Zohran Mamdani’s astonishing victory in New York City’s mayoral election will electrify the Left nationally — as it should. But what does this win mean for socialists? It’s always tempting to read election results in sweeping ideological terms, as an index of the national mood or the vindication of an ideology. We all remember less than a year ago, when Kamala Harris’s loss showed that an increasingly anti-immigrant nation was lurching rightward — and older readers will even remember that four years ago Eric Adams’s tough-on-crime centrism was the future of the Democratic Party. (Now people are saying the same thing about Zohran.)

But elections are never tidy referenda on an ideology or a platform. They’re determined to a very large degree by the talents and foibles of whoever happens to run. If Mamdani hadn’t been elected to the New York State Legislature in 2020, he wouldn’t have been in a position to run, and no candidate of similar talent and commitment would have replaced him. If Eric Adams hadn’t been notoriously corrupt, he might well be cruising to victory right now, and no serious candidate might have emerged to challenge him. There was no guarantee that the opportunity to run a democratic socialist for New York City mayor in 2025 would emerge, or that when it emerged there would be a candidate ready to seize it.

Exactly because of that contingency though, the work that positioned the Left to seize that opportunity was crucial. A significant part of that work was done by the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA), which has spent the past decade electing candidates like Mamdani to city council and state legislative positions. The chapter and its sister Mid-Hudson Valley DSA chapter have elected nine state legislators and two city councilors to office, all of them committed to the cause of working people. A mayoral election wasn’t part of the plan for NYC-DSA eight years ago, but if our chapter hadn’t ground it out in the trenches of state assembly races then the organizational capacity and coalition relationships and credibility and, most important, the candidate wouldn’t have existed for a race like this.

That organizational capacity has also shaped how the race was run. NYC-DSA has developed a unique campaign ethos over the years, one centered on “field” — that is, canvassing by thousands of individual volunteers. For NYC-DSA, canvassing isn’t simply a tactic for winning votes (although it is that); it’s a way to bring ordinary people directly into the campaign as a collective project, as participants and co-organizers rather than observers and fans. Mamdani clearly understands his 90,000-strong volunteer canvassing operation as key to his success, and it’s no accident that that operation was led by veteran DSA campaigner Tascha Van Auken; the campaign has built on (and improved on) an organizational ethos and technical skill developed over years of winning and losing campaigns in DSA.

This mass participation ethos explains more than most outside observers will realize about the power of Mamdani’s campaign. There has never been a moment in my lifetime when the gap between people’s politicized desire (to work together to change the world) and the opportunities offered them has been greater. In these circumstances, the Mamdani campaign’s ability to offer people not only hope but the opportunity to work for change and build connections with neighbors has felt revolutionary.

Even so, the campaign might well have foundered against stronger opponents. I’ve heard many people say this cycle that Zohran has been lucky in his opponents — lucky that Adams was corrupt and in hock to Trump, and lucky that Andrew Cuomo is a disgraced former governor possessed of skeletal anti-charisma who went down in flames for sexual harassment and whose policies in his years as governor are largely responsible for everything that’s wrong with New York City today.

Certainly, if the billionaire donors who backed Adams and then Cuomo had found a better standard-bearer, the race might have gone differently. But I submit to you that their failure is not exactly, or not exclusively, down to bad luck. There are structural reasons why the centrist candidates are so awful, reasons that were also much on display in last year’s presidential campaign.

A Democratic Party increasingly disconnected from any meaningful base and bereft of even meaningful internal structure winds up being dominated by whoever’s currently on top and whoever can rake in the most donations; it’s not an accident that those people make bad, out-of-touch, scandal-prone, corrupt candidates, and it’s not an accident that even when the centrist donors can see that a disaster is unfolding for them (Joe Biden in the summer of 2024, Cuomo immediately after the primary this year), they lack the collective capacity to stop it. This form of failure is built in; the system is what it is and systematically elevates people like Adams and Cuomo to power.

More surprising, to me anyway, was Zohran’s success in dominating the progressive lane in the primary. This is the place where I’m most tempted to throw up my hands and blame contingency: for reasons still not fully understood by scientists, some people are just more charismatic than other people.

That’s some of it — but there’s more than that. A broad spectrum of even progressive politicians are trapped by a mental model where voters are on a spectrum from Left to Right; in that mental model, if the voters move right (as they seemed to in 2024) then you move right. There’s a cottage industry right now of Democratic pundits insisting that if Democrats want to beat Trump they need to focus on commonsense pocketbook issues; in these unprecedented times, it’s simply too risky to reach for unprecedented measures.

This worldview generates ever-more-absurd results (Trump is winning because he’s focusing on kitchen-table issues, like kidnapping construction workers and giving children measles). But the “progressive” candidates shared this worldview, and it caused them to fundamentally misread the political moment. Voters weren’t tired of the extreme and looking for the center; they weren’t tired of Biden’s progressivism and looking for common sense; they were tired of a status quo that is clearly not working as policy (can’t afford rent) or politics (ruled by fascists), and they were looking for something aggressively new. Zohran offered that.

This dimension of the campaign can’t be understood apart from the war in Gaza. When Mamdani announced his campaign, his rigorously principled and public support for Palestinian rights was viewed as his largest liability as a candidate — even more so than his democratic socialist commitments. It turned out to be just the opposite, a powerful asset. Many voters (particularly, but not exclusively, young and Muslim voters) had grown increasingly disgusted by mainstream Democrats’ evidently dishonest apologia for Israeli genocide; Mamdani’s unwillingness to compromise on this issue and his demand for equal rights for Palestinians became a mark of his courage and authenticity not only on Israel-Palestine but more broadly. Many voters may not have had a clear view on the two-state solution, but they were tired of lies and evasions.

What happens now? Mamdani’s election represents success beyond the wildest dreams of most New York socialists eight or four or two years ago. But as many have pointed out, this is just the beginning of the fight. A lot is riding on what we manage to do together as a city in the next four years — both to deliver public solutions to crises like housing and childcare and, first and foremost, to protect New York’s hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Trump’s campaign of ethnic cleansing.

There’s certainly no guarantee of success. But for New Yorkers, a Mamdani administration offers the opportunity to fight back — and for socialists nationwide, his campaign offers a blueprint for building the infrastructure to win power.