It’s one of those unmistakably Washingtonian customs: At the end of a successful campaign, there is an urgent need to identify the mind sitting quietly behind the scenes that made it possible. There’s James Carville (“It’s the economy, stupid!”) and Bill Clinton; Karl Rove, architect of George W. Bush’s success; David Axelrod, who was able to integrate Barack Obama’s political talent; and Susie Wiles, the woman who added method to Donald Trump’s return to the White House in 2024.
Behind the meteoric rise of socialist Zohran Mamdani, who recently won the mayoral race of New York City and transformed himself from a virtual unknown just a year ago to a global figure, is a group of people, mostly young, some even younger than him (he’s 34), who have helped him design a highly effective social media campaign that has also created a “movement” of more than 100,000 volunteers.
Some of these staffers are poised to join his team when he takes office on January 1. Elle Bisgaard-Church is one of them. “Without a doubt there has been no one as important as her in the electoral campaign”, notes Gustavo Gordillo, co-president of the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the party with which the candidate has been associated since 2019 and without which her rise would be impossible to understand.
The mayor-elect named his chief of staff a couple of weeks ago, the same day he joined his team, in a balancing act between old and new, a veteran of New York City budget politics, 74-year-old Dean Fuleihan, who had already helped former mayor Bill de Blasio deal with Donald Trump. Joining the team of seasoned professionals who will work with Mamdani on Wednesday is current Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, whose record includes achieving record drops in crime and shooting rates as well as campaigning to remove thousands of illegal guns from the city’s streets.
Bisgaard-Church, who had never run a campaign before, is one of the few people who can say she was there from the beginning. He is a member of the DSA and has served as Mamdani’s chief of staff since 2020, when the mayor-elect was a member of the State Assembly from Albany. At 34, she is a discreet woman, defined by her collaborators as “quiet”.
She also looks modest. He hasn’t done much to take credit, except for an article titled “How This Campaign Was Won,” published by the monthly magazine The Independent shortly after the primary victory. In it, Bisgaard-Church explains how Mamdani went from 1% in a February poll to defeating her main rival, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, by nearly 13 points, thanks to a communications strategy heavily focused on the Internet and based on three principles: “consistency, clarity and authenticity.” He also attributes his success to his field work with volunteers; the formation of a “multiethnic and multigenerational” coalition that has won over influential political allies, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders; and the successful fundraising of numerous small donations.
“For the first couple of months, until the money started coming in, Mamdani’s campaign was a very small operation,” explains journalism professor Theodore Hamm, author of Run Zohran, runa book about the candidate’s rapid rise, in a telephone conversation.
This core group includes names like strategist Andrew Epstein, the creative mind of the campaign; Zara Rahim, an exceptionally well-connected communications specialist in the city; and 26-year-old Morris Katz, who, along with other young strategists, is working to redefine the Democratic Party after Kamala Harris’ defeat in the last election. As he told NPR in an interview, “what people are frustrated with is a policy of education in the face of deep division, in the face of deep income inequality.” People, he said, see Democrats as overly complacent with the status quo. “We don’t have to be this party. We don’t have to be afraid of our own shadow. We don’t have to be afraid of billionaires and lobbyists and corporations. And I think we started this work in New York and hopefully we can continue it,” he added.
Zara Rahim’s contribution
Rahim, 35, has a resume that includes stints at Vogue, Uber and the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. It helped Mamdani connect with celebrities who boosted his candidacy and polished his media image. Rahim, active in the pro-Palestinian cause, was also instrumental in convincing Mamdani to “forget the idealized New York of political strategists”, as one advisor put it The New York Times this summer and focus on “running a campaign about the real New York City.”
As for Epstein, he is another product of Albany politics. In the early part of the campaign, he served as communications director and is credited with a double-edged strategy: heavily focused on social media, but at the same time strengthened on the ground, knocking on voters’ doors in all five boroughs of New York City. “After the primaries, Epstein stepped down as speaker (let’s just say talking to CNN wasn’t his thing) and focused on the creative side. Essentially, he and Zohran made most of the videos that made headlines in recent months,” explains biographer Hamm, who points out that beyond these individual names, “Mamdani’s victory is due to building a movement, and it’s thanks to the DSA.”
Gordillo, co-president of the New York DSA, explains that the work began long before the candidate decided to run for mayor. “It took us 10 years to build a network of locally elected officials, and he was one of them. Because of that, we developed a large infrastructure. When we launched his campaign, we already had dozens of organizers who knew how to stage field interventions and train people to knock on doors and campaign directly on Twitter. That was a huge advantage he had before he entered the race, an advantage that other candidates didn’t have,” Gordillo says.
The DSA also helped Mamdani lay out his cost-of-living platform: free buses and childcare and a rent freeze on rent-controlled apartments. With that simple message, Gordillo recalls, he broke the consensus record in the recent history of the city, collecting one million votes. Now the party is ready to continue its struggle elsewhere by focusing on the working class. “The democrats have to choose between defending the working class or continuing to defend the billionaires. Otherwise they will continue to fight to win the elections”, explains the young socialist leader, who admits that “despite the candidate’s talent”, he never believed, not even in his wildest dreams, “that Mamdani would get this far”.
And that’s another lesson Washington has learned well. No matter how much political strategists rack their brains trying to identify patterns, a successful campaign like Mamdani’s is impossible to replicate without a candidate like him – “the great political talent of his generation,” according to Ocasio-Cortez – and without the alignment of the stars within his inner circle that pushed him to make history.
It will be January 1st when he will become the first socialist and Muslim mayor of the largest city in the United States.
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