Zohran Mamdani speaks to volunteers at the Muslim Democratic Club of New York (October 19, 2025) | Ron Adar / Shutterstock
In the run-up to this year’s election for New York City’s next mayor, I’ve spent several days canvassing for Zohran Mamdani. On every occasion I’ve been as much as a half-century older than the rest of my young, white comrades. Unlike most of them, I’m also a native New Yorker, with a thick Brooklyn accent.
Before we’ve gone out to knock on doors, there’s always been a brief rah-rah session, during which we’re asked to say why we’re campaigning for Zohran.
My answer is always the same: I’ve been active on the left since 1968 and am used to losing. I’m 73 years old, legally blind, with arthritic knees and one functioning coronary artery. This is my last campaign, and I want to go out on a win.
Since I describe myself as a nonpracticing communist, that Zohran and his program should appeal to me is not shocking. He might not be a socialist in the line of Eugene Debs, who truly wanted to end capitalism and whose program spoke openly of doing so, but he’s willing and anxious to undo the abuses of capitalism. At my age, I can settle for that.
Aside from his program, which is only slightly to the left of old-fashioned good-government municipal progressivism, Mamdani also has all the right enemies.
Those who hate and oppose him represent everything that is evil: Trump, Cuomo, real estate interests, and the cynical fearmongers who see Nazis behind every opponent of Israel—primarily as a reason to crush dissent. To me, there can be no better endorsement.
That said, I hate to canvass. My hatred of it is precisely why I chose to do it: There’s nothing meritorious in donating money if you can do something you hate as proof, if only to yourself, of your serious commitment.
Former Governor Cuomo has made much of Mamdani’s having allegedly “pledged allegiance” to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and its program—as if that party were a substitute for authentic American patriotism. I’m not a huge fan of DSA, which I criticized in a New York Times piece in 2020 for its obdurate opposition to supporting Joe Biden. But I recognize that for some young Americans, the DSA seems like the best focus for organized radical activity.
Proof of this can be seen in the canvassing apparatus of Mamdani’s campaign. The organizers of each section are always DSA members.
The DSA is to the Mamdani candidacy what the American Communist Party (CPUSA) was to the 1948 Henry Wallace candidacy: a key source of grassroots support that is disciplined and enthusiastic. That some parts of DSA’s program seem as unrealizable as that of the CPUSA in 1948 is almost beside the point. I don’t doubt that much of its membership truly supports defunding the police, but I also don’t doubt that none of its most radical proposals will ever happen.
To treat Mamdani’s membership in the DSA as a threat to Western civilization is absurd. New York is a city where a single chocolate chip cookie costs seven dollars! Radical change is needed here. My enemy is not those with perhaps unrealizable political ideas and utopian dreams but those who have refused the legitimacy of any dreams.
The first thing I learned while canvassing was that what you read about Mamdani’s supporters is accurate. Mamdani’s appeal is greatest among young, educated whites, as is knowledge of who the candidates are and what they stand for. Among whites, I grew to dread knocking on the door of anyone above 50. I felt great relief when residents my own age weren’t home.
Telling people about Mamdani’s three main programmatic points—free buses, free childcare, and freezing rents—was what we were there for. We almost never had to make our spiel at any door opened by a young white person. They knew Zohran, knew his program, and were all for it. We were literally pushing against an open door.
Immigrant voters were the most reluctant to open their doors, and when they did, few knew there was an election—much less who Zohran Mamdani was or what the elements of his program were. One day, I was accompanied by a Haitian who was able to communicate with some residents in Creole. They listened politely but were noncommittal.
The situation was only slightly different in apartments where the residents were American or Anglo-Caribbean Blacks. They listened kindly but again were polite more than interested. The level of engagement, both before and after Eric Adams’s departure from the race, was low, when it wasn’t totally dismissive of the idea that things can change for the better.
No one on any occasion mentioned Mamdani’s position on Palestine. This is doubtless a function of the addresses I was assigned in Prospect Lefferts Gardens. A few blocks north in Crown Heights, for instance, knocking on the doors of Chassidim would have produced different results. This must have been an issue for others, since I received a text and an email inviting me to a special training session for canvassing in neighborhoods with large Jewish and Muslim populations.
When we asked people what mattered most to them, or why they supported Mamdani, the answers were sometimes unexpected.
Most were especially pleased about his promise to freeze rents. Free childcare was important in those apartments where we could see signs of the presence of little children. Free buses were never mentioned, maybe because between 40 and 60 percent of passengers don’t pay anyway. More interesting were those who said things like, “He seems to really care about New York.”
This, I think, gets to the heart of the matter, and it’s also why I was pounding the pavement when I’m not certain how much of his program can or will be implemented.
It hit me when I encountered a woman who knew there was a mayoral election coming but didn’t really know who stood for what. I asked her, “Wouldn’t you like your rent frozen for the next four years? Don’t you want childcare to be free? And wouldn’t free buses be great?”
It’s hard to imagine who would answer “No” to questions like that. And then I thought, while I’m proposing an idealistic program, why not add, “And wouldn’t you like free pizza every Tuesday?”
I mean, if I was going to promise the moon, why not the stars?
But I didn’t say it. However optimistic Mamdani’s campaign is, however difficult it will be to fulfill his promises, what’s important is the broader vision of a better future he embodies.
A mayor who promises safety above all else—who offers no utopian projects, who, as Mamdani says when he speaks of Cuomo, “thinks small”—will do nothing but perpetuate the city and government we now have.
To make this concrete: My son and his wife, an average young couple, spend $65,000 a year on rent and childcare in Brooklyn. My granddaughter is a sixth generation Brooklynite, and I don’t want her to be the last.
A city in which people can live is more than one where there’s a cop playing video games on his cellphone on every corner or subway platform.
Decency, farsighted intentions, and, yes, dreams are exactly what we need in a mayor to escape the morass in which we are now stuck.
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