Zohran Mamdani, the charismatic young Democratic Party candidate for mayor of New York City, has been hard at work balancing his deep-dyed socialist beliefs with his need to show voters that he is at least a cousin to mainstream liberal Democrats.
Last week, he confirmed that he had previously fielded a phone call from former President Barack Obama. With cameras rolling, Mamdani spent a day in early August in the political embrace of Elizabeth Warren, a progressive Democratic doyen. The Massachusetts senator talked passionately of challenging billionaires while Mamdani talked of his sympathy for police officers whom he described as overstretched and overworked. The same day, they sat on a park bench like old buddies, chatting and leaning in toward each other. Mamdani shed a possibly impromptu tear—after which he and Warren burst out laughing, in a moment that his campaign promptly retailed on Facebook and TikTok.
Mamdani, 33, conveys that he is a man prepared to work with the organs of capitalist democracy to progressive ends and not to demand ideological litmus tests. But the Mamdani who takes great pride in his identity as a member of Democratic Socialists of America and who told Meet the Press in late June that “I don’t think we should have billionaires”—to the alarm of Wall Street donors—has hardly disappeared.
By his own account, his political journey from state assemblyman to mayoral nominee owes almost entirely to his umbilical connection with DSA. A cache of podcast interviews and speeches over the past five years sheds light on his view of this evolution.
Two years ago, in a speech at DSA’s national convention, he described how belonging to the organization helped him and a handful of fellow socialist assembly members survive in the cauldron of Albany. “We are special as DSA electeds not because of ourselves; we are special because of our organization,” he said. “It is far easier to corrupt an individual than a mass-movement organization.” He concluded, “So sincerity forever, solidarity forever, and socialism forever.” In past years, he has also argued that DSA must push for causes that make some supporters uncomfortable, such as the “end goal of seizing the means of production.”
The practical meaning of that rhetoric—its old-school socialist flavor boarding on obscurantist—is difficult to parse, and not just because Mamdani is remaking his image in real time. The political left from which Mamdani emerges is a collection of disorderly tribes, sheltering self-styled revolutionaries alongside those who prize compromise and electoral victory, and those who want to sand the edges off capitalism alongside those who want to replace it altogether.
Within DSA, that tendency toward sectarianism can produce a cacophonous and quarrelsome internal politics: Marx meets the Marx Brothers. Some members—likely a majority of the organization—seem intent on trying to change the Democratic Party from within, by supporting figures such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in primaries. Some speak of the group becoming a party of its own. Still others have formed Leninist cliques that yearn to transform DSA into a revolutionary vanguard.
Earlier this month, a DSA-friendly Substack account cobbled together a reader’s guide to the organization’s clotted mass of caucuses. Among them is Red Star, a Marxist-Leninist outcropping whose unforgiving politics can be discerned from a recent post entitled “We Do Not Condemn Hamas, and Neither Should You.” My favorite DSA offshoot is the Caracol caucus, an eco-socialist degrowth group named for the Spanish word for snail.
Those allied with Mamdani, and those who fear and oppose him, are alike in speculating how much socialism he might try to bring to New York. But the bigger question might be what kind of socialism he embraces. His challenge will be to draw on DSA’s organizing support while transcending its fractiousness and some members’ ideological excesses.
DSA sprang to life in 1982 from the dying embers of earlier left-wing organizations. Its founders were committed to working within the Democratic Party. The group’s intellectual father was Michael Harrington, whose 1962 book The Other America: Poverty in the United States was credited with helping build support for Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society program. Harrington described DSA as occupying “the left wing of the possible.” That DSA refused for many years to work with Marxist-Leninists and Trotskyites, who were seen—for reasons grounded in decades of empirical observation—as authoritarian and disdainful of democracy. It attracted New York politicians such as former Mayor David Dinkins and had a membership of about 6,000. It remained bookish and locally respected and—for the first couple of decades after the end of the Cold War—more or less irrelevant.
Then came 2016 and Bernie Sanders’s electric run for the Democratic presidential nomination. The Vermont senator is both avowedly a democratic socialist and temperamentally unsuited to behaving as any group’s obedient cadre. He never joined DSA (and long avoided joining the Democratic Party), but young people flocked to his banner—and to DSA’s. Two years later, a 28-year-old bartender and waitress vanquished a top House Democratic leader in a congressional primary. That insurgent, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was a preternatural political talent. She became the face of DSA and played a role in attracting tens of thousands more young people to join the organization, whose national membership stands at about 70,000. The New York City chapter has 10,000 members.
Joshua Freeman, a retired historian at the City University of New York, joined DSA a few years ago, drawn by its sense of possibility. “The party is dominated by younger people, which is absolutely everyone except for about three of us,” he said. The 20-somethings gravitating to DSA in the past decade could be forgiven for viewing as ancient history the angry polemics and intellectual brawls that marked relations between 20th-century social democrats, Stalinists, and Trotskyites.
Yet significant divides have opened up within today’s group. “The problem is that while New York City DSA is pretty much in the ‘left wing of the possible’ tradition, the national party is not in that place,” Maurice Isserman, a historian at Hamilton College, told me. He was a DSA member for many decades before quitting when DSA equivocated about the brutal Hamas attacks of October 7. “Once the left sectarians are lodged in place, they become an immoveable force.”
Militant groupings within DSA local chapters wield more power in cities such as San Francisco, Boston, Syracuse, and Portland, Oregon, than in New York. The Portland branch—four of whose members now sit on the city council—urges members to pursue a “rupture with the Democratic Party.” And its co-chair, Olivia Katbi, recently boasted on X of telling a New York Times reporter to bug off because that newspaper published “disgusting, racist, dehumanizing propaganda” about Palestinians.
These militant caucuses wield considerable power on DSA’s national committee, which controls national endorsements. The militants hold candidates to exacting, even self-defeating, standards. In 2024 the national organization withdrew its endorsement of Ocasio-Cortez, the group’s best-known candidate. She apparently had paid insufficient attention to its Federal Socialists in Office Committee and, in a moment of apostasy, had co-signed a press release supporting stronger anti-missile systems to help Israel defend its civilian population.
DSA’s New York City branch, by contrast, voted by a wide margin to endorse her. “We’re concerned at the increasing mismanagement and sectarianism in DSA’s national leadership,” a caucus prominent in the New York chapter said in a statement, “as some leaders attempt to steer the organization into powerlessness and isolation.” (Ocasio-Cortez survived the national DSA snub, besting her Republican opponent by 38 points.)
Mamdani is more of a from-the-cradle socialist than Ocasio-Cortez. His father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a prominent theorist of settler colonialism at Columbia University; his mother, Mira Nair, is a well-known filmmaker—Monsoon Wedding, Mississippi Masala, and The Reluctant Fundamentalist—with left-wing politics. When invited to attend the progressive Haifa International Film Festival in Israel in 2013, she declined, tweeting that she would go there only when Israel ended the occupation and stopped “privileging one religion over another.” Zohran, who identifies as a Muslim, noted in August 2023 that Palestinian liberation is “at the core” of his politics and was the cause that drew him to DSA.
DSA’s national political platform, rewritten when Mamdani was an assemblyman, is a gumbo of left-wing positions, many of which sit miles from the political mainstream. The organization would free all inmates from prisons and jails and decriminalize the drug trade, prostitution, and squatting in unoccupied homes. DSA endorses cutting police budgets “annually towards zero,” disarming cops, and decertifying their unions.
Mamdani has hauled some of this ideological baggage into the national spotlight. In December 2020, just after he was elected to the state assembly, Mamdani wrote of New York City’s police force: “There is no negotiating with an institution this wicked & corrupt. Defund it.” That view has not aged well. Mamdani of late has taken to energetically disavowing his former view, portraying it as an artifact from many years past, before he was an elected official. “I am not defunding the police. I am not running to defund the police,” Mamdani told reporters last month, after meeting in late July with the family of a police officer killed in a mass shooting. Mamdani said that he is a “candidate who is not fixed in time, one that learns and one that leads, and part of that means admitting as I have grown.”
The political successes of Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and now Mamdani have done much to rehabilitate the term socialist and even give it a hip aura. Evidence that the term no longer carries a toxic sting can be heard on the right, as conservative commentators now use a harsher term to describe Mamdani: communist.
His actual positions range from splendidly consumer-friendly promises such as free municipal buses and cheap groceries in city-owned supermarkets to universal day care for all children ages six weeks to 5 years. He promises to freeze apartment-building rents and to triple the city’s capital budget, creating 200,000 units of publicly subsidized housing. The price tag for this is $100 billion over 10 years. He has sidestepped the question of how he would pay for all this, however badly day care and housing are needed, other than to propose billions of dollars in new taxes, all of which are controlled by the state legislature and governor.
As the Democratic nominee, Mamdani met recently with the Partnership for New York City, a chamber of commerce for finance, real-estate, and corporate leaders. Afterward, Kathryn S. Wylde, its longtime president, told me that although Mamdani “has no policy chops—none—he is smart, has a smile that will kill, and he will listen.” He has overhauled his communications and campaign team, importing distinctly non-cadre sorts from the Democratic mainstream.
Mamdani seems aware that, however much he might still listen to his DSA comrades, he faces a larger reality: He could soon oversee some 300,000 employees in a city of 8.5 million people.
Still, unease among wealthy New Yorkers is palpable. They are accustomed to winning and not inclined to bet on the chances that a smart left-wing candidate might moderate after being elected mayor. They would prefer to spend money and seek his defeat. Several years ago, Mamdani joked about this reflex: “It’s almost a ritual of the donor class to set their money on fire when it comes to running against DSA candidates.”
Exhibit A is an email that an acquaintance forwarded to me in late July. Written by Ricky Sandler, the CEO of a global equity-management firm, the message predicted that a Mamdani victory would have “dire consequences.” It proposed a joint fund that would shower millions of dollars on a competing candidate. In his email, Sandler, who did not respond to my request for an interview, pledged to toss in $500,000, and he set the desired minimum counterrevolutionary donation at $25,000.
Alas, the donor class’s other choices are not appetizing. They include formerly indicted Mayor Eric Adams, now running as an independent; former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, now running a sputtering independent campaign after Mamdani soundly defeated him in the Democratic primary; and Curtis Sliwa, a Republican best known for founding the anti-crime group Guardian Angels in the 1970s and more recently for sharing his apartment with 16 cats.
Mamdani’s commanding lead in the polls offers him much room for political redefinition. His transition in the past five years—from obscure socialist state assembly candidate to a TikTok star who attracts Obama’s interest and sheds an artful tear with Warren—is remarkable. It is premature to say that he will wind up as just another left-liberal Democrat. He has been insistent throughout his brief political career on the centrality of his identity as a socialist. Without that, he told the DSA convention two years ago, “you will start to rationalize that which you initially rebelled against.” Socialists know, he told the convention, that “winning an election is not an end, but a means to an end.” The precise contours of his desired end remain, for now, something of a mystery.
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