At 82, Joyce Ravitz is aware that she can no longer navigate the stairs of New York's walk-ups, the city's iconic buildings constructed in the early 20th century that still lack elevators. Not with the same ease as she did three decades ago, when she began volunteering for political campaigns. But that hasn't deterred her from going door-to-door seeking votes for the newly minted Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani. Ravitz is part of the army of 100,000 volunteers who, in the last year, have taken 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 one that comes to mind when thinking about the movement Mamdani has created. The 34-year-old candidate's campaign, which has gone global and inspired a resurgence within the Democratic Party, has been characterized by its youth-led approach. The millennial hopeful has had a strong presence on social media and has been seen in nightclubs and at concerts soliciting votes from young people. Ravitz herself admits that she didn't know much about his campaign until shortly before the Democratic primaries last June. But when she saw Mamdani win that election 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 to the polls this Tuesday, which could see him elected as New York City's first Muslim Democratic socialist mayor. He holds a lead of between 5 and 26 points over his opponents, according to polls. The candidate himself attributes his meteoric rise to those who, like Ravitz, have been out on the streets day after day, employing what is perhaps the most basic campaign tactic: door-to-door canvassing. While they have also made millions of 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 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 six in the morning 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 of the city's voters' names, ages, and party affiliations, they began their 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-to-door. “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 has called home for more than six decades, but also across the country. But, she says, none of them are 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 like “Gays for Mamdani” and “Latinos for Mamdani” have emerged, and although the profile of its volunteers tends to be those taking their first steps in political activism, there are also veterans of the more progressive wing of the Democratic Party, those who cite Bernie Sanders as their contemporary, as does Ravitz, or his 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 giving him 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,” Ravitz commented after the event. The change he’s referring to is the same one cited by all the volunteers interviewed by this newspaper as the main reason they campaigned for Mamdani: to make New York more affordable for its residents.
The candidate has focused 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 real estate markets that experienced the largest drops in rents during the pandemic, since 2020 rents have risen between 18% and 20%, according to various estimates. The average rent exceeds $3,000 per month.
Given this reality, Mamdani's proposals include freezing rent increases for four years for rent-controlled apartments, which number around one million, or 40% of the units in the city. He also wants free public transportation and free 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 reiterates—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 native New Yorker, has threatened the city with retaliation if Mamdani, born in Uganda to Indian parents and who obtained his U.S. citizenship 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 massive immigration operations like those he has done in other Democratic cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago. However, it is possible that, following Tuesday's results, he will order a deployment to the Big Apple. This was suggested on Monday by Mamdani's main rival in the election, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent candidate and who received Trump's endorsement.
Fear of that scenario motivated Marcela Mulholland to join the Democrat's volunteer team in June. The persecution that the Trump Administration has waged against immigrant communities is something the 28-year-old has experienced firsthand: her maternal 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 him. On the contrary, he has been criticized for agreeing to facilitate Trump's immigration policies 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 an aberration,” 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.”
