One hundred thousand volunteers and one million doors knocked on: Zohran Mamdani’s historic campaign for mayor of New York

At 82, Joyce Ravitz is aware that she can no longer go up and down the stairs of New York’s walk-ups — the city’s iconic early-20th-century buildings that still don’t have elevators. Not with the same ease she did three decades ago, when she began volunteering for political campaigns. But that hasn’t deterred her from going door to door in search of votes for New York City’s new Democratic mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani. Ravitz is part of an army of 100,000 volunteers who, over the past year, have carried Mamdani’s message of building a more affordable city directly to the homes of more than a million voters in the most populous city in the United States.

Ravitz’s profile isn’t the first that comes to mind when thinking about the movement Mamdani has created. The 34-year-old candidate’s campaign, which has drawn worldwide attention and inspired an awakening within the Democratic Party, has been characterized by its youth leadership. The millennial hopeful has maintained a strong presence on social media and has been seen in nightclubs and at concerts asking young people for their votes. Ravitz herself admits she didn’t know much about his campaign until shortly before last June’s Democratic primaries. But when she saw Mamdani win that vote comfortably — surprising his rivals and defying all the polls, which at the start of his candidacy gave him only a 1% chance — she knew she was witnessing a historic phenomenon.

A year after launching his campaign, Mamdani heads into this Tuesday’s election — an event that could end with the selection of New York’s first Muslim socialist Democratic mayor — with a lead of between five and 26 points over his opponents, according to polls. The candidate himself attributes his meteoric rise to those like Ravitz, who have taken to the streets day after day, deploying what may be the most basic campaign tactic of all: knocking on doors. Although his team has also made millions of phone calls and sent over a million text messages, if he wins this Tuesday, the candidate’s success will largely be due to the hundreds of thousands of voters with whom his volunteers have had face-to-face conversations.

The 100,000 volunteers aimed to connect with as many voters as possible. Knocking on more than a million doors is no small feat in a city where 1.15 million people voted in 2021. The volunteers were organized by neighborhood and time slots, from 6 a.m. until nightfall. Each shift began with a brief introduction, where the team leaders — more than 700 — gave the volunteers a short set of instructions: knock firmly but respectfully, start on the top floor of each building and work your way down, don’t get into arguments, avoid wasting time with overly talkative people… Then they paired up and, equipped with an app called MiniVAN — which provides access to a national database with the names, ages, and party affiliations of the city’s voters — they set out to work.

That process has been “the heart of this campaign,” Mamdani acknowledged last Thursday at a volunteer event in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. The candidate arrived unexpectedly as a group was preparing in a park to go door knocking. “While many of us have lived and breathed this race for over a year, there are many New Yorkers who have simply been too busy trying to make ends meet in the most expensive city in America to think about politics. Those are the New Yorkers you might be speaking to today,” the candidate noted. “With all the interest this campaign has generated, the constant throughout has been all of you,” he added, thanking those present.

An “inclusive” coalition

Ravitz signed up as a volunteer for the campaign shortly after the June primaries. For the past 30 years, the retired special education teacher has volunteered for countless election campaigns — not only in New York, the city she’s called home for more than six decades, but across the country as well. But, she says, none of them have been like the New York candidate’s campaign. “For starters, it’s much bigger,” she says, laughing. But it’s also, she adds, a much “more inclusive” volunteer community.

The Mamdani coalition prides itself on having a place for everyone. Among the 100,000 volunteers, groups have sprung up such as “Gays for Mamdani” and “Latinos for Mamdani.” And although the typical volunteer profile tends to be those taking their first steps into political activism, there are also veterans from the more progressive wing of the Democratic Party — those who cite Bernie Sanders as their contemporary — like Ravitz or her partner, 71-year-old Ellen Garvey.

In the month leading up to Tuesday’s election, Ravitz and Garvey have dedicated about 10 hours a week to volunteering. Other volunteers have put in as many as 60 hours a week. Due to their age and physical limitations, the couple has focused on going door-to-door in buildings with elevators in their Lower Manhattan neighborhood and organizing campaign events at senior centers. Last Friday, they participated in a meeting Mamdani held at a senior center on the Lower East Side, where he led tai chi sessions with the elderly residents, including Ravitz, who greeted him wearing a campaign T-shirt and with a hug.

“I understand that change happens very slowly, and I know Zohran isn’t going to achieve everything he wants. But we have to start thinking about the kind of change Zohran is talking about,” said Ravitz after the event. The change she refers to is the same one mentioned by all the volunteers interviewed by this newspaper as the main reason they’ve campaigned for Mamdani: making New York more affordable for its residents.

The candidate has centered his platform on the cost of living in the most expensive city in the United States and one of the most expensive in the world. Although New York was one of the housing markets that saw the biggest rent drops during the pandemic, since 2020 rents have risen by between 18% and 20%, according to various estimates. The average rent now exceeds $3,000 a month.

In response to that reality, Mamdani’s proposals include freezing rent increases for four years on rent-stabilized apartments — about one million units, representing 40% of the city’s housing. He also wants to make public buses free and provide no-cost childcare for children up to age five.

Lex Rountree, 27, a community organizer for tenants’ rights and a member of Mamdani’s volunteer team since January, believes that rising housing costs will be the defining issue of this campaign. “Renters make up 70% of New York City’s population and have enormous potential to significantly influence this election in order to get a mayor who supports a rent freeze,” she says.

For her — as Mamdani often states — the key is building a city where people “don’t just survive.” “It’s not just about working endless hours at a job to pay the rent. It’s about making sure tenants are actually getting what they need,” Rountree points out. “I’ve been a tenant organizer for a long time, and it’s heartening to see someone addressing this issue with empathy.”

Standing up to Trump

Another issue that has mobilized volunteers is the Trump administration’s immigration policy and the need for New York to elect a mayor willing to stand up to the Republican. In addition to insulting the candidate, Trump — a New Yorker by birth — has threatened the city with retaliation if Mamdani, who was born in Uganda to Indian parents and became a U.S. citizen in 2018, wins this Tuesday.

Although there have been arrests and raids, so far the president has not sent National Guard troops to New York or launched mass immigration operations as he has in other Democratic cities such as Los Angeles or Chicago. However, it’s possible that after Tuesday’s election results, he could order a deployment in the Big Apple. That’s what Mamdani’s main rival, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo — running as an independent candidate and backed by Trump — suggested on Monday.

Fear of that scenario motivated Marcela Mulholland to join the Democrat’s volunteer team in June. The persecution that the Trump administration has carried out against migrant communities is something the 28-year-old has experienced firsthand: her mother’s family and her brother migrated from Venezuela to Florida, where she was born.

In addition, she has been volunteering for some time, assisting asylum seekers in New York. This group has been the hardest hit by the more than 3,000 arrests immigration authorities have made in the city since Trump returned to the presidency 10 months ago and authorized courthouse detentions. The outgoing mayor, Democrat Eric Adams, has done little to stand up to Trump. On the contrary, he’s been accused of agreeing to facilitate Trump’s immigration policy in New York in exchange for the federal government dropping a corruption case against him.

“Seeing Eric Adams completely cave to the Trump administration to protect himself in exchange for cooperating with the federal government has truly been appalling,” Mulholland says. “We need New York to be led by a progressive who truly represents a strong contrast on immigration issues. And if Trump wants to pick a fight with Zohran, I think he’ll find he’s met his match.”

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