“We just elected Zohran Mamdani as NYC Mayor!!!!!” For more than six months after Mamdani’s election, a banner atop the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America’s homepage heralded this victory with no fewer than five exclamation points. Coming exactly a year after Trump was reelected, Mamdani’s win was the purest validation of DSA’s ability to offer a compelling alternative message — and an explicitly socialist one at that. 

DSA is a singular creature: not a party, as many assume, but a democratically governed nonprofit mostly composed of volunteers. A decade into the organization’s revival following a long period of hibernation, the Mamdani campaign has elevated its national profile and turbocharged its recruitment. Since the 2024 election cycle began, NYC-DSA, the group’s largest chapter and spiritual core, has more than doubled in size to some 15,000 people — a tent that is both big in the literal sense and so figuratively ample as to include Maoists and former Obama staffers. Nationally, the organization counts 120,000 members, nearly half of whom signed up during that same time period. 

Suddenly, democratic socialism is everywhere: mainstream pundits have been forced to acquire fluency in its idiom; the New York City cochairs are fielding gotcha questions about the Shining Path on Fox News; Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has taken to reading aloud from DSA’s national platform at events as though reciting an apocalyptic bedtime story. The organization’s power in New York was further ratified by the June 23 Democratic primaries, when DSA candidates nearly swept their races, and all three of Mamdani’s endorsed congressional hopefuls won, two by double digits. The front page of The New York Times called the mayor a “kingmaker.” The New York Post contorted in paroxysms of agita; “THE HATEFUL SLATE: Three Israel, cop and private property hating Mamdanites win Democrat Congressional primaries,” its curiously punctuated headline ran. In The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait warned his audience not to be fooled; DSA, he argued, had been thoroughly infiltrated by communists. This summer, a barrage of pieces in legacy outlets — The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic again — have spilled considerable ink on the menace DSA poses for the moribund Democratic Party, failing yet again to apprehend just how deeply the American public desires fundamental change. 

Mamdani followed the electoral victories with the fulfillment of a key campaign promise: on June 25, his stacked Rent Guidelines Board convened at El Museo del Barrio in Harlem to vote through a rent freeze for rent-stabilized apartments. This one-two punch has only bolstered NYC-DSA leaders’ already profound belief that the organization’s fortunes are fundamentally linked to the mayor’s ability to deliver on its promises. “We see the fate of the organized left and the Mamdani administration’s fate to be tied together,” Gustavo Gordillo, the chapter’s cochair, told The New York Times last fall. “His success would be our success, and his failure would be our failure.” 

But the question of what success actually looks like, and how best to help Mamdani achieve it, is the source of considerable political and strategic dissension within the chapter. It is common to hear people within DSA refer to the “contradictions” of electing socialists to higher office — the thorny questions, and inevitable compromises, that arise when an anti-capitalist wins and holds power within a capitalist system. The mayor himself has offered words of caution about holding DSA-affiliated leaders to their principles: “We cannot count on our electeds going into these spaces coming out the way they were sent in. And I say that as an elected,” Mamdani, then a first-term assemblyman, told Dissent in 2022. 

In the lead-up to the 2025 mayoral election, members surmised that to install one of their own in the executive seat would be to inject these contradictions with an anabolic cocktail worthy of Barry Bonds. That prediction has borne out during the first six months of Mamdani’s term. On June 25, even as the chapter basked in the afterglow of its electoral wins and many members celebrated Mamdani’s rent freeze in Harlem, others gathered downtown for a protest against his police commissioner’s announcement that the NYPD would hire 580 new officers. Outside City Hall, speaker after speaker — including Councilmember Tiffany Cabán, a DSA member and police abolitionist — highlighted a spate of mayoral decisions that seemed like nothing more than politics as usual. On the campaign trail, “Mayor Mamdani put forth a new vision for public safety,” one advocate told the crowd. “Increasing the size of the NYPD is not new.” 

NYC-DSA is attempting, very publicly and in real time, to determine what the relationship between its elected leaders and its base looks like when the leader in question is so powerful — and so structurally constrained. “Governing from City Hall represents new scale, with a ton of new considerations for the left to navigate,” Elle Bisgaard-Church, Mamdani’s chief of staff and a longtime DSA member, told me. “That requires learning and growing and maturation from all of us.” Mamdani’s improbable win, and the most recent round of electoral victories, have forced the chapter into a new subject position relative to the rest of the city. “At this point I think we are the establishment — we have a mayor!” Abdullah Younus, a former NYC-DSA cochair, told me in June. The limelight has brought unprecedented scrutiny; right-wing detractors like the Post and the Manhattan Institute are hungry to produce evidence of privilege and hypocrisy. In August, the media salivated over new information that suggests cochair Gordillo inhabits a row house purchased by his parents in the rapidly gentrifying Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, failed to complete his IBEW apprenticeship, and is behind on his union dues.

Success has also crystallized long-germinating internal conflicts: over whether to prioritize organizing within the electoral campaign cycle or outside of it, over how to navigate the delicate balance between supporting the organization’s elected leaders and holding them accountable, over the role of private developers in housing provision, and over the centrality of the police to a socialist critique. To what extent can NYC-DSA bend to the world as it is — the deals and concessions that allow politics to get done, the city in all its messy multiplicity — without sacrificing its socialist ideals? When does compromise represent a form of necessary pragmatism, and when is it a fundamental abdication, one that might doom DSA’s entire project? How big of a tent is, in fact, too big?

The chapter’s diverse and sometimes opposing answers to these questions are instructive not because they reveal that DSA is divided — it would be troubling if an organization of 15,000 people didn’t evince some strategic and ideological dissension — but because they represent a serious negotiation over the shape of the American left and the future of New York City. “So often we’ve discussed politics as if it is an intellectual debate,” the mayor said recently, reflecting on his first hundred days in office. But in this work, he said, the victories are not intellectual: “When you win something, it means you can change someone’s life.” The fundamental achievement of Mamdani and NYC-DSA’s mayoral campaign and the subsequent 2026 primaries was to make New Yorkers believe that their lives, and their city, could be different. The terrifyingly high-stakes reward is the chance to make these intellectual questions material — to determine, together and apart, precisely what different could look like.

During the 2025 election cycle, some centrists and right-wingers liked to sneer that Mamdani, an erstwhile rapper amusingly known as “Mr. Cardamom,” was a nepo baby who had never really had a job. This is not true; his job was DSA. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the politician previously most associated with DSA, has likely paid far more money in dues to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee than to DSA. Mamdani, though, is “cadre,” the term of art for the organizers at DSA’s core. He is a product of the electoral machine he helped create; within the chapter, he inspires the sort of devotion that provokes religious metaphors or comparisons to Beatlemania. People call him Z, a little breathlessly. 

DSA, which was founded by the socialist intellectual Michael Harrington in 1973, took its present form in the 1980s after fusing with another New Left political group called the New American Movement, a successor to Students for a Democratic Society. But although many of the late twentieth century’s prominent left-wing politicians and thinkers were members, the organization waned after Harrington’s death and remained marginal throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Its emergence from this interval of relative slumber has tracked exactly with the rise to national political prominence of two elderly New York natives: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. All three phenomena have to do with the failure of the Democratic Party amid intertwined crises — climate annihilation, forever wars, the new precariat that has emerged alongside absurd wealth concentration and neoliberal austerity — to offer a vision of life that resonates with working-class people across the United States. 

Over the past decade, New York’s DSA chapter in particular has built out a portfolio of socialist leaders and achieved significant legislative and labor wins to boot. It did so, at first, by losing. Its first candidate in this new era, a tenant organizer named Debbie Medina, fell short in her insurgent campaign for state senate about seven weeks before Trump was elected. So did Emily Gallagher, the district leader candidate running on Medina’s slate. Gallagher had been politically active in her neighborhood through the reform club New Kings Democrats, but she found herself attracted to DSA’s socialist principles and insider-outsider strategy. “Before DSA showed up, it was pretty split,” she told me. “You were either into politics or you were into activism, but you didn’t see a lot of overlap.” 

NYC-DSA’s sophomore effort, in 2017, supported two candidates for city council: the educator and community organizer Jabari Brisport, who ran in Central Brooklyn on the Green Party ticket, and the Palestinian Lutheran pastor Khader El-Yateem — known as Father K — who ran in Bay Ridge and refused to accept money from real estate developers. What the chapter offered them was canvassing might: “We can promise people an army,” Younus, who served as Father K’s field director before his stint as chapter cochair, said at the time. 

Both candidates lost, but Brisport would be back, and the effort to elect El-Yateem may have had even more profound ramifications: when I spoke to Younus in June, he called it “the winningest losing campaign in the history of campaigns.” It brought together a shocking number of people who’d go on to be figures of note in New York City politics, including activist Linda Sarsour, Councilmember Kayla Santosuosso, and, of course, Mamdani himself, then a recent college grad commuting to Bay Ridge. These campaigns are iterative: people who work on one go on to run for office themselves; new leaders recruit others. In 2018, organizers used the lessons they learned in Bay Ridge to map out a campaign strategy for an activist named Julia Salazar in North Brooklyn. Salazar, who joined DSA through a Jacobin reading group, won by an almost eighteen-point margin. 

That same cycle, DSA endorsed and supported Ocasio-Cortez’s insurgent congressional race. The chapter also worked on successful efforts to pass a raft of landmark housing and tenant protections at the state level and prevent Amazon from setting up shop in Long Island City. Mamdani was there all along, coleading the Queens DSA Electoral Working Group and helping to build out Cabán’s campaign for district attorney in 2019.

In 2020, amid the upheavals of the pandemic and the George Floyd protests, all six NYC-DSA members running for the state legislature won their races, including Mamdani, Brisport, and Gallagher. Momentum slackened somewhat during the Biden interregnum — 2022’s slate of hopefuls saw decidedly more mixed results, and the chapter shed members — but there were other victories, including the 2023 passage of a landmark public renewable energy act after several years of organizing by NYC-DSA’s Ecosocialist Working Group. Horror at Israel’s genocide in Gaza following October 7 injected new energy into the organization before Mamdani’s mayoral campaign the following year brought new members in record numbers at both the local and national level. (Its accomplishments and rapid growth belie the fact that the lion’s share of NYC-DSA are “paper members” who typically only pay dues and vote on internal matters; in the estimation of Michael Shank, a housing advocacy worker and elected leader within NYC-DSA, about twelve to twenty percent of the chapter canvasses regularly and attends meetings, and three percent are “DSA sickos” who have meetings practically every night.)

If politics is about “changing dominant institutions, the most obvious is government, and the most obvious tactic is the electoral project,” Cabán said when we spoke in late March. But from the beginning, DSA 2.0 was never just about winning elections. “The goal is to build a movement,” Salazar told Jacobin in 2018. “Otherwise, long term, we are just reformists.” DSA’s ideological insistence on mass movement socialism and its inside-outside theory of change, which favors working both within and outside of the institutional political system, are precisely what distinguishes the organization from other progressive political projects — and what gives it heft. Unlike other political groups, DSA doesn’t liberally dole out endorsements, but the candidates it does bestow its favor on receive considerable support, up to and including a whole campaign apparatus. In return, those who win are expected to take DSA along for the ride: its “socialists in office” may now be on the inside, but they remain directly accountable to their base, with weekly meetings to discuss barriers to enacting the organization’s political vision and brainstorm solutions that involve mobilizing the membership. “If I don’t want to have to respond to, relate to, fold to institutional power, I need an outside organized force at my back,” Cabán told me. “For me, there’s no point in doing this without DSA,” Mamdani reflected near the end of his first assembly term, discussing the organization’s unique “co-governance” model. “The whole point of being in office is to do the same work that we’re doing as an organization.”

But what is that work, exactly? Alongside NYC-DSA’s external narrative of progress runs a murkier, parallel struggle to define the course and politics of the chapter. Its internal structure functions like a mini-parliament, with power spread across a series of informal parties and coalitions representing different ideological tendencies. It is not uncommon to hear talk of DSA’s “right wing,” a locution sure to amuse any actual Republican, but which, in this context, is broadly correlated with an investment in electoral politics. Caucuses also disagree about things like DSA’s relationship to the rest of the left and whether democratic socialists should continue to run candidates within the Democratic Party or form their own ballot line. (NYC-DSA’s press office did not respond to multiple interview requests for this piece. All DSA members quoted here spoke in their personal capacity.) 

Unlike DSA’s national body, which leans left, as do many of its smaller chapters around the country, New York’s chapter is in the hands of the right. Two groups — the Socialist Majority Caucus and Groundwork — dominate the chapter’s citywide leadership committee, currently accounting for 53 of its 71 seats. Members from both caucuses were “leaders in pioneering our electoral strategy, in running our campaigns, and through that, were able to recruit a lot of people,” said Alex Pellitteri, a former National Political Committee (NPC) member from South Brooklyn who belongs to Bread and Roses, a caucus with a much smaller foothold in New York. “It’s only natural that now their politics are hegemonic within the chapter.” 

The remaining eighteen spots, meanwhile, belong to members from smaller “left” caucuses that tend to be more skeptical of the possibility of enacting transformative change via the electoral system, and more focused on priorities like police and prison abolition, tenant organizing, and solidarity with the international left. DSA leaders on the right “believe that getting more power in this realm of the existing power structure will allow them to eventually enact a socialist vision,” Cheryl Rivera, an abolitionist organizer who was an active member of NYC-DSA between 2018 and 2024, told me. Having achieved a handful of electoral victories at various levels of government — winning a proverbial seat at the table — “people have convinced themselves that there is a true path to socialism at that table,” she said, “and there just isn’t.” Sophia Cocke, who is affiliated with the left caucus EMERGE and helps run the chapter’s Racial Justice Working Group, pointed out that plenty of New Yorkers either can’t vote or don’t out of a profound sense of disillusionment: “We need to view people who are outside of the electoral system as just as much political actors as those who are actively engaged.”

In some ways, NYC-DSA provides the closest encounter with direct democracy that many of its members will ever have. It’s composed of seven local branches corresponding to different areas of the city; at biannual conventions, delegates from each make decisions about what sort of political work the chapter will devote its members’ time and dues to prioritizing. Its working groups, meanwhile, are venues for organizing around specific issues like racial justice, ecosocialism, labor, and housing; their work feeds back into the larger organization’s priorities and campaigns. 

But to some members of NYC-DSA’s minority factions, the chapter’s structure and voting processes encode real democratic deficits. This is a source of considerable frustration. Forget Jonathan Chait and the New York Post: some of DSA’s harshest critics pay dues every month. Who but an insider could speak so passionately and bitterly about the fecklessness and authoritarianism of the ruling factions, could denounce with greater spleen its strategic errors and Faustian bargains? And they do — in Signal chats, in polemics posted on niche websites, and, inevitably, on X, despite NYC-DSA’s leadership’s efforts to project the appearance of unity. I have lost track of the disputes that have convulsed the chapter just in the time since I began reporting this article in January. There were quarrels over a vote to elect new leadership of the chapter’s Anti-War Working Group, whether to endorse Councilmember Chi Ossé in his aborted challenge to Representative Hakeem Jeffries, AOC’s potential re-endorsement, a resolution to expand direct voting, and a local bill to end around-the-clock home healthcare shifts. The discourse can get hyperbolic: the working group reshuffle was called a “coup”; the home healthcare fight occasioned comparisons to slavery.

Given NYC-DSA’s outsize position on the national stage, these fights sometimes extend beyond the city’s borders: one national leader of the Groundwork caucus, which opposed the home healthcare bill, took aim at its supporters, charging them with waging a “delusional” campaign and further accusing the entire New York minority faction of “an antagonism that attracts the cynical, the burnt out, the oppositionally defiant, and the unsatisfiable.” There is also longstanding tension between the New York chapter and the national DSA committee. The question of whether to endorse a prospective AOC 2028 presidential run is likely to be the next big flashpoint — early conversation has already resulted in threats of secession from one NYC-DSA leader.

Today, Mamdani is so indisputably the global standard-bearer for DSA it’s easy to forget that his bid for the New York City chapter’s support in the autumn of 2024 occasioned its own round of debate. Gallagher, Cabán, and DSA Councilmember Alexa Avilés all argued against bestowing the chapter’s imprimatur on their colleague, fearful that the perception of DSA’s backing a “spoiler” candidate could limit their ability to work with whoever actually won the race. Other DSA members believed that Mamdani should run an agitational campaign in order to force the conversation left, rather than moderate his positions in the hopes of winning. When it came down to it, though, just one-fifth of NYC-DSA voted against endorsing him; in the aftermath, even initial skeptics got fully on board with the program, crossing the city to canvass for their candidate. Then, as Mamdani steadily rose in the polls, the chapter was confronted by another, more unforeseen question: could they adapt their “socialist in office” model to fit the corner office at Global Capitalism headquarters? 

In October 2025, as Mamdani’s victory seemed increasingly assured, NYC-DSA gathered at Riverside Church — the stately neo-Gothic edifice overlooking the Hudson where, in 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous address opposing the war in Vietnam — to debate how to approach having one of their own in charge. Specifically, they were there to vote on a proposal, written by the chapter’s leadership body, that NYC-DSA put the task of supporting Mamdani’s mayoralty “before the task of critique.” Holden Taylor, a member and tenant organizer who attended the meeting, called it “fun as hell” but “kind of a farce.” In his estimation, this “single attempt” to deal with the contradictions of a Mamdani mayoralty carried a promise of what a more democratic, deliberative organization could look like but was short on deliberation itself. While the resolution’s language was watered down somewhat following objections from left-wing members, it passed overwhelmingly, setting NYC-DSA’s policy ambitions in line with Mamdani’s platform and focusing on mounting a “Tax the Rich” campaign at the state level to fund his affordability agenda. As one New York City DSA member, who also sits on the national elected committee, pointed out, the resolution didn’t mention tenants, or the NYPD, at all. Instead, it established that NYC-DSA’s number one priority under Mamdani, alongside fighting for the working class, “will be campaigning for a democratic socialist mayor.” (In italics and bold print, lest there be any doubt.) Declaring that the chapter’s relationship to the administration would be one not of accountability but of allegiance, the resolution summoned the specter of a never-ending electoral campaign.

On a frigid late-winter day in mid-March, I went to Bedford-Stuyvesant’s Hattie Carthan Playground to join a canvass for Eon Tyrell Huntley, a DSA member running for New York State Assembly. To seek local office with the blessing of DSA in a post-Zohran New York is to encounter a sort of paradox: Mamdani’s success and popularity have forced the city’s entrenched political forces to accommodate him, and yet they remain desperate to keep more of his ilk out of power. This placed the mayor in a bind during the primary cycle: if he endorsed all the insurgent candidates whose politics aligned with his, he risked damaging relationships with politicians whose support he needed to win budgetary concessions critical to enacting his vision. Reluctant to antagonize State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Jeffries, an ally of several Central Brooklyn incumbents, Mamdani would eventually cosign only those DSA state legislative candidates who were competing in open races — a list that didn’t include Huntley. 

The in-person reality of DSA tends to be more wholesome and less dogmatic than the discourse on X might suggest. Michael Shank, a housing advocacy worker who served as an advisor and field coordinator for Huntley, jokingly referred to the campaign as a “team of rivals”: one paid member from each of the two major caucuses and one from EMERGE. “Don’t let anyone tell you that the [DSA] left doesn’t care about electoral politics!” he said. 

A few minutes after noon, Huntley sidled up to the canvassing event with his hands burrowed in the pockets of his Stüssy leopard-print fleece. He is tall and lanky, with a nose ring, and wore sunglasses with thick black frames despite the resolute grayness of the day. Joining the loose circle of waiting canvassers, he started to talk about displacement, a fundamental concern for many locals (between 2010 and 2020, Bed-Stuy lost 22,000 of its black residents and gained some 30,000 white ones), the campaign’s marquee issue, and a sticking point during his first run for office. He exchanged thoughts with a few of the volunteers about strategy this time around, and how best to approach potential voters; “One of the lessons of 2024 was ‘sunglasses off,’” he said, but then left his on for an amusingly extended period. 

Huntley made an initial bid for the District 56 seat in 2024 after being recruited by Gallagher, who met him at a Covid-era PTA meeting. That year, he fell short by only around five hundred votes. His opponent, incumbent Stefani Zinerman, ran the most expensive campaign for state assembly that cycle, with pro-Israel, charter school, and real estate interests spending heavily to boost her. Zinerman and some of her supporters had also decided to deploy the local-politics equivalent of a nuclear warhead: the gentrifier allegations. Though Huntley grew up in East New York and had lived in Bed-Stuy for years, Zinerman’s campaign seized on the fact that he and his family lived a few blocks outside of the district to argue that he wasn’t from the community, claiming he was being used as a figurehead by an organization fundamentally composed of white transplants. “That narrative was weaponized against Eon very purposefully,” DSA member Maya Meredith said on the podcast “Unruly Subjects” in December 2025. 

The idea that NYC-DSA is run by and for young white people who did not grow up here is a common talking point in New York City politics, and one that has dogged the chapter for years. In a recent New Yorker profile, Jeffries, a Zinerman supporter and longtime DSA hater, said that the organization doesn’t bother to run candidates in public-housing heavy districts because “there’s nothing for them there.” DSA, in turn, tends to be quite dismissive of this framing; in our interview, Gallagher called it “nativist.” It is true that New York’s intensely tribal ethnic politics can produce rhetoric that approaches parody; in the final weeks of his 2026 campaign, U.S. Rep. Adriano Espaillat, a former undocumented immigrant, opined that people like his DSA challenger Darializa Avila Chevalier, who is also Dominican but grew up in Florida, should be sent “back home packing wherever they came from.” It is also true that Zinerman herself has consistently opposed tenants’ rights legislation in Albany. But all the talk about transplants gets at something real: many New Yorkers feel acute anxieties, about displacement and how the city is changing, that they suspect newcomers cannot fully appreciate. While NYC-DSA has a long-established pattern of elevating candidates of color — this cycle actually saw its first-ever white male endorsee, David Orkin — at the end of the day, Younus said, DSA critics can continue to deploy accusations of hypocrisy because the organization itself is still “white as fuck.” 

It’s not quite as white as it once was: NYC-DSA recently ran a new membership demographic survey in which sixty percent of respondents identified that way. Still, during Meredith’s time in the organization, she has seen other black members become demoralized over the chapter’s reluctance to prioritize issues that affect New York’s black communities. To her, the charges leveled against Huntley’s first campaign found purchase because they contained a kernel of truth: his team did not have the neighborhood-level relationships to counter them.

Since Huntley’s initial failure to unseat Zinerman, Meredith has devoted much of her time to building up NYC-DSA’s Afrosocialist caucus, which is unique within the chapter in that affiliation is based on identity rather than ideology. She hopes to create a stronger pipeline for the next generation of organizers of color. In the summer of 2024, she also worked with Ronit Kory, a volunteer who would go on to serve as Huntley’s campaign manager in 2026, and with other DSA members affiliated with the leftist EMERGE caucus, on a proposal, “Socialism is the People,” to devote chapter resources to building bridges with existing neighborhood groups. Places like Harlem and Bed-Stuy, far from being terra nullius, were home to organizations that had been fighting against police brutality and landlord abuses for much longer than DSA had been around, and Meredith thought that NYC-DSA had something to learn from them. That fall, she wrote an open letter deeming Zinerman’s win “one of the most clear-cut illustrations of NYC-DSA’s race problem,” and asking: “Do we want to organize the multiracial working class, or not?” 

In hindsight, there were various explanations for Huntley’s 2024 defeat. “Voter turnout was depressed — but also, the voters were depressed,” Stephen Wood, Huntley’s Communication Director, told me: Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the Democratic Party’s floundering, MAGA once more rearing its infernal head. But regardless of the precise balance of factors, Huntley decided to take his opponents’ critique seriously. “We need to make sure that we stay engaged with these people,” he told supporters the night he lost. “We can’t just let them feel like we only come around when there’s elections.” In the months after, he told me, “I never went away.” As he went about campaigning for Mamdani, he also reached out to community leaders, veterans of black radical Bed-Stuy groups like the December 12th Movement and The East — “people who would be [our] natural allies, but feel disconnected because they haven’t had any sort of conversation.” That Sunday in March 2026, we were waiting for two new such allies: Carmella Charrington and Omar Hardy, candidates for district leader on a slate with Huntley and Jabari Brisport, who was running for reelection. Charrington and Hardy had both been propelled into local politics by personal fights against deed theft, an umbrella term for a range of predatory practices aimed at getting homeowners to forfeit their stakes in their properties.

Deed theft is not a typical area of focus for DSA: it affects a comparatively small (though growing) number of people; by definition it involves homeowners, not exactly a socialist organization’s core constituency; and its perpetrators largely target black people. The Huntley campaign’s elevation of the issue was a nod to the particular concerns of the neighborhood he was running to represent — though eighty percent of the district rents, the promise that homeownership carries for black Brooklynites whose ancestors have been systematically shut out of building generational wealth via land is incalculable. (Demonstrators at a recent “Stop Deed Theft” protest held “Black Homeowners Matter!” signs.) Huntley also features in his campaign literature commercial rent control, which would support small business proprietors — another constituency that some in DSA might look at askance. “The petite bourgeoisie is angry,” he chimed in at the canvass as Shank outlined the campaign’s vision of homes as sources of community wealth, not speculative assets. “They’re struggling and suffering, too.”

As if on cue, Charrington arrived, dressed for the weather — “Stop Deed Theft” top over a puffy jacket, trader’s hat with fuzzy earflaps, oversized aviators — with a student videographer, her father Allman, and a wagon full of signature forms in tow. After city marshals tried to evict her from her father’s home, she told the group, her electeds had ghosted her: “All of them look like me, and I didn’t get any help.” She later explained to me that she thought Huntley’s opponents had seized on negative perceptions of DSA to fearmonger about something that had already functionally happened under existing leadership. “People talked about Eon like, ‘Well he’s not from Bed-Stuy, he doesn’t know what our needs are,’” she said, but over time “our whole community has pretty much been wiped out” — and since Huntley lost in 2024, that process had only accelerated. “So why is that?” 

DSA’s basic pitch to voters is that, no matter their race or class or the place they come from, their problems, and their hopes, are not so different from one another. Would the longtime Bed-Stuy residents on the canvassers’ lists that afternoon be willing to hear it — to see the young white people moving into their neighborhood not as enemies or harbingers of dispossession but as fellow victims of predatory market forces larger than any of them? “That is the question,” Shank told me later. “That’s our whole existential problem.” 

Deed theft unexpectedly became citywide news in late April, when Ossé, a DSA city councilmember, was arrested by the NYPD for trying to protect Charrington’s brownstone from repossession. Within days, Mamdani had announced a new office for deed theft prevention. A week after the incident, at another “Stop Deed Theft” rally that was held outside the brownstone (and attended by Huntley and his team), there was a palpable effort by some of the black speakers to include both DSA and the young white people who had turned up. Imani Henry, the founder of Equality for Flatbush, a neighborhood organization that agitates against displacement and police killings, observed that the white working class had it just as bad, saying, “We need to unite against the real estate developers!” While some speakers applauded the mayor’s office for its responsiveness on deed theft, Henry also condemned the administration’s support for a raft of Eric Adams-era housing ballot measures that reduce neighborhood-level control over new developments. Mamdani, he said, was trying to “privatize” housing. 

This unlikely combination of praise and critique hinted at the fact that Mamdani’s housing and tenant policy is a bit of a smorgasbord. It has been characterized, in part, by sensitivity to community demands, a focus on bad landlords, and efforts to curb skyrocketing rent prices, which culminated in late June’s successful rent freeze. The mayor “revitalized” an Office to Protect Tenants and put Cea Weaver, a veteran DSA member and tenant organizer, at its head. Along with the Office of Mass Engagement, her team has been canvassing building-to-building to understand people’s housing issues and holding trainings on how to form tenant associations. “I really believe, and the mayor really believes, that when more people are involved in fighting to stabilize their housing and in organizing with their neighbors to articulate a vision for where they live, we’re going to see better and stronger results,” she told me.

But under immense pressure to alleviate the housing crisis and constrained by the fact that private developers are generally the only actors who can supply the necessary capital to build on a mass scale, Mamdani’s administration has also endorsed the Adams-era ballot measures and projects that involve upzoning, deregulation, and the transfer of public housing to private management. Mamdani hired Leila Bozorg as his deputy mayor for housing and planning; she is an Adams appointee and former board member of the pro-development, or “YIMBY, ” group Open New York, which pronounced itself “thrilled” to see her appointment. Prominent NYC-DSA members and subgroups have gotten on board: the ballot measures were endorsed by the chapter’s House the Future Working Group as well as Weaver herself. Her contention is that, paired with strong enough tenant protections, greater housing supply can actually “give tenants more power.” 

But Mamdani’s YIMBY drift has other DSA socialists in office concerned that the mayor is trying to solve the housing crisis by seeking to channel the very forces behind that crisis. Gallagher told me that the rampant market-rate construction in Williamsburg and Greenpoint over the last several years has not made her district more affordable. “I am not someone that can get behind the idea that just building housing is going to solve the problem,” she said. These debates are longstanding within DSA. Over the past few years, the chapter’s housing policy has been tugged in opposite directions by two opposing forces. On one side is the ascendancy of the YIMBY movement, which aims to fix the housing crisis through upzoning and deregulation — basically, by building as much as possible, including market-rate and luxury developments. On the other is the influence of New York’s existing tenant unions, which are clear about the forces underlying displacement and gentrification — namely, developers and the real estate lobby — and remain focused on winning protections against eviction and rent increases via collective organizing. DSA member Isaac Kirk-Davidoff joined the Crown Heights Tenant Union in 2021 and considers their organizing model his north star. “People in tenant union meetings really fucking care about displacement, and I’ve never seen it have the same kind of weight, especially over the past few years, in DSA,” he told me. 

This growing ideological and strategic rift was literalized between late 2022 and 2023, when NYC-DSA’s Housing Working Group, unable to develop a democratic means of adjudicating tensions, split into two parts. House the Future is broadly focused on constructing and preserving affordable housing; it’s currently all in on a bill, sponsored by Gallagher, that would create a statewide “development authority” to build green social housing. Members tend to see the private sector’s role as a necessary — or perhaps even positive — compromise and are thus more aligned with the Mamdani administration on housing policy. The other, the Tenant Organizing Working Group, abhors YIMBYism, prioritizes building-level organizing, and is concentrated on forming tenant assemblies where renters meet and compare the situations in their buildings, with the goal of eventually establishing a city-wide tenant union. “There’s a lot of bad blood” between the two groups, Kirk-Davidoff, who ended up in the tenant working group after the split, told me. 

There are people in both groups who are unhappy with this balkanization. Iziah Thompson, a housing policy expert, joined DSA right as the split was happening, and while he gravitated toward House the Future, he told me he still tries to make sure that the perspective of the tenant organizing group is heard. “I think we can’t continue moving forward without trying to at least synthesize some of the key concepts that we’re working with,” he said. Kirk-Davidoff agreed, observing that more links to House the Future’s policy experts would also help the Tenant Organizing Working Group translate their ideals into practical proposals: “We’d be stronger if we had some of those wonks we could ask, ‘How do you make this legal?’”

Public housing inhabitants seem like an obvious constituency for a socialist group to cultivate, but NYC-DSA has not historically had close ties with residents of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). Huntley, who grew up in a NYCHA building in East New York, noted that while he’s never felt resistance from NYC-DSA members when it comes to public housing, it might not be top of mind for most DSA members because “that’s not their background.” NYCHA is nearly 43 percent black, and its buildings’ residents skew older than those of the city at large; this demographic combination is not one that DSA has ever had much luck with. (2026 Harlem state assembly candidate Conrad Blackburn, a public defender who was raised in Florida housing projects, foregrounded NYCHA in his campaign and had probably the sharpest analysis of the relationship between displacement, gentrification, and the police of any NYC-DSA candidate this cycle. But he faced a well-funded opponent from a local political dynasty, likely suffered from DSA’s lack of a foothold in Harlem, failed to secure either Mamdani or AOC’s endorsement because of his slim chances, and ended up the slate’s only loss.) Thompson also noted that NYCHA residents already have tenant councils, which can make it harder for DSA to organize there. “It becomes difficult when there is a strong, sometimes really entrenched power structure in a building already,” he said. 

NYCHA has been so drastically under-resourced over the past decades that some of its buildings are in a state of dereliction. This is the case with two public housing complexes in Chelsea, one of New York’s toniest neighborhoods. Under Mayor Bill de Blasio, the city had proposed a contentious privatization scheme known as Permanent Affordability Commitment Together (PACT). It would demolish the buildings, temporarily displace longtime inhabitants (many of whom are elderly), grant much of the land to market-rate housing, and convert the public housing units to Section 8, meaning the city would subsidize residents’ rent while private developers control the buildings. Public ownership is by no means a panacea — the New York public advocate’s most recent installment of the annual “Worst Landlord Watchlist” mentioned that the city’s worst landlord by far is the city itself — but other NYCHA conversions under the PACT privatization program have resulted in much higher eviction rates and less transparency around evictions than those in non-converted buildings. Bozorg has called the project “innovative,” telling the Times the administration is behind it, and Weaver, historically a bête noire of the real estate industry, now supports it as well, arguing that it represents the city’s leveraging what assets it has — here, the high value of the land — to address dilapidated housing conditions amid decades of disinvestment in NYCHA. “I really believe that the plan at Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea is an extraordinarily powerful step forward for public housing,” she told me.

The administration’s decision to back the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea project has infuriated many of the complexes’ residents, though some consider it a reasonable trade-off. It’s hard to imagine the project’s opponents reacting particularly well to a hypothetical DSA canvasser’s argument that the real estate industry is the common enemy when the Mamdani administration has settled on a controversial private developer — the geniuses behind Hudson Yards, no less — as the solution to their woes. In mid-June, NYCHA residents confronted Bozorg and Weaver at a public event, urging them to reverse course on the demolition plan, which the residents have called “a land grab and a fundamental abandonment of NYCHA’s responsibility to preserve permanently public, deeply affordable housing.” In recent weeks, the Tenant Organizing Working Group has formed a NYCHA subcommittee to support Fulton and Elliot-Chelsea residents, and some NYC-DSA members have circulated an open letter demanding that Mamdani halt the project. To move ahead with the demolition would “open the floodgates of private market predation in our city,” the letter cautions. “Letting this happen under the cover of socialist governance is simply unacceptable.”

Yet during the first six months of his term, NYC-DSA’s fealty to Mamdani remained almost entirely steadfast. In early February, when he endorsed New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s reelection bid, stifling a progressive challenge in its cradle, the city chapter released a muted statement of discontent that contained no direct criticism. Some individual DSA electeds backtracked on their initial negative reactions to the endorsement and others declined to discuss it at all. If you had tuned in late to a radio interview the cochairs did with Brian Lehrer near the end of February, you could have been forgiven for assuming the two were mayoral spokespeople rather than leaders of an independent organization appraising his record. After Lehrer asked about Mamdani’s shifting policy on homeless sweeps following the deaths of eighteen homeless people during a period of bitterly cold weather, they defended Mamdani’s slightly rejiggered version of sweeps as a “new approach to contacting homeless residents” that was “a pretty dramatic departure” from past practices under Adams. Lehrer read a fed-up listener’s reaction to this on air: “I’m really disappointed to hear you responding to thoughtful questioning about deaths of New Yorkers with facts about how great Mamdani is — this is typical party hack stuff.” 

Over the same six-month period, DSA concentrated its manpower and resources on its electoral canvassing operations and on Tax the Rich. The canvassing expenditures paid off: Huntley won his race by double digits, as did eight of the nine other winning NYC-DSA candidates. (Charrington and Hardy, who were not endorsed by DSA, won their district leader races, too). Voters across Bed-Stuy, East New York, Queens, and Harlem — not just the transplants but many longtime residents, too — were very clear: they are excited by the vision of life that DSA is offering. 

NYC-DSA’s 2026 effort to Tax the Rich was somewhat less successful. Though Mamdani had initially promoted a “millionaire’s tax” applying to anyone who made over one million dollars a year, the attempt produced, in the end, an additional tax on second homes in the city, provided that the property’s market value (often orders of magnitude lower than a home’s sale value) exceeds five million dollars for a house or one million dollars for an apartment. DSA has continued to tout the tax as a win, but it is also gearing up for another Tax the Rich campaign next session, when a presumably freshly reelected Hochul may be more inclined to take bigger political risks. There have been other wobbles: the mayor’s failure to secure an ideological ally as council speaker, delays in filling key administrative positions, and the collapse of the group Our Time, which was founded after Mamdani’s win to continue to mobilize non-DSA members who were activated during his campaign. 

But it is the mayor’s status quo approach to policing that has provided the most revealing test of DSA’s unity pledge. At some point along the way, Mamdani plainly calculated that he would have to avoid any confrontation with the NYPD if he wanted to meaningfully advance his affordability agenda. On August 6, when asked by the radio host Clay Cane where he differed with DSA, the mayor didn’t hesitate: “I’ve been very clear that we have our police force, we have prisons, we have jails,” he said, adding that the “purpose” of these institutions is to “ensure that we are delivering safety and justice hand-in-hand.” 

After Mamdani’s stunning June 2025 primary upset, Gordillo told the Times that if Mamdani were to reappoint Jessica Tisch as the head of the NYPD, it would be a problem for the membership: Tisch, Eric Adams’s final police commissioner, is a Zionist billionaire heiress with a history of opposing even modest police reforms. But when Mamdani did just that in November, bucking decades of precedent, the move quickly found defenders within NYC-DSA. On “The Dig,” former cochair Sumathy Kumar suggested that Mamdani’s decision to retain Tisch simply wasn’t that consequential. “The public doesn’t care about personnel fights,” she added, as though this were simply a P.R. matter rather than a battle to control the direction of the NYPD. 

While Mamdani was clear all the way back during his endorsement meeting with NYC-DSA that he wouldn’t run on Defund, he did offer other ambitious policing ideas such as a Department of Community Safety, a new city department that would tackle mental health and violence prevention. Bisgaard-Church called this an “affirmative vision of safety,” adding that the proposal Mamdani articulated on the campaign trail was “a tangible, feasible plan for actually showing what we think keeps people and communities safe.” (The plan for DCS does not allocate money away from the NYPD, but a fully funded and operational department could, in theory, render portions of the police department redundant.) Mamdani also pledged to do away with the NYPD’s riot squad and gang database. NYC-DSA’s Racial Justice Working Group accordingly set their sights on all three targets, a pragmatic move but also one that effectively allowed the mayor to establish the horizon of the possible. 

The administration has taken some initial steps toward creating a Department of Community Safety, but Mamdani’s gang database and riot squad pledges — both of which Tisch opposes — have gone unfulfilled. (Bisgaard-Church reaffirmed when we spoke in August that both are “top priorities,” but would not offer a concrete update on their progress; when I asked her if Mamdani believes that Rikers Island and the NYPD are currently delivering safety and justice to New Yorkers, or if this was an aspirational statement by the mayor, she did not answer directly but said, “We have not changed our commitments around closing Rikers and reforming these institutions.”) And as the NYPD continued to operate with much the same blend of brutality and disregard for constitutional rights as it always had, NYC-DSA was silent — at least, up until June. 

Plenty of contingents within NYC-DSA are furious at Mamdani’s inaction on policing and choice to keep on Tisch, but the October unity resolution initially left them little formal outlet to express their outrage. Other NYC-DSA members don’t view the carceral apparatus as intrinsic to a socialist critique. “I simply reject the premise that opposing cops and prisons is this intractable part of socialism,” an active NYC-DSA account wrote on X recently, adding, “to the extent to which traditional Marxist theory calls for an end to police and prisons, it’s in the context of a post-revolutionary classless society.” Still others have argued, as a practical matter, that it’s wiser to avoid tackling policing in the short-term, given the NYPD’s extraordinary power and influence. The chapter has never championed policing laws anywhere near as ambitious as its 2019 housing and tenant protections or its 2023 renewable energy act. Though NYC-DSA embraced Defund the Police in 2020, this was more of a blip than a turning point; by 2022, the backlash to the George Floyd uprising had set in, and the chapter jettisoned the Defund campaign, even as it remained a national priority. Rivera finds it telling that NYC-DSA’s commitment to changing people’s minds through organizing seemingly doesn’t extend to police and prison abolition, which are seen as bigger threats to the chapter’s electoral project. “People are like, ‘It’s not a priority for working-class black people, actually.’ I’m like, ‘Socialism isn’t a fucking priority for working-class black people!’” she said. “You have to build the coalition you want.” 

NYC-DSA’s unwillingness to take on the police in recent years has led to the departure of a number of organizers for whom the issue is paramount: Rivera quit in late 2024 and instead helped open up a community space in Crown Heights. This has left the Racial Justice Working Group struggling with high turnover and comparatively less influence. (The “Defund NYPD” link in its Instagram page’s bio now leads to the webpage for an online casino apparently seeking to attract a Kazakhstani customer base via a fetching A.I.-generated maiden.) Still, this summer, the group has played a lead role in urging NYC-DSA to take a public stand against Mamdani’s deference to the NYPD. 

In mid-June, after Tisch unveiled the plan to hire hundreds of new cops, the EMERGE caucus — which overlaps significantly with the Racial Justice Working Group — wrote an open letter arguing that the decision furthered “a trend of capitulation to police power” and urging Mamdani to fire Tisch. Cocke and their fellow Racial Justice Working Group leaders pushed for a similar statement from the entire chapter and wrote up a draft. By the end of the week, NYC-DSA released its first public statement explicitly chastising Mamdani, saying that the expansion “runs counter to the values of the socialist and working-class movement that elected him.” (Its tone was somewhat less confrontational than the EMERGE letter: no call to ditch Tisch here.) One young DSA member I met at the anti-police expansion rally told me they felt the chapter’s statement represented an encouraging shift in approach: “I think they’ve realized they can’t go four years without criticizing him.” 

Five days later, Mamdani backtracked, saying that he and Tisch had determined that the police department had enough officers for the time being. On Instagram, NYC-DSA proclaimed victory: “no new cops.” When we spoke shortly afterward, Cabán primarily credited “the organizations and the directly impacted people who have been organizing around these issues for years,” but granted the chapter a secondary role, saying: “It’s important that DSA weighed in and supported and echoed the asks of these folks.” Behind the scenes, the city council’s 23-member progressive caucus — which includes all four DSA councilmembers, with Cabán as cochair — had also urged Mamdani to reverse his decision: “We pushed incredibly hard,” she told Gothamist. 

As with the earlier deed theft case, the NYPD expansion debacle demonstrated Mamdani’s responsiveness to the demands of community groups, as well as his sensitivity to his base’s concerns. “Elections are an opportunity to elect the people that you think are going to be the best to be able to organize with — or organize around when you disagree,” Cabán told me. But the whole affair proved, too, that Mamdani is sufficiently powerful, and sufficiently canny, to reframe the Overton window in real time: at the end of the day, the big win DSA and others were trumpeting amounted to the NYPD staying the exact same size and shape as before.

Mamdani’s election and the most recent round of primary wins showed that NYC-DSA has activated new constituencies. The chapter’s task in the coming months will be determining how to convert this electorate into active participants who will get out in the street in support of bold policy changes, show up for city council and legislative hearings, or become canvassers in their own right. The “unilateral power of the mayor demands a wider base,” cochair Grace Mausser wrote in December, outlining a vision for a broad left-labor coalition. For the mayor’s part, Bisgaard-Church said, “this administration is trying to have a new relationship to engaging with people historically seen as ‘outside’” the system. Voters are fickle; a mass movement could actually allow the Mamdani and NYC-DSA to win the tax changes critical to enacting his agenda and challenge the forces that control the city: the business class, the real estate lobby, the police and its unions. What would it take to really organize NYCHA residents, or people who don’t speak English, or the thousands of New Yorkers involved in civilian complaints against the NYPD this year?

The stakes are astronomical. The same day as the June primary, eight defendants in the Prairieland case were sentenced to a total of 450 years in federal prison for actions that, for the most part, amounted to little more than attending a protest at an ICE detention facility. Trump and his cronies are waging all-out war on “radical left terrorism,” masked agents are shooting people in the streets, U.S.-funded bombs are still falling on Gaza. Cody Israel, an organizer and community land steward I spoke to, praised DSA for its remarkable victories but noted that, in the time the organization has been ascendant, “we are also seeing so many losses, so, so, so many losses on every single front: militaristically, environmentally, socially.” The worst case scenario, for DSA and for us all, would be for it to start to appear that “the left is losing and DSA is winning,” as Israel put it.

And NYC-DSA’s electoral wins inevitably resurface that nagging question: what does success look like for the chapter? Is it workers controlling the means of production? Is it a city where no senior citizen is displaced, where no child is homeless, where no teenager endures the humiliation of stop and frisk, where no mentally ill person is warehoused at Rikers island? Will it mean confronting the police and the real estate lobby head on? Or will it mean finding ways to accommodate these forces? Is it a balanced city budget and four more years of Zohran? Is it DSA setting its electoral sights even higher? Mamdani and NYC-DSA’s cochairs are already talking about running a socialist in the next presidential election: “When does the race for 2028 begin?” the mayor asked a crowd of supporters at a rally in June just before the recent primaries. “It starts now.” 

The more radically transformative vision better reflects the values that have traditionally animated DSA, and yet these questions of electoral strategy and ambition will be far more familiar to anybody who has been following the discourse about New York, DSA, and the left over the past six months. In part, this is because these are the questions members of the media and the political establishment are asking — the language of the horse race is the only language they understand. Even as pundits and the Democratic Party faithful clutch their pearls and fan the flames of a new red scare, the thought of DSA capturing votes is still preferable to the possibility of actual change resulting from these electoral outcomes. Politicians can always be neutralized or co-opted, their demands edited to fit the strictures of governance. “In my mind, the biggest danger for DSA is actually that it transforms itself over time through excessive moderation into something like the new version of the Congressional Progressive Caucus,” Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder of Jacobin and current publisher of The Nation, told The New York Times in July. 

For now, “the vibes are pretty good,” Taylor, the tenant organizer who has been critical of the Mamdani administration’s direction on housing and policing, told me a few days after the June primary. “There’s a lot of unity.” And there are indications that the pressures of a DSA member at the city’s helm haven’t pushed the chapter to moderate in every respect: the election of organizers like Chevalier and Claire Valdez, who are notably to the left of the mayor on housing and policing; the nascent effort to join forces with NYCHA tenants protesting the demolition and privatization of their homes; and the recent unanimous adoption of a priority arms embargo campaign, which links labor organizing to the struggle to end American complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. These are glimpses of a potential future in which DSA might be able to move from running and winning insurgent candidates to acting as a real insurgent force in political life. 

When I spoke again to Cabán a few weeks after the primary, she confessed some vexation at the relentless focus — from the media and DSA members alike — on NYC-DSA’s recent electoral victories. “Why are we trying to win these races? Not to just show that democratic socialism wins,” she said. “We’re doing it for actual transformation.”