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After Sweeping Statewide Races, DSA Aims to Put a Socialist Caucus on New York’s City Council

Through democratic, grassroots-powered campaigns and an army of volunteers, socialists are flexing their muscle to bring a left-wing policy agenda to New York City.

Annie Levin December 4, 2020

On January 9, tenant organizer Michael Hollingsworth joined a human chain blocking bulldozers from entering a worksite in Brooklyn’s rapidly gentrifying Crown Heights neighborhood. The previous spring, a judge in a rezoning suit issued a temporary restraining order on construction, but real estate developers had ignored it. New York City police officers present at the site also refused to recognize the judge’s order and arrested several of the organizers who formed the blockade.

Hollingsworth links the ordeal to bad decisions made by his City Council representative, Laurie Cumbo. Cumbo, who voted in favor of the rezoning and is named in the lawsuit, is one of 35 New York City Council members whose seats will become “open” next year as incumbents face term limits, out of the full 51-member Council. “We had to sue her because she never engaged with the community in terms of what we wanted for rezoning,” Hollingsworth says. After being part of the blockade, Hollingsworth wrote to his tenant union, saying “that empty City Council seat in 2021 is starting to look really good.”

On November 14, the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) endorsed Hollingsworth and five other socialists running for City Council: Adolfo Abreu, Alexa Avilés, Tiffany Cabán, Brandon West and Jaslin Kaur. The endorsement announcement came less than two weeks after the November general election, which saw all of NYC-DSA’s endorsed candidates on the ballot — for seats ranging from state senate to the House of Representatives — win their races.

With the majority of seats coming open on the New York City Council, at least 300 candidates have already thrown their hats in the ring. All of NYC-DSA’s endorsed candidates will be running for open seats, with the primary election slated for June 22, 2021. This will also mark the first election to use ranked-choice voting since the democratic reform was adopted as a ballot measure in 2019.

Should the DSA slate be voted in, candidates have signaled they intend to form a socialist caucus on the City Council. According to DSA organizers, this caucus could work in coalition with other progressives to form a large enough bloc to bring significant changes to the body, from choosing the next Speaker of the Council to passing a budget that prioritizes working people.

NYC-DSA, with a membership currently numbering over 5,800, has made significant inroads into local government since Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her historic primary in 2018. But it wasn’t until the organization swept in its endorsed state races this year that its locally endorsed candidates came to be viewed as potential frontrunners. The November election saw Jabari Brisport win a seat in the New York State Senate (where he joins DSA-endorsee Julia Salazar), while DSA-backed Phara Souffrant Forrest, Marcela Mitaynes and Zohran Mamdani were elected to the State Assembly.

DSA’s winning strategy, according to its National Electoral Committee’s strategy document, includes developing its own candidates and building out a campaign infrastructure that is democratically controlled by membership. According to DSA, this model allows the organization to stand up to the Democratic Party establishment by developing its own power base — one that includes data collection, fundraising and fieldwork, with a volunteer canvassing army in the thousands. The aim is to have candidates rely on DSA, instead of the corporate Democratic machine, for campaign support.

As local New York politics have moved left in recent years, many candidates now run on progressive platforms, but only a select few earn access to DSA’s resources. Leanna Ballester, a former DSA organizer who was involved in candidate selection for the 2021 races and now serves as campaign manager for DSA-endorsed City Council candidate Brandon West, says the process included in-depth candidate interviews, questionnaires and research on district demographics. After weeks of assessment, candidates were selected and presented at candidate forums and then, in October, voted on by the membership at geographic branch locations. Finally, this democratic process was ratified by an elected representative body known as the Citywide Leadership Committee. Out of over 50 individuals who sought the group’s endorsement, just six received it. This “long democratic process gets us to candidates that the membership has bought into and is really excited about,” Ballester says.

With meetings moved to Zoom during the pandemic, hundreds of members were able to attend the DSA candidate forums. Attendees were given the opportunity to speak and to question potential candidates, with more well-known DSA members such as former New York gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon and Women’s March co-chair Linda Sarsour, as well as current elected office holders, waiting their turn to speak alongside rank-and-file members.

The candidates selected from this process run the gamut of left-wing organizing in New York City. Like Michael Hollingsworth, Alexa Avilés in Brooklyn and Adolfo Abreu in the Bronx have backgrounds in housing justice organizing — a high priority for the slate given the high rents and housing shortage in New York City. Jaslin Kaur, 24, is an organizer in Queens who has advocated against gender discrimination in schools. Brandon West is a campaign manager at the Center for Popular Democracy and an organizer in DSA’s Afrosocialist Caucus. Tiffany Cabán, probably the most well-known member of the slate, was a public defender who ran for Queens District Attorney in 2019 on a decarceral platform and came within a hair’s breadth of victory.

Candidates from such different corners of left-wing organizing could potentially bring large coalitions together around their platforms. For Jaslin Kaur, this coalition development will be a vital part of her work on the Council if she wins her race in East Queens. In her jurisdiction, she plans on using her campaign’s “relational organizing” — which facilitates outreach between friends and neighbors — to continue campaigning, she says, “beyond just the ballot.” In order to build democratic socialism through the City Council, Kaur says the slate “will need to expand the electorate, build out a DSA membership, and build out socialism within our respective districts so we can continue building this organizing model and bringing people into these policy issues.”

Brandon West believes that if the slate is elected to the Council, this coalition development will be key to pursuing its policy agenda. “I think the socialist caucus can be an opportunity for us to set the narrative of what real change is,” he says. West believes that one of the ways they can accomplish this is through working with left-wing unions in the city that “have rank-and-file folks who are pushing the union leadership in the direction they should go in, who are taking the political center of gravity from where it’s always been.”

A candidate like West, who has both worked in Mayor de Blasio’s Office of Management and Budget and helped organize the June occupation of New York City Hall to defund the NYPD, could help bring together organizations and community groups that would not otherwise be in the same spaces. A number of the DSA-endorsed candidates boast this multiplicity of experiences in which they have one foot in governance or progressive nonprofits and the other in local grassroots organizing.

Bianca Cunningham — a former NYC-DSA Co-Chair who also helped organize the June occupation of City Hall — attended Brandon West’s forum and encouraged the membership to vote for him because of his DSA bona fides. “Brandon is cadre,” she said, describing him as an active organizer who had been with her on the front lines of the protests.

Sean Reilly, a DSA member and organizer in Brooklyn, attended Hollingsworth’s endorsement forum and supported his candidacy, impressed with his work with the Crown Heights Tenant Union — an organization that had helped Reilly organize a tenant association in his own building.

One of Hollingsworth’s most vocal supporters at his forum was DSA-endorsed Assembly Member-elect Phara Souffrant Forrest. Living in the same building in Brooklyn, they helped organize their tenant association together.

As DSA endorsees, the City Council candidates are expected to work as a team, and to share resources. West’s campaign manager Ballester says, “the strength in numbers is really important when you’re working against an establishment that has a lot of money and a lot of power. From an emotional and mental state, it’s important not only for the candidates but for everybody doing the work for them. Also, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel because somebody had already done it and can share.”

With Covid-19 cases continuing to rise, team organizing is becoming especially important as campaigns have fewer opportunities for door-knocking and in-person campaigning. Souffrant Forrest believes that this camaraderie was essential to DSA’s primary wins over the summer. She said of her fellow NYC-DSA slate members: “We come out for each other. It’s everything you could imagine as an incoming legislator no one wants to let you know. It’s super helpful to have at least four brains working together and that’s what I wish for the City Council too.”

DSA organizers hope that the group’s electoral strategy — combining democratic buy-in with a strong infrastructure — stands as an example of how a socialist organization can develop staying power and expand its base in the face of a powerful Democratic machine. However, this emphasis on electoral work is unique among many grassroots organizations where, traditionally, community organizing precedes electoral victories. In New York, DSA reversed this old formula to gain traction in the districts where it’s currently building bases of support. As Brandon West puts it: “It’s weird that this has been inverted, but mainly it’s because the establishment is so incredibly poor at engaging people that DSA had to do the work and then run the table very quickly.”

The endorsed Council candidates hope to work alongside DSA endorsed state elected officials as well as other left-leaning lawmakers and groups such as the Working Families Party and Make the Road New York to achieve goals such as undoing austerity, defunding the NYPD and taxing the rich. “When it comes down to policies,” Souffrant Forrest says, “we ain’t asking for half of anything.”

Should the NYC-DSA City Council candidates succeed in their races, the slate will follow in the footsteps of the six DSA-endorsed candidates elected to the Chicago City Council in 2019. As in Chicago, the New York socialists’ capabilities in office will be a measure of how well they can build bottom-up coalitions that will come out in support of their policies, even in the face of entrenched corporate power in the city.

The NYC-DSA candidates are quick to point out they’re under no illusion that the structural changes they’re proposing will trickle down directly from the state capitol in Albany, or from the City Council. The solidarity and camaraderie built during the campaigns, they say, must extend into the districts they represent to truly shift the balance of power in New York City from the corporate class to working people.

“For us to have the changes that are necessary, the tea kettle has to be boiling, piping hot,” Souffrant Forrest says. “People have to be out on the streets, and elected officials have to be in session, screaming about it. That’s the only way we’re going to get the things we need.”

As a 501©3 nonprofit publication, In These Times does not oppose or endorse candidates for political office. The author is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Annie Levin is a New York City-based writer and arts organizer. Her recent work can be found in Protean Magazine, The Progressive and The Indypendent.

New York’s Socialist Revolution Isn’t What It Seems

The success of left-wing candidates in the Empire State has less to do with their ideas than with the decline of the Republican Party.

July 8, 2019

Bernie Sanders has a new rival in Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York City, who recently made a feisty case that he, not the senator from Vermont, should be the tribune of the Democratic Party’s socialist left. Jaded New Yorkers have for the most part treated de Blasio’s presidential campaign as a joke, one that reflects the delusions of a mayor notorious for his laziness and gargantuan self-regard.

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Notably, disdain for de Blasio seems to unite New Yorkers from across the political spectrum, including more than a few young leftists who toil in his administration. So it has been striking to see the warm reception for de Blasio’s performance at the first Democratic primary debate of the 2020 presidential campaign in Miami, where he distinguished himself with his eagerness to interrupt his fellow presidential aspirants and to stake out the most leftward position available on any given issue.

Whether de Blasio has staying power is an open question. I’ll admit I’m skeptical. Nevertheless, it is fitting that de Blasio is contesting Sanders’s hold on the country’s democratic socialists, for it is the gentrifying precincts of New York City, not the college towns of rural Vermont, that are the heartland of American socialism. Even if avowed socialists are ultimately vanquished in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, as seems likely, socialist politicians are gaining real power and influence in the Empire State. Though many socialists will no doubt attribute this development to the widespread appeal of their ideas, the truth is that it is more an artifact of low-turnout Democratic primaries and the Republican Party’s precipitous decline in America’s densely populated urban regions.

Shortly before de Blasio’s coming-out party in Miami, Tiffany Cabán, a 31-year-old public defender endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, appeared to have narrowly defeated Melinda Katz, a veteran local politician, in the Democratic primary for district attorney of Queens. (When all the ballots were counted, Katz had a 20-vote lead; the race is now headed for a recount.) Cabán’s strong showing was, of course, touted as a sign that New York’s socialist insurgency has staying power. What it also reflected, however, is the fact that primary turnout was dismally low. Whereas 217,000 Queens Democrats voted in their party’s 2016 primary, a presidential year, only 85,000 turned out in June.

Primary voters in off-year elections tend to be more educated, more affluent, and more ideological than in other elections, which is a recipe that has served socialist candidates in New York City rather well. If she ultimately prevails with the support of a 34,000-vote plurality from a small pool of Democratic primary voters in Queens, Cabán is almost certain to win the general election and then to shift criminal-justice policy sharply to the left. And she’ll be in a position to do so even if a far larger number of Queens residents object.

None of this would have been possible without the withering of the New York GOP. For much of the postwar era, New York Republicans were able to maintain an ideological profile separate from their national party’s, one that offered fiscal rectitude and bourgeois morality rather than the Sun Belt libertarianism and overt piety associated with the GOP in other regions of the country. The New York GOP undoubtedly made missteps during the Giuliani and Pataki years, but the real driver of its decline was the larger nationalization of American politics.

As David Schleicher of Yale Law School has argued, “there is a mismatch between the level at which party identification is created and the level of government at issue in [local] elections.” Voters today come to their political opinions by aligning with either the Republicans or Democrats on questions of national concern, and then applying those allegiances to local and state races. The result is that because most New Yorkers reject the party of Donald Trump, local politicians like Tiffany Cabán and Bill de Blasio face only token opposition in general elections.

A similar dynamic has helped transform the New York State legislature. To understand why New York’s politics have moved sharply to the left since the 2018 election, it is helpful to ignore the state’s many outsize personalities and focus instead on a series of long-term trends. First, a growing share of the state’s population can be found in New York City. When you add in the city’s suburbs, downstate New York accounts for two-thirds of the state’s population. Second, downstate New York has grown more monolithically Democratic in state and local elections as the Republican Party has come to be seen as the party of socially conservative rural whites hostile to the region’s more socially liberal sensibilities.

Of course, this is not unique to downstate New York. The decline of the GOP in dense urban areas can be seen throughout the country, in blue states and red, as Jonathan Rodden, a political scientist at Stanford University, observes in his important new book, Why Cities Lose. But it has been especially pronounced in the New York City region.

For several years, a small band of New York’s moderate Democratic state senators, the Independent Democratic Conference, formed a pivotal bloc that caucused with Republicans in the upper house of the New York State legislature to form a narrow majority. They did so in part out of an opportunistic desire to hold the reins of power, but also out of a sense that they needed to temper the ideological enthusiasm of New York’s activist left.

As long as this coalition of Republicans and rogue Democrats held the state Senate, left-of-center Democrats in the state assembly couldn’t get their way on taxes, charter schools, and rent regulation, among other issues. But in 2018 six of the moderate Democratic state senators who had previously aligned themselves with Republicans lost their seats to self-described progressives who campaigned on legalizing the recreational use of cannabis, single-payer health insurance, and extending new protections to unauthorized immigrants. In short, the sensibilities of the urban activist left triumphed over those of the suburban center.

Armed with majorities in both houses of the state legislature, Democrats have begun clearing the backlog on the progressive wish list, including the most stringent rent-control law since New York City was flooded with GIs returning from the Second World War. The law’s main thrusts are twofold: It forecloses the path to market prices and greatly reduces landlords’ incentives to maintain their buildings and units.

After a series of reforms passed under former Governor George Pataki, the number of rent-regulated units in New York City fell as property owners were given greater freedom to raise rents, old tenants were replaced by new ones (vacancy allowances), and monthly rents passed the state’s vacancy-decontrol threshold (which was set at $2,000 in 1993 and then raised to $2,733 in 2015), after which a unit was eligible to be rented at market rates once its current tenants moved out. Additionally, though yearly rent hikes in stabilized apartments are set by the Rent Guidelines Board, owners were previously allowed to tack on additional rent increases of up to 6 percent if they invested in the building or the unit.

New York’s progressive lawmakers thought this provision was too often used as a cover for excessive rent hikes, and so they’ve tightly constrained the extent to which landlords can recoup capital investments through higher rents. One likely consequence is that New York’s landlords will grow less inclined to invest in maintaining or improving rental housing. As for those who’ve made large investments in rent-stabilized housing in recent years in the expectation that they’d eventually be able to charge market-rate rents for their most valuable units, well, they’re about to see their investments crash in value, which in turn will discourage other investors from pouring their money into rental housing. The legislature could have taken steps to address this problem—for one, it could have paired new rent regulations with measures that would make it more attractive to invest in new market-rate rental housing in New York, which is in desperately short supply. But it did not.

The new legislation promises trouble along a number of other fronts as well. As The Wall Street Journal has detailed, the bill’s benefits will be concentrated in the hands of relatively well-off Manhattanites, who, though not rich per se, are far from the neediest New Yorkers, many of whom live in dangerously crowded illegal apartments on the edge of the city. It is in the city’s wealthiest borough where the largest gap exists between market and regulated rents, and where renters are effectively being subsidized to the tune of thousands of dollars.

It is not at all clear that these renters are more deserving than low-income outer-borough renters. The other challenge, endemic to rent-control efforts across the country, is that the forces that generate the political appetite for rent control are also the ones that ensure it will be counterproductive.

According to a report from the state comptroller, more than a quarter of the city’s renters pay 50 percent or more of their income in rent. Generally, policy makers and experts consider an affordability crisis to be an environment where a sizable share of the population is paying more than 30 percent of their income in rent. By that measure, New York’s housing crisis really did warrant major intervention. It’s just a shame that the more than 6 million New Yorkers who don’t currently reside in rent-regulated units, and all those looking to move to New York City in search of opportunity in the years to come, will now see their housing situation become more dire.

The reason, as Roderick M. Hills Jr. recently argued in The Washington Post, is that price controls encourage “producers to move investments out of price-capped commodities—namely, rental housing—into owner-occupied housing such as condominiums,” which in turn “diminishes the total supply of rental housing and increases the rents of any units that are not controlled.” Again, relaxing local land-use regulations might mitigate this effect, but the New York State legislature has betrayed no interest in going down that route.

Since 2018, despite a governor who is clearly wary of the far left, it is the democratic socialists who’ve seized the policy initiative in New York State, as moderate Democrats, fearful of left-wing primary challengers, have put up little resistance to their agenda. The long-term viability of this left-wing politics, though, is unclear.

Whether it be in two or six years, at some point Donald Trump will no longer be an omnipresent figure in our politics, and while he will undoubtedly have left his mark on the Republican Party at that point, it is hard to imagine another candidate so perfectly designed to raise the ire of suburban moderates. Additionally, by that time, suburban New Yorkers will have been reminded of all the places where they diverge from the fiscally expansive agenda of the urban socialist left.

Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has shown an Olympic gymnast’s flexibility on so many issues, has been unbending in holding down property taxes. Moreover, the suburban state senators who flipped the chamber balked at the prospect of statewide single-payer health care, not least out of concern for what it would have done to the finances of New York’s major hospitals. Should New York’s Democratic left stray too far from Cuomo’s political formula of marrying progressive symbolism with (relative) fiscal discipline, expect the revolution to fizzle out.

Reihan Salam is the president of the Manhattan Institute and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of Melting Pot or Civil War? A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders.

AOC-backed socialists have a plan to take over New York City

By Carl Campanile

September 21, 2020 | 12:26pm | Updated

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Getty Images

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Democratic socialists brigade wants to turn New York City far-left — from the ground up.

The Democratic Socialists of America-NYC is pushing to put up or back a slate of City Council candidates who, if elected, would create a “socialist caucus.”

The overwhelmingly Democratic council is vulnerable next year to the left-of-left push with 35 out of 51 council seats up for grabs due to term limits. Only 16 council members can run for re-election.

The strategy is detailed in a 13-page “tasks and perspectives” strategic planning document that will be reviewed by DSA members this week.

A litmus test for candidates to obtain the DSA endorsement is a pledge to “defund” the NYPD — slashing the police budget by $3 billion or 50 percent.

“This campaign will be a key issue in the 2021 election cycle. NYC-DSA has already committed to making the call to defund [the NYPD] a central matter in its City Council endorsements and the socialist caucus it aims to build in advance of the 2022 budget,” the DSA steering committee plan says.

The DSA document complains that the already liberal council and mayor this year “merely moved [NYPD] money around” when they adopted the current budget following protests over the deaths of unarmed black men during interactions with police, including George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The savings from the police cuts could be used to prevent the layoffs of teachers, EMTs and firefighters or fund youth and social service programs to attack the root causes of crime, the DSA said.

DSA member AOC has become the face of the Democratic socialist movement in Congress and a national voice on the far left in American politics following her stunning victory over veteran Congressman Joe Crowley in 2018. Her upset also forced Crowley to resign as chairman of the Queens Democratic Party.

The DSA said it intends to exploit the misery triggered by the coronavirus pandemic to woo support for other aspects of its agenda:

Confront Gov. Andrew Cuomo and push the state Legislature to tax the rich to help fund the Green New Deal and New York Health Act, legislation that would create a government-run, single-payer health insurance system and to prevent state cuts in public services. “In the face of an austerity budget, many of our campaigns will lend their weight to a demand on the state government to tax the rich, putting us directly in the cross hairs of Andrew Cuomo. We welcome his hatred. Remaining resolute now is the time to expand the public sector, to provide social housing, public power [energy/utility supplier] …,” the plan says.
Use the COVID-related housing crisis to “cancel” rent, thus squeezing landlords of revenue and forcing them to give up their properties and “exit the market” — and have the state acquire the properties and convert them to public housing. Its housing agenda also includes “undermining” the real estate industry’s already diminished clout in the Democrat-run state Legislature.
DSA-backed candidates won five Democratic primaries for state legislative seats in June, with four of its insurgents ousting incumbents. The document says incumbents’ “fear of being primaried” should make them more “accountable” or amenable to backing DSA priorities.
Increase the DSA presence in three of the city’s largest public employee unions — District Council 37, the United Federation of Teachers and the NYS Nurses’ Association.
Establish deeper ties to the city’s working-class, minority neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, other leftist groups and unions are joining forces to try to flex influence in the City Council.

Politico reported that the powerful SEIU 1199 health care workers union has formed an alliance with the political wings of activist groups Make the Road New York and Community Voices Heard to endorse a slate of council candidates. It is unclear whether DSA and the triumvirate will back the same candidates in the council Democratic primaries that will be held in June 2021.

How New York City’s Democratic Socialists Swept the Competition

All five of DSA’s New York legislative slate won in June. Here’s a closer look at how it happened.

by Matthew Cunningham-Cook

September 4, 2020

John Minchillo/AP Photo

Protesters march on the Brooklyn Bridge, June 4, 2020

New York’s June 23 Democratic primary produced some seismic results. The 16-term chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Eliot Engel, was defeated by Jamaal Bowman, a principal from the Bronx; and the state is set to send the first two gay Black men to Congress, Ritchie Torres (who is also Latino) and Mondaire Jones.

Bowman, Torres, and Jones all had convincing victories that were apparent, if unofficial, shortly after Election Day. But for weeks, results were delayed for a fascinating slate of progressive and democratic socialist candidates, which denied their victories any real role in the resulting discourse. All five state legislative races targeted by the Democratic Socialists of America—two state Assembly seats and two state Senate seats in Brooklyn (one held by an incumbent democratic socialist, Julia Salazar), and a state Assembly district in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s turf in Queens—resulted in victories.

Jabari Brisport, a math teacher who had run as a Green for City Council in 2017, won the Brooklyn Senate seat. Phara Souffrant Forrest, a Haitian American nurse, won an Assembly seat that mostly overlapped with Brisport’s. Marcela Mitaynes, a Peruvian American tenants’ rights activist, won the other Brooklyn seat, while Zohran Mamdani, a foreclosure counselor, won the Queens seat. Another DSA member not endorsed by the organization, Emily Gallagher, defeated a 24-term incumbent. Several left-wing Assembly candidates backed by the Working Families Party also won: Khaleel Anderson and Jessica González-Rojas defeated machine politicians in Queens, and Anna Kelles picked up an Assembly seat in Ithaca.

The result, which will be confirmed after the general election in November, will establish one of the most left-wing legislatures in New York in decades.

The result, which will be confirmed after the general election in November, will establish one of the most left-wing legislatures in New York in decades. Just a few short years ago, a block of right-leaning Senate Democrats caucused with Republicans, putting the chamber under GOP control. In 2021, not only will Democrats control both chambers, but there will be more self-described socialists in Albany than at any time since 1920, the height of the post-Bolshevik Red Scare, when five members of the Socialist Party of New York were expelled from the chamber for being “unfit for membership.” A century later, those five have now been replaced, and then some.

WHAT CAN EXPLAIN this resurgence of the party’s left wing in the hotbed of New York City? Sochie Nnaemeka, the New York state director of the Working Families Party, argues that the collected victories represent the electoral response to two crises: police brutality and COVID-19. “The victories were a response to the conditions that we were living in, where on the one hand you have a global pandemic causing economic dislocation and killing thousands, and on the other New York being at the epicenter of a crisis; hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers were marching in the street in response to the crisis of police brutality,” she said. “So what we saw was a real connection and clarity about the need to connect the protest movements; to take the grief and anger that New Yorkers were feeling and turning it into electoral action.”

Sumathy Kumar, the co-chair of New York City DSA, said that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s success helped to pave the road for the organization, giving them a blueprint for victory. Ocasio-Cortez endorsed four out of the five candidates on DSA’s 2020 slate.

“AOC made winning feel more possible to folks,” said Kumar. “For working-class people of color, her victory made them think, ‘I can run too and I can win.’” She added that the AOC race stressed to NYC DSA the importance of standing up a professional campaign infrastructure, adding organizing muscle to ideas attractive to the city’s young and diverse population. “Now DSA feels like it can be a one-stop shop for people running for office. Which is really exciting that we can fill all of our roles that a campaign needs to win.”

The victories come in advance of 2021 municipal elections in New York City, when all 50 members of the City Council are up, as well as the mayor, the public advocate, the comptroller, and the district attorneys of Brooklyn and Manhattan. The latter is the most powerful DA in the nation, as they often take the lead in prosecuting Wall Street cases. The transformations of city politics at the state and federal level are coming to the city as well.

One of the most concrete policy areas where the victories for the left will have an impact is on housing policy, as one-quarter of renters in New York City have not made payments since March, on top of a pre-existing affordability crisis. The winning candidates have pledged expanded rent control protections and a pied-à-terre tax, which would charge people living outside the city for vacant luxury properties.

One of the most concrete policy areas where the victories for the left will have an impact is on housing policy.

The state legislative victories “were about the tenant movement gaining strength,” said Cea Weaver, coordinator of the Housing Justice for All coalition, which won a transformative expansion of renters’ rights in New York in 2019. “Of the people that were elected, three of them had been arrested protesting for affordable housing in the recent movement.”

Given that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is often hostile to progressive policy, Weaver and her allies are hoping the new members can pressure New York Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins. “Phara, Jabari, or Marcela alone are not going to be able to take on Gov. Cuomo,” said Weaver. “Their goal is to develop a caucus that will force Carl and Andrea to work together to force Cuomo to make different policies.”

JABARI BRISPORT GREW UP in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, in a union household. His father was a member of the Sheet Metal Workers, and his mother, the Communications Workers of America. As he put it, “Social justice was always accessible in my household.” Brisport, who is 33 and identifies as LGBTQ, got his start in political action advocating for same-sex marriage in New York state in 2009. “That was the first time I got really involved to get friends to call their state senators,” said Brisport. “I was getting people to advocate and lobby. When we lost, it made me feel like a second-class citizen.”

Brisport returned to the phones and the streets in 2011 and helped to secure same-sex marriage rights in the state. “That showed me the power of political action,” he said. The bug caught, Brisport went on to get involved with the Black Lives Matter movement after the shooting death of Michael Brown.

The first electoral campaign that Brisport got involved with was Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, because “if I got someone elected who I agreed with, I would have to protest a lot less,” he said. That summer, he started to study political theory. “I put it together that slavery was an example of capitalism, where Black people were traded on the open market and used as collateral for banks, and seeing how racialized capitalism was holding Black people back, and how the pursuit of money was keeping Black people down.” The next year, Brisport joined DSA, impressed with its campaigning approach. He made the decision to run for office the night of Trump’s election, thinking, “This is a nightmare. I have to do something. Wasn’t even set for City Council. I have to run for local office to defend my community.”

The next year, Brisport took 29 percent of the vote as a Green, an impressive tally for a third-party candidate in a city dominated by the Democratic Party. With the victories of AOC and Julia Salazar in 2018, Brisport felt that he could win in a contested Democratic primary.

The following year, in Brisport’s meetings with the electoral branch of DSA, “I brought up a deep desire to not run alone this time, because running for office is a really lonely thing,” he said. Eventually, DSA recruited a slate of candidates.

The slate created a community, Brisport explained. “We had a group text—‘Are you stressed?’ ‘I’m stressed too,’” he said. “It was really nice. It was great too from an organizing standpoint to amplify each other’s voices together. We released joint policy platforms. Phara and my campaigns were intricately connected.”

Brisport bristles at the notion that democratic socialism is restricted to white millennials. Issues like charter schools pulling funds from public education and the crisis of private-sector health care are universal, he said. “It’s funny, when I was running my sister was saying, ‘Stop saying you’re a socialist, people may not want to vote for you.’ But older Black voters agree with basically everything that socialists say.”

Brisport bristles at the notion that democratic socialism is restricted to white millennials.

Phara Souffrant Forrest’s impetus to run came from a realization that politics was dominated by the well-off. Forrest attended public schools both in K-12 and in college and graduate school, and started working at age 16, eventually becoming a nurse. “I just felt that there weren’t enough working-class people in office,” Forrest said. “That’s why we’re getting a lot of inappropriate policies passed without the input of regular people.”

Forrest, who was born and raised in Crown Heights, is the progeny of Haitian immigrants. Her mom is a union health care worker, and her late father was a union baker. Her stepfather worked as a taxi driver. She is still living in the apartment that she has lived in since she was two, and she formally decided to run after she was arrested at a tenants’ rights protest in Albany in June 2019, and the police became violent. “We had planned this, we’re ready for this, but we weren’t ready for violence,” she said. “I just want to pay the rent with a little dignity and you’re beating me up for this.”

Forrest’s father was part of the Haitian diaspora that was active in supporting Fanmi Lavalas, the political party of former liberation theologian priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was ousted in U.S.-backed coups in 1991 and 2004. She grew up in that political culture, joining her father at protests over Haiti and police brutality.

As a leader in the Crown Heights Tenant Union, Forrest was seen as a natural political leader. “People had approached me to run, before the protest, and my response was, ‘Hell no! I’m a nurse,’” she said. “After the protest, I said, ‘OK fine, I’ll run.’”

Forrest’s campaign prioritized relationship-building and organizing over winning support from existing power brokers. Once the slate had developed a common platform, the organizing came naturally. “People had way bigger buy-in than just supporting me as an individual,” said Forrest. “We got buy-in through the issues.”

THE WORKING FAMILIES PARTY has been winning campaigns in New York since the late 1990s, and is a more sophisticated operation, with a significant number of highly qualified paid staff. This storehouse of talent and knowledge was critical to many of the victories, especially Bowman’s, who faced an avalanche of outside spending. The DSA’s organizing operation, on the other hand, thrived due to motivated volunteers drawn to the agenda of its endorsed candidates.

“As socialists, we know that the only way we’re going to win is through people power,” said DSA’s Kumar. “That’s why we concentrate on base-building and training our members to become organizers who can work really hard. The ideology undergirds the whole project.”

That played out dramatically for Brisport’s and Forrest’s campaigns, the candidates said. In the month of the election, Forrest’s campaign was able to set up a new volunteer shift of at least 15 people every three hours. They would engage in phone and text banking, and relational organizing, with get-out-the-vote volunteers reaching out to their own networks within the district. “We had at least 2,000 postcards—people handwriting postcards,” said Forrest. “It all started in October, but to see what we had built by the end of June was phenomenal.”

In the midst of the pandemic, “I would let volunteers know that you might be the first person they talk to all day.”

Despite the inability to knock doors because of the pandemic, organizers stressed to volunteers to engage voters in meaningful conversations about the issues. “We were talking to people about a vision for politics and connecting it to their personal narratives,” said Fainan Lakha, Brisport’s campaign manager.

The victories have already had a concrete impact on the 2021 elections in New York City, and have given energy to the national DSA’s other targeted campaigns this election cycle, mainly Jackie Fielder’s insurgent campaign for state Senate in San Francisco. Soon after their victories were announced, the winning New York candidates co-hosted a national online fundraiser for Fielder, who did well in the March primaries and has a shot after her opponent, incumbent Scott Wiener, needlessly enraged the building trades unions (typically a pillar of the right of the Democratic Party in California), leading most of them to withdraw their endorsements.

Kumar is hopeful about collaborating with the Working Families Party in their joint efforts to transform politics in the city and state. Tiffany Cabán, the insurgent socialist who lost a campaign for district attorney of Queens by 60 votes in 2019, has indicated that she will run for City Council in a district overlapping DSA Assemblyman-elect Zohran Mamdani’s. She is a strong favorite to win. Brisport has discussed the goal of electing a majority-socialist City Council in 2021.

Brisport emphasized the human connection of their people-powered campaigns. In the midst of the pandemic, “I would let volunteers know that you might be the first person they talk to all day,” said Brisport. “Be aware of that and be aware of the beauty you are spreading right now.”

Why Congresswoman-Elect Nicole Malliotakis May Start an 'Anti-Socialist Squad’

By Faraz Toor New York City

PUBLISHED 8:38 AM ET Nov. 18, 2020

Why Congresswoman-Elect Nicole Malliotakis May Start an 'Anti-Socialist Squad’

By Faraz Toor New York City

PUBLISHED 8:38 AM ET Nov. 18, 2020

Assembly Member Nicole Malliotakis is the likely new Congresswoman in Staten Island. | John Nacion/SOPA Images/Shutterstock

Nicole Malliotakis could form an “anti-socialist squad”

A Q&A with the likely Staten Island Congress member

By JEFF COLTIN

November 9, 2020

Assembly Member Nicole Malliotakis is used to taking on hard races. She first won her seat in 2010 by unseating two-term Democratic Assembly Member Janele Hyer-Spencer in a district on both sides of the Verrazzano Bridge in Staten Island and southern Brooklyn. In 2017, she was the Republican nominee who unsuccessfully challenged New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s reelection bid. This year, she took on first-term Democratic Rep. Max Rose – and now looks all but guaranteed to be the newest member of Congress, and the only Republican, representing New York City.

“I feel that it’s important that elected officials are held accountable,” Malliotakis told City & State. “And that’s why I’ve chosen in all three of my races to take on a Democratic incumbent that I feel wasn’t doing a good job.”

In-person ballots left Malliotakis with a 58% to 42% lead over Rose, or a 37,158-vote difference. At least 41,663 absentee ballots have been returned, and have yet to be counted, and although they are expected to break heavily towards Rose, the margin is likely impossible for the incumbent to make up.

That follows closely with President Donald Trump’s margin over former Vice President Joe Biden in the 11th congressional district, which covers all of Staten Island and a swath of southern Brooklyn. Malliotakis aligned herself closely with the president, who gave her his “Complete & Total Endorsement” ahead of the primary.

City & State caught up with Malliotakis the Thursday after Election Day, when Trump was still claiming victory, despite the evidence. She talked about criticizing Rose for attending a Black Lives Matter march, the need for balance in the city’s congressional delegation and her plans for an “anti-socialist squad.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You thanked the NYPD and law enforcement unions at your victory party and said the race was “about the brave men and women of the NYPD.” Neither you nor Rose worked in law enforcement, and it’s not really a federal issue. How did that become so central to the race?

Elected officials have a platform, whether they’re a city, state or federal rep. They have a platform in which they can support or oppose issues or policies. For example, you saw (Rep.) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pushing for defunding (the police) and even when they cut the billion dollars (the actual NYPD budget cut was closer to $400 million) she was saying that’s not defunding, and using her platform to continue that push.

Also, there needs to be a balance in this city. We saw disastrous policies take effect because there is not balance. The move to close Rikers Island, which, yes, was the city, and defunding the police, which was the city, and the bail law, which was the state. They’re looking now to take those policies to the federal level. In the COVID package, you have (House Speaker Nancy) Pelosi and the House Democrats trying to insert bail reform and release of convicted felons. We have to be vigilant that the policies I believe have been disastrous here in New York, to not allow them to go national.

You criticized Rose for joining a Black Lives Matter march in June. Do you think that peaceful demonstration was wrong? And did you join any demonstrations against racism and police brutality this summer?

I went to a number of marches in support of the police. I used my platform on Twitter to speak out. There’s nothing wrong with peaceful protest. That’s a foundation of our democracy. It’s one of the constitutional freedoms that we need to protect. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that you proceed – like in the case with Max, he showed up at this rally, they had signs that were derogatory towards our police. “All Cops Are” – I’m not going to complete the term. He proceeded to march with them. Then they started chanting “defund the police” and he continued to stay there. And while I support peaceful protest, I’m not going to participate in a march in which those messages are displayed. Everyone has had to make their own determination. But I still don’t understand what the men and women of the 122 (police precinct) did to warrant their Congressman standing in front with those very derogatory messages toward them.

You’re expected to be the only Republican member of Congress in New York City, or even in any districts that border the city. Looking beyond the district that voted for you, do you think it’s important to have a Republican in the city’s delegation?

The city needs a balance. That’s where you get the best policy, when you have a balance. You compromise, you meet in the middle somewhere. I bring a very important viewpoint that is needed. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has brought the whole delegation to the left. And there’s nobody really providing a counterview or a balance. So even though I’m going to be significantly outnumbered, I provide that viewpoint that is needed. But I also look forward to working with the other members of the New York City delegation, because at the end of the day, we need to fight collectively for our city and for our state. And where we can find common ground, whether it be transportation infrastructure dollars or funding for New York City housing or for education, we need to work together. At the end of the day, it’s not me versus them, it’s us versus the other 49 states.

But when I think that the New York City Democrats are doing something that hurts my constituents, would strip away our freedoms and liberties, I’m going to fight back, and hold them accountable. It’s a balanced approach.

We’ve generally seen Democrats in Congress pushing for larger federal bailout packages for cities like New York and transportation agencies like the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, while Republican leadership has blocked them. Do you think that the city needs federal money?

I was among the local legislators that did write to (Senate Majority Leader) Mitch McConnell asking for assistance for the MTA. Of course I want to see more money coming to my city and state. But I want accountability as well. Nobody in the New York City delegation has really held our mayor accountable as to where the money we’re giving him is going. We know the mayor squanders our tax dollars, whether it be the Renewal Schools program, whether it be the ThriveNYC program.

President Trump has made baseless claims about Democrats trying to steal the presidential election and has tried to cast doubt on legitimate mail-in ballots. Do you believe that the president has won, and do you believe his claims are valid?

Here in my district, we found two dead Democrats that voted. We want to make sure that all the ballots are counted, but that they’re legitimate. That’s the way you preserve our democracy, by making sure all ballots are counted, but of course, that they’re all legitimate.

Your mother was born in Cuba, and you’d be one of what looks like ten Cuban-Americans in Congress. Have you talked with any of them yet? And in office, do you expect to get involved with foreign policy?

Senator Marco Rubio supported me, as did Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart, a Cuban-American from Miami. I know Maria Elvira Salazar, who was just elected, also representing Miami, and I also met Carlos Giménez, who’s the mayor (of Miami-Dade County), now elected (to the House) also on Tuesday. There’s going to be a Cuban Caucus there. I think it’s important, because Cuban-Americans know more than anyone what socialism and communism mean and are very vigilant when it comes to individuals who want to take away any freedoms or liberties or move us down a path to socialism. Our voices are going to be significant. We may have a little anti-socialist squad forming in Congress.

And certainly, foreign affairs has always been something of interest to me. I don't know what committees I may end up on. Transportation is of interest to me as well. We’ll see how this all shakes out.

I still have relatives that live in Cuba. I know the oppression that they live under. We need to do what we can as a nation to continue to be the leader of the free world and try to promote freedom and democracy everywhere. It’s certainly something of interest to me as the daughter of a Cuban refugee.

We just passed the 8th anniversary of Superstorm Sandy. Is Staten Island prepared for the next storm, and what does the federal government need to do?

This is something that’s near and dear to my heart, because I represent the Assembly district that was most devastated in the entire state by Sandy. The seawall project is critically important. It’s been delayed twice in the last two years. It’s going to be a large focus of mine. One of the first things I want to do is meet with the Army Corps of Engineers and get the status. I’ve met with (the New York City) Parks Department over this, because the seawall is an opportunity for us to bring recreational activity and economic opportunity to the East Shore and incorporate that into the seawall project. I’m going to use my voice to push that project along and make sure it’s completed. It’s not just the protection it provides, but it’s also the assistance in terms of reducing flood insurance rates for my constituents. Once that wall is 50% built, the flood insurance rates will drop.

You’re instantly the most sought-after endorsement in a lot of the 2021 elections for City Council, Borough president and mayor. Are you planning to get involved, and are you endorsing anyone yet?

I haven’t endorsed anyone yet. But the mayor’s race in particular is important. When I ran for mayor, I pushed de Blasio to form a property tax commission. That property tax commission has come up with recommendations that will help the low and middle income communities that are subsidizing the wealthier neighborhoods of our city in terms of property taxes. We need to fix the system and before I give my endorsement to anyone, I want a commitment that they’re going to work with me on this issue. Because it’s just too critical to the people of Staten Island and southern Brooklyn.

It looks like Donald Trump’s presidency may be coming to an end soon. Will you be pushing for the Trump Presidential Library on Staten Island?

I think that’s (City Council Member) Joe Borelli’s endeavor (laughs). The first time I met Donald Trump he was speaking at the commencement ceremony at Wagner College, around 2004. He has a long history on Staten Island. His dad owned some apartments here and he grew up collecting the rent. Tysens Apartments and some on Howard Avenue as well. He’s beloved here in his community. He’s the president and deserves a library just like the others, and if the other boroughs don’t want him, I’m sure we’ll find a place here on Staten Island.