Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) leaders are publicly expressing doubt about New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s loyalty to their group’s causes after it helped him win office.
Since Mamdani won office in November, DSA officials and chapters criticized him online for letting New York Police Department (NYPD) Commissioner Jessica Tisch keep her job, endorsing non-DSA candidate Brad Lander for a House seat and attending a friendly White House meeting with President Donald Trump about shared goals in November. The organization’s official stance toward Mamdani has been overwhelmingly supportive, indicating a disconnect among socialists about how to make their radical goals a reality as he prepares to take power Jan. 1.
“He isn’t even sworn in yet, and parts of his own base are already seething, from the Trump meeting to keeping Tisch,” Stu Smith, an analyst at City Journal who follows DSA politics, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “On the far left, there’s a growing bloc of disaffected activists who see politicians that alarm conservatives, like Mamdani, as not nearly radical enough simply because they operate inside electoral politics. For them, politics itself — and the Democratic Party in particular — looks like counter-insurgency.”
Mamdani did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
The DSA counts Mamdani as a member and helped him win the mayoral race with more than 99,000 personnel who conducted door-knocking, phonebanking and other voter outreach operations. The group calls for abolishing police and prisons and arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on U.S. soil. Mamdani supported dismantling the NYPD and heavily criticized Israel earlier in his political career but has since said he will “work with” police officers and promised to combat antisemitism as mayor.
Mamdani still maintains ties with the DSA. His transition team, comprising hundreds of people, hired at least 26 members of the DSA’s New York City chapter for economic, health, “immigrant justice,” housing, education and other roles. One of them is a police abolitionist who discouraged Mamdani from keeping Commissioner Tisch in a July op-ed for The Nation months before the mayor-elect chose him as a public safety adviser, further illustrating the tension at play.
“Retaining Tisch represents a political alignment with the NYPD’s legacy of racialized policing, surveillance, and repression, and a retreat from the values of justice and liberation that Mamdani’s campaign claimed to champion,” the pro-Palestinian group Within Our Lifetime said after news broke of Mamdani’s alliance with her. The statement was so-signed by two of DSA’s college campus chapters, three regular chapters and seven of its informal factions or caucuses.
“Despite Mamdani’s charisma, the fractures in his coalition are already obvious,” Smith told the DCNF.
“I don’t have a crystal ball, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he ends up in a Brandon Johnson situation: an aggressively unpopular mayor kept afloat by a loud band of die-hard loyalists and the ‘Commie Corridor,’” Smith said, alluding to Chicago’s leftist mayor. “And whatever happens to Mamdani personally, his playbook is not going away; other cities will almost certainly elect DSA candidates running the same plays.”
Weeks before Mamdani’s win, leading figures in DSA’s “Liberation Caucus” conveyed a host of doubts and complaints about Mamdani in a statement on issues such as Zionism and criminal justice, including a DSA political education chair who called him “ZIOhran.” The caucus nevertheless released a video a day after the election declaring support for his incoming government — with strings attached.
“There will also undoubtedly be mistakes and errors made by the Mamdani administration itself,” a DSA International Committee member going by “BlackRedGuard” said in the video. “Such is the nature of governing under capitalism. We must stand ready to criticize and push for rectification. We cannot blindly lie to the masses.”
“We must create one, many, but better Zohrans, fully accountable to the movement, cadre candidates. And we must always remember to build evermore towards the party,” he said.
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