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IT’S DANGEROUS TO OVERESTIMATE THE LEFT’S STRENGTH  
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Eric Blanc and Bhaskar Sunkara
January 5, 2026
Labor Politics
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_ Be excited about Zohran, but sober about our movement's shallow
roots. The big question now is whether we will be able to lean on that
hope to rebuild a powerful working-class movement in workplaces and
neighborhoods across our city and nation. _

Illustration by Rose Wong, Jacobin,

 

Even with a couple of months’ distance, Zohran Mamdani’s election
still feels almost unreal, like a dispatch from an alternate universe.
But it’s happening: America’s largest city is now led by a young
socialist, a _Jacobin_ subscriber, and a committed member of
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

For many of us on the New York left, this is the high point of our
political lives thus far, a vindication of patient, often grinding
organizing. But amid the celebration, there is a note of worry — the
feeling that we have won the sprint, and now the marathon begins. For
November’s result to mark the beginning of a lasting transformation
of not only one city but national politics, we have to start by
acknowledging an uncomfortable truth: despite our impressive electoral
reach, our movement’s roots are still shallow.

Things were very different when American socialism had its first big
electoral breakthrough. The 1910 election of Socialist mayor Emil
Seidel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, initiated nearly fifty years of
leftist governance in the city. Milwaukee’s triumph was the
culmination of decades of escalating working-class militancy and
socialist growth. Mamdani’s, by contrast, has taken place despite
far lower levels of union and left organization. Consider the raw
numbers: while Milwaukee’s Socialists
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roughly one member for every one hundred city residents, New York’s
chapter of DSA has, even after a big surge in the past decade, one
member for every 670 residents.

But organizational size isn’t the biggest difference. In the early
twentieth century, Milwaukee’s Socialists led nearly every major
union in the city and were woven into working-class neighborhood life.
It was this on-the-ground power that made it possible for them to
sustain their movement for so long and to pressure intransigent
legislators from other parties to pass some of their policy planks,
like improving infrastructure and strengthening workers’ legal
protections. In contrast, New York’s democratic socialists don’t
lead any of the city’s largest unions. And Zohran proved able to win
over much of the working class despite NYC-DSA’s disproportionate
concentration among college-educated voters in a handful of
neighborhoods.

How did we get to this paradox of electoral strength without
organizational depth? And what does it mean for Mamdani’s ability to
govern, as well as for rebuilding a socialist movement worthy of the
name?

HOW WE GOT HERE

Socialists, not just in Wisconsin but nationally, were once deeply
tied to a social base. The late 1930s witnessed the high-water mark of
left power within the organized working class and US politics writ
large. Well-rooted radicals like the Popular Front–era Communists,
Wisconsin’s sewer socialists, and the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party
played a central role in a resurgent labor movement and acted as a
left flank in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition.
But widespread elite-stoked backlash blocked
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movement’s forward advance and culminated in the mass expulsion of
leftists from union leadership nationally during the McCarthyite
purges of the 1950s.

No other industrialized country experienced such a dramatic divorce
between labor and the Left, a split from which both sides have yet to
fully recover. Bureaucratized American unions became narrowly focused
on serving their existing members and making backroom deals with
Democratic leaders, while socialists henceforth found themselves
largely isolated from the broader working class and its organizations.

Though the social movements of the 1960s provided an explosion of
activist energy, the socialist left never came anywhere near its early
majoritarian peaks. A retreat into academia and nonprofits from the
1980s onward further isolated American leftism, while the union
movement, for its part, went into free fall under the combined impact
of deindustrialization and Reaganism. By the 1990s and 2000s, both
American socialism and, to a lesser extent, organized labor were
located firmly on the margins of national political life. Lacking the
collective vehicles to advance their interests — and living in an
increasingly atomized
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society where working-class cultural bonds were being steadily eroded
— workers turned to individualist survival strategies to simply get
by.

The roots of socialism’s rebirth in the United States can be traced
to the 2008 financial crisis and the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement,
both of which thrust the question of economic inequality back to the
fore. But it really took Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign
to drag organized socialism out of the political wilderness.
Membership in DSA spurted upward from less than ten thousand in 2016
to nearly one hundred thousand by 2020, and insurgent electoral
campaigns within Democratic primaries began to catch on. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez was elected to Congress in 2018, as was NYC-DSA’s
first state legislator, Julia Salazar.

For the first time in more than a century, democratic socialism, at
least in New York City, began to build a real political machine
capable of vying for power. Faced with a hollowed-out Democratic Party
and leaning on the volunteer energy of radicalized, downwardly mobile
millennials, it became clear that you could actually win some races
— particularly low-turnout contests in neighborhoods with large
numbers of college-educated young people — even without very deep
roots among the broader working class. Unions, for their part,
continued to decline in number and mostly stayed aloof from, if not
actively hostile toward, these electoral insurgencies. That distance
between the Left’s electoral victories and the overall weakness of
working-class organization remains the central contradiction of our
political moment — we are a Left with ballots cast but few shop
floors won, with more cultural importance than class power.

ZOHRAN’S BREAKTHROUGH

Zohran’s mayoral campaign was a breakthrough for the Left in many
ways. Unlike Bernie, he proved able to dramatically increase youth
turnout. And perhaps most important, propelled by his astounding
success with young minorities, he won over a decisive majority of
working-class voters well beyond the white-collar workers and
professionals upon which the Democrats and the Left have both
increasingly come to depend.

However, precisely because his margins of victory were so
unprecedented for a modern democratic socialist, it’d be dangerous
to overestimate the Left’s strength. Though the roughly one hundred
thousand volunteers that powered Zohran’s campaign constitute an
important extension of organized power into the broader working class,
most of these people are only loosely engaged. One of the crucial
challenges for the movement will be to develop enough of these
volunteers into cadre for Zohran’s agenda in office and, to the
greatest extent possible, for a democratic socialist future.

November’s decisive victory demonstrates that working-class politics
can effectively speak to the anger of everyday people. But in terms of
organization, there remains an undeniable gap between the more than
one million New Yorkers who voted for Zohran and the still quite
narrow base of organized democratic socialists in New York City.
Everything now depends on finding ways to bridge this gap.

REVERSE ENGINEERING A WORKERS’ MOVEMENT

The task ahead is to make use of the momentum of the mayoral victory,
plus the levers of city hall and the reach of Zohran’s massive
platform, to reverse engineer a working-class movement powerful enough
to transform New York City. Many will do this by joining DSA, others
by unionizing their workplaces — some by doing both.

Most urgent of all, huge numbers of New Yorkers will need to plug into
efforts like NYC DSA’s [[link removed]] Tax the Rich and
Our Time [[link removed]], a new campaign meant to
sustain and deepen Zohran’s canvassing operation to win free
childcare, affordable housing, and better transit by taxing the rich.
Workplace and neighborhood Our Time hubs could coordinate petitioning
efforts, hold potluck socials, develop creative ways to reach peers,
and escalate campaigns to pressure the governor and state legislators
to back an affordability agenda. Changing the relationship of forces
through outward-facing organizing will do far more to help make
Zohran’s platform a reality than denunciations
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the administration’s inevitable limitations and compromises.

Still, one socialist insight must never be forgotten: there are limits
to how many doses of socialism within capitalism the system can
tolerate even at the national level, much less the municipal one. And
when you’re up against some of the world’s most powerful corporate
interests, just getting elected and pursuing smart insider politics
isn’t enough to pass even modest social democratic policies.

The fact that establishment politicians like Governor Kathy Hochul
endorsed Mamdani testifies to the strength of the movement behind him.
But our veto-holding governor’s continued hesitation to support
taxing the rich illustrates just how far we still have to go. To push
Hochul and other establishment politicians to fund reforms — and to
keep up Zohran’s popularity in the face of inevitable attacks and
crises (including those imposed by Donald Trump) — New York’s left
will need more popular depth and breadth. Without such a working-class
movement, there’s a real danger that Zohran’s agenda will get
blocked or that, even if it partially passes, most working people will
be too busy with the day-to-day grind or too swayed by media spin to
give him credit.

Nor can we expect that Zohran’s charisma and viral videos will be
sufficient to keep him popular. When the going gets rough — and it
certainly will in the face of concerted billionaire opposition —
even the best communications game won’t be able to assuage the
doubts, misunderstandings, and fears that will arise among ordinary
people. For that, you need trusted on-the-ground organizers talking to
their coworkers, neighbors, family members, and friends. Developing
such a broad layer of well-rooted working-class activists is the key
strategic challenge of the coming months and years.

Given that the central obstacle to socialist power and growth is
working-class resignation, perhaps the single most important thing
about Mamdani’s election is that it has the potential to erode the
despair and fear that have dominated our daily lives and politics for
decades. Zohran himself stressed this dynamic in his victory speech:

There are [some] who see politics today as too cruel for the flame of
hope to still burn. New York, we have answered those fears…. While
we cast our ballots alone, we chose hope together. Hope over tyranny.
Hope over big money and small ideas. Hope over despair. We won because
New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be
made possible. And we won because we insisted that no longer would
politics be something that is done to us. Now it is something that we
do.

New Yorkers were given a reason to hope — and they seized it at the
ballot box. The big question now is whether we will be able to lean on
that hope to rebuild a powerful working-class movement in workplaces
and neighborhoods across our city and across the nation.

_[A version of this article was published in the recent print issue of
_Jacobin_, which you can __subscribe to_
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_[ERIC BLANC is an assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers
University. He blogs at the Substack Labor Politics and is the author
of __We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing
Labor and Winning Big_
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_BHASKAR SUNKARA is the founding editor of Jacobin, the president of
the Nation magazine, and the author of __The Socialist Manifesto: The
Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality_
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* Zohran Mamdani
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* 2025 Elections
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* Elections 2026
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* 2026 Midterms
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* DSA
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* Democratic Socialists of America
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* Working Families Party
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* WFP
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* Politics
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* Left Politics
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* left political strategy
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* Electoral Politics
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* Democratic Party
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* MAGA
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* Donald Trump
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* Affordability crisis
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* socialist movement
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* Fighting Oligarchy Tour
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* Bernie Sanders
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* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
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* AOC
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