It’s one of those unmistakably Washingtonian habits: at the end of a successful election campaign, it is urgent to identify who the dark brain was that made it possible. There’s James Carville (“it’s the economy, stupid!”) and Bill Clinton; Karl Rove, architect of the rise of George W. Bush; David Axelrod, who was able to accompany Barack Obama’s political talent; or Susie Wiles, the woman who added method to Donald Trump’s return to the White House in 2024.
After the meteoric rise of the socialist Zohran Mamdani, who recently won the office of mayor of New York, becoming a figure of global significance that almost no one knew just a year ago, there is rather a group of people, mostly young, some even older than him, who is 34 years old. They are the ones who helped him design a campaign with an effective impact on social networks, which also managed to create a “movement” of over 100,000 volunteers.
Some of these collaborators are already ready to join his team when he takes office on January 1st. Elle Bisgaard-Church, for example. “Without a doubt, there has been no one as important as her in the election campaign,” warns Gustavo Gordillo, co-president of the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialist Party of the United States (DSA), a party with which the candidate has been associated since 2019 and without which it would not be possible to understand her rise.
The mayor-elect named her chief of staff a couple of weeks ago, the same day he added to his project, in a balancing act between old and new, a veteran of New York budget politics, Dean Fuleihan, 74, who had already helped his predecessor at City Hall, Bill de Blasio, deal with Donald Trump. The team of experts who will work with Mamdani was joined Wednesday by the current police chief, Jessica Tisch, whose track 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 campaigned before, is one of the few who can say she was there from the beginning. She is a member of the DSA, having served as 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, whose collaborators define her as “quiet”.
She also looks modest. He hasn’t done much to take credit, except for a piece titled “How This Campaign Was Won,” published by the monthly The Independent shortly after his primary victory, in which Bisgaard-Church explains how Mamdani went from “1% of the vote in a February poll” to beating his main rival, former governor 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.” Furthermore, attention to “field work” with volunteers; to the formation of a “multi-ethnic and intergenerational” coalition that was able to win over important political allies, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders; and to the success in collecting many 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, run, book about the candidate’s meteoric rise.
This hard core includes names like strategist Andrew Epstein, the creative brains of the campaign; Zara Rahim, an exceptionally well-connected communications specialist in the city; or Morris Katz, 26, embarking with other young strategists on a redefinition after the defeat of Kamala Harris in the last elections of the Democratic Party, which, as he said in an interview with NPR public radio, is frustrated to see him fight “with too polite weapons when polarization and inequality require another attitude”. “People see us as overly complacent about the status quo“He added. “We can’t be that kind of party. We don’t have to be afraid of our shadow, billionaires, lobbyists, or big corporations. We started in New York and hopefully we can continue in the rest of the country.”
Zara Rahim’s contribution
Rahim, 35, has periods of work RowingUber and the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. It helped Mamdani connect with celebrities who promoted his candidacy and polish his media profile. Rahim, active in the pro-Palestinian cause, was also instrumental in convincing Mamdani to “forget the New York idealized by political strategists,” according to an adviser this summer. The New York Times, and focus on the “real New York City campaign.”
As for Epstein, he is another product of Albany politics. In the first part of the campaign he worked as communications director and is credited with a double-edged strategy: heavily focused on social media, but at the same time strengthened on the streets, knocking on the doors of voters in New York’s five boroughs. “After the primaries, Epstein stopped being a spokesperson (let’s say that talking to CNN was not what he wanted to do) and concentrated on the creative part. In essence, between him and Zohran they created most of the videos that have caused a sensation in recent months”, clarifies biographer Hamm, who warns that beyond these proper names, “(Mamdani’s) victory was due to the building of a movement, and this was 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 ten years to build a network of elected officials at the local level, and he was one of them. Thanks to that, we developed a large infrastructure. When we launched his campaign, we already had dozens of organizers who knew how to organize interventions on the ground and train people to knock on doors and proselytize directly on Twitter. This was a great advantage he entered the race with, an advantage that the other candidates did not have,” Gordillo says.
The DSA also helped Mamdani shape his cost-of-living agenda: free buses and daycare and a rent freeze for rent-controlled apartments. With that simple message, Gordillo recalls, he broke, with one million votes, the record of consensus in the recent history of the city. Now the party is ready to continue fighting elsewhere with its commitment to the “working class”. “The Democrats have to choose between defending this situation or continuing to defend the billionaires. Otherwise they will continue to have problems winning elections,” explains the young socialist leader, who recognizes that “despite the talent of the candidate”, he never believed, not even in his wildest dreams, “that Mamdani would get to this point”.
And that’s another lesson Washington has learned well. No matter how much political strategists rack their brains to extract patterns, a successful campaign like Mamdani’s is impossible to recreate without a candidate like him – “the great political talent of his generation,” according to Ocasio-Cortez – and without the inner-circle stars aligning that catapulted him to make history.
It will be January 1, when he will become the first socialist and Muslim mayor of the largest city in the United States.
