Halper and Sani are among the thousands of volunteers who are aiming to elect 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani as the next mayor of New York City.
Halper, a member of the DSA like Mamdani, is inspired by the candidate’s vision for New York City.
But like many other volunteers, he’s not immune to the pull of something much more tangible — merch.
All Mamdani volunteers receive a “ZetroCard:” it looks like a MetroCard, but with spaces on the back to mark how many times they’ve canvassed.
“What?” “I’m here to talk to tenants about Zohran Mamdani?” Sani tries again.
Amid the persistent drizzle, the majority of New Yorkers were cooped up in their apartments on a somber Wednesday night. Dylan Halper and Mohit Sani were hoping for precisely this situation.
Halper beats a jovial knock on an apartment door in the Upper East Side. Maria, a woman, emerges with her barking dog at her heels.
This is Mohit, and my name is Dylan. We are volunteers for the mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani,” Halper says.
After being paired with Sani, a novice canvasser, Halper, who is only eighteen, takes the initiative.
With skepticism, Maria asks, “Democrat or Republican?”. Before now, she had never heard of Mamdani.
“Democrat,” Halper tells her, “he wants rent-stabilized tenants to have their rent frozen.”. “.”.
“That’s me!” she’s saying.
Soon after, Maria utters the enchanted words, “I vote for him.”. She also expresses gratitude to the two volunteers who came.
Sani and Halper are part of the thousands of volunteers working to elect Zohran Mamdani, 33, as the next mayor of New York City.
Joining the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and representing Queens in the state Assembly, Mamdani is running on a platform of affordability, which includes universal childcare, free buses, city-run grocery stores, and a rent freeze.
He has exceeded expectations thus far, emerging as a strong number two in the polls from a group of progressives. He gained support from the “terminally online” thanks to his progressive campaign platform, which was presented through polished social media videos. Additionally, he has maximized his campaign contributions from individual donors: The campaign has received over 27,000 donations, 12,000 more than the next-highest number of donors, city Comptroller Brad Lander. He is seen by his supporters as a socialist Barack Obama or a young Bernie Sanders.
To his critics, however, he is inexperienced, a nepo baby, a “show pony,” and even antisemitic. Mamdani would be the first Muslim mayor of New York if elected, and his opinions on what he unapologetically calls a genocide in Gaza have left him open to criticism from pro-Israel politicians, who have made trips to Israel a standard part of the job for politicians in the city.
The former governor is still ahead of him. Although a recent Emerson poll has Mamdani cutting the lead to single digits in the last round of a ranked-choice voting tally, Andrew Cuomo has been leading the race since he entered it and has held a sizable lead ever since. With the help of well-funded local super PACs known as independent expenditure groups, Cuomo has raised the most money overall.
To differentiate themselves, however, the Mamdani campaign is relying on their ground game.
The campaign reports that they have knocked on over 750,000 doors and that almost 30,000 people have signed up to canvass. According to Mamdani, it’s “the largest volunteer operation in NYC history.”. Undoubtedly, it’s the biggest one taking place this election cycle.
The canvassers for Mamdani are present every night of the week in every borough.
It may be an unappreciated task. Volunteers must navigate their way through buzzer systems and doormen to enter apartment buildings in the city, where they frequently end up on the ground floor of one of the notorious walk-ups in New York. And most of the time, nobody is home.
However, that doesn’t deter Halper and Sani.
Like Mamdani, Halper is a DSA member who finds inspiration in the candidate’s plans for New York City. Like many other volunteers, though, he is susceptible to the allure of something far more material: merchandise.
A “ZetroCard,” which resembles a MetroCard with spaces on the back to indicate how many times they have canvassed, is given to each Mamdani volunteer. Halper has been informed that he will receive a poster, a sought-after memento that he cannot obtain elsewhere, if he completes the card quickly enough.
Andrew Epstein, a spokesperson for Mamdani, claims that because of New York City’s campaign finance regulations, none of the campaign’s merchandise is actually for sale. Like bright yellow bandanas adorned with iconic New York City symbols like pigeons and hot dogs, it has transformed Zohran-branded merchandise into cult collectibles that volunteers wear or tie to their tote bags.
Additionally, the campaign makes it very simple to show up, which is the only way to receive one.
low entry barrier.
The 25-year-old Anna Henderson stated, “I’ve considered volunteering for other things, but no one responds to your emails, or you have to apply and go do this thing, and then they only have one shift a week — and that’s when you work.”.
However, the Mamdani signups are straightforward and plentiful: “I just clicked on a day I could go in my neighborhood and just went,” Henderson said when he made the decision to do so. She is now an experienced canvasser on the Lower East Side.
There are advantages and disadvantages to the low entry barrier as well as the chance to canvass in your local community. On the one hand, volunteers can use information unique to their neighborhood, such as a local bus that was provided for free because of Mamdani’s legislation.
Conversely, the entire South Bronx lacks canvasses, while some neighborhoods, such as Williamsburg and Astoria, have a lot of them.
Maxwell Dickinson, one of the field leads in The Bronx, went out on a Saturday afternoon with a varied group of volunteers, including several individuals over 40, a crucial demographic that Mamdani needs but hasn’t yet captured.
Dickinson, a native of Miami, currently resides in Riverdale. If he notices a child in the apartment, he likes to start his canvassing conversations by mentioning universal child care and Mamdani’s free-bus platform.
Personally, I’ve never mentioned that he’s in the DSA, especially being from Miami,” Dickinson remarked, alluding to the Cuban community in Miami who are skeptical of socialism. However, that might just be my paranoia. “”.
The Bronx canvassers are aware that their borough is not receiving enough attention. At a diner, they discuss ways to grow their business over coffee and pancakes following the canvass. Because of its sizable Bengali community, one volunteer expressed her belief that Parkchester would welcome Mamdani. Another suggested that in order to spread the word, the campaign collaborate with nearby organizations.
Dickinson concurred: “You need people who are from there.”.
To the polls from the phones.
Mamdani is literally trailing in the footsteps of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another Democratic Socialist from New York City. In order to defeat the incumbent Representative in 2018, Ocasio-Cortez emphasized the importance of her ground strategy. Joseph Crowley. Once on exhibit at a Cornell museum, her battered shoes came to represent the power of face-to-face communication for marginalized candidates. As of yet, Ocasio-Cortez has not endorsed anyone in the mayoral race. ).
Mamdani needs to reach people in all five boroughs, while Ocasio-Cortez only needed to rally voters in her Bronx and Queens district. Ocasio-Cortez’s efforts to attract supporters through door-to-door canvassing had a significant impact because the congressional primary had an exceptionally low turnout of only 11.8 percent of registered Democratic voters.
It’s easy to see where Mandani’s voter base is concentrated because his canvasses are typically held in areas with a high volunteer population. The most frequent canvass opportunities are offered five days a week in Brooklyn’s Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant, Manhattan’s East Village, and Queens’ Astoria.
However, it’s possible that the younger, frequently transplanted residents of those neighborhoods won’t actually vote. While the turnout in Bushwick, Brooklyn, was only about 14 percent, the west side of Manhattan, from Greenwich Village to Columbia University, had some of the highest turnouts in 2021, ranging from 30 to 40 percent. Furthermore, younger voters are notorious for staying at home: in the 2021 mayoral primary, only 18 percent of registered Democrats aged 18 to 29 cast ballots, compared to more than twice that of those aged 70 to 79. A primary voter in New York is 54 years old on average.
The goal of some Mamdani organizers is to alter that.
Initially, Myesha Choudhury canvassed for Mamdani in places like Staten Island, Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and Hillside, Queens. Talking to small business owners in Jackson Heights particularly inspired her: “I was literally speaking about New York City politics in Bangla, my native language, to New Yorkers who had been here for decades and decades,” she said.
In contrast to the people she spoke with, Choudhury aimed to connect with those who may not intend to stay long enough to care and who haven’t lived in the city long enough to understand local politics.
Choudhury explained, “I think it’s really important for young adults who have been living the dream in New York to uplift New York as well.”.
She helped create Hot Girls 4 Zohran, an initiative to get young people in New York off their phones and into their communities. In addition to canvassing, the group, which is not connected to the campaign, organizes raves, picnics, postering sessions, and fundraisers.
A Sunday morning was bright and early as 15 of the Hot Girls walked down Central Park West, chatting and cheering as they went. They were papering lampposts with pink posters that combined a Mamdani plank with a warning not to rank Cuomo, which is also the stance taken by the official canvassers.
One said, taping a poster, “Cuomo is literally hiding from New Yorkers because he knows if he’s confronted about his platform, he’s screwed.”. Cuomo is not running a street campaign and has only made a few appearances at candidate forums. The statement, ‘New York deserves a hot mayor,’ is accurate. A hot mayor is deserved by hot girls. “.”.
sharing the gospel.
The sexual harassment accusations that forced Cuomo out of office, which he still denies, may disqualify him from running for office, and he has avoided public appearances more than Mamdani and the majority of the field.
However, a strong group of supporters has joined his campaign. Large unions, whose resources, clout, and membership are crucial in municipal elections, have endorsed Cuomo heavily, including those who demanded his resignation in 2021. He has also concentrated on courting Black clergy members in an effort to gain support from a group that helped Mayor Eric Adams win the election the previous time around.
According to political consultant Hank Sheinkopf, “the advantages of what he’s doing are to maintain a frontrunner status — to not let opponents attack you personally.”. They are meaningless voices speaking into thin air, and since he isn’t answering, their significance is diminished. “”.
The canvassers naturally hope Mamdani wins. And his campaign appears less and less unlikely, at least to the volunteers.
The Lower East Side resident Henderson stated, “I am not under any illusions that he has it in the bag.”. However, it’s not impossible, in my opinion. It’s not a hopeless situation,” she remarked. “I suppose I’ve been canvassed. “.”.
The Upper East Side canvassing experience has given Sani more energy than he had before he started.
“I think about my former self and I see someone who watched Hasan Minhaj, John Oliver, and The Daily Show and I felt politically active — but when I look back, I did nothing,” Sani reflected. “I felt angry all day, but that anger didn’t lead to anything. “”.
Since then, I have stopped watching Hasan Minhaj, John Oliver, and The Daily Show. Additionally, I’m a thousand times more involved in politics,” he added. After that, I can sleep at night without experiencing existential stress. “.”.
Motivating 29,000 canvassers, however, might not be sufficient. There is not much time left for the volunteer army to motivate voters, as early voting begins on June 14 and primary day is only three weeks away.
Sani presses the buzzer in the claustrophobic entryway of an Upper East Side apartment. He has so far pushed a few without receiving a response. However, a distorted voice asks, “Who’s there?” from the other end.
With haste, Sani states, “I’m here to talk about Zohran.”.
The other voice, however, is perplexed. “What?”.
Sani makes another attempt, saying, “I’m here to talk to tenants about Zohran Mamdani.”. No recognition.
Last resort: “I’m here to discuss the election.”.
The voice at the other end sounds disappointed and says, “Oh.”. I was awakened by you. I had been asleep. “”.
“I apologize for disturbing you,” Sani says. He turns to Halper and asks, “Did I do something wrong?” with genuine remorse.
