How door-knocking for Mayor Mamdani restored my faith in the power of organized people to defeat organized money.
The thought of knocking on a stranger’s door once filled me with dread. It sounded uncomfortable at best, and potentially humiliating, or dangerous, at worst. What if someone slammed the door in my face or said something memorably vicious? I’m a 43-year-old white woman, raised in an upper-middle-class home in Buffalo, New York. My parents, respectively descended from Eastern European Jews and Sicilian Catholics, discussed politics and occasionally attended protests, but knocking on strangers’ doors wasn’t a big part of my childhood.
Yet in the last eight years, as I’ve gotten older and more politically active, I’ve begun to grasp the value of pushing through that discomfort. In April, before the summer’s Democratic primary, I started knocking on doors for then-New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, and continued through Election Day in November. Altogether, I knocked on approximately 2,000 doors, usually with a partner, which was more fun and comfortable, if less efficient, than going alone.
Door-knocking shifts for Mamdani regularly drew dozens of New Yorkers, even in terrible weather, and on Monday and Tuesday nights, when fewer people are motivated to go out after work. I mostly knocked on doors in Brooklyn, where I live, but my fellow canvassers came from all over the city. Some were ideologically motivated, while others had concrete, pragmatic reasons for showing up, like the woman I met who joined a canvass because “the bus I took to get here took 40 minutes to make two stops.” (Making buses fast and free was one of Mamdani’s signature campaign promises.) Or the 40-something Afro-Latino couple who said they came out for the sake of their children’s future, because “right now, things aren’t looking so good.” Other first-time canvassers I encountered included a soft-spoken young woman named Fatima, a heavily tattooed, outgoing 20-something Asian-American guy, a shy middle schooler with her immigrant dad, and a young white man who praised the campaign’s “immaculate vibes.”
Together, we reportedly knocked on over 3 million doors.
One reason Mamdani means so much to so many New Yorkers is that he assembled a 100,000-person volunteer army—the largest in municipal history, and one of the most diverse. His volunteer base included young and middle-aged progressives of all stripes, and a substantial subset of Jewish New Yorkers, South Asians, and Muslims. Getting to know my fellow canvassers for hours and months at a time as we worked to expand that coalition was an extraordinary project in a perilous time for democracy. It demonstrated the hope that tens of thousands of us still feel, and how hard we are willing to work to make life better for ourselves and our neighbors.
Given how many doors we knocked throughout the city’s five boroughs, the New Yorkers we reached were even more varied than the volunteers. During one general election canvassing shift in Kensington, a young Black woman opened the door to me and my friend Tania, who is Jewish. Although she didn’t initially recognize Mamdani’s name, as we went into our spiel, she realized he was the candidate her boyfriend had urged her to vote for. “Normally I wouldn’t tell a woman to do what her boyfriend says, but in this case, he’s right!” Tania said. (Our new friend smiled.)
Another striking moment came when an older man in South Brooklyn’s Sunset Park unsmilingly asked if I were Mamdani’s daughter. He seemed to be trying to determine why I was volunteering for a man to whom I had no apparent ethnic or religious ties. Why else would I be doing this? Mamdani was not, in fact, my father, I explained, but I believed so strongly in his agenda that I was volunteering anyway. The man kept his face blank. I wondered when someone had last knocked on his door.
Another day in Sunset Park, an older Spanish-speaking woman thanked me and my partner, who also spoke Spanish, for volunteering. She invited us into her home, where she and a small circle of relatives were celebrating her 90-year-old father’s birthday with balloons and cake. I’ll never forget the warmth and intimacy she offered us as total strangers.
In the last eight months, I’ve met Mamdani fans from Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Australia, and Canada. None could vote or contribute to the campaign, but some shadowed canvassers and interviewed volunteers, most commonly because they belonged to left-wing political parties and hoped to reproduce his success at home. Although he often emphasized that he was running a local race to benefit New Yorkers, it was clear Mamdani was also inspiring admirers around the world.
In addition to many happy, surprising, and rewarding encounters, I had my share of the awkward, unsettling, and agitating. There was the woman who saw my “New York Jews for Zohran” shirt and pretended to retch; when I moved toward her, thinking she might need help, she screamed, “That was about you, because you want my children dead!” There was the super who ordered us out of his building because we were supporting a candidate who, he falsely believes, “wants to kill all the Jews.” Another woman called my friend Allie “Nazi scum” and said she should just “put on the burqa [Mamdani will require] right now.”
Moments like these were reminders of the ugly racism our politics so often exposes. They shook me: I am rarely around people who would speak this way to anyone, let alone a stranger. But they also strengthened my resolve to work for and with people who lead with love, respect, and decency, and model those traits for others.
As of last week, New Yorkers have made one such person our mayor.
Just before the polls closed on Election Night, Tania and I met a man with two little girls with him on the street in Park Slope. He hadn’t planned to vote and realized he couldn’t make it to his polling site in time with the kids. After he left, I joked that we should have offered to babysit: “We can start delivering on Mamdani’s promise of free child care right away!” We were giddy with pre-election anxiety, and desperate to turn out every last vote.
A short time later, once it was clear Mamdani had won, my friends and I experienced one of the happiest moments of our lives. We were weeping and hugging and singing and cheering at what we’d accomplished together. All the neighbors we’d met on the ground were reflected in the voting blocs he’d won: older, moderate Black voters; young voters, including but not limited to white socialists; and immigrants, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. I’d knocked on doors before, but Mamdani’s campaign showed me just how powerful it could be.
Later, I wondered if we’d ever find a way to recapture that feeling and use it to drive ourselves forward in less happy and hopeful times. Could we love each other enough to keep doing the work that only occasionally produces such moments, even in times when there’s no end, and no payoff, in sight?
I’m still not sure how we’ll navigate this fundamental challenge of organizing. But being part of a political project that attracted the passionate support of New Yorkers in all five boroughs, and sympathizers around the world, has restored my faith in the power of organized people to defeat organized money. And although a huge part of Mamdani’s appeal is that he ran on improving New Yorkers’ daily lives, he also showed that grassroots campaigning works—and that contemporary politics can be a joyful and loving project that brings people together, rather than an ugly spectacle that thrives on negative attention, exploits our fears, fills us with anxiety, turns neighbors against each other, and leaves us feeling empty, sad, bitter, and alone.
In canvassing for Mamdani and other DSA-backed candidates, I saw how much people are craving community, connection, and fun. We need to create more opportunities like this—to move joyfully toward something, rather than slogging through a sales pitch for a mediocre candidate who’s better than their opponent in hopes of slowing what feels like an endless parade of horrors. In the last year—still emerging from the long shadow of a global pandemic—I’ve embraced more near-strangers than I had in the previous five. Now, there’s a bracing sense of possibility in the air—the unfamiliar feeling that good things can still happen, and we can make them.
