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\n Photo: Adam Gray\/Bloomberg\/Getty Images\n <\/p>\n
Nobody, not even the co-chair of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, anticipated the depth and breadth of the group\u2019s success in last Tuesday\u2019s primaries. \u201cIf we were to elect all of our candidates tonight, we would almost double our cohort in the State Legislature,\u201d Gustavo Gordillo told me a few hours before the polls closed. \u201cI\u2019d be happy if we won a majority of our races.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gordillo and the DSA did a lot better than that. They carried nine out of the ten seats they went after<\/a>, in some cases with blowout margins, defeating longtime representative Adriano Espaillat and three incumbent state legislators along the way. Much of the credit properly goes to Mayor Mamdani<\/a>, but the political muscle came from energetic DSA volunteers who ran circles around New York\u2019s aging, creaky network of traditional Democratic clubs and candidates.<\/p>\n Now comes the fight over what it all means.<\/p>\n The jubilant winners, naturally, are claiming a victory for their ideology.\u00a0 \u201cNYC-DSA is not even close to reaching the ceiling of what the Left in this city can achieve,\u201d columnist Liza Featherstone crowed in Jacobin<\/a>, a socialist publication. \u201cAIPAC money, racist attacks, and other evil and formidable facts of American life proved weaker than the superpower of thousands of sweaty and smiling volunteers committed to a vision of a better world.\u201d<\/p>\n At the other end of the political spectrum, New York Post columnist<\/a> Michael Benjamin rejects the notion that the DSA has won a contest of ideas. \u201cTuesday\u2019s Democratic Socialist romp can\u2019t be blamed on outside factors like inflation or Israel or the national party\u2019s mad obsession with countering President Donald Trump\u2019s every move,\u201d he wrote. \u201cNo, it\u2019s the result of 15 years of New York Democrats\u2019 single-party rule \u2014 and the monstrous ego of Andrew Cuomo.\u201d\u00a0 Benjamin, who once served in the State Assembly, believes that while Cuomo was positioning himself for a presidential run, \u201cthe state Democratic Party developed sclerosis as establishment leaders grew lazy, fat, comfortable and corrupt.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIn business, we\u2019d call this a hostile takeover,\u201d said political analyst J.C. Polanco<\/a>, a former president of the city\u2019s Board of Elections, attributing the DSA victory to New York\u2019s system of closed primaries, which give outsize influence to small, organized groups of Democrats and exclude the large and growing number of centrist voters who choose not to enroll in any party.<\/p>\n Whatever else happened, we know that the DSA out-organized mainstream Democrats by adopting the door-to-door, community-based approach that was once the pride of New York\u2019s Democratic machine. \u201cHaving let its own turnout operation and neighborhood roots decay, the establishment couldn\u2019t even manage to motivate non-fanatic voters to turn out Tuesday to stave off the Marxist Wave,\u201d concluded an unsympathetic Post editorial board<\/a>. \u201cIt got fat, then got eaten.\u201d<\/p>\n In the Black neighborhoods of Central Brooklyn, traditional Democratic clubs were outworked and hopelessly outnumbered by waves of mostly white newcomers to the area, according to activist Mark Winston Griffith<\/a>.\u00a0 Central Brooklyn \u2014 including Clinton Hill, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, East New York, Brownsville, and Flatbush \u2014 has incubated a sizable chunk of Democratic leadership, including former mayor Eric Adams, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, Attorney General Letitia James, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and Kings County Democratic chair Rodneyse Bichotte-Hermelyn. But the same area, where Shirley Chisholm made history as the first Black woman elected to Congress, is undergoing a rapid demographic transformation<\/a>: Between 2010 and 2020, according to Census figures, 30,000 white residents moved into Bed-Stuy while 22,000 blacks moved out, and the numbers have accelerated ever since. Three-quarters of Bed-Stuy households were Black in 2000; that number has fallen to 38 percent.<\/p>\n Central Brooklyn has approximately 4,000 DSA members, the largest local contingent of the group\u2019s citywide enrollment of 14,400, according to Griffith. \u201cThese are not passive card carriers but a highly activated, vast reservoir of volunteers who flood the zone with social media, knock on doors, and animate campaigns at every administrative and mobilization level,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n By contrast, Vanguard Independent Democratic Association, a storied, 50-year-old political club started by the late Al Vann<\/a>, claims approximately 150 members. The lopsided numbers explain why VIDA\u2019s slate went down in flames, with Assemblymember Stefani Zinerman losing her seat to DSA candidate Eon Huntley.<\/p>\n DSA\u2019s tendency to promote Black and Latino candidates backed by a mostly white organization has created tension in the community and within the DSA itself. \u201cAlthough it\u2019s understood across the chapter that our membership doesn\u2019t reflect the race and class diversity of the communities we seek to organize, there\u2019s evidently little will to proactively address this problem,\u201d wrote Brooklyn DSA activist Maya Meredith in a 2024 Medium post<\/a>.\u00a0 \u201cThe reality is that NYC-DSA fails to recruit and retain working class people of color because we\u2019ve failed to build trust with these communities.\u201d<\/p>\n The best outcome for New York would be for traditional Democratic organizations to up their game, get back to basics, and compete with the DSA. It used to be common for Democratic organizations to launch voter-registration drives in the months leading up to an election year, then stay in touch with those newly enrolled voters through regular canvassing with volunteers knocking on the doors of registered Dems to see how people are doing, ask about local concerns, and remind them to vote.<\/p>\n Mamdani and other DSA activists, who boast about how many thousands of doors they\u2019ve knocked on, may not realize how old school the technique is. As far back as the presidential election of 1800<\/a>, Thomas Jefferson won thanks to the relentless, innovative campaigning of his running mate Aaron Burr in the old Sixth and Seventh Wards stretching across what is now the Lower East Side.<\/p>\n \u201cOur organization was completed by dividing the city into small districts,\u201d wrote a campaign observer, \u201cwith a committee appointed to each, whose duty it was to canvass the district and ascertain the political opinion of each voter by going from house to house.\u201d This was considered crass and unheard-of in an age when candidates tended to issue printed manifestos and let voters decide. The Jefferson-Burr ticket narrowly carried the city and won the presidency with Burr boasting to an opponent, \u201cWe have beat you by superior management.\u201d<\/p>\n More than two centuries later, the DSA can make the same claim.<\/p>\n