The watch party was packed full of Zohran Mamdani supporters, some of whom had just finished a canvassing shift that ended when the polls closed. When the results were announced, sooner than expected, the room broke into excited screams, hugs, and chants of “Fuck you, Cuomo.” Some were in tears. Many seemed relieved and ready for sleep. But as the evening’s speakers said, the fight isn’t over.
Rest? “No, there’s too much to do. We’re facing the national guard, and ICE,” Jews for Racial & Economic Justice organizer Lexi Sasanow told me an hour earlier in Manhattan, 11 miles away. Standing with two others outside a polling place off 110th Street beneath the bright full moon, Sasanow described what people should do today: Find a political home, be it a nonprofit, mutual aid group, or a community garden, so you “have a network of people you want to be with as things get harder.”
JFREJ, for example, is hosting a mass call tomorrow to talk about what comes next. Sasanow and fellow organizer Alessia Milstein, the organization’s digital and communications fellow, urged people to sign up. “We don’t elect saviors,” Milstein said. “We elect comrades.” And while progressive organizations may have more power under a Mamdani administration, the city is going to face real, material threats from President Trump that must be fought.
Mamdani beat former governor and sex pest Andrew Cuomo, 50.4 percent to 41.6 percent as of late Tuesday night. The 8.8-point lead meant that even if Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa had dropped out and sent his 7.1 percent to Cuomo, Cuomo still would have lost.
“We are breathing in the air of a city that has been reborn,” Mamdani said in his acceptance speech. “We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible.”
Mamdani’s 104,400 volunteers took nothing for granted, canvassing until polls closed.
More than 735,000 people cast ballots during early voting alone, quadruple the number of voters who did in 2021. By 3 p.m., voters had already surpassed the turnout of any mayoral election since 2001, casting 1.4 million votes. By the end of the night, the tally was up to two million, the highest mayoral race turnout since 1969.
At the Synod Hall polling site, where JFREJ organizers were getting out the vote, a poll worker said the turnout was the most intense she’d ever seen in her 15 years on the job, and that it was especially busy at lunchtime. “It’s like five times the amount of people coming out,” she said shortly before polls closed, as voters stood beneath the prayer house’s vaulted ceiling and candelabra.
Mamdani’s 104,400 volunteers took nothing for granted, canvassing until polls closed. The campaign knocked on another 1.4 million doors across all five boroughs as of 2 p.m. yesterday, on top of the 1.6 million during the June primary. Now they vow to continue organizing to help Mamdani achieve his agenda.
ELECTION DAY WAS CLEAR AND COLD. Mamdani’s army of volunteers began before dawn, turning out for 6 a.m. shifts near polling places, subway station entrances, and cafés across the city. Some supporters had already been thinking about the day after the election, and were intent on heeding the lessons from other headline-grabbing campaigns built by volunteers.
Obama for America, for example, organized 2.2 million volunteers to get Barack Obama to the White House in 2008. But in the months after he became president, volunteers said they felt discarded and disenchanted because he had no further use for them, even though they wanted to keep fighting for health care and other policy proposals.
“The failure of the Obama era was , ‘Oh, he’ll take care of it from here,’” David Duhalde, former political director of Our Revolution, said ahead of the election. A better move is to keep organizing. Duhalde suggested that anyone who volunteered to get Mamdani elected should rest first, then keep pushing. “You want to keep fighting the hard battles,” he said, such as flipping seats to progressive candidates, and continuing to agitate for progressive policies until they are implemented. Much of Mamdani’s agenda hinges on cooperation with the state legislature and Gov. Kathy Hochul, and persuading Albany will be instrumental to the mayor-elect’s success. But Hochul herself is up for re-election next year.
“It’s not lost on her that a mandate for a Democratic Socialist agenda focused on affordability has grown in the city,” said Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of NYC Democratic Socialists of America. “I think that will be on her mind when she’s campaigning, that hundreds of thousands of people have made their views clear and will be expecting the governor to deliver.”
Several organizations that helped elect Mamdani were already organizing for policy changes similar to his major planks, and leaders told the Prospect yesterday that they intend to keep going.
That’s the plan at CAAAV Voice, a New York Communities for Change coalition member that organizes to build working-class power for Asian immigrants, tenants, and young people. Speaking on Election Day, CAAAV Voice organizing director Alina Shen said her group decided to help get Mamdani to Gracie Mansion as a tactical move in the long battle to make New York more affordable, especially on housing.
His candidacy was an opportunity for CAAAV Voice to highlight its priorities, and engage community members who didn’t previously want to get involved in politics. One of its first volunteer efforts for Mamdani was canvassing small businesses in Chinatown, Shen said, where multiple owners were initially not all that interested in what they had to say. But because some of the volunteers spoke Fujianese and had lived in the neighborhood for years, it was possible to build small, skeptical interactions into trusting relationships.
“We had to earn people’s trust,” Shen said. “There are instances where we’ve had to transform and move people, because we need every single person in this city to move towards this vision together.”
Isaac Kirk-Davidoff, a DC 37 union member and Crown Heights Tenant Union volunteer, also has housing on the mind. Like CAAAV Voice, volunteering for Mamdani was a chance for him to advance his goals of activating renters and getting closer to the goal of organizing across the entire city.
“We don’t just need a new mayor, we need a new system,” he said yesterday. “It’s a window of opportunity and I really want to seize it and see what we can push through.”
Continuing to organize is not as simple as just saying you’ll do it, he said; long-term organizing takes time and stamina. His day-after suggestion is to find or stay with a group and to talk to neighbors, especially for those living in a building with problems.
“My advice is to find that space where you can think, act, and do politics,” he said, “and build from there.”
[Whitney Curry Wimbish is a staff writer at The American Prospect and can be reached at [email protected]. She previously worked in the Financial Times newsletter division for 17 years and before that was a reporter at The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and the Herald News in New Jersey.]
Read the original article at Prospect.org.
Used with the permission. © The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 2025. All rights reserved.
Support the American Prospect.
Click here to support the Prospect's brand of independent impact journalism.
