How Working Class Asians Helped Secure Zohran's Victory
The real story you won't get from all the hot takes.
Who were the most indispensable constituencies to Zohran Mamdani’s breakthrough mayoral run? Working-class people and immigrants.
You wouldn’t know if from all the hot takes last week — which included the right-wing of the Democratic Party turning apoplectic, racist, and apocalyptic, and the extremist far right praising him in a backhanded way while cackling with glee.
But when Mamdani began his campaign he knew that working class people and immigrants were the folks he wanted at the heart of it. And working-class Asian Americans were at the center of his successful coalition.
Zohran is now set to become the first Asian American mayor of New York City. He is part of a cohort of visionary second-generation Asian American politicians, which include another progressive stalwart, Boston mayor Michelle Wu.
Kamala Harris, too, is another second-generation Asian American politician. And the contrast between Mamdani’s approach to assembling a winning coalition and hers couldn’t be more stark.
The former vice president began her presidential campaign last summer by paying lip service to soaring narratives of freedom and opportunity meant to court the working and middle classes. But as her campaign ground on, she explicitly pivoted her appeal to members of the donor class.
Zohran and Michelle Wu instead have focused on so-called kitchen table, bread-and-butter issues. And their politics seem even more viable now nationally — as they win back even Trump-curious immigrants of color during a moment where the president’s violent, detestable attacks on them thrust them squarely into the spotlight.
Lots of air time has been given over to Zohran’s democratic socialist card, his pro-Palestinian politics, and his Muslim background. His father is Mahmood Mamdani, an Indian immigrant from Uganda, and a professor at Columbia University who has been outspoken against the genocide in Gaza. His even more famous mother is Mira Nair, the writer and director of Mississippi Masala, one of the all-time classic films on interracial love and solidarity.
It stands to reason that Zohran might become a symbol of pride for South Asians and Asian Americans.
But he represented something much more material to them, too - an intimate insight into what those communities needed, and an instinctual understanding, perhaps even nurtured by his parents, of how those needs could connect to others’ needs and transformed into a shared and winning platform.
Lost in all the hot takes is this: Zohran is where he is now is because of a working-class-led coalition he built in which Asian Americans were in the middle, not on the outside or in between, from the beginning.
The only piece that has spoken to this fact so far was published this past weekend in Jacobin. It was written by 35-year old Sri Lankan community organizer, Sasha Wijeyeratne, the executive director of the long-running Asian American community organization, CAAAV, and its sibling organization, CAAAV Voice.
Their piece, “Zohran Mamdani Spoke To Working Class Immigrants’ Needs”, is a must-read because it explains precisely how Zohran built his coalition, in a narrative of solidarity notably missing from most of the media.
Sasha describes a coalition founded by CAAAV Voice, the Desi American group, DRUM Beats, and the broad-based neighborhood organizing group, New York Communities for Change. Together they turned Zohran’s longshot bid into a viable candidacy.
CAAAV Voice focused on organizing Chinatown (where Mamdani defeated Cuomo by 28 points), Astoria (+52 points), Jackson Heights (+26 points), Sunnyside (+42 points), Sunset Park (+37 points), and Woodside (+34 points).
Embedded in Sasha’s account is perhaps a blueprint to reimagining a progressive politics of renewal, one where Asian Americans may not just have not a seat at the table but a major role to play.
I had the opportunity to speak to Sasha this weekend after the publication of their piece. They were more than happy to elaborate.
You can hear the conversation above, and read the lightly edited transcript below.
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Jeff: So there's a lot of hot takes out there on Zohran's victory. Tell us what really happened.
Sasha: I think a key part of the story that's been lost in the telling of it post-election is the role that working class organizations played from day one of the campaign. Before Zohran launched his campaign, he reached out to a number of organizations that included us at CAAAV Voice, DRUM Beats, New York Communities for Change, which all organized working class immigrants, and DRUM Beats and CAAAV Voice organized working class Asian immigrants.
And we were all Day One endorsers of Zohran. We launched his campaign alongside him at a moment when he was polling at, I don't know, I think 0.5% maybe, where people thought he had no chance of winning. We got questions about why we would support a left flank candidate instead of somebody who really had a chance.
We got critiques about wasting our political positioning and power, and what we were clear about is that this was a campaign that was deeply committed to actually building with and alongside working class people and immigrants and not as props. That we were actually going to be part of the process of developing his platform, and of developing the campaign alongside him.
I think that's a big part of what people miss. There's been so much talk about the digital component of this campaign and how compelling the videos are and how moving they are and how they really speak to Gen Z and all of that is true, but I think what that misses is that actually in a lot of the neighborhoods where Zohran won, where Trump won in the last presidency or, or even Eric Adams won in the last mayoral election, there are tons of people in those neighborhoods who are just not online.
And he won those neighborhoods because organizations like ours actually hit the ground and knocked on door after door after door and canvassed in parks and canvassed at institutions and talked to mosques and talked to senior centers. And actually went out and found people where they were at, and brought this very clear and very easy to understand and jargon-free platform to them.
So we could go and ask, do you want a four year rent freeze? Do you want free childcare? Do you want fast and free buses? And so much of that actually on the ground work by working class and immigrant and working class and Asian organizations — to me, that's really what won the campaign.
Even the campaign itself had 50,000 volunteers. Those were all people who were on doors, on phones making person to person contact. And so the digital part of the campaign absolutely was important. But I think the piece that gets lost is actually how much of a ground game. I mean, the campaign knocked over a million doors over the course of the race. That's unheard of in electoral politics.
Many of those people are actually getting absorbed into organizations. So it won't be a sort of a flash in the pan moment where millions of people are activated and then we have no idea what happens next. There will actually be hundreds, if not thousands of people that are in organization after this, ready to throw down, throw down in November, but also ready to throw down over the next four years.
Jeff: It's powerful to hear those numbers. I'm wondering if you can quantify it from an Asian American perspective. Here you all at day one. You are approaching this as: we've got a candidate who's a super long shot. Somebody who just has almost no chance in the world, it feels like, but we're gonna win and we're gonna do this by organizing our communities. How many people did you actually knock on doors of? What neighborhoods were they in?
Sasha: We estimate that we reached over 15,000 people throughout the course of the campaign. And that's through a mix of door knocking, canvassing, asking members of CAAAV Voice and leaders of CAAAV Voice to talk to their own communities and institutional outreach, especially in mosques and senior centers, as well as media, as well as placements in ethnic media. We got Zohran into the World Journal, which has a huge Chinese readership.
Jeff: We'll talk about this a little bit more, but for folks who don't know, World Journal is not necessarily the leftiest.
Sasha: Yes, World Journal is not a leftist leaning paper. A lot of what we were doing was actually trying to use our relationships to actually then position Zohran in these different communities. And our goal was to actually not have him just be talking to the left because we actually couldn't have won that election if we'd talked just to the left.
We needed him to be talking to everyday people and to be in the publications that everyday people read and to bring him in, not as, "Here's the far left candidate with his far left ideas", but rather as, "Here's a candidate with really clear and compelling platform around affordability that directly speaks to what our people and what your readership wants."
So we primarily focused on Chinatown, Sunset Park, Astoria, Jackson Heights, Sunnyside, Woodside, and Jamaica. And in every single one of those neighborhoods Zohran beat Cuomo handily. A minimum of 26 points up to by as much as 50. Over 50.
Jeff: Over 50! What you're painting a picture of is you all, here on day one, organizing Asian American communities. Some of these communities have been very, very, actually you could call it reactionary, in recent years. So if we go back to the World Journal, one of the things that the World Journal was playing up a lot, from about 10 years before this, was a defense of a New York police officer named Peter Liang who had killed a Black man in Brooklyn public housing named Akai Gurley.
Sasha: Yes.
Jeff: And this is not to press on the World Journal, but just to be able to say: here's the politics of what's happening in Asian American communities. The World Journal is a Chinese language newspaper that has also been very much pressing a grass tops campaign to work against affirmative action and to support the right wingers who were filing a suit against Harvard University to undo affirmative action.
And so what does this mean, going into the community and organizing Asian Americans? They seem to be politically a really volatile type of group and they've been painted very much by the mainstream media who don't really know as right wingers.
Sasha: I think everything that you're saying about the World Journal is really helpful context and like, what they've reported on in the past or the positions that they've taken in the past seem contradictory with then actually having an interview with Zohran.
I think also in our communities more broadly, and this is both in Chinese communities, but also in Bangali communities, what we saw is that we actually had a number, to be really transparent, CAAAV Voice had a number of members who voted for Trump in the presidential election.
And as we got curious and asked about it, folks did that because they were tired of the status quo. They really wanted a change, and they got captured by the Right's rhetoric around speaking for the everyday person, you know, the kind of false populism of the right. They were won over by that. By the rhetoric of being political outsiders, of seeing that the political system, the way it is, is broken.
Now they're in the reality of what that win means, and they're experiencing that, that rhetoric was completely shallow and hollow. They are not seeing any difference in their day-to-day lives, or if anything, they're finding their day-to-day conditions getting worse and worse.
The rent has only gone up. The price of groceries has only gone up. The rate of displacement in New York City has only gone up, and so I think we enter this campaign in a moment where people have been swayed by the rhetoric of the right, but are also understanding that it's empty and are coming face-to-face with the hard reality that actually that rhetoric has just led to worsening conditions and in particular has led to a whole spike and rash of deportations that have deeply impacted our communities and led to an extreme amount of very real and very grounded fear.
I think one of the interventions that we're able to make is that we didn't actually lead with left rhetoric. We're not necessarily coming in saying, look, "Here's a democratic socialist. Don't we want that?" We're coming in saying, "Here's the platform. You all as CAAAV Voice members developed the demand for a rent freeze. Zohran has taken it and made it a key part of his platform."
You go to any rally, any campaign rally, and at some point people start chanting, "Freeze the rent! Freeze the rent!" That came from our members, and our members know that — because they developed it. Here's a platform for free childcare, for fast and free buses, right? The deep focus on affordability of this campaign, I think meant that instead of what we often try to do on the left, which is to organize around ideology or rhetoric, which is also what the right is doing.
We organized working class people, working class Asian immigrants around the actual demands, around the actual things that people needed in their day-to-day lives in order to be able to stay in the city. And I think that cut through so much.
It meant that people who voted for Trump, or maybe supported Peter Liang were able to say, "Sure, maybe I got pulled into those things, but I desperately need my rent to be frozen because if my rent goes up, even another hundred dollars, I can't live here anymore. I desperately need cheaper groceries because the cost of eggs is going up to nearly $10 a dozen. You know, I can't afford to feed my family anymore."
And I think those real bread and butter issues, being able to organize deeply and widely around those in the context of this campaign was huge.
Jeff: And again, it needs to be kind of emphasized that you all are doing this as, as Day Oners, right. You guys are organizing working class Asian Americans. But this is how the coalition begins to spread. It starts here literally with a demand around "freeze the rent" that you all developed and then it flows out to a broader campaign so that he's moving from 0.5% to 43.5%. That feels like a big story and it feels like nobody's talking about this.
I wanted to actually also ask this question about shifting folks from defending a New York police cop — who's killed a Black man in the height of the Black Lives Matter movement — as a “scapegoat” and that he should be treated like all the other white police officers should be treated — to a politic around "freeze the rent." And it seems to me that it parallels this sort of evolution of CAAAV from its roots in community organizing that have to do with violence.
So CAAAV - the original name of CAAAV was...
Sasha: Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence.
Jeff: Can you describe how CAAAV evolved from defending against anti-Asian violence into standing in solidarity with Black communities against violence into this moment that you're in now?
Sasha: CAAAV was founded in the eighties as an organization around anti-Asian violence, and in many ways we're founded around Vincent Chin's murder. We're founded in response and in solidarity in that moment. We took on cases of working class Asian people being killed by police.
And one of the biggest cases that we took on was actually Akai Gurley. We did a ton of work with Akai's family and organized to have the Chinese police officer who shot him be held accountable. There was a real cost to that because it was a hugely divisive issue in Chinese communities and within our own membership. We lost members in that time. There was a real organizational cost to taking up that position.
But what we were always clear about is that police violence is police violence. It doesn't matter who perpetrates it, and that policing overall in the way it's done in the US is a, an extremely unjust system, both from its historical roots to the way it works in the present. And that if we're going to be serious about taking on violence, then we have to recognize the ways that that actually comes from the police.
And I think in many ways it's that focus on what violence actually means that gets us to where we are now. And so over time we realized that we were kind of chasing — we would get called every time an Asian person was targeted in any kind of hate crime, in any kind of what seemed to be a racially motivated incident. And we would run around the city and do our best to support.
But at some point we realized that we were just running around putting out fires and that that wasn't actually very effective. We weren't actually getting to the root cause. And so we decided, we made a decision that we wanted to focus more on: what are the root causes of violence? How do we understand violence is not just one person hurting another, but rather as really deeply systemic?
There were a multitude of issues that we tried organizing around. The one that really stuck was around housing, and so in many ways we actually understand gentrification as a form of violence and gentrification in our neighborhoods as anti-Asian violence.
And so now we organize working class Chinese immigrants in Chinatown really around housing and gentrification, around folk's right to be able to stay in their homes, to stay in their neighborhoods, to grow up and have families, and have families who can continue to live in those neighborhoods. And similarly with Bangladeshi or Bangali immigrants in Astoria. Those are both neighborhoods where there are huge numbers of our people and that are at the forefront of gentrification. This is where the “freeze the rent demand” comes from. Both of those neighborhoods are being intensely targeted. Chinatown is one of the only affordable neighborhoods left in lower Manhattan.
When you think of lower Manhattan, you often think of Wall Street or the Financial District. Chinatown and the Lower East Side are some of the only holdout neighborhoods in that lower half of Manhattan and are constantly being targeted for development. In fact for a long time, the waterfront of Chinatown was the site of the biggest proposed development in all of New York City.
And then similarly in Astoria, as we see gentrification wreak havoc on Manhattan and on parts of Brooklyn, we're also seeing it encroach into Queens. And our assessment was that Astoria was one of the front lines of that and we only started organizing in Astoria a few years ago. I wanna say it felt like the day of — I'm sure it wasn't — but it felt like the day that we decided to organize there, there was a $2 billion project proposed by some of the biggest developers in all of Manhattan for Astoria called Innovation Queens.
And our first campaign there was actually against that development and we won. We didn't win everything we wanted. But we got it to be nearly 50% affordable and from what we know it is the biggest concession that's been won from a fully private developer on fully private land. Meaning they had no incentive to do anything other than what they wanted, other than like deeply organized people fighting back.
And so, yeah, our understanding of anti-Asian violence has grown to that. Where those kinds of developments absolutely are violent and that's what we're actually defending against.
Jeff: It also seems as if you're following your membership in terms of this expansion of thinking about violence beyond when an individual is harmed in an incident. What you're saying is: displacement and resegregation as forms of violence are really questions that point us in a direction to get at the structural issues of what this notion of an Asian American is and what an Asian American politics should be.
Tell me a little bit about how you all are seeing another form of violence impacting Asian American politics, and that is the threat of deportation and, of course, these spectacles now of violent wrenching away of people from the communities and of families being split apart. Does that figure into this particular campaign? Is it a moment now in which the ICE deportation ramp ups are creating a new politic for Asian America?
Sasha: For better or worse, we're often in campaigns that are defending our neighborhoods because there's actually so much that's trying to come in. Part of our pivot in forming CAAAV Voice and then deciding to be part of Zohran's campaign from day one was trying to play offense.
Part of the reason for our decision is that we're in this context where Trump is president, where we're seeing increasingly and rapidly growing right wing authoritarianism. We're seeing the clawing back of freedoms that America claims to hold sacred. We're seeing politically motivated arrests. We're seeing things that speak to the growing threat of fascism. And part of that is this ramped up deportation machine. Our assessment was that we can't fight these deportations one by one. I mean, we'll try, but that's not the path to success.
We actually need a higher level of protection, and one of the ways of getting to that is to actually win the mayor of New York City. Because we actually need New York to be a fighting city. We need New York as a city to stand up and say, " We're not gonna do what Trump says." This is actually what we have chosen for ourselves and we won't allow it.
And of course there are limits to that, but the highest intervention, the most scaled up intervention that we could imagine making around deportation and immigration was to elect a mayor who would then actually enforce a level of protection for immigrants. For people who are undocumented or not fully documented, or frankly at this point, even just citizens who are the wrong color.
We needed that to actually be at the level of the city, not just at our individual organizations or our individual neighborhoods. That was gonna be insufficient. And so that was a huge part of actually making the pivot into this is the first, this is, this is really the first time that we've run like this deep of an electoral campaign.
We don't tend to do electoral politics this way, but we made a decision that it was actually incredibly strategic in large part, both because of the scale, the increasing scale of threat around deportation, but also around gentrification and displacement.
Some of what we are putting forward as an organization is that an Asian American politic actually has to follow the politics of working class Asian organizations and communities and people. And so we, we don't spend actually a lot of time talking about or thinking about what it means to be Asian, but rather thinking about, what is the impact of that identity on people's day-to-day, on our day-to-day material conditions and lives?
So an Asian American politic in this moment should absolutely be a rent freeze because places like Chinatown, like Astoria, these neighborhoods that we rely on for connection to our people, a connection to our culture, connection to our history. Places where we can still go and find aunties and uncles and grandmas and grandpas and find our people — those will disappear if we allow them to be gentrified away.
An Asian American politic has to be against deportation, has to be for a city that will actually protect its people against the growing and growing overreach of authoritarianism of Trump and MAGA and the right. And so I think some of what we're putting forth is a different kind of Asian American politic that really stems from working class people in communities.
Jeff: Do you think in some ways this victory is a signal that organizing working class Asian Americans can lead to a progressive politics of renewal?
Sasha: I was just actually talking with some of the other Day One endorsers DRUM Beats and New York Communities for Change, and we were reflecting on how there's a real lesson for the left here: you can't actually just speak to ideology. You can't be so focused on jargon and you cannot just speak to activists who say all the right things and are pulled into the leftist language. You actually have to build, if you wanna win as the left, you have to build real mass bases of working class people.
And I think the same is true in Asian American politics. If we want to win, if we want to win as Asian Americans, we actually have to be building real strong mass bases. And by mass I do not mean like 20 to 30 people in a room. I mean actual mass bases, right? Where you're bringing in hundreds of people and where you're bringing in people who don't agree with you.
It means that you can't turn someone away at the door because they voted for Trump in the last election. You can't do it. You actually have to bring in people where they're at in all the ways that they've been pulled and all the ways that they've been shaped. Who may not agree with you yet, who may not even like you yet — you have to actually still bring them in and struggle around the things that matter, the things that actually matter in their day-to-day lives.
And that's a very different way of getting to a left politic and of getting to a left victory. And it's a way that actually works.
People who came into this campaign for a rent freeze, for childcare, for buses, for whatever it is, for whatever deeply material thing that they care about, they're not going anywhere. They wanna see those things actually happen and they're willing to fight for them regardless of who's mayor.
There are lessons there around what it actually takes to build a winning coalition and lessons that force us to actually challenge some of the ways that we build base and build organization now. We have tons of stories within our own organization of people who voted for Trump in November, again, like I was saying before, in large part because of alienation and disillusionment with the Democratic party who are now staunch, knocked on doors, made phone calls, put their bodies on the ground for Zohran's campaign because what they desperately actually wanted was someone to meet their real material needs.
Building a campaign in that way is different than what we're used to doing in our organizations and on the left. And I hope that one of the lessons from this election is that it worked.
It works and it will continue to work!