NYC DSA’s City Council Strategy Demands an Independent Electoral Offensive

Nine months ago, New York City elected a socialist as its mayor. Since then, Zohran Mamdani has become something more than a steward of city administration — but rather a national, even international, symbol of what a different kind of politics could look like. His approval ratings have held. His policy deliveries, narrated through a sharp communication style, have made him a fixture well beyond the city's borders. For a left that has spent decades on the defensive, his visibility has been its own kind of victory.

But the record is not all causes for celebration.  Though his popularity endures, there is still a real and growing number of people on the left who have found themselves frustrated by the shortcomings of the Mamdani administration, particularly around policing.  

In November, NYC-DSA will convene to decide what comes next. The context is not just Mamdani's mayoralty but a year of electoral breakthroughs — DSA-backed candidates won congressional primaries in New York, unseating incumbents and sending socialists to Washington. And looming over all of it is the imminent 2028 moment, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may very well run for president. Regardless of who runs or who wins, the terrain of American politics will shift dramatically in ways we cannot yet predict.

The question before the convention is what socialists do with this moment.  To answer this, one must look beyond the well-deserved celebrations and identify opportunities for growth within this historic socialist mayoralty.

Zionist land sales continue under the socialist mayor's watch. Police reform has been more or less dead in the water. The Department of Community Safety — proposed during the campaign as a new institution that would break the NYPD's monopoly on public safety — has so far amounted to an office with two staffers. The Strategic Response Group still operates, and Jessica Tisch remains commissioner. The administration has been either unwilling or unable to deliver on much of what the campaign promised, especially on key demands from socialist and progressive movements. These gaps are important to identify, for they determine the set of political tasks that lie ahead for the socialist movement.

Many of the reasons for these shortcomings are structural, and they are not reducible to Mamdani's personal caliber. Governor Kathy Hochul's cooperation is required for nearly every element of his agenda, and a business lobby breathes down his neck, waiting for the first sign of failure. Likewise, the NYPD has never accepted civilian oversight and likely never will, voluntarily. Every mayor faces these constraints, and a socialist mayor faces them with less margin for error and with a movement on his left expecting more.

If this all sounds familiar, it should. Mass enthusiasm, volunteer armies, and the sense that a new era had arrived and that the country's long deferral of its own promises was finally ending — we have indeed been here before. Obama's 2008 campaign generated much of the same energy and the same expectations, and the disappointment that followed was the result of a mix of betrayal and structural reckoning with what an election can and cannot accomplish.

But Mamdani is not Obama, and in many ways he does represent a genuine political advance from the former president.  While both govern with a similar managerial ethos, Mamdani’s socialist principles are not hard to identify. Where Obama let the government disappear into managerial opacity, Mamdani runs a permanent campaign that is savvy with social media, comfortable in the vernacular of the city, and capable of highlighting how his administration is serving the people.  He has at least so far kept his coalition intact in a way Obama, who famously shut down his grassroots machine upon election, did not. These genuine advances help explain why his popularity has held so far and why he has become a national symbol for the vitality of socialism rather than yet another cautionary tale.

But his popularity will not hold forever, and those on the left are right to be frustrated by the shortcomings.  Zohran Mamdani was as close to the steel-resolved DSA cadre as anyone we are likely to see. If the limits of successful election apply even to him, they will apply to anyone entering power in the current balance of political forces. The question is not whether Zohran will disappoint us — he will, and has. The question is what tasks lie ahead for us.  Mamdani will navigate the constraints of his office to perform his tasks. We must navigate an entirely different set of structures, incentives, and obstacles.

Before his inauguration, Geese proposed a socialist Project 2026 for New York City, where we argued that the executive branch presented the opportunity for a ‘political’ rank and file strategy: the proposal that a socialist mayor should restaff the agencies and boards under his control with people committed to the socialist project and transformative democratic change.  To some extent, we have seen the Mamdani administration demonstrate an understanding of this. His appointments have drawn from movement-aligned circles, and there are real signs of this political rank-and-file strategy taking shape inside the agencies.

But in the several months since inauguration, we can see the executive has limits, and they cannot all be reduced to limits of will or imagination. The mayor can appoint, direct, and restaff, but he cannot legislate. He cannot write the laws, hold the hearings, or set the Council's agenda. On the demands the movement was built around — police reform above all — the executive has been either unwilling or unable to act. Mamdani cannot do this alone, and without our intervention, he will find the only path available is liquidation into progressive deliverism, not too dissimilar from the mayoralty of Bill de Blasio.

The executive, in other words, is not enough to enact our socialist vision in New York City.  It is obviously a powerful office, and we were right to contest it.  But after having won, the tasks of socialists in New York City, as was clear from the beginning, lie through and beyond the executive office. Leaving Zohran isolated and casting demands from afar will not suffice. He shouldn’t be seen as a lone solution, but rather a stepping stone for a movement that must continue developing and reaching new heights. The first obvious place to look is the City Council. The Council is the primary institution with the power to pass or kill Mamdani’s agenda, and it is currently controlled by a right-wing opposition.

Julie Menin was elected Speaker of New York’s City Council in January 2026, and has acted as the structural counterweight to Mamdani. She controls the legislative agenda, the committee assignments, and the budget process. The Council's preliminary budget response in March rejected the mayor's tax-the-rich proposal and proposed closing the deficit through "efficiencies" instead. And the Department of Community Safety became an office rather than an agency in part because Mamdani's aides concluded that Menin would not allow it to advance through legislation.

Winning the City Council is not just necessary to put left pressure on Mamdani and expand his possibilities for action, but it also defangs an ideological enemy. After pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrated outside Park East Synagogue in November 2025 — protesting an event that promoted the sale of land in occupied Palestinian territories—Menin introduced legislation to create protest buffer zones around houses of worship and schools. While Mamdani was able to veto the bill applying to schools, the houses-of-worship bill passed the Council 44-5, a veto-proof supermajority. The council has made it clear that on the question of Zionist land sales and the protest movement against them, the Council could legislate around the mayor and undermine the anti-zionist movement through unconstitutional criminalization of free speech.

These are the stakes of a City Council captured by the opposition. While the right’s pressure comes from, among other places, Menin’s Council, the left's pressure on Mamdani comes from movement organizations. This has worked to some degree, such as when 70 organizations mobilized against the mayor's proposed NYPD headcount expansion, leading him to reverse and freeze it instead.  But what these movements lack is institutional expression. External agitation can be ignored, co-opted, or waited out.

The four DSA members in the Council — Tiffany Cabán, Alexa Avilés, Chi Ossé, and Shahana Hanif — are the closest thing to a socialist bloc in the Council. But four votes cannot set an agenda, and all four are term-limited in 2029. So are more than two-thirds of the Council's members. The bloc has to be rebuilt regardless of what else happens, and the body will be reshaped with or without the DSA.

The resolution before the NYC-DSA convention calls to seize this rare opportunity. 2029 is also the year Mamdani will likely run for reelection, which means the Council races will be fought with him at the top of the ticket. With his army of volunteers in the field and his name at the top of the ballot, this resolution calls for seizing the opportunity for an electoral offensive for the 2029 City Council elections, and an attempt to build an independent socialist pole in New York City politics.

A key part of the terrain is the "Commie Corridor." This is the contiguous zone of socialist strength that stretches from western Queens through western Brooklyn — Astoria, Long Island City, Sunnyside, Woodside, Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Bushwick, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Crown Heights, Prospect Heights, and Sunset Park. It is the geographic base where the socialist ‘brand’ is hegemonic, where DSA infrastructure is embedded, and where Mamdani won with wide margins. The corridor, therefore, is the base from which the offensive is launched and the terrain the offensive must first hold.

The resolution's other aim is a socialist Speaker, and here we have to be honest about both the difficulty and the necessity.

Conventional wisdom says a first-term council member cannot become Speaker. Though this is not a law,  it is the practical reality of how City Council works. The Speakership is won through relationships, committee work, favors owed, and a demonstrated ability to manage a body of fifty-one people who each have their own ambitions and their own constituencies. A member sworn in for the first time in January 2030 will likely not have any of that. The arithmetic of a first-term Speakership is daunting–but daunting is not impossible.

One option is for a sitting Socialist in Office from another body to run for a Council seat. For example, a state SIO — a member of the State Assembly or Senate who already holds office—already has relationships, already knows how to legislate — would enter the Council not as a freshman but as a colleague with seniority in a different chamber. The connections of a second-term council member, earned elsewhere, would come with them. Though not typical, and not the only possible path, this example should show us that the aspiration for a socialist Speaker is not impossible, and we should not surrender our resolve and our imagination without a fight.

The Speaker is a powerful role through which the Council's powers are actually exercised. The Speaker controls the legislative agenda, the committee assignments, and the budget process. A socialist bloc with a socialist Speaker would therefore have the ability to set the terms of debate, decide what gets a vote and when, and shape the budget rather than react to it.  But even without the Speakership, the bloc would be a decisive force in the Council.

The resolution calls for an electoral offensive, with the goal of building an independent socialist political pole.  Such a pole, for us, means constituting an organized socialist presence in the political life of a city that can act beyond the constraints of the Mamdani administration. It maintains its own program, its own demands, and will necessarily often come into conflict with the mayor’s priorities. That is OK, and likely inevitable as our movement grows. Its concrete expression is a militant socialist bloc in the City Council.

The proposed bloc would need to maintain its political independence. Mamdani is a democratic socialist, but his administration is largely staffed by progressive liberals, and constraints are imposed by moderate liberals in Albany and the City Council, and even conservatives in Washington. The bloc exists so that the socialist pole is not exhausted by the mayor's compromises, and so that the movement's demands have an institutional expression when the mayor is constrained or unwilling to act.

Police reform is the clearest example of where political representation for the demands of the people is desperately needed. Mamdani has often deferred police policy to Commissioner Tisch, and low-level enforcement under his administration has continued the broken-windows policing of the Adams years. A socialist bloc in the Council can champion the demands the mayor cannot, introduce the legislation he will not, and hold the hearings that put the city's policing apparatus on the record. It can give the frustration of movements, and the left, an institutional expression, so that dissent is not only captured by forces to his right.

The bloc also exists to ensure that the gains made by the Mamdani administration do not alone represent the limit of what is possible, and that the demands the movement was built around remain live political questions even when the mayor has decided they are not.

Criticism of the administration must be internal to the coalition rather than oppositional. The bloc strengthens Mamdani against the right, and the dissents it issues would reveal a multifaceted coalition. Support and criticism are therefore not mutually exclusive, and both are necessary for the coalition to hold. What makes the bloc useful to the administration is precisely that it is politically independent of it.  It can say what the mayor cannot, and its support carries weight because it is not automatic.

The bloc is also where future socialist candidates for mayor, for state office, and for Congress are incubated. Darializa Avila Chevalier's victory in NY-13 is the model: a 32-year-old socialist and Palestine movement organizer, unseating a five-term incumbent who chaired the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. She was attacked as too radical, her old posts were weaponized against her, and she won anyway. That is the kind of profile the resolution's succession races should seek: movement-rooted socialists with demonstrated bases in their districts, willing to champion demands bolder than the administration's official position. An independent socialist pole in New York City means an institution with its own base, its own program, and its own capacity to act.

The creation of such a pole will not emerge out of thin air, however. We must intervene so that our Socialists in Office are not isolated and compromised by the Democratic establishment. It’s clear that the only way forward is to pack offices at every level with socialists who can pursue their own initiatives rather than waiting on the establishment's permission, and the City Council provides a crucial opportunity to do so. The 2029 moment holds uncertainty for the city and the country, but also the promise of socialism's growth and consolidation in government. It will arrive on terrain that the period we have now leading into 2028 will have reshaped — a presidential election, another round of congressional and state races, and a national political landscape that will look unrecognizable regardless of who wins.

But if we want to win that moment, we must not wait, we must not be patient. Planning for the electoral offensive must begin now.