Note: Elle Bisgaard-Church is Zohran Mamdani’s campaign manager and has also served as his chief of staff in the New York State Assembly. This communique was released on June 26 and has been lightly edited for style and concision. 

On the evening of June 24, Zohran Mamdani defeated Governor Andrew Cuomo and a crowded field of candidates to secure the Democratic nomination for Mayor of New York City. With 93% of votes reported, Zohran won 43.5% of the vote to Cuomo’s 36.4%, while Comptroller Brad Lander earned 11.3%. This electoral outcome has shocked the political establishment, made front page news across the globe, shown a new way forward for the Democratic party, and challenged preconceptions about the New York City electorate. But any narrative that this victory occurred by accident is false. This was the result of a campaign that sought to reach New Yorkers in every corner of the city by deploying an unprecedented communications, field, and political program. This is how Zohran won.

Expanding the Coalition

Zohran turned out historic numbers in traditionally progressive areas and then expanded his coalition by overperforming — and winning — working-class areas across the city.

We won progressive strongholds like Astoria, Greenpoint, and Williamsburg, while also overperforming in multiethnic, working class neighborhoods like Jamaica and Forest Park in Queens. He showed further remarkable successes by winning: working class neighborhoods that Eric Adams won in 2021; working class neighborhoods in the northern shore of Staten Island; and areas that swung rightward for Trump in 2024. For example, Zohran won Woodhaven, Queens — a majority Hispanic neighborhood — by nine points. Woodhaven swung 30+ points towards Trump in 2024 from Biden 2020. Zohran won by nearly three percent in Castle Hill, a low-income, majority Hispanic neighborhood in the Bronx that swung towards Trump by over 20 points.

Zohran went from obscurity, to frontrunner, to the Democratic nominee in four months. He closed an incredible gap to win the election in the first round: in Emerson’s February poll, Zohran was in last place with just 1% of the vote  —  trailing frontrunner Andrew Cuomo by 32%. Just four months later, Emerson’s poll had Zohran in a close second in the first round with 33.7%, and winning by 3.6% in the final round. He made a crowded field a two-person race, gaining approximately 10 points in each month’s Emerson poll.

Our campaign accomplished this through the following tactics:

Communications

The campaign offers a model for how to talk to voters anchored in three principles: consistency, clarity, and authenticity. Zohran launched his campaign in October by talking about a New York that working people could afford. The banner hanging behind him as he delivered his victory speech on Primary Night read “Afford to Live & Afford to Dream.” The campaign is unwavering in its fidelity to the central message of affordability across all its communications.

That consistency of message was buoyed by its clarity. Audiences throughout the campaign would finish Zohran’s lines as he listed off his three signature policies of freezing the rent, making buses fast and free, and providing universal childcare. That’s because they required no translation: voters could easily understand how putting Zohran in City Hall would change their day-to-day lives.

And Zohran was an authentic messenger. Campaign videos and media captured Zohran’s genuine love for New York City and saw him criss-cross the City as he held real conversations with everyday New Yorkers. Those conversations were centered around listening: his very first viral video came after Trump was elected, as Zohran asked voters in parts of the city where Trump’s support had surged to share their concerns — New Yorkers that the political class has long neglected. A campaign video on Zohran’s plan to tackle “Halalflation” turned a wonky policy proposal on regulations into a viral social media moment which led to a glowing piece in Eater that lived on the frontpage for 24 hours. Utilizing innovation to maximize traditional means of campaigning played a critical role in the campaigns success. This is not a sterile campaign insulated from the City; it’s a campaign deeply immersed within the City.

These three principles came across in the campaign’s videos, which were many voters’ first introduction to Zohran and our message. While Andrew Cuomo’s Super PACs blanketed the airwaves with paid ads, Zohran’s campaign created a different sort of ubiquity by pairing online enthusiasm with the largest field operation in U.S. history. The launch ad which focused on the affordability crisis in this city that served as a thesis for the campaign, one Zohran and the team resoundingly proved over the course of the race. The ad is as relevant today as it was in October. We employed a video team uniquely equipped to produce rapid response videos around endorsements and other campaign news, policy explainers that make complex issues accessible, and narrative pieces that tell a broader story of the campaign. The dynamism of those videos fueled online interest in a candidate who began the race with limited name recognition; Zohran’s authenticity, consistency, and clarity helped translate those into volunteers, votes, and victory.

The campaign’s ads generated significant enthusiasm and attention by tapping into those same values. The campaign also took to the airwaves before any other campaign, and made a massive investment in visibility during the Knicks playoff run, understanding that a victory would be dependent on a feeling of joy and possibility, something the promise of a potential Knicks championship was filling those very same viewers with.

Focusing less on traditional news and more on entertainment and live events the paid media approach mirrored the general ethos of the campaign: Meet people where they are. In doing so, it also showcased the growing support of the campaign from key figures like Congresswomen Nydia Velázquez and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. By relying heavily on 15-second ads instead of the traditional 30s, the campaign was able to stay competitive on impressions even while super PACs flooded the airwaves.

The campaign’s communications pursued the broader campaign goal of expanding the electorate. The communications team released videos in Urdu, Bangla, and Spanish that spoke directly to communities that Andrew Cuomo and other past campaigns have neglected. The campaign urged voters to update their registration in creative ways, and successfully pushed viewers to become volunteers time and again. It engaged influencers and leaders in communities across the entire city. And it maintained its focus on a central message of affordability that tapped into the concerns of New Yorkers who had never before felt compelled to vote.

Beyond the campaign’s own content, it generated unprecedented amounts of earned media rooted in earnest engagement with the press corps. Zohran spoke to reporters at open press conferences often and at length, including off-topic press conferences that invited engagement on an array of issues. Beyond the New York press corps, he spoke with journalists specializing in specific policy issues, diving deep into concerns New Yorkers have while maintaining the consistency, clarity, and authenticity that guided all campaign comms. The communications team also extracted significant press coverage from each policy rollout throughout the campaign, showcasing a deep and sustained engagement with the issues facing New York. And it showcased the unprecedented enthusiasm for the campaign by generating coverage of historic rallies at Brooklyn Steel and Terminal 5. Rallies with a Presidential campaign quality presentation and size were a deliberate choice. If people had questions about Zohran’s ability to govern, we wanted them to be able to see the campaign’s ability to execute at scale. As a campaign the standard was always excellence – because that, and nothing less, will be the standard for the Mamdani administration too.

Field

No municipal campaign has ever organized a field outreach campaign as comprehensive or ambitious as Zohran’s. We believe that this was the most effective field campaign in modern American history. Typically dismissed as a secondary concern with negligible impact on the outcome of a race (the common refrain is that the best field program can sway, at most, 3% of the electorate), this campaign is unapologetically built around its massive field program. The campaign boasts the largest volunteer field operation in New York City history.

Boasting 50,145 volunteers and 499 field leads, we have knocked on over 1.5 million doors and made 2.1 million phone calls. The field team ran canvasses seven days a week across more than 65 neighborhoods for five months, and held phone banks two to five times a week, with phone banks everyday, all day the last four days of the campaign. Just as important, our massive field program has created a feeling of community that encourages young voters to involve themselves in the race (and remain involved!). That sense of belonging defines Zohran’s positive, vigorous perception that persuaded so many voters, and ensures continued visibility across the city.

Political

This campaign pursued an expansive, all-inclusive political strategy — one that worked in tandem with its communications and field efforts to reach voters in every borough and across every racial demographic and faith background. It also sought to earn and deploy key endorsements from elected officials, labor, and movement organizations in areas where they accorded relational credibility.

As Zohran began to grow his name recognition and support over the last two months of the campaign, outreach to key electeds was deepened. The numbers tell the story — on April 9, Zohran had six endorsements, all of which were from long-standing socialist allies. Nine weeks later on Election Day, he could boast 40, including the influential support of Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nydia Velázquez. These endorsements were strategically wielded over the final stretch of the campaign to persuade voters in areas where validators possessed high name recognition and via their inclusion in campaign materials — palm cards, TV ads, rally speeches, mailers, and more. Zohran also made deep efforts to cultivate relationships with labor endorsers and ultimately secured the transformative DC37 #2 endorsement, as well as support from UAW 9A, UNITE Here Local 100, CIR-SEIU, PSC-CUNY, and many others.

Zohran made great efforts to build a multiethnic, multigenerational coalition that looked like the city he sought to represent. He attended two churches nearly every Sunday for the last eight weeks of the campaign (with a pronounced focus on Black churches), extended continuous outreach to the Jewish community via synagogue visits and rabbinical meetings, held town halls with specific constituency focuses (i.e. an antitrust town hall targeted at liberal New Yorkers with Lina Khan and Zephyr Teachout in the West Village, a Puerto Rico tele-town hall with Rep. Nydia Velázquez etc.), and planned his schedule to spend time in targeted areas that raised visibility with target demographics whether it was walking through Flushing with State Senator John Liu or spending election day morning in Astoria with Emily Ratajowski.

Fundraising

Our campaign fundraised to the spending cap of nearly $8 million for the primary in March — the fastest any New York City campaign has hit that mark in history. That record-breaking pace meant Zohran began telling supporters to stop donating to him, allowing us to steer them to other ways to support the campaign and to focus on other parts of its operations. It also enabled Zohran to twice encourage his followers to donate to other candidates, including to fellow mayoral candidate Adrienne Adams.

The story of Zohran’s fundraising success is not just its speed, but also its breadth of support. While Andrew Cuomo’s campaign relied on an average of $700 from 5,730 donors, Zohran’s primary campaign was fueled by 20,720 donors who gave an average of $82 each. That broad base of support shows the success of the campaign’s strategy to engage New Yorkers who had never before been given a reason to participate in an electoral campaign. This organic momentum, and our faith that it would occur, allowed us to forgo investments in attracting new viewers to our online platforms, saving the campaign valuable resources. The campaign produced a video about this phenomenon, and the grassroots nature of its fundraising also showed up in the groundswell of volunteers, and in the more than 432,000 New Yorkers who ranked Zohran first on their ballots.

Running a Disciplined, Bold, Visionary Campaign

Zohran has always believed that New Yorkers deserve a mayor who “hustles as hard as they do.” On the morning of the election, he woke up at 4am for a sunrise press conference  —  meant to symbolize the dawn of a new era for New York City. Just two days prior, Zohran walked the entire length of Manhattan, greeting voters and answering their questions along the way. His walk energized the thousands of New Yorkers who saw him on the road and millions more who heard about his trek online and watched the campaign’s recap. The video received 11.4 million views.

This ethic was embodied across eight months of strategic campaign planning and deployment, and demonstrated the ability for a campaign run and waged by the left to win. From operating daily canvasses with thousands of volunteers to managing 70 volunteers to hold an over 3,000-person rally just weeks before the election, our campaign showed what a dedicated strategy and managerial capacity looks like. We will have created a new blueprint for left campaigns as a result.

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