The success of Organize NYC, a new initiative designed to bring a grassroots base into the guts of the governing process, will have implications for the left outside the five boroughs.
Published in Dissent.
Stroll down a street in New York City and you are likely to see Zohran Mamdani’s face beaming from a window. Campaign posters still decorate bodegas, coffee shops, and apartments six months after the mayoral election, a reminder of the energy that propelled the young democratic socialist to victory back in November.
Mamdani now wants to harness his campaign’s grassroots energy to help fulfill his governing agenda. On election night, the incoming mayor alluded to Governor Mario Cuomo’s adage that you campaign in poetry but govern in prose. “If that must be true,” Mamdani countered, “let the prose we write still rhyme.” For many politicians, campaigning in poetry means inviting widespread participation and inspiring volunteers to get involved in building a vigorous electoral push. In contrast, governing in prose means demobilization. Those once-fired-up volunteers are invited to sit back and take a breather while the professionals handle the dirty details of public policy and administration.
Of course, there is a big problem with this conventional approach, which the new mayor is seeking to disown. Absent the broad-based engagement that can fuel improbable campaigns like Mamdani’s, insurgent politicians can find themselves with limited tools at their disposal once they take office—tools that would provide the leverage needed to combat the power of entrenched interests and moneyed lobbies working to prevent change. With their army of supporters put to rest, or possibly even disbanded, politicians’ capacity to deliver on past promises is often greatly diminished. The post-election fate of Barack Obama’s Organizing for America—an impressively robust mobilization that fueled the president’s 2008 campaign but then was unceremoniously put to pasture—should come to mind here, although it is hardly the only cautionary precedent.
In seeking to “rhyme” his governing with his grassroots campaign, Mamdani instead is aiming to keep New Yorkers engaged in fighting for the type of left politics of affordability he spoke movingly about during his remarkable candidacy. The internal discord and uncertain future of Our Time, an independent organization which was meant to keep Zohran’s large network of campaign volunteers active but which has experienced staff shakeups over the last few weeks, suggests that the mayor and his supporters have not fully cracked the code on how to avoid demobilization. And yet they have hardly given up.
Speaking in front of a crowd of tenant organizers in the Bronx on April 29, Mamdani announced a new city initiative called Organize NYC, designed to bring a grassroots base into the guts of the governing process. “We want the voices of working class New Yorkers,” the mayor said, “to be the driving forces behind the decisions that shape their lives.”
As Mamdani explained at the event, the first mission of Organize NYC will be to turn out thousands of New Yorkers to testify at the public hearings of the Rent Guidelines Board ahead of its June meeting to vote on whether or not to increase the cost of rent-stabilized apartments. “Freeze the rent” became a memorable call-and-response chant at Mamdani’s rallies, and this vote represents a clear chance Mamdani has to fulfill one of his signature campaign promises. With roughly 69 percent of New Yorkers renting their homes—more than half of whom qualify as rent-burdened—there is deep hunger for relief in a city that is quickly becoming unaffordable for working-class New Yorkers. Organize NYC can be a vehicle for giving greater voice to demands for action around affordability.
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A new office takes shape
Organize NYC is the first major project to come out of the city’s new Office of Mass Engagement, created by executive order on Mamdani’s second day as mayor. The office promised to “serve as a constant drumbeat within City government to ensure that New Yorkers’ needs and perspectives are integrated into all elements of New York City government.”
The office was a statement that the Mamdani administration’s approach to governance might differ from those of his predecessors: Instead of “I know what I’m doing,” Mayor Mamdani seemed to say, “I need your help.” In particular, the office was tasked with leading campaigns that “organize New Yorkers to participate in City decision-making,” creating new channels through which residents could provide feedback to government, and reaching “communities that have historically been excluded from policymaking.”
Crucial to this reimagining of participation in city affairs is Tascha Van Auken, the architect of Mamdani’s massive field program that knocked on an estimated 3 million doors during the 2025 election. Van Auken is taking an organizer’s approach to her new role as commissioner of the Office of Mass Engagement. She cites Marshall Ganz, the storied organizer of both farmworkers and Obama’s 2008 volunteers, as a major influence on her theory for how to get people involved in the political process: “Treating people like smart people who have agency, who can be there or not,” she told the New Yorker, “asking people to step up and lead, so it’s not about me, it’s not about one person being a leader.” Not coincidentally, Van Auken’s language mirrors a central slogan from Bernie Sanders, for whom she was a volunteer during his 2016 presidential campaign: “Not me, us.”
In the months since it was first unveiled, the Office of Mass Engagement has been fairly quiet about how its planned projects would go further than pre-existing city outreach programs. The New Yorker profile of Van Auken in early April explored her path to political activism, but it was light on details about what precisely she aimed to accomplish in her new position. Likewise, a story published in Hell Gate noted that the office has intentionally taken its time to find its bearings, with Mamdani expressing his desire to give Van Auken “more than five minutes before she gets into the position to have to answer some of the specifics around budget and personnel.”
Organize NYC, which will run neighborhood canvasses in five areas of the city with high concentrations of rent-stabilized housing, offers a first clarifying glimpse into what types of campaigns Van Auken’s office will undertake. However, it also raises questions of its own about the purpose of such mobilization.
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A theory of mass engagement
Having won the election, Mamdani was able to appoint six members to the Rent Guidelines Board in February, giving his supporters a majority. Presumably, the Mayor has his votes lined up. If Zohran wants a rent freeze, there is good reason to believe he would win it without much of a struggle.
Why, then, mobilize renters en masse to testify ahead of the board’s final vote in June?
The first answer is that people feel more committed to public policies that they have actively fought for and won than those they may have received passively. As professor and labor strategist Eric Blanc recently argued, if Mamdani focuses merely on “delivering” for his base without building power, he risks limiting his ability to secure greater gains.
This has consequences for the wider left. “Even the most principled, charismatic, and competent leftist politicians on their own can only deliver so much as long as working people stay on the sidelines,” Blanc wrote. “And since most of our candidates elsewhere won’t be able to rely on Zohran’s astronomic charm, nor the same level of media attention. . . . We need all anti-corporate officials, Zohran included, to use their platforms and positions to directly encourage and funnel ordinary people into mass democratic organizations and wide-scale campaigns for change.”
A second answer is related but distinct: Not only does an activated base make it possible to win more, it makes it more likely that those gains can be defended against future rollback. As Sumathy Kumar, managing director of the New York State Tenant Bloc, and Gianpaolo Baiocchi, director of the Urban Democracy Lab, contended in a January article in Jacobin, people feeling genuinely invested in the process of governance allows us to “weather serious attacks from hostile federal, state, and city politicians, as well as a panicking capitalist class who will use every lever imaginable” to thwart progress.
We already know what happens when politicians don’t ask much of their grassroots base. Under President Biden, Democrats passed some substantially redistributive policy measures, a key example being the expanded child tax credit. Described by New York Times columnist Ezra Klein as “the single best policy of the Biden era,” the credit pulled millions of children out of poverty during the Covid pandemic and put thousands of dollars back into the pockets of working families. Democrats assumed—indeed, were banking on—the idea that the policy would prove so popular among voters that large constituencies would continue voting blue in order to make the tax credit permanent. Instead, the measure died along with much of the Biden agenda when Senator Joe Manchin refused to vote for the Build Back Better Act. Some observers even speculated that voters ended up blaming Democrats for letting the credit expire and punished the party at the polls in 2024.
Mamdani’s approach with the Office of Mass Engagement embodies the idea that it is not enough to win elections, or even to successfully implement discrete policies. In order to create change that endures, the government needs the ongoing, organized support of the public.
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The limits of government directing movements
There is a certain respect in which the Organize NYC initiative might be described as curiously depoliticized. While the first initiative is working to get people to attend public hearings, it is not giving them talking points on what to say. And the Mamdani administration is inviting participation from landlords as well as tenants. Clearly, there is fear that if the City Hall is perceived as using public funds to influence the result of the Rent Guidelines Board’s decision, it could open itself to legal challenges from the real estate lobby.
Then again, the fact that Zohran made his announcement of the project amidst a gaggle of progressive organizers suggests that the initiative is not entirely impartial. This is a point that the conservative New York Post latched onto in its predictably scathing assessment of the Mayor’s announcement. The paper quoted a “real estate source” who labelled Mamdani’s approach as “disingenuous” at best. “You are standing with Cea Weaver, one of the most notable tenants’ rights activists who has called for rent freezes for years, but yeah, we aren’t advocating for anything,” the anonymous source quipped.
Pushing against the limits of what is perceived as acceptably “political” within the confines of city government will be one continuing challenge for the Office of Mass Engagement. Another will be what to do when movements become unruly or even adversarial with their erstwhile allies in government.
Activist mobilizations are notoriously bad at taking marching orders from centralized political structures, such as parties and government administrations. Politicians like having a cheering section to support their preferred policies. But a mobilized base that might challenge their priorities or reject as inadequate the compromises that they painstakingly craft is another matter. The idea that powerful elected officials might secretly welcome having outside agitators “make them do it” is a myth. The historical record shows politicians are more often irked and offended by rowdy movements that they cannot control than pleased at the prospect of being made to do anything. For this reason, tensions may be inevitable. As an “insider” body established to encourage outside pressure, the Office of Mass Engagement faces a contradiction that it will need to reckon with in a continued way as it expands and builds its activities.
Nevertheless, in launching Organize NYC as a flagship initiative, the office is furthering an important new model of how to incorporate a vocal citizenry into the process of governance. And the success of its experiment will have implications for the left that resonate far outside the borders of the five boroughs.
