It’s Dangerous to Overestimate the Left’s Strength

By Eric Blanc and Bhaskar Sunkara

Even with a couple of months’ distance, Zohran Mamdani’s election still feels almost unreal, like a dispatch from an alternate universe. But it’s happening: America’s largest city is now led by a young socialist, a Jacobin subscriber, and a committed member of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

For many of us on the New York left, this is the high point of our political lives thus far, a vindication of patient, often grinding organizing. But amid the celebration, there is a note of worry — the feeling that we have won the sprint, and now the marathon begins. For November’s result to mark the beginning of a lasting transformation of not only one city but national politics, we have to start by acknowledging an uncomfortable truth: despite our impressive electoral reach, our movement’s roots are still shallow.

Things were very different when American socialism had its first big electoral breakthrough. The 1910 election of Socialist mayor Emil Seidel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, initiated nearly fifty years of leftist governance in the city. Milwaukee’s triumph was the culmination of decades of escalating working-class militancy and socialist growth. Mamdani’s, by contrast, has taken place despite far lower levels of union and left organization. Consider the raw numbers: while Milwaukee’s Socialists had roughly one member for every one hundred city residents, New York’s chapter of DSA has, even after a big surge in the past decade, one member for every 670 residents.

But organizational size isn’t the biggest difference. In the early twentieth century, Milwaukee’s Socialists led nearly every major union in the city and were woven into working-class neighborhood life. It was this on-the-ground power that made it possible for them to sustain their movement for so long and to pressure intransigent legislators from other parties to pass some of their policy planks, like improving infrastructure and strengthening workers’ legal protections. In contrast, New York’s democratic socialists don’t lead any of the city’s largest unions. And Zohran proved able to win over much of the working class despite NYC-DSA’s disproportionate concentration among college-educated voters in a handful of neighborhoods.

How did we get to this paradox of electoral strength without organizational depth? And what does it mean for Mamdani’s ability to govern, as well as for rebuilding a socialist movement worthy of the name?

How We Got Here

Socialists, not just in