pass his policies. But there’s a real danger that low organizing expectations plus organizational inertia and divisions will translate into a major missed opportunity for effective bottom-up organizing after November.

Consider the experience of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, which was memorably built around the vast “Obama for America” supporter network. Even though senior adviser Christopher Edley Jr. had been pushing for months for the campaign to develop a post-November 4 plan to turn this network into a “Movement 2.0” which would provide external political support for Obama’s presidency, no such operation existed by the time Obama won. The New Republic explains what happened next: “On November 5, the day after Obama’s victory, his headquarters in Chicago was deluged with phone calls and emails from supporters asking for guidance on how to keep going. Exactly as Edley had feared, no answers were forthcoming.”

A few weeks after the election, the campaign sent out a survey to its supporters. Of the 550,000 people who replied, 86 percent expressed their interest in joining a grassroots push for Obama’s policies. Yet with priorities elsewhere, and afraid of challenging the Democratic establishment, nobody pulled the trigger on the “Movement 2.0” proposal. This was “Obama’s biggest mistake,” notes The New Republic, and it “helped pave the way for Donald Trump to harness the pent-up demand for change Obama had unleashed.”

Mamdani will face the same choice that Obama faced. Though Mamdani’s campaign is, fortunately, far less tied to the Democratic establishment, it’s likely that some operatives will advise him to work exclusively through institutional channels. “Leave the mobilizing to your grassroots coalition partners,” they’ll say. “You’ll have your hands full just trying to govern.”

It’s true that Mamdani’s team in office won’t have the capacity or political space to focus on bottom-up organizing—especially when some of its targets may be colleagues Mamdani has to work with to govern. A division of labor between movements and elected officials is inevitable and, at its best, fruitful.

But Mamdani is currently the figure with the most reach and legitimacy to jump-start a campaign for an affordable New York. And though this movement should be built no matter what, its chances of success will be higher with an initial boost from the candidate himself. Since there’s no realistic path to winning Mamdani’s planks with the current balance of political power, the riskiest option is to pursue a path of least resistance and minimal confrontation.

Doing the Impossible

New Yorkers will be waiting forever if they expect their new mayor to deliver an affordable city from on high. It’s too often forgotten that America’s most successful populist mayors—like Milwaukee’s sewer socialists and New York’s Fiorello La Guardia, a hero of Mamdani’s—leaned on powerful workers’ movements to counteract employer and media scaremongering, to muscle through their policy agenda, and to keep up morale in the face of setbacks. No such movement exists today. Everything hinges on recreating one.

The good news is that popular initiatives that might have been previously unachievable are now on the table during America’s crisis. In fact, they’re likely the only way to fend off billionaire authoritarianism. Winning an affordable New York is our best bet to demonstrate that there’s a viable alternative to both Trumpism and decrepit Democratic centrism.

As Zohran Mamdani likes reminding us, a big leap forward always seems impossible until it’s done. He has already done the impossible by winning the primary. If we keep the pedal on the gas, we’re confident he’ll do so again in November. And then the real fight begins.