Less than a month out from election day in New York City, Democratic Socialists of America cadre candidate, Zohran Mamdani is running for mayor and consistently polling in second place — within 10 percentage points of the frontrunner, disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo.
The Mamdani campaign is stirring up a level of excitement arguably comparable to that generated by Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns. A gifted political communicator, Mamdani has raised over $8 million from over 18,000 individual donors, reaching the maximum fundraising limit under New York City’s public matching funds program. Campaign and DSA-led canvasses routinely attract hundreds of excited people ready to talk to their neighbors. DSA meetings are seeing a spike in new members as campaign volunteers look for something bigger to plug into, with NYC-DSA membership reportedly up by as much as 40 percent.
The current battle is for the Democratic Party nomination and whoever wins will occupy that ballot line in the general election. It is looking more and more like that nominee will be either Mamdani or Cuomo. Never a great public speaker, the last few years out of the public eye have not been kind to Cuomo. His lackluster debate performance, raft of fundraising and compliance mistakes, and resistance to campaigning among normal people demonstrate a level of incompetence that was unthinkable years ago. This race is winnable and within the grasp of Mamdani and of DSA. Despite the massive enthusiasm the Mamdani campaign has generated, there is no fallback plan for the general election.
Mamdani may lose the Democratic primary to Cuomo, but we should not see that as the end of this contest. If Mamdani runs in the general election he could be eligible for an additional $7 million dollars in matching funds. He could easily run a mayoral-level campaign even on a third-party ballot line and NYC-DSA could knock another million doors in support. The general election presents another opportunity to draw out the contrasts between Mamdani’s democratic socialism and Cuomo’s centrist conservatism — this time for a broader audience. General elections draw a wider voter demographic, likely more receptive to a broad working class message than the committed Democratic primary voters, or “triple primes,” who tend to be older college-educated voters invested in voting within these party elections. (NYC-DSA typically uses these triple primes as its voter universe for field and print mailers.)
New York State’s voting laws make it possible for Mamdani to run in the general election on a third-party ballot line if he does not win the Democratic nomination. In fact, should he win, both Cuomo and current mayor Eric Adams plan to run on third-party lines in the general election and very well might beat him. Should Mamdani lose the primary, it would be a waste of the infrastructure, political capital, and enthusiasm developed by the campaign not to run in the general election.
The Working Families Party
NYC-DSA has missed the May deadline to gather the 3,750 base signatures and 7,500 additional safety signatures needed to secure our own ballot line in the general election and to resist inevitable court challenges. As a result, we have missed the opportunity to propagandize with our own ballot line and use it alongside the Mamdani campaign to expand the base for explicitly socialist politics in NYC. This is not a surprise: NYC-DSA leadership remains committed to a long-established strategy of exclusively running candidates in the Democratic primary, avoiding experiments with third-party ballot lines or campaigning in general elections. Mamdani also told NYC-DSA members during early candidate forums and planning meetings that he did not intend to run third-party in the general and would focus exclusively on the Democratic primary, though many now reportedly hope he will reconsider.
That leaves the Working Families Party and its ballot line as the only way to prevent a Cuomo or Adams general election win if Mamdani loses the Democratic primary. As a registered political party in New York State, the WFP is guaranteed a ballot line in general elections. Currently their nominee is a placeholder and party leaders will decide later who will occupy that line in the general. The WFP’s recent public endorsement of Mamdani as its recommendation for voters to rank #1 in the ranked-choice Democratic primary election, over several visible progressive candidates, indicates leaders may be open to running Mamdani on the WFP line in the general election. Mamdani’s supporters and DSA members should apply pressure to WFP and Mamdani himself to run on the WFP line in the general should he lose the Democratic primary.
This pressure will be necessary. Historically, WFP has aimed to push Democrats left by supporting their favored candidates in contested Democratic primaries, but the party has a minimal track record of using its line to oppose Democrats in the general election. In 2022, despite demand to run one of their most visible cadre members, Yuh-Line Niou, in the general election against Dan Goldman for US House District 10, WFP and Niou declined. WFP has typically defaulted to endorsing whoever wins the Democratic primary, including endorsing Cuomo himself for governor.
While the WFP was originally formed as a coalition of labor unions and other interest groups in the late 1990s in order to push the Democratic Party left, the cynical political maneuverings of Andrew Cuomo as governor helped to successfully hollow out the WFP and alienate much of its organized labor core. As it stands, WFP is in practice more of a consulting agency and a brand than a political party or political vehicle for organized labor. However, it has what DSA does not: years of brand visibility built by maintaining its own ballot line, party-like identity, and campaigning and proselytizing for its own value as a separate organization.
If Mamdani loses the Democratic primary, running him on the WFP ballot line would be an important opportunity for WFP to actually represent working families and to try to prevent a Cuomo or Adams mayoralty.
Cuomo and Adams Run Third-Party
We are in a unique and slightly bizarre political moment for third-party ballot lines. After years of federal investigation into alleged bribery, then allegedly trading political favors with Donald Trump for suspension of that investigation, mayor Eric Adams has seen the way the wind is blowing — at least in the Democratic primary. Adams has declared that he will forgo competing for the Democratic nomination and will run on two third-party ballot lines in the general election, “EndAntiSemitism” and “Safe&Affordable.” It is unclear if this is a legitimate attempt to revive and coalesce his 2021 coalition of outer borough working class voters of color or a short-term attempt to prolong his quid pro quo with the Trump administration to avoid federal prosecution.
Even more bizarrely, Andrew Cuomo, long a creature of the Democratic establishment, has declared that he plans to run in the general election on the “Fight and Deliver” ballot line. Cuomo seems to be responding to what he sees as the genuine threat Mamdani and DSA pose to the Democratic Party establishment and the capital-dominated right-wing faction that Cuomo represents: the very real possibility that Mamdani subverts current polling and wins the Democratic primary.
Cuomo’s third-party ballot line run is a smart bet that if he loses the Democratic primary to Mamdani, he can build a coalition of moderate and center-right Democrats and Republicans for the general election. If Mamdani wins the primary, Cuomo and his backers will argue that the Democratic Party has been captured by the far left and that they must fight back by aligning with potential anti-left allies: conservative and moderate Republicans. This is a reasonable bet that many Republicans, when faced with a potential Mamdani mayoralty, would rather back Cuomo and his third-party ballot line than “waste” their votes on the long-shot candidacy of right-wing radio personality and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa — the current Republican nominee. While New York has long been a Democratic Party stronghold, with winners of the primary typically coasting to victory in the general, recent rightward shifts within New York will embolden Cuomo, Republicans, and conservative Democrats about a potential coalition. This shift was most recently seen in 2022 when Republican Lee Zeldin lost by only 6 points to Democrat Kathy Hochul in the race for New York State governor.
Cuomo is following the game plan established by the Democratic mayor of Buffalo, Byron Brown, in his 2021 general election win over India Walton. Endorsed by DSA and the Working Families Party, longtime organizer Walton won the Democratic primary, only to be beaten in the general by a write-in campaign organized by the then-incumbent Democratic mayor, who created a winning voting bloc of Republicans and anti-leftist Democrats. Brown’s write-in campaign and Cuomo’s third-party ballot line effort underscore what we in DSA and the left have known for years: “moderate” Democrats have more in common with Republicans than they have with the left and are more motivated and willing to align with Republicans to defeat the left than they are to beat the far right.
Missed Opportunities for Socialism
As our right-wing rivals prepare to run on third-party ballot lines to defeat us in the general election, we have missed the opportunity to help make socialism and DSA more visible as an identity and politics distinct from the Democratic Party, liberalism, and progressivism in America’s biggest, arguably most important city, where the race for mayor is the most visible electoral contest outside of US president. Regardless of whether Mamdani wins the Democratic primary or runs on the Working Families Party ballot line in the general election, DSA will have missed a chance to propagandize in the general election for socialism and for our organization as a home for working class voters.
I have written previously about the importance of using fusion ballot lines and general election campaigns to build visibility and affinity for the politics of NYC-DSA’s project and breaking away from our current reliance on triple prime voters, those most dedicated Democratic voters who consistently vote in primaries. This makes sense if the only goal of a DSA electoral campaign is to win and to place an endorsed candidate in office. Overlooking opportunities to appeal to the wider working class makes less sense.
New York City’s fusion voting system allows the same candidate to appear on multiple ballot lines in the general election, with votes from all the different ballot lines added up to one total. DSA candidates appearing on a Democratic Socialist, or similar, ballot line in the general could propagandize and base-build around our socialist identity and politics and grow DSA and affinity with our project.
When NYC-DSA candidates win the Democratic primary they typically take a break, go silent, and run passive or nonexistent campaigns in the general, coasting to wins in the safe Democratic districts they typically run and win in. This means that in the general election a DSA candidate presents as just another Democrat to the diverse, broad swath of voters who walk into the general election voting booth, mark a check next to the Democratic line, and move on with their busy lives. DSA candidates may have won the Democratic primary, largely by appealing to triple prime voters, but in the general election they become just another part of the Democratic Party blob. In the current political climate, with the Democratic Party polling at an all-time low, this is a mistake. Not only do we miss the opportunity to build our own identity, we risk tarring ourselves with long-term association with the toxic Democratic Party brand. This is even more of a missed opportunity if Mamdani pulls off a win in the Democratic primary, especially as he appears on TV talking about the Democrats as “our party.”
NYC-DSA is no stranger to third-party ballot lines. In 2017, we backed now-state senator Jabari Brisport’s run for New York City Council on the Green Party line, while also petitioning for and running him on the “Socialist” ballot line. Brisport lost his last-minute campaign — the speed with which the campaign came together was a key reason he ran third-party in the general and not in the Democratic primary — but walked away with nearly 30 percent of the vote, an unthinkably high total for a third-party run in blue New York City. This run showed the viability of Brisport’s and DSA’s politics, laying the foundations for our successful run for state senate in the Democratic primary in 2020. Competing on electoral terrain as open socialists can help us build the long-term foundations for a separate socialist or workers’ party. We will not build that party and identity overnight, but we can begin to establish the possibility for us and for the wider population.
A Right-Wing General Election
Mamdani’s campaign is already a landmark moment for NYC-DSA. Mamdani has captured the imagination and passion of young people and the left in New York City in a manner arguably not seen since Bernie Sanders. If Mamdani loses the Democratic primary to Cuomo, we will face a general election contested solely by Cuomo, Adams, and Curtis Sliwa, a right-wing trifecta committed to crushing the left. After building the campaign infrastructure, visibility, and excitement that Mamdani has, it would be a shame and a massive loss for him to cede the potential to contest the general election and leave it with no left-wing candidate. The stakes are too high.
