The heat nearly broke me on election day. I stood outside for hours at a pollsite in the “tropical-like conditions” as the weather report called it – 100 degree heat, stifling humidity – asking prospective voters to vote for Zohran Mamdani. Normally, pollsite visibility is a futile effort. Voters pass you by without a glance. If you’re lucky you’ll find a supporter in the throng of election day voters. You’re not usually lucky.
But on that deathly hot election day, something was different. Nearly every voter who passed told me they were voting for Zohran. Plenty stopped and thanked me. A bartender came out for a smoke break and stood with me. “You know Zohran’s real because the right people hate him,” he told me through drags of his cigarette. I had been doing this for almost a decade and pollsite visibility was always an exercise in demoralization. This time, I felt solidarity.
And I felt solidarity not just from younger voters who usually back Democratic Socialists like Zohran, but from voters of every ethnicity and age. I met a mother who had brought her two special needs sons to vote with her. “We desperately need him to win,” she said. At around 6pm, with the heat just starting to break, I texted a group chat of volunteers, “We’re going to win.” They immediately made me delete it so as not to jinx the election. But for the rest of the afternoon, into the evening, I held onto faith that we would win. It was clear to me that this election was different, Zohran had built a new political coalition.
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In the wake of Zohran’s victory, so many Americans are desperate for a Zohran of their own to represent them. They are asking, how do we elect one?
Politics moves at a glacial pace and then all at once. The political allegiances of just a few months ago have been disrupted and scrambled. Zohran’s victory as well as the massive protests against Trump’s second term, including Bernie Sanders’ and AOC’s wildly successfully Fighting Oligarchy Tour, point to the emergence of a new force with the potential to reshape American politics: a Democratic Socialist coalition.
Past Failures
When Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2020, he never expected to win a majority of Democratic primary voters, but instead hoped to arrive at the Democratic convention with a plurality. What was at the time heralded as a piece of strategic cunning is with the benefit of hindsight an indication that Bernie’s politics could not move a majority of Democrats, let alone the full electorate. Ultimately, after a moment of brilliance, Bernie flamed out after Super Tuesday, just like he had in 2016.
“Why?” I and so many other Democratic Socialists cried out at the time. “Majorities of Democrats, even some Republicans, support our policies. They want Medicare for All. They want a Green New Deal. Why aren’t they voting our way?”
But just because someone supports something in theory, does not mean they will support a candidate who will transform America in the ways necessary to get it. Steady, predictable change is preferable to drastic, risky change, particularly when Trump is on the ballot. There was a huge chunk of the Democratic primary electorate who were ready for drastic change with Bernie, but not a majority. Ultimately, the promises of the Obama era, steady change that could beat Trump and fears that drastic change would lose in November were enough to allow Biden to limp to victory.
But that promise would go on to be broken in the chaos of the Biden years. In fact, Biden proved the very opposite: when you do not move with enough vigor, you empower the enemies of democracy to overwhelm you.
This is the key difference between this moment and the progressivism of the late 2010s. Slow and steady change has been delegitimized. When the richest man in the world, out of his mind on ketamine, slashes the federal government to ribbons over the course of a few weeks, it’s clear that drastic change is necessary.
An Opening Emerges
An opening has appeared for a Democratic Socialist coalition that can wield power at the city, state, and perhaps even national level. But this does not mean that it is inevitable. We must bring a Democratic Socialist coalition into being.
Coalitions do not form out of the ether. Political movements bring them to life with messaging and policy platforms that give voice to voters’ needs and desires. Obama came into the disorder and economic catastrophe of the latter Bush years with a message of change. Trump gave voice to those left behind by globalization, blaming immigrants for the nation’s woes. They, like all successful politicians, were able to cohere coalitions of voters with differing politics, ideologies, outlooks, and personalities in order to win. Bernie was not able to do this in 2020. His coalition was too young, too progressive, and too white.
After the polls closed and the results came in, it became apparent that not only had Zohran won in an upset landslide, but that he had done so by reshaping the political map. Voters under 45 easily outvoted voters over 45. Zohran won Latino, Asian, white, and young Black voters. Perhaps most importantly, he brought thousands of Muslim voters into the political process, winning broad swaths of neighborhoods like Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst, and Sheepshead Bay that normally go for moderate candidates, but this time went for the Democratic Socialist.
And there were plenty of liberals who went for Zohran. In the final days of the race Zohran and liberal-stalwart Brad Lander were joined at the hip, cross endorsing each other and doing campaign events. The liberal vs. socialist wars that defined Democratic politics from 2016 to 2020 were over. The liberals were fine voting for a Democratic Socialist. They voted for him in droves.
All political coalitions are unique to the candidates who assemble them, but Zohran’s victory demonstrates that a Democratic Socialist political coalition is possible at least in urban areas. If a Democratic Socialist can win in New York City, then Democratic Socialists can win in every major city in the country.
But what about at the state and federal level? To truly transform the nation away from capitalist hell to socialist plenty, Democratic Socialists will have to win at more than just the municipal level. Luckily, there are signs that a Democratic Socialist coalition can be assembled on a higher political level.
Democratic voters are pissed.
The first sign of this emerging Democratic Socialist Constituency is in polling data. Unlike after Trump was elected in 2017, Democratic voters are furious with Democratic Party leaders.
It has been pointed out that the new distinction within the Democratic party is between those willing to fight and those unwilling to fight, but Democratic Socialists are the ones fighting. Bernie Sander’s Fighting Oligarchy tour captures this frustration among the Democratic base that their leaders are rolling over to Trump.
It’s not that mainstream Democrats aren’t fighting because they don’t feel like, but because the same factors that lead to Trump’s resurgence are holding back Democrats from fighting, particularly the continued dominance of tech and crypto billionaires in the Democratic Party. Just look at the GENIUS Act, a pro crypto billionaire bill. Kristen Gillibrant, a once progressive stalwart, led the charge to pass the bill because she and plenty of others are in the pocket of big crypto. There are some moderate Democrats who are fighting back, but as long as those moderates are dependent on the oligarch money that got us into this catastrophe, there is a ceiling on their ability to fight back.
How to Cohere a Coalition
Whether it’s through door to door canvassing, tabling, conversations with friends and families, Instagram, Tiktok, Bluesky, the post-apocalyptic remains of the website formerly known as Twitter, even Facebook, we will have to have millions of conversations with millions of people to convince them that Democratic Socialism is the only way out of the hellish quagmire we found ourselves in. People are listening. What are we going to say?
There’s an old saying that if you’re not thinking about who your audience is, your audience is yourself. This means that if we’re not thinking about who we’re speaking to, when we speak out into the world, we’re not talking to millions, we’re talking to ourselves.
Leftist movements throughout history have suffered this problem, having conversations that are totally inaccessible to those not steeped in movement history, debating small differences with each other in journals read by no one, standing on street corners handing out poorly printed newspapers.
I’m painting a bit of a caricature here, but this kind of inward focus is the default when there is no overarching strategy. We are all susceptible to this navel-gazing myopia.
Strategy is not something that can be created in a single article and then thrown out into the world. Strategy is the careful creation of theory and practice, the scientific model of taking a hypothesis, testing it in the real world, then refining (or throwing it out completely) based on the results. I won’t pretend to have the perfect strategy to cohere a Democratic Socialist Constituency wrapped up with a pretty bow. But let’s take a moment to look at the successful Democratic Socialist movements of the second Trump era and try to understand why they were successful.
Starting with Zohran, the answer to his success is obvious: New York is too fucking expensive. In fact, everywhere is too fucking expensive. Since the pandemic housing costs have gone through the roof and inflation has beaten monthly budgets into the ground. While mainstream Democrats propose tax cuts for the upper middle class to lower the cost of living, Zohran proposed building up the municipal government and using the power of rent control to provide relief, a much more overarching and durable solution. Much of Zohran’s platform was the kind of policies that progressives have been demanding for years, but his innovation was framing it all as a measure to lower the cost of living.
Bernie and AOC however, are not focused on cost of living, but rampant wealth inequality leading to fascism. It’s important to note that their Fighting Oligarchy tour is itself an innovation on standard pro-Democracy rhetoric, just like Zohran’s focus on cost of living was an innovation on standard progressive platforms. Biden and other mainstream Democrats hammered Trump for his authoritarian tendencies but ended there. What Bernie and AOC have done is connect authoritarianism with wealth inequality. The latter breeds the former.
So cost of living and oligarchy are the two messages from our Democratic Socialists, but is there a way to identify a commonality between them? A socialist theory of everything? I think there is one, rooted in the very essence of socialism.
As the feudal era came to a close a new class of merchants, lawyers, and doctors called the bourgeoisie became frustrated that they lived at the whim of inbred nobles who never left their gilded palaces. So they revolted and installed democratic governments with wonderful things like universal rights (for men) and full suffrage (for men).
But it quickly became apparent that while political freedom was great if you were a wealthy member of the bourgeoisie, it didn’t mean jack if you were a factory worker working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. A group of thinkers realized that political freedom was useless without social freedom. These thinkers, unsurprisingly, called themselves socialists.
Today, we are witnessing the death of both political and social freedom. The Trump administration is taking an axe to the constitution and civil liberties, while skyrocketing wealth inequality is making it nearly impossible for working people to afford to live. But unlike the 19th century, where movements for political freedom gave way to movements for social freedom, in the second Trump era threats to political and social freedom are intertwined.
Let’s look at the hypothetical experience of a trans person, a member of one of the most marginalized groups under the second Trump administration. A trans person right now faces severe threats to their political freedom including an inability to get a passport (an executive order temporarily blocked by the courts), restrictions on medical care, and employment discrimination. But because trans people face joblessness and homelessness at much higher rates than the general population, a trans person’s biggest crisis might not be political repression, but the inability to pay rent. That’s not to say that the political threats don’t matter but that threats to their political and social freedom are intertwined into one awful gordian knot.
And threats to freedom help explain why once stalwart liberals are suddenly open to Democratic Socialism. Liberalism has always been defined by an expansion of political freedom, and to quote architect of neoconservatism turned resistance liberal Bill Kristol, “If capitalists side with authoritarians–better social democracy than corporatist authoritarianism.” Even for someone who is economically secure, it’s not hard to see how the same oligarchs shredding social freedom are also threatening political freedom. The only solution is redistributive politics.
Ultimately, the Democratic Socialist Coalition, while differing from location to location, will contain the downwardly mobile young people who made up the Bernie coalition, working class voters attracted to a politics that promises to lower the costs of living, and comfortable liberals who are terrified of rising authoritarianism. Messaging and focus can be modified depending on specific electoral races. Campaigns in more working class areas can focus on cost of living, while in more well off areas can focus on political repression. That’s not to say that these topics are mutually exclusive, but the exact opposite: under the banner of “freedom,” both political and economic, a Democratic Socialist coalition can be reliably assembled across the nation.
An Unstable and Contradictory Beast
Coalitions are inherently unstable and contradictory beasts. The New Deal coalition contained both Northern Black voters and southern segregationists. Even Trump’s own coalition has fault lines, such as those who want the Epstein files released, and those who would do quite a lot to keep that from happening.
One of the primary challenges of the Democratic Socialist movement will be to assemble coalitions and then manage that coalition after it is in power. Since every coalition is unique, we can’t construct permanent rules for how to manage them, but we can hypothesize some of the challenges we’ll face.
The first one is liberals. Since 2016 the left and liberals have waged a brutal online war and in 2020 progressive liberals flocked to Elizabeth Warren, not Bernie Sanders. But since Trump’s reelection there has been a detente of sorts, which we have seen most powerfully in Brad Lander’s support of Zohran Mamdani. In retrospect, Bernie’s inability to win over progressive liberals was a major failure of his campaign. Zohran has shown that it is possible for progressive liberals and socialists to coexist in relative harmony. For those on the left who remember the pitched battles over whether Planned Parenthood was part of the political establishment or what Bernie and Elizabeth Warren said to each other after the debate, it is time to lay down your swords. Yes, progressive liberals can be cringe. No, you don’t have to wear a pussy hat. Yes, you have to find common ground.
Another place of tension is the ever-elusive blue collar worker. Since the dawn of the socialist movement, educated organizers have fretted about how to reach out to workers who do not share their backgrounds. Today, some organizers worry that sharing pronouns will turn off blue-collar workers. But bringing in workers to a socialist coalition does not require any particular black magic rituals. Simply creating spaces that are welcoming and inclusive is more than enough. There can be a tendency on the left to fall into “organizing speak,” using terminology borrowed from progressive nonprofits that is overly academic. But this is not just offputting to blue collar workers, it’s off putting to anyone who is not part of the progressive nonprofit world. Forming a welcoming and inclusive environment for new members is a key skill that all organizers should have and it will continue to be important for assembling a coalition.
But anxieties around working with liberals and workers are mostly that: anxieties. They are easily solved with openness, kindness, and a desire to foster a welcoming environment. But a real issue for the left as we assemble our electoral coalitions is bringing in voters with conservative values.
While Zohran had the most leftwing Trans Rights platform in history, there is no doubt that plenty of transphobes voted for him. What gives? Well, Zohran centered affordability in his campaign, broad issues that appealed to everyone, but all candidates center broad issues that appeal to everyone.
There really isn’t a good answer to how to deal with socially conservative voters. Culture war issues have been used to smash the left since the dawn of the left. There’s a reason that they work and they will continue to work. But one lesson we can draw is that we can’t give an inch. In the UK the Labour Party, in the face of the ultraconservative Reform Party, has been tacking right on trans rights and immigration. It has failed miserably. When it comes to socially conservative voters, the best the left can do is stand our ground and offer a compelling political and economic message that overwhelms personal bigotry.
Looking Outward. Not Inward
With Zohran Mamdani’s election, Democratic Socialists have now amassed more power than they ever have in American history, but to enact a durable transformation of society and economy, we will have to grow exponentially. Right now with about 80,000 members, the Democratic Socialists of America are in a sort of strange middle point between sizable organization and mass movement. For comparison, the National Rifle Association has over 4 million members (and that’s at a historic low). With Zohran’s election, and the prospect of many more victories on the horizon, DSA will have to scale up rapidly in order to meet the political moment.
One of the most ongoing debates in DSA and the left more broadly is whether to run on the Democratic ballot line. Much digital ink has been spilled over this debate, so there is no reason to rehash it here, but it’s clear from Zohran’s victory that running on the Democratic ballot line is a tangible way to seize state power. That debate is closed.
Whether its ballot line access, reform or revolution, defund or abolition, the left is rife with internal debates about strategy and outlook. That inward looking left, always searching for some path to power needs to be put to rest. There is a clear path to power and in the case of New York City, the left now is in power.
This means building a Democratic Socialist movement that is focused on repeating the victory of Zohran across the country, hundreds of Zohrans running for municipal, state, and even federal office, primarying the old guard of the Democratic Party that is both unable and unwilling to do what is necessary to defeat Trump.
There is a future that has opened up for us where in the next decade millions of Americans identify as Democratic Socialists, there are hundreds of elected Democratic Socialists, a Democratic Socialist caucus in the house, and Democratic Socialist mayors and governors instituting a 21st century socialism. We can make this future happen. All we have to do is step up and make it so.