In just a few months, Mamdani, a 34-year-old state assemblyman and Democratic Socialist, has gone from a long-shot fringe candidate to a national figure — securing an upset win in the June primary, where voters 18-29 had the highest turnout of any age group.
Now, on the cusp of Election Day — where polls show him the clear frontrunner over his closest rival, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo — Mamdani is counting on that youth coalition to show up again. But his pledge to address rising costs appears to be resonating with young people far outside of the five boroughs. It’s a message that many Gen Z and millennials say speaks to their most pressing concerns at a time when many feel hopeless about their leaders and yearn for new voices willing to break with political norms.
“When a candidate is able to speak to the concerns of the populace and validate those concerns … I think that that has a big impact, especially when it comes to young people,” said Ruby Belle Booth, who studies young voters for the nonpartisan research organization CIRCLE.
And this is the VERY key part. Local organizing almost always makes larger impacts, because most people, to be perfectly honest, don’t give a shit about any form of organizing in their local community. It’s easier to cast a ballot for a federal candidate, “chip in” (as all political fundraising emails love to overuse so fucking much while setting the default for every donation to like $50 or some bullshit after asking 20 times a week) a few bucks, and be done with it, than it is to walk down to every house over a few block radius and have a chat with any person who answers the door about a local candidate or policy.
To use Zohran as an example, he’s already gotten hundreds of thousands of votes, but as of one of his campaign’s emails yesterday, got just 1,000 people to canvass today (a day they were trying to break the record for most doors knocked in a single day, which is meant to attract a large swath of anyone who wants to canvass for him).
One person in a thousand canvassing for him is infinitely more impactful to the end result than one person voting by ballot.
I can’t say enough about how effective this is. You will learn a goddamn SUPER POWER if you do this, you will learn how to get people to listen to you, how to be heard, how to be social and involved. It might not seem like much, but a lot of the world is becoming very isolated and sheltered, the people who can go talk to a stranger about politics are literally going to dominate the power structure of the future.
Learning emotional intelligence, learning how to make someone feel heard and use their feelings to guide them to better ideas, these seem like far-off skills but you can do it, you can influence people so much easier than you think just by making them feel listened-to and involved with something bigger than themselves.
When someone visits your home to talk to you about a controversial topic and they are polite, respectful and ready to defend their ideas, you will remember the interaction. You will think about it, you will think about the topic. It goes from an abstract “read it on the internet” narrative to a real-life thing that impacts people and this makes you take the idea more seriously and give it more nuanced thought.
There are organizations that help coordinate these kinds of efforts, I recommend https://www.progressivevictory.win/ as a great starting point for getting more involved with your local efforts.
I also recommend Progressive Victory!
They were the ones who initially got me to phonebank for Zohran, and they’ve got good communities of people who can help you out in a number of different ways.