Zohran’s Victory Shows We Need to Run a Socialist for President
By Allan F. & Ben D.
Allan F. is a member of NYC-DSA and DSA’s Bread & Roses Caucus. Ben D. is a member of Metro DC DSA and DSA’s Groundwork Caucus.
Zohran’s campaign shows that executive races have the best ability to reach working people. To recreate the effects of Zohran’s campaign at a national level, delegates at the 2025 DSA convention should vote for R33.
This article is cross-published here and in The Call.
Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the NYC Democratic Mayoral primary has sent shockwaves across the country. Zohran has gone from being a little-known, DSA-elected State Assembly Member in New York to being the national face of the Left virtually overnight. Alongside Zohran and his affordability-focused platform, his self-professed ideology — democratic socialism — and the organization he proudly and publicly identifies with — the Democratic Socialists of America — have entered the national spotlight. Zohran’s victory was a massive leap forward for the Left and has already made significant contributions to class formation in the United States. But, importantly, Zohran’s campaign also serves as a proof of concept that campaigns for executive offices present the best opportunity for the Left to spread our message to an audience of millions of working people.
If this is true for a mayoral campaign, it is all the more true for a presidential campaign. This is why our caucuses, Bread & Roses and Groundwork, are proud to bring forth a resolution at the upcoming 2025 DSA convention — “Resolution 33: Unite Labor and the Left To Run A Socialist For President” — committing DSA to seriously prepare for running a socialist candidate in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary. If Zohran’s victory is causing ripples across the US political landscape, a DSA-backed presidential campaign in the 2028 Democratic primary can cause tidal waves rivaling the impact of Bernie’s two campaigns. As DSA begins to discuss potentially backing a presidential candidate in 2028, it’s important to take stock of the lessons learned from Zohran’s campaign. That campaign provides four reasons to support backing a socialist challenger in 2028.
Reason #1: Working People Are Desperate For Change
Zohran’s victory shows that working people are desperate for change and are open to left-populist politics. The Trump administration’s attacks on working people and the Democratic Party’s failure to present a competent challenge to Trump have created an opening for socialist politics. Recent polling shows that Trump’s favorability is at 40%, with a net approval rating of -15%. Polling for the Democratic Party is even worse, with favorability of congressional Democrats at just 19%, the lowest it has been in decades. The Democratic Party’s leadership has lost favorability even among its base, with only 39% of registered Democrats approving of the job the party is doing in Congress — opposed to 52% of the party’s base who disapprove. This creates a massive opening for socialists to step into this void with a class-struggle, left-populist message. The popular resentment against Trump’s anti-worker policy and dissatisfaction with the corporate Democratic party establishment fueled Bernie’s “Fighting Oligarchy Tour,” which drew massive crowds across the United States, including in Republican-dominated territory, on a class-struggle framework.
Additionally, after decades of austerity, stagnant wages, growing inequality, and rising costs of education and housing, socialism is more popular than ever. Libertarians have sounded the alarm after the Cato Institute recently published a study showing that 62% of Americans aged 18-29 are favorable to socialism. Zohran’s campaign succeeded in turning out many of these young people to vote in the primary, often for the first time. It was this huge increase in youth turnout that won Zohran the election.
Since Bernie’s first run, DSA has continuously built a larger socialist base, but, by not providing a left-wing alternative in 2024, we missed a chance to move this base into action and to propagandize on the only political terrain that reliably reaches a majority of American workers: the presidential election. As Trump accelerates his attacks on working people and our democratic institutions over the next three years, we can expect these contradictions to heighten, creating an even more favorable political opening for socialists in 2028. It’s important that we take advantage of this opportunity.
Reason #2: Executive Campaigns Can Give Socialist Politics a National Stage
So far, with limited exceptions, most DSA electoral campaigns have been limited to campaigns for legislative office. While we’ve made tremendous progress at winning legislative office — especially at the local and state level — there’s only so much that legislative campaigns can do by themselves. Most Americans probably don’t know their local city council member, state representative, or member of Congress, but are likely to know their mayor, governor, and president. As previously argued, executive campaigns have been crucial to the growth of nascent left movements. Even when unsuccessful, these campaigns can successfully broadcast a party’s message to a large audience, grow its membership, and, through its coattail effects, deepen its bench of down-ballot electeds. We’ve seen this in Bernie’s presidential campaigns. Bernie’s two campaigns were major causes of the revival of democratic socialism, DSA’s explosion in growth, the election of the Squad to Congress, and the resurgence of the labor movement.
Zohran’s mayoral campaign, DSA’s first serious campaign for executive office, has confirmed this hypothesis. Zohran has served as a New York State Assembly Member for two terms without causing much of a stir, but his mayoral campaign has turned him into a national sensation. Since his victory in the primary, Zohran has appeared on numerous national news outlets, explaining democratic socialism on CNN and arguing that billionaires shouldn’t exist on NBC. Zohran’s presence online has grown throughout his campaign, with many of his 3.8 million followers on Instagram and 14 million likes on TikTok coming from outside of New York.
This national attention hasn’t been limited to just Zohran. After Zohran's victory, searches for “democratic socialism” on Google exploded to the highest level since the 2020 election and DSA National Co-Chair, Ashik Siddique, was invited to speak on CSPAN about the organization’s growth. This spark of interest in Zohran and democratic socialism is not limited to high-information voters, with ordinary workers all across the United States organically discussing Zohran on the shop-floor. Zohran’s impact on the national public consciousness, especially among Gen Z, has been immeasurable.
Bernie’s campaign was built on the idea that he could bring out millions of depoliticized non-voters around a democratic socialist message. While Bernie’s campaigns activated and organized many people, he was unable to reshape the electorate in this way. Zohran’s campaign has proven something Bernie’s did not: a democratic socialist campaign can win over massive numbers of working-class people who had not consistently voted or been politically engaged. The scale of his volunteer effort, if matched nationwide, would be in the millions. The effects of such a campaign on class consciousness in the United States would vastly exceed that of the Bernie campaigns.
Reason #3: DSA Can Play A Leading Role In An Executive Campaign
Bernie’s 2020 campaign was the last significant executive campaign that DSA meaningfully contributed to at the national level. As we were smaller and less experienced than we are now, DSA played a minor role, acting as a junior partner in Bernie’s campaign. However, in the five years since, after nearly doubling our membership, winning successful electoral campaigns across the country, and developing our canvassing capacity at the local level, DSA can now play a leading role in an executive campaign.
The experience of Zohran’s campaign confirms this. NYC-DSA was the driving force behind Zohran’s campaign, with DSA cadre serving as the majority of canvassing field leads. It was NYC-DSA’s extensive electoral infrastructure, built over the last several years, that was responsible for Zohran’s amazing ground game, as the chapter mobilized over 50,000 volunteers to knock over 1.5 million doors. The close association between NYC-DSA and Zohran’s campaign has been greatly beneficial for the chapter, with membership up over 4,000 members since the start of the campaign. The campaign was able to bring field leads and other budding organizers into DSA, turning an electoral campaign from something that exists just through an election into something that can build sustainable working-class organization for the long haul.
A DSA-backed Presidential campaign in 2028 would be able to mirror NYC-DSA’s experience on a national scale. DSA’s national infrastructure would be crucial for a left challenger to the Democratic establishment. A DSA candidate would have pre-built campaign infrastructure, complete with local offices and strong canvassing operations in dozens of major cities, ready to go on day one. A truly DSA-led campaign, like Zohran’s, at a national scale would allow the organization to democratically direct much of the campaign’s program and messaging. Additionally, just like Zohran’s campaign, a presidential campaign tied closely to DSA would be able to convert enthusiasm behind the campaign into massive growth for the organization.
Reason #4: Executive Campaigns Can Unite The Left & Labor
We have made massive progress in bringing DSA closer to the labor movement over the last several years, both through solidarity campaigns like Strike Ready and, crucially, through the work of rank-and-file DSA members being active on the shop-floor and in union reform efforts. However, we have made little progress in merging our electoral work with our labor organizing work. Zohran’s campaign demonstrates that executive campaigns can activate labor and bring the labor movement closer to DSA.
Thanks to efforts of DSA members and other rank-and-file reformers who organized for a Zohran endorsement in their union, United Auto Workers Region 9A was the first union to endorse Zohran, with UAW President Shawn Fain calling on working-class New Yorkers to rank Zohran first and UAW rank-and-file workers clocking in over 1,000 volunteer canvass shifts for Zohran. Members in DC37, a historically conservative union with 150,000 members, organized internally for a Zohran endorsement, winning him a shocking second place ranking endorsement. This endorsement from DC37 is crucially important as the union is largely composed of older black and brown workers, a key demographic of the multiracial working-class that the modern US left has failed to connect with in the past. This rank-and-file network created by the Zohran campaign will last beyond this election and serve an important role for both future electoral campaigns and contract fights and reform efforts within the union.
However, despite these notable examples, most major unions either backed Andrew Cuomo or remained neutral during the Democratic primary, reflecting the power that the conservative union bureaucracy still holds over the majority of the labor movement. The UAW bucking this trend shows that we need internal union reform and increased rank-and-file militancy on the shop-floor to push unions towards class-struggle politics. On the other hand, the experience of the “City Workers For Zohran” network in DC37 shows that electoral campaigns can conversely help spur labor organizing. Members activated by these electoral campaigns can help reform and democratize their unions, pushing the labor movement toward class politics in both the electoral arena and in their contract fights.
DSA can build on this in 2028. The 2028 presidential campaign coincides with Fain’s call for the labor movement to align their contract expirations for May 1st, 2028. This creates an unprecedented opportunity to unite the labor movement with the Left and to further the process of class-formation within the United States. A socialist candidate can walk the picket-lines with Fain and champion the demands of the striking workers. This mass labor mobilization, when combined with a socialist presidential campaign that has unified messaging and demands can spark a new historic upsurge in labor militancy across the United States. Additionally, through a presidential campaign, we have an opportunity to bring members of DSA and of major class-struggle unions, like UAW, together in a left-labor coalition — which can serve as the foundation for a future mass worker’s party in the United States.
Vote Yes On R33, Let’s Run A Socialist For President
Zohran’s campaign shows us that DSA can run an executive campaign that can capitalize on people’s frustration with the status quo, spread socialist messaging to a large audience, grow the organization, and bring the Left and labor together. By launching a presidential campaign in the 2028 Democratic primary, we will be able to do all this at a far larger scale. But, to be ready to take on such a campaign in 2028, we need to start preparing now. That’s why R33 commits us to laying the foundations for a possible future campaign now. If you’re a delegate to the 2025 DSA convention, we urge you to vote yes on R33.