Hazel Grinberg, Socialist Alternative (ISA in the United States)
(This article was first published on 5 November 2025)
In a truly historic victory, self-described democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani has defeated hated former governor Andrew Cuomo to become mayor of New York City, home to Wall Street, the epicenter of US capitalism. With almost all votes counted, Zohran won a 50.4% majority in a three-way race, granting him a mandate from New Yorkers to fight the city’s affordability crisis with a bold platform reviled by big business and much of the political establishment.
Cuomo agreed with Trump, after the president endorsed him, that he deems Zohran to be an existential threat—a bigger threat, it seems than Trump himself. This reactionary section of the establishment race-baited him and they red-baited him, but it didn’t work—in fact, just the opposite: Zohran won more votes than any New York mayoral candidate since 1965. Socialist ideas are especially embraced by young people, who doubled their turnout since last election. Zohran won decisive majorities among working-class voters across the city, including in Black and Latino neighborhoods, and flipped the Bronx after Cuomo won it in the primary.
The mood in NYC is absolutely electric, but after a night of celebration the next phase of this fight must now begin. Over a million New York City voters want bold action to make the richest city in the richest country in the world actually affordable, and many are galvanized to actively participate in this fight. This level of excitement and engagement with a campaign could never have been harnessed by someone promising to conduct business as usual. But we need to be clear: Zohran becoming mayor does not mean smooth sailing from here on out. His entire platform directly contradicts the interests of the Democratic Party and its corporate donors, which will remain Zohran’s biggest obstacle.
Zohran will have two key priorities as mayor: resisting attacks from Trump’s authoritarian administration, and winning the platform he campaigned on, including free buses and free childcare, rent freezes on rent-stabilized apartments, city-owned grocery stores with price caps, and a $30/hr minimum wage. Both tasks will require Zohran to use his executive position to assume the role of “organizer-in-chief,” mobilizing his 100,000-strong volunteer base (over 1% of all New Yorkers!) and leading a mass movement totally independent of the Democratic Party, who will hamstring him every step of the way. Zohran and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) should begin by immediately calling mass meetings in every borough in the coming weeks to launch this fight.
Socialist Alternative members in New York City have spent this election fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with Zohran’s most dedicated volunteers, knocking on doors, talking to working-class New Yorkers about how to make the city affordable, and working to build neighborhood groups preparing to hit the ground running now that the real fight is upon us.
Trump-proofing NYC
It’s currently a question of when, not if, Donald Trump will send the National Guard to New York; he vowed to do so if Zohran won and threatened to withhold funding for crucial and popular infrastructure programs, like the Second Avenue Subway. In his victory speech, Zohran pointed towards the kind of fightback we need when he challenged Trump: “To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.” The nuts and bolts of his fightback plan, though, are unfortunately not much more than what other toothless Democrats across the country are doing, like hiring an army of lawyers and teaming up with the governor to sue the president. Relying on ruling-class institutions like the US court system is a dead-end strategy at the best of times, let alone when Trump blatantly ignores their rulings to continue consolidating power.
Trump’s escalating ICE raids and spending cuts are attacks meant to stoke fear and division in the working class and must be met with mass mobilization to leverage our collective power. For instance, Zohran’s office could call on the quarter of a million people who participated in “No Kings” protests in the region to take action and keep ICE out. That’s the real force capable of defending against Trump and the right wing’s authoritarianism, and would serve as inspiration for other cities around the country and around the world.
Tackling the affordability crisis
“Taxing the rich” is a nonstarter for Governor Kathy Hochul, and she’s unswayed even by the thousands chanting the demand at her at a rally for Zohran in Queens in late October. Zohran shouldn’t meet that with the intention to compromise, as he did on the campaign trail, saying in a debate that he’d drop “tax the rich” if it turned out he could get the money elsewhere. Instead, with his new mandate, he should be doubling down on his most bold progressive positions and organizing his base to fight for them using methods of class struggle, like mass protests, walkouts, and strikes. As a step in the fight for fast and free buses, Zohran could call for a citywide action like an MTA (New York’s public transit system) fare strike, in alliance with the Transport Workers Union, to force the hand of the Albany-appointed MTA board.
Zohran will be under massive pressure to be “pragmatic” and deliver something through collaboration and compromise. But working people win real change not by placing our trust in one representative making backroom deals, but through mass collective struggle against our class enemy—against our bosses, corporate landlords, and all their political stooges. This struggle isn’t a task for one person: Zohran’s 100,000 strong working-class volunteer army and the dozens of unions who backed him, representing over a million workers, are a much more formidable force than even the office of the mayor of New York City. The decisive factor for whether ordinary people win victories or suffer defeats is not who’s in office, but the power of our movement. If Zohran does not quickly take on the task of organizing this force, it will be up to us—DSA, Socialist Alternative, the unions that backed him, and his volunteer army—to do it ourselves.
Zohran’s first 100 days
As we wrote in the latest issue of our newspaper, the real fight begins today. Zohran needs to mobilize his base in the leadup to his first day in office on January 1, keeping his volunteer apparatus alive and turning his dedicated doorknockers towards a mass campaign to win his agenda. For instance, as a first step his office could set a goal of collecting one million petition signatures from New Yorkers who’ll refuse to compromise on taxing the rich, using this as an organizing tool to build toward a tens-of-thousands-strong rally in Albany. This would serve as a warning shot directed at Governor Hochul and the state legislature that the new mayor is not messing around.
Trump’s ICE and National Guard crackdown could come fast, to retaliate against Zohran’s election and his pro-working-class agenda. It will take coordinated mass action like a citywide one-day strike to kick out ICE and make NYC a real sanctuary city—and that can’t be built overnight after Trump invades. Labor unions that endorsed Zohran like UAW Region 9A, SEIU, DC37 and the UFT could start preparing for this now, discussing strategy at membership meetings and establishing workplace committees prepared to lead their coworkers into action.
Using already-existing structures like those that have been built to coordinate canvassing in every neighborhood, Zohran’s office could organize dozens of local meetings; these could draw in wider layers of working people, bringing unions, faith groups, and immigrant rights organizations together to democratically discuss strategy for fighting Trump’s intimidation and austerity. People across the city forming neighborhood watch groups for ICE defense could band together in borough-based coalitions of resistance, prepared to respond quickly to escalating attacks.
Mass protests and rapid response networks are crucial, but must be accompanied by an offensive escalation plan, too. Union density in New York is nearly twice the national average; organized labor needs to step into the ring, prepared to take the struggle against xenophobia concretely into the workplace, by organizing deportation defense committees to protect our undocumented union siblings. When Trump invades NYC, Zohran’s most powerful weapon to defend working-class New Yorkers, and especially immigrants, is not through any overtures toward working with Trump; it’s the massive base of active support he’s built through his campaign.
This is the kind of socialist approach that could set Zohran apart from Democrats like Gavin Newsom and JB Pritzker, and it’s the kind of alternative to business-as-usual politics that New Yorkers want to see. While he’s nominally a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), over the course of the campaign he’s increasingly distanced himself from the organization and its positions, which is a major mistake. As Socialist Alternative knows very well from our ten years of experience in the Seattle City Council, a socialist elected official needs a fighting organization behind them, because under capitalism, the political system is completely hostile to socialist politics, even with the mandate of a decisive electoral victory. Without an organization, it’s too easy to become all bark and no bite.
DSA has played a very important role energetically leading up Zohran’s campaign apparatus, and has impressively grown to 13,000 members in NYC. Now, there should be a role for all members in discussing and debating the strategy Zohran’s office takes. He should answer only to them and to the movement behind him, and should keep Democratic Party functionaries out of his staff.
The task of holding Zohran accountable is of paramount importance, and debates are already ongoing within DSA about the best way to do that—and about if that’s even their responsibility at all. Socialist Alternative argues emphatically that it is. At a recent citywide meeting of NYC DSA, in which several SA members also participated, the steering committee put forward a resolution which initially said that “[their] priority will not be policing the mayor’s lapses and demanding accountability” (their emphasis).
This was met with boos and derision from the floor as members made clear they felt the exact opposite is true. Under pressure from membership, the language was removed. This shows the necessity of robust democratic discussion, but unfortunately the final resolution was still inadequate in preparing for the intense pressure Zohran is under to compromise with the establishment—which he has already begun to bend to. DSA has a central role to play in building the mass campaign to win the agenda Zohran ran on, and to serve as a backbone that resists that pressure. DSA membership meetings should have room for all members to participate and vote in serious discussion and debate about Zohran’s tactics going forward.
We need a new party
Big business and the political establishment are clearly working hard to get Zohran under their thumb, so working people must be prepared to fight back and show who he really needs to be accountable to. Now is not the time to praise his supposed pragmatism in backing off from defunding the NYPD or for inviting Kathy Hochul and NY Attorney General Letitia James to speak at his rallies. Nor can New Yorkers afford to have a “wait and see” attitude, with intentions to speak out only if and when he starts deviating from his promises. Instead, the movement needs to be proactive, using the momentum of the win to immediately launch a concrete campaign for rent freezes and taxing the rich to fund free buses, free childcare, and city-owned grocery stores.
The structures to do this do not and cannot exist within the Democratic Party. Zohran’s victory may seem like a huge opening for him to transform the Democratic Party, charting a leftward path out of its limbo. But the Democrats are tied by a thousand threads to the interests of big business and Wall Street, whose preferred candidate may have lost the election, but whose political machine is well-entrenched in New York City. The number one priority of the Democratic Party establishment, including any party bureaucrats he installs in his administration, will be to fully co-opt Zohran and neuter his agenda as much as possible to make his mayorship palatable to big business. Obama’s friendly offer to act as Zohran’s “sounding board” is part of this effort.
A genuine workers’ administration should have no Democratic Party staffers loyal to the establishment. Instead, it should be composed of community organizers, union fighters, and socialists. Additionally, to combat the systemic pressure on a pro-worker mayor, Zohran should announce that he’s only taking the average workers’ wage, donating the rest to the movement.
If Zohran intends to deliver on the campaign promises that matter most to his supporters, he should look to the UK for an example, where independent socialist MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana recently launched a new left party which quickly attracted 800,000 signups. Zohran should seize on the momentum from this win to announce he and DSA are launching a new, independent, left-wing party with internal democracy, rooted in his working-class base of support, and founded on the mission of struggling for his platform of demands and more. This new party shouldn’t take a dime of corporate cash, and should have committees in every neighborhood for democratic discussion and decision making about how to use Zohran’s office to truly upset the status quo and fight for a New York that works for the vast majority, not the political establishment and Wall Street.
