The Power of Canvassing for Zohran Mamdani

(I just remembered I wrote a post about canvassing back when I first started this substack, but given recent events, I’m writing about it in light of Zohran’s win. I want to revise this and submit it to a magazine, in case any of y’all have any leads!)

When I moved back to New York in May of last year after eight months of soul searching, I was lost.

I wanted to follow my dream of being a writer, but knew I had to get a job, and was reluctant to take anything that would take too much of my time and energy.

I was still unemployed last summer, as I am again now, but I decided I needed some guidance and went on an Ayahuasca retreat upstate. That’s not a story to tell here— but basically, I’d been desperately hoping for what any anxious, confused, scared person hopes out of something like that: “healing” which is a fill-in for an imagined state of internal resolution, clarity, confidence, peace and happiness that would be a new permanent state of being. I did not have that experience. In fact, I spent the night in a hell made up of all my worst thoughts and feelings about myself; Hell was being myself.

In the fallout of that, I got a job at Barnes & Noble in September, looking for part time work so I could focus on my book project. I was feeling considerably worse since the Ayahuasca trip. One of its effects was the feeling that the line between me and the world had blurred. I saw the writing on the wall about the ascendance of the next Donald Trump presidency. Not able to see myself as separate from a world where Donald Trump was elected for a second term, I couldn’t shake the paranoia that it was personally my fault that he’d been re-elected. This applied also to watching the genocide unfold in Gaza: it wasn’t simply that it was horrible, but I could not see it as something separate for myself, or something I had nothing to do with. Every image felt like a heavy indictment against me personally.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that with no boundary between me and the rest of the world, I could never be well, or “healed” if I did not take a personal responsibility for the world. This line of thinking is filled with holes and contradictions, but it’s a state of mind I can look at compassionately as I understand that I was desperately trying to reconnect to something bigger than my anxiety.

I believe part of the nature of our social media-mediated experience is one of complete powerlessness. Every day, we take in the world in a disembodied detached way. Because we experience the world in such a disembodied way, it is perhaps even by design that we experience the events of the world as a passive observer unable to influence anything. After the Ayahuasca journey, I was no longer able to tolerate this.

In short: I think I, like many, especially those of my generation who have been hoodwinked as the economic security that was our parents birthright has been pulled out from underneath us, have been existing in a state of arrested development, completely bewildered by the collapse of the society and civilization that our parents enjoyed the full rewards of. We are a ways into our adulthoods, struggling to meet the benchmarks of the successful and normal life we were told to aspire to— in many cases disillusioned with those aspirations. We were raised on the internet and got to learn on our own terms, discuss with each other through new instant forms of communication, and come to understand just what horrors our lives had been built upon. My generation, and the young people of our world, who have spent most of our lives (at least since 9/11 in America) being constantly told that we have no future and no hope, have been in a state of perpetual crisis with no security or roadmaps for years.

Sometime in February, two of my co-workers at Barnes & Noble showed me a video of Zohran Mamdani, who was running for mayor. When they showed me the video and told me about him, their main comments were simply that he was good at making content, which they found refreshing, but they didn’t remotely entertain that he had any shot at winning.

I was looking for ways to stop feeling powerless. I wasn’t a stickler about policies; I’d call myself a leftist only insofar as I had the feeling that I’d like to live in a society where everyone cared for and took care of each other. I don’t consider myself more political than I think many of my generation who see all the theater of politics merely as a reflection in the mirror. The question was only who and what did we feel best reflected us as we aspire to be, and as we are.

I looked through Zohran’s videos, and what I saw was something I think my generation had been looking for. We’ve been hoping somebody would step up and represent the best of us our potential, for the world we believed in and saw the best of ourselves in.

The real foundation of my politics were formed by canvassing.

In the year 2012 when I was a sophomore in college, my father was sick of paying for my pot and alcohol, so he kindly suggested I find part-time work that fit with my class schedule, in order to have “spending money.” I was surfing Craigslist and found myself in the politics section.

In my first semester of college the year before, I saw about the Occupy Wall Street that was happening down in the city. I had the feeling that something important and interesting was happening, so I took a bus from New Paltz down to the city. I got off at Port Authority and walked over to Time Square and quickly found myself swept up in the march.

I remember two main things from that day: I remember the music. The drumming and the chanting and the songs. Ever since, I’ve been acutely aware of how music drives all protest movements; it is an energizing and focusing force, it is a passionate force, it is an inspirational source, and it is an ever-renewable resource.

I also remember making it down to Wall Street and standing in front of the buildings where men in suits looked down on us holding glasses of wine and flipping us off. Then I remember being told to disperse or else the cops would begin tear-gassing us. I couldn’t believe it was that real, that transparent. I remember thinking that my. mom would’ve been there, and she’d have been proud of me for going.

My mother had been someone who spent my youth during the Bush Era watching MSNBC and surfing Daily Kos and cursing “fuckface” Dick Cheney. She died while I was a junior in high school, and ever since then I’d been looking for ways to feel close to her, so paying attention to politics always made me feel connected to my mother. I thought that she’d be proud of me to do a job in politics, because while my mother had never said this explicit, as I watched her respond to this thing called politics, as I heard her talk about sexual violence against women and the history of Civil Rights and the N word, she’d given me the feeling that what politics was essentially was caring about other people—a definition I only later realized wasn’t everyone’s understanding of politics.

I found a listing looking for canvassers for the Working Families Party, and met the Campaign Managers for an interview at the most popular cafe on Main Street. The campaign managers were only two or three years out of college themselves, barely older than me. They had tattoos and piercings— in fact, the managers were a couple. They explained to me what they were doing:

Local farmer Cecilia Tkcacyk was running a progressive campaign for a State Assembly Seat for Ulster County to unseat the republican incumbent. They told me what her campaign was running on, a bunch of stuff that sounded like things you’d do if you wanted to be kind and nice to people. Then they described the work of canvassing: The job was going into neighborhoods and knocking on the doors of registered voters and persuading them to vote for your candidate. The hours were 5-9 several days throughout the week, ideal as a job after classes, and in college not even that late where there’d always be something going on once I was done.

Before even going out to canvas for the first time, I was enchanted with the people I worked with. There were other students from the college like me, but there were also plenty of other eccentric characters who were older.

There was Eric, a saxophonist and goofball who liked to flash his stomach at us and do Elmo impressions. There was Estuardo, a shy but passionate art teacher. There was Morgan, a witchy woman from Canada who rode her bike to work 15 miles every day, read tarot cards, and also liked to flash everyone.

Canvassing is the the only true meritocracy I’ve ever encountered. You cannot Nepo Baby your way into it. You can’t go to school and get a degree or certification. It makes canvassing truly transcendent of class. There is no barrier to entry; either you can do it, or you can’t. (The secret is everyone can, they only need someone to help them believe that they can.)

We’d drive across the Hudson Valley into different towns, lead by a brave field lead, with ice breaker questions and rap practice in the car-ride over. We practiced our raps, the blueprint for persuasive communication, talked about and shared all our strategies for getting the job done. It could have been scary but to me, it felt like an adventure with a mission.

Maybe I was a little nervous to go knock on doors by myself the first time. I remember early on, I knocked at the door of a house somewhere in Kingston and was greeted by an older man with a radiant smile bound to wheelchair. He invited me into his home, and while I told him about Cecilia Tkacyk, he listened politely and then started telling me about Buddhism, about how he was so happy even though he was in a wheel chair.

“You could be in Antarctica, it doesn’t matter,” I remember him telling me with a big smile on his face. You could be in a wheelchair, you could be in Antarctica, it didn’t matter. Another time, I approached a house where an older man was giving drum lessons to a boy around my age, and we talked about Dave Brubeck and 7/8 time, and he gave me a business card. I quickly realized that the greatest perk to this job was the opportunity it provided you to have life experiences meeting people you never would otherwise, having conversations that would stay with you in a way that was deeper than a lot of other things.

Of course there were people who weren’t kind to me as I knocked on their doors, but I don’t remember any of them. I knew to expect it, and so none of it ever affected me personally. It was all the kindness that stuck with me, because it was nothing I could take for granted as someone who was a stranger knocking on someone’s door. I also learned once I was brave enough to find out the kindness was far and away much, much more common. With every door and every interaction, my whole conception of humanity, and therefore my judgement of my own humanity, was expanded and mostly improved. Each second I spent with people dissolved my ability to see them as abstractions or reduce them to my brief judgements. I liked people the more I met each one, each special exceptional and unique one, and yet all of them human, with far more in common than different.

Over the course of two months, we drove around the Hudson Valley, exploring towns and neighborhoods in the assemblyman’s district, getting to know specific people, getting peaks into their lives, often hearing about their personal struggles. We were there at their door not with a snake oil cure or a product, but a promise, that the person we were campaigning for was going to help.

I wasn’t yet legal drinking age, but the night of that election our campaign team snuck me into the bar and snuck me drinks as we anxiously awaited the results. When they came in, that was the kind of celebration anyone on a sports team understands.

We won that election by 16 votes. It was something we’d done, together. We celebrated with a “best ass” contest in which we bent each other over the pool tables and all grabbed handfuls of each other’s asses, and somehow I ended up the champion—likely they liked picking on the baby of the group. Morgan flashed us all, I can’t remember why.

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Canvassing opened itself up to me as the heart of what politics really was: it was the joy of going into a strange place with strange people on a mission to become acquainted, to make the strange familiar, to understand, to care, to communicate, and to organize— all towards the end of helping each other. Canvassing was my politics.

While I was finishing college, my father passed away. When I came back home, my uncle was helping me sell our home, and encouraged me to get straight to work. I had a degree in English and Philosophy. I went back to Politics Jobs section of Craigslist. Amnesty International was hiring.

Working as a Street Canvasser for Amnesty International was another kind of beast: instead of electoral work, this was all fundraising. I’d done some with WFP before I quit to focus on school, but the entire approach was different.

Our job was to stand on the streets of New York City, stop whoever passed us, and persuade them to commit right then and there on the street to give a monthly donation to Amnesty International. It meant meeting someone, and within minutes, or as long as it took from case to case, to make them agree to give their credit card to you. It was canvassing as intense as NYC itself.

The staff mirrored the energy of the city: The staff was about 40 canvassers, from all walks of like, all over the world; it felt as though every single kind demographic in the world was represented in that staff. The canvassing operation was lead by a young guy from North England who was a gifted orator and liked to call us comrades in his morning briefings.

On my first day, I was mentored by a lanky actor from Texas named Robert who liked to dance both to draw attention to our cause and amuse himself. He was exceptional at popping and locking.

Our turf that day was West 4th, known as a relatively easy place to get signups given its proximity to NYU. I remember standing with Robert on the Avenue of the Americas and locking eyes with a short older white lady with a grey pixie cut. We smiled at each other, I waved, and asked, “how’s your day going?”

She stopped in front of me. “Honestly,” she said, “not great.”

Her name was Margot Pelletier. She was a queer film director in post-production for a film called “Thirsty” which was bio-pic about Scott Townsend, a Cher impersonator and revered drag queen Thirsty Burlington. Margot’s trouble was that she also had ovarian cancer, and was struggling to pay for her treatments while also funding the completion of her film.

I told her I understood what cancer was like, as I’d watched both my parents go through it. She asked me what I was doing out here, and I told her about Amnesty’s work advocating for Syrian refugees fleeing the civil war in the summer of 2016. After hearing her story, I didn’t even feel like asking her to sign up— probably it was because I’d let her get to know me, she said she’d deal with her wife’s frustration, and she volunteered to sign up. She gave me a business card for her film, and we hugged as she left.

I looked up Margot years later, having held onto her business card. Margot passed away six months after we met.

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I signed up for Zohran’s campaign in February when they were still trying to get him on the ballot. I went to Qawah in Williamsburg and with a handful of others received the petition forms and were given the instructions on how to do it properly. A few of us decided to head down into the Bedford L, thinking that was the only place we could catch people in the few minutes they might be idling and waiting for subways.

After that, I let a few weeks slip by. Then the campaign announced they were moving to traditional canvassing, electoral door-knocking. I signed up for a shift in Bushwick, the neighborhood I’d been living in since 2016. Like many transplants, I mainly had only ever met other transplants, or more plainly other gentrifiers: like many of my generation, I wanted to be in the place where young creatives could somewhat afford to live in the city. Like many other transplants, I hardly knew the longtime residents who had always called it home. I was happy to have the excuse of canvassing to go knock on the doors of my neighbors.

The first time out, we were put in pairs, and I went with a guy who was a teacher at charter schools, but in between doors we talked about politics, but also psychedelics. We laughed and we got to know each other. No matter how the day went, I just liked the way I was spending my evening. There was no question about whether I was wasting my time, regardless of the outcome.

I went for another shift, happy to spend a late afternoon walking through my neighborhood, knocking on doors, getting to take a brief peek inside the lives of the people I wanted to get to know. After the end of a second day, I told the Field Lead about my experience canvassing, that I was eager to get more involved and offer all that I had. The following day, he told me the campaign needed for Field Leads, and invited me to an online training. He asked me what worked for me. Besides my B&N job and the time I was focusing on a writing project and life itself, I knew it’d be best to pick one day a week that I could show up to consistently. I agreed to lead every Wednesday shift in Bushwick from then, in the beginning of April, through to Primary Day, June 24th. I myself still had no idea whether any of this woudl work or not, and odds at that time said it probably wouldn’t happen— but for entirely self--soothing reasons, I liked that I had made it a part of my life, that I was trying to do something small that made me feel more sane. And, in itself, it was a way to spend an evening that always left me feeling better on every level.

It’d been many years since I lead canvassers, and this was a new campaign, with a different context and different stakes, though essentially regardless of the specific situation, there’s a universal truth about canvassing that makes it successful in any context.

When people are new to canvassing and showing up to do it for the first time, many are nervous and anxious at the prospect of what they are about to do. Not everyone shares my cheery attitude towards the activity; they see it as a dreadful necessity. Not everyone is a short unintimidating white guy like myself who fears neither racial discrimination nor sexual harrassment. Regardless of all that, canvassers receive the script meant to guide them, and they start to believe they have to perfectly memorize it, they need to rehearse it as if they’re about to perform a monologue for an audition. They believe they have to be policy experts. They fearfully anticipate being screamed at and threatened with violence, dogs sic’d on them.

When the volunteers assembled before me, whether they were new to canvassing or not, I started off by quoting Maya Angelou to them:

“At the end of the day people won't remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.”

I would tell them they didn’t need to be policy experts: they only needed to be themselves, just as they were. Who wants to have someone knock on their door and repeat a perfect script like a robot? People connect to people.

If I asked any of the people who showed up volunteering to spend their Wednesday afternoon to do something that was scary for them why? they’d have an answer only they could give; something like what I’ve written here.

The first time I had a Co-Field Lead, no one showed up. We got to know each other a bit and then went and hit our own turfs. His name was Paul, he worked in tech, and was a proud DSA member. We liked to talk about what kind of tech might be possible in a socialist framework; he went to hackathons. We became friends pretty quickly.

Those first weeks of April were bitter cold. The entire month, every Wednesday it rained, but a dedicated few showed up. We did our best to encourage people to commit with a weekly consistency, but everyone was after-all volunteering, and life happened.

In one of those early weeks, a journalist reached out and asked to shadow one of our canvasses and interview us. At the end of the night, after all the canvassers had reported back and a few of us chatted idly, she asked me that same question that everyone who got involved in Zohran’s campaign had their own answer to: Why are you doing this?

I already knew canvassing was an end in itself. To my mind, canvassing is the easiest point of entry for any person out of a state of powerlessness—regardless even of the reason you’re canvassing, underneath what is even happening in the political moment. It is an activity anyone can do that essentially invites you to connect. In a world where so much of our conscious attention and energy is directed at the screen of our phones, absorbing information that doesn’t love us or care about us, and warps our minds to the point that we look up at the physical world conditioned to believe it is a scary place filled with people that want to hurt us, that keeps us strangers to each other—canvassing is an activity where thought and action become one. You knock on a door, and into a literal and figurative unknown, already a brave act. You do it because something and someone encouraged you to dare to believe what beautiful things might be possible if you were only willing to take that little step, to do something— finding out once you took that step you were far from alone, you were in fact very good company. The braver you were in taking that step to knock on a door and introduce yourself and meet someone new also gave courage to everyone around you to do the same. Like a wave, New Yorkers who’d never crossed paths before were getting to know each other.

The journalist asked me, what was it about this campaign? I gave an answer only I could give, which would be different form the answer anyone else would give, which is the way it should be, which is part of everyone’s answer:

What made Zohran’s campaign different was that he didn’t set himself up as a savior that would solve all our problems. Perhaps for too long we have been made to believe that’s what leadership was, if anything, a scapegoat that could allow people to continue in that state of learned powerlessness, always able to blame the person in power.

Zohran’s campaign was different because he made it clear that his mission was only possible if we took the mission on as our own, each one of us. Each person needed to feel it was their own personal responsibility, the same way he pledged to take it on as his personal responsibility, not waiting on someone else to get it done. He knows that his power is only our power, the power that each of us give to him, because we are out there working not for him, but with him, because he has promised that he’s out there for us.

Zohran’s campaign has been historic in its grassroots insurgency because he has generated cultural energy. I believe politics is ultimate downstream of culture. People will not give money to charities to save dying children, but they will travel the world and spend large amount of their savings to go see a Pop Star in concert. In my mind, culture embodies wherever the energy of excitement, life, and vitality are found. As people gather and organize not out of fear, but out of excitement, possibility, and a feeling of empowerment, it spreads like wildfire, and everyone, especially young folks who have grown up in this world, flock to the light.

Each week in June, I watched his numbers in the polls increased, and I felt that I personally and in collaboration with at that time hundreds of others, were responsible for that. The Whatsapp chat for everyone in the canvassing campaign got filled with banter, yapping, and community-building. Each week, more and more people were showing up to the canvasses, and I was excited each week to tell everyone who showed up that they were already part of something historic, that canvassing at this scale of operation was defeating millions of dollars in the polls.

June 24th felt almost too much like something that would happen in a novel. A few of us field leads started the day by setting up a polling site tent for volunteers to grab materials and be deployed to polling sites in the neighborhood. After we’d all arrived, with enough hands on deck, I went around to do poll site visibility, and already hot, it was still bearable at 9 in the morning. That early in the morning, I stopped only a handful of people, but I was shocked to find when I asked people who they were voting for, more than one said they didn’t know and had not heard of Zohran Mamdani. It was alarmingly possible to still get votes up until the very last minute.

I took breaks throughout the day checking in with other volunteers and hanging with other field leads holding down our launch site, walking back home a few blocks to cool off, take a nap, check on my cat. I worked up until polls closed.

In those last hours, I was sitting on the street corner of Wilson & Woodbine with my back against the wall, asking anyone who passed me if they were voting today. A guy came by on a bicycle and gave me ice cream; he was going to all the polling sites and treating volunteers. One young man passed me and said he was on his way to vote now, but still wasn’t sure who he was going to vote for. He was interested in Zohran, but his therapist told him they were voting for Cuomo. For the final time, practiced from months spent having this conversation, not only with people at the door, but with myself as this fledgling campaign that started from a sincere and honest if unlikely dream to something very possible to make real, something that was within my power, and the power of thousands and thousands of New Yorkers to take in their hands and make possible, all simply by having a conversation and turning a stranger into a neighbor, a citizen, another person to care about. The guy’s name was John.

When John came out of the polling site, he gave me a thumbs up and told me he voted for Zohran because of me. There were thousands of people just like me doing that across the city.

When the volunteers of North Brooklyn wrapped up with the poll sites by 9 PM, the WhatsApp group said the action would be at 9 Bob Note, a large gay club with a nice-sized outdoor space. We were all ready for it to be a long night.

At 9 Bob, I met so many people who’d felt the same call as me at some point int he past six months. Each had their own story. I saw people who’d canvassed with me over the course of those months, and it felt strangely like a reunion. It was like reaping the bounty of a slow patient labor, where all the little moments along the way presented themselves to you all at once and you realized how much you had done, not just for the campaign, but for yourself. New York, and the world, became a more familiar and more friendly place, with each fellow volunteer and each encounter at the door. In a club full of canvassers, everyone there was just happy to connect with each other, to celebrate what we had done and the power that we’d discovered together. Though no one knew what would happen, even then we had the sense that we’d discovered something special; even if Zohran didn’t win, we had a sense of what was possible when people felt empowered and organized.

Then it shot through the room not even a full hour after polls had closed: “Cuomo conceded.”

That night, many drinks deep, hugging my co field-leads, we all had the feeling of what it was like not only to be alive for history, but to be a participant in it, an agent in it. We, who were so used to losing, proved to ourselves it was possible to be victorious. We felt like superheroes. I kept telling people, shit-faced, “I feel like we’re in a Tolstoy novel!”

I can’t speak for all the other volunteers who decided to get involved with Zohran’s campaign, whenever they did, and I don’t in any way speak on behalf of Zohran’s campaign. I only speak for myself, when I tell anyone why I support him. If you asked me why I support Zohran’s campaign, and believe he’s the mayor we need to make New York City a shining beacon for a bright future that signals to the world that our generation, that the young can do incredible things that previous generations never could— It’s not simply because of Zohran. It’s because he created the conditions for a reality to manifest, a reality where each and every person can experience what it’s like to feel empowered, what it’s like to work in community, in solidarity.

Zohran’s campaign is a demonstration that money is not what makes the world go round, which is a lie we’ve been fed for generations. Zohran’s campaign is a demonstration that love really does it all. Canvassing won his campaign, and will win it again in November. Canvassing will win every time, because it is a victory in itself, a fundamental act of caring about someone else.

This is definitely an exaggeration: that said, I believe everyone who canvassed for Zohran in the democratic primary has the feeling as though they personally have changed history and possibly saved the world and lit a very bright light into the world. Maybe that’s just the Ayahuasca talking. Truthfully, I have been overwhelmed and slightly addicted to watching the billionaires and powerful elite panic over the potential of Mamdani getting elected. It has felt to me as though, because I was simply brave enough to take a chance on believing that I was personally responsible for making the world a better place, I have proven to myself just what I am capable of. I wouldn’t be surprised if every person who volunteered for Zohran’s campaign feels some share of that. I know even the people who simply watched what we did have also been woken up by the proof of what is possible, and have started to take those brave easy first steps towards believing that they have power to change things.

For anyone who has become sick of watching the world collapse, Canvassing is the best antidote.

Powerlessness is over; great power and responsibility is in, for each and every one of us, together.