I never thought it would happen to me: The year my friends and I elected the Mayor of New York City.
A lot has already been written and I think will be written about what we (almost entirely not me) did between July 2024 and November 2025, so I'll confine my remarks to some of the things that I remember first-hand.
To be honest, I was against the idea of Zohran running when I heard about it for the first time. I think it was the day of the June primaries in 2024—I was sitting in the third floor bedroom of a Bed-Stuy townhouse generously donated as a canvass staging location by a volunteer for Eon Huntley's campaign. My friend S and I were between dispatching door-knocking shifts for GOTV. The day felt unreal, stiflingly outside. We'd pulled the blinds inside the apartment to create a recovery room for returning volunteers, amidst the boxes of jewelry and makeup and perfume samples. Both of us had woken up before dawn in order to get the site running by the time the polls opened at 6:00 AM. "I didn't like the idea at first," S said, "but now I'm warming up to it." What else were we going to do next year, she pointed out. We needed a Big Project. The members would get restless, otherwise, turning to factional infighting like they'd done in 2023.
I wasn't convinced. It seemed to me that the purpose of winning the mayoralty, which holds sweeping administrative powers but little ability to pass durable legislation advancing our political positions, would be to reform or abolish the NYPD. And as David Dinkins' and Bill de Blasio's experiences demonstrated, if you made even the slightest gesture towards doing that, the cops would, uh... resist, to say the least. But the biggest problem, as I saw it, was that we couldn't win the race. We'd lost three of the four races we worked on in 2022. We'd go on to lose two out of three in 2024—including Eon's by a nerve-wracking 260 votes. And losing is not winning! If we couldn't bat higher in contests for relatively small districts in the state legislature, I reasoned, how could we possibly hope to win a jurisdiction several orders of magnitude larger? I tried to make my point at the South Brooklyn branch endorsement forum, smugly informing the people gathered at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church on 74th Street that there was "no path to victory."
Needless to say, it didn't work. I was temporarily flummoxed. I considered flouncing. But that's hard to do when all of your friends are on the other side of your preferences. Part of me knew that they were right—one state legislature seat every two years wasn't going to win socialism. And I couldn't shake the feeling that I was failing an important test of vision or ambition. I kept thinking of that line from Trouble Boys about how Bob Stinson would have been happy playing the same Minneapolis dive bar every night for his whole life. Ultimately I found a compromise position, which was to help out on Alexa's re-election campaign. She was facing down a primary challenge from the right, from an unprepared careerist dumb-dumb funded by a state level AIPAC-like formation. In retrospect, we were silly to take it seriously, but I think we were all on edge from seeing what happened to Jamaal Bowman. But that's how I tried to stay relevant, and I did find myself increasingly enthusiastic about the "all city" nature of the Zohran campaign. I duly filled my Zetrocard (mostly through joint Alexa canvasses in Sunset Park) and spent a few weekend afternoons bundling lit on the top floor of my former co-working space at The Yard on 13th St. (I was there when the off-gassing from the freshly-printed palm cards triggered the fire alarm.) I thrilled to the Hasan Piker interview transitioning to a walking tour of Yemeni coffee joints in Astoria, ground my teeth at Hasan saying he wasn't hungry for dinner when the dinner was obviously gonna be fire. When Alexa and Zohran rallied in Sunset Park and Raul and that goblin Christopher showed up to start trouble, I joined the phalanx keeping them at bay, and we all danced to the music from Isela's portable speaker.
The final weeks of the campaign were remarkable. A hundred people showed up to a weeknight canvass at the athletic field on 59th St. across the street from Las Rosas, more people than we'd marshaled to kickoffs for some of our previous state campaigns. The Hot Girls 4 Zohran brand was dominant, even as there was some benign confusion over who they were and how they were organized. (We joked that Hot Guys 4 Zohran would print some shirts just as soon as we could get our shit together.) A citywide network of porch and foyer lit stashes supplied asynchronously by volunteer couriers propelled the massive field operation. Local media talked not just about the phenomenon of the campaign and the candidate, but about the phenomenology of the great mass of people volunteering for the campaign on a regular basis. Seemingly everyone on the subway or walking down a major thoroughfare was brandishing a Zohran tote. Six weeks of Total Cultural Hegemony. Politics was back!
I watched the date of the primary approach with mounting dread, however- the forecast predicted a historically miserable day, with a Feels Like high of 120. But showing up for E-day is non-negotiable, so I'd taken the day off work and booked myself for consecutive shifts starting at 9:00 AM. (Since becoming Old I've granted myself the luxury of sleeping past the 6:00 AM shifts.) I reported for duty at a Red Hook loft apartment decorated with Bohemian taste, the owner elsewhere but a geriatric cat prowling the kitchen where the turf was being sorted. I was quickly dispatched to a poll site at a public school on W 9th near the highway, where I sheltered under a tree. As I've found is often my experience of heatwaves, the sun felt too bright for how early in the day it was, but not yet intolerably hot. The real heat set in for my afternoon door shifts, where I was Getting Out The Vote in the Red Hook NYCHA complex near Dwight St. The little concrete plazas between buildings were punishingly bright and hot, and you could see people darting across them to reach patches of shade behind the buildings. In some of the houses, people had set up box fans in the hallways and had gathered to smoke and talk, presumably because the tile finishes of the halls kept them cooler than the apartment interiors. I was soaked with sweat by the time I reached my target doors mere blocks from the staging location, prompting some kindly older voters to invite me in for some air conditioning and a bottle of water.
I'd volunteered to run a table at the South Brooklyn results watch party at Sunset Stoop, a lovely bar on 5th Ave. that had opened last summer and whose owner Roberto had been an early Zohran supporter. The place was already packed by the time I pulled up a little after 9:00 PM in a car with some Thai food Nadia'd ordered for us at the Red Hook loft. The Citywide Electoral Working Group had primed us with instructions for talking to members in the event of blowout loss, as well as talking points if the race was too close to call—this last being our expected outcome given the campaign's positive swing in the polls over the final weeks. We were, of course, not prepared for a decisive, thirteen-point win; and when that happened the crowd surged. A few minutes later our liaison to the bar recruited me to relieve some crowd pressure by taking a contingent of celebrants up to L'Wren, another politically aligned bar a few blocks up the street with a capacious and air-conditioned back room. We quickly filled that place up as well, and the crowd spilled out onto the street, chattering and singing songs. The sun had set, the full dark of night had fallen but it was easily still ninety degrees or more outside. Nina and I bought the bodega on 41st St. out of bottled water to distribute to our dehydrated comrades, then did the same at the store on 39th. Beyond my physical discomfort, I felt uneasy giving myself over to the revels—I was thrilled that we'd won, but that night seemed like it ought to belong to the True Believers.
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