On November 4th, 2025, I spent nearly eight hours 100 feet outside of a polling location in Stuyvesant Heights, Brooklyn, reminding passersby to vote for Zohran Mamdani. Thousands of other New Yorkers had the same conversations throughout the city. Politicians are all the same, they’d remind us. What good is just one vote? Nothing ever changes.
We made the case that Zohran was different. He didn’t take corporate money; in fact the ultra-rich were spending against him! To those who asked why their one vote mattered: Zohran was going to win, but we needed to run up the score to send a decisive message to Albany and Kathy Hochul that if she didn’t get with the program and raise taxes on the rich, we’d come for her seat next.
Zohran’s endorsement of Kathy Hochul’s re-election as Governor of New York yesterday is disappointing and undermines the strategy and goals of the movement that put him in office. By endorsing her he also failed nurses on strike at Mount Sinai, Montefiore, and NewYork-Presbyterian, providing Hochul cover for anti-labor executive orders that threaten the entire labor movement.
Mass Struggle or Insider Deals?
In Zohran’s endorsement of Hochul, he gives her credit for a recent win that our movement had to force: Hochul’s commitment to help pay for a re-universalization of NYC’s Pre-K and 3K, fund Zohran’s signature 2K program for two years, expand childcare vouchers, and pilot universal Pre-K statewide. In his endorsement op-ed published in the Nation, Zohran opens, “‘The era of empty promises ends.’ That’s the vision that drove our mayoral campaign. It’s the foundation of my administration. It’s also what Governor Kathy Hochul said as we celebrated an agreement to deliver universal childcare — one of the largest expansions of the social safety net in our city’s history.”
We have not, in fact, won universal childcare. The state funding falls dramatically short of the necessary $14 billion needed for truly universal childcare statewide: six weeks to five years, the policy Zohran ran on. Hochul is providing nearly $2 billion, which, while a good start, is far from our full goal. It is confusing, disappointing, and disorganizing to not only exaggerate an incomplete success but also attribute it to an opponent. Zohran ran on speaking truth to power. This isn’t truth. And it’s going to take a lot more working-class power to win our demands.
NYC-DSA and Our Time have re-engaged Zohran volunteers and supporters to build the movement to tax the rich and fund universal childcare. These canvasses have taken place in sub freezing temperatures with everyday New Yorkers engaging their neighbors to take political action, pressuring their representatives and Hochul to tax the rich, which she continues to oppose. By singing Hochul’s praises, Zohran is failing to use his bully pulpit to mobilize supporters to these efforts and wage public pressure against her opposition.
It’s all the more confusing that Zohran chose to endorse Hochul when Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado is challenging her with a platform of Zohran’s own agenda to tax the rich and fund progressive pro-worker priorities. Delgado has chosen DSA member and former candidate for Buffalo Mayor, India Walton, to be his running mate and has received endorsements from Zohran’s fellow Socialists in Office State Senator Jabari Brisport and Assembly Member Emily Gallagher, and DSA State Assembly candidates Eon Huntley and Christian Celeste Tate. They endorsed Delgado on the theory that 1. he will be a stronger partner to win our priorities and 2. the stronger his campaign, the more pressure Hochul will feel to concede to our demands to stave off her left-wing challenger. Zohran, on the other hand, has wagered that his personal relationship with her is the stronger path toward achieving his agenda. It’s a bad bet.
It’s also not the first time he’s made this bet. Zohran’s interventions in the NYC-DSA endorsement process to convince supporters against Chi Osse’s potential challenge to Hakeem Jeffries was similarly indicative of his increasingly conflict-averse disposition toward the Democratic establishment. Supporters of Osse’s run argued that challenging Democratic leadership, acting oppositional, and proposing an alternative, is how we grow our movement and win for workers. Zohran, instead, feared confrontation with national Democratic leadership, making the case that we would be more successful by avoiding such a battle. (Some DSA members were opposed to endorsing Osse on claims that he was seeking DSA’s endorsement opportunistically, while others argued limited capacity, but those were not the arguments Zohran made.) Watching Jeffries’ lackluster response to Trump’s occupation of American cities amid a nationwide uprising against ICE, it’s hard not to feel the absence of an Osse challenge and Zohran’s strategic blunder.
Which Side Are You On?
Zohran’s endorsement of Hochul couldn’t come at a worse time. Nurses at three private hospital systems in New York — Montefiore, NewYork-Presbyterian, and Mount Sinai — are in their fourth week of an open-ended ULP strike. Zohran siding with Hochul provides cover for her support of Hospital CEOs as they seek to illegally permanently replace 15,000 striking NYC nurses. The central demands of this historic strike — the largest nurses strike in NYC history — are to enforce safe nurse-to-patient staffing ratios and protect nurses from violence at work. Nurses are out on the line during an unprecedented cold spell in New York, making their resilience all the more heroic.
The hospitals, however, have held out largely thanks to Hochul’s support. Hochul’s Executive Order (EO) 56, signed days before the nurses walked out, loosens licensing laws to allow out-of-state travel nurses to cross the picket line as scabs. Hochul has continuously extended this EO, defanging the striking nurses’ leverage over their hospitals. In recent days, the nurses have made Hochul their prime target, organizing a direct action at Grand Central this Monday, demanding the EO be rescinded.
Hospital executives say they will permanently replace striking nurses, a shocking and massive violation of federal labor law. The longer EO 56 is in place, the more time out-of-state scabs have to receive New York credentials, and be hired as permanent replacements. This struggle is life or death for 15,000 nurses, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of NYC patients, and every single worker in the United States. If Hochul succeeds in crushing the nurses’ strike, it will send a chilling message to labor nationally: If you strike, you will lose your job. It will set a dangerous precedent and provide a model for employers everywhere. It will be a PATCO moment for New York labor. By providing cover for Hochul’s anti-labor moves, Zohran’s endorsement of Hochul threatens to kill the same workers’ movement that not only helped get him elected but is necessary to winning his agenda.
Similarly, this endorsement threatens to alienate tens of thousands of New York nurses and their families from supporting Zohran and the movement that elected him. As the strike commenced, Zohran issued a statement of support and spoke at the picket line a week later alongside Senator Bernie Sanders. Videos captured the incredible enthusiasm of striking nurses for their Mayor in support. Trevor, a nursing student in NYC-DSA and Bread & Roses who is helping coordinate strike support, told The Call that “there were ‘Zaddy please save us’ signs at Sinai West when Zohran came to speak.” However, given Zohran’s endorsement of Hochul, he says, “it’s going to be whiplash for a lot of rank and file now that it’s clear that won’t happen.” Trevor laments that “the timing of this could not be more embarrassing to our movement. Zohran is in every ad for DSA on Instagram. I don’t know how I can proudly tell nurses on the line I’m a DSA member.”
In the labor movement we have the saying, “Which side are you on?” Zohran chose wrong, and now DSA is on the hook.
