Portland DSA Celebrates Zohran Mamdani’s Historic Victory in NYC, Signals Parallel Path for Portland on Affordability Issues

PORTLAND, OR — The Portland chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) today celebrated the historic election of Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York City, hailing it as a watershed moment for the socialist movement and evidence that a politics centered on working-class issues resonates with voters in major American cities, including Portland.

“The victory of Zohran Mamdani shows what is possible with grassroots energy and people power,” said Tiffany Koyama Lane, Portland City Council Vice President, District 3. “In Portland and across Oregon, we stand on the same side of the fight for: no-cost childcare, housing by and for the people, people over big banks and billionaires, dignity for everyone and protecting democracy. Zohran’s win proves that when we organize, regular working people can change the rules, and win a better world.”

“Mamdani’s victory is a clear sign that people want representatives who relentlessly and unapologetically fight for working class people, stand against genocide, and share a vision for a world where everyone lives a life of joy and dignity,” said Angelita Morillo, Portland City Councilor for District 3. 

Mamdani’s victory, powered by an army of volunteers and a platform of affordable housing, free transit, free childcare, and taxing the rich, demonstrates that voters demand concrete solutions to the affordability crisis. Here in Portland, DSA-endorsed city councilors are already advancing a similar agenda.

A Shared Vision for Governing

The policy priorities championed by Mamdani in New York mirror the work Portland’s socialist councilors are already advancing. In New York, Mamdani ran on a platform tailored to the needs of working people. Similarly, in Portland, DSA and our electeds are championing and defending universal Preschool for All, advocating for major expansions and improvements in public transit, recommitting the city to eliminating traffic deaths, advancing police accountability, funding our parks, exploring new models for social housing, taking on the fossil fuel industry, protecting sensitive habitat in Forest Park, affirming Portland’s Sanctuary City status, protecting Portlanders from ICE and Trump’s promised military invasion, and demolishing the false narratives of the Trump Administration on national television (1, 2).

Portland DSA has a long history of advocating for a progressive tax revenue program, famously encapsulated in its “Tax the Rich Portland” initiatives, which resulted in a successful universal preschool ballot measure This aligns directly with Mamdani’s pledge to fund social programs and public services by ensuring the wealthy pay their fair share.

“The same energy that elected Zohran Mamdani in New York is alive and well in Portland,” said Olivia Katbi, co-chair of Portland DSA. “For too long, our city has been told that corporate-friendly policies are the only way. Mamdani’s victory, and our own successes on the Portland City Council, prove that when you offer a clear, bold vision for a more affordable and just city, people will rally to it.”

Earlier this year, Portland DSA launched a new initiative called “The Family Agenda for Portland,” which aims to win policies that help families and children. Members have been canvassing for the Parks levy as the first official project under this campaign. The Family Agenda was inspired by one of Zohran’s campaign proposals earlier in the year, which promised “baby boxes” to all new parents in the city as part of a comprehensive Family Agenda for NYC.

Portland DSA’s Record of Action

With four members on the Portland City Council, Portland DSA has become a decisive force in city politics, setting the agenda and passing substantive policy changes. Key budget achievements include rerouting $1.8 million from the Golf Fund to parks maintenance and fully funding the city’s Small Donor Elections program. The socialist bloc also championed a move to divert $2 million earmarked for the Police Bureau to fund parks, reflecting a commitment to reallocating resources to community needs. 

Even where DSA priorities didn’t achieve council majorities during budget season, DSA electeds stood clearly for our values. Councilor Mitch Green led a charge to reallocate Prosper Portland’s “Strategic Investment Fund” to critical public services under threat, criticizing the development agency’s history of “directing public funds for unaccountable private profit-making.” Councilor Angelita Morillo proposed an amendment redirecting funding for 1 of Portland’s 20 encampment sweep teams to emergency rental assistance.

After budget season, Councilor Tiffany Koyama Lane championed a unanimous council reaffirmation to Vision Zero, moving the head Vision Zero Staffer under the Deputy City Administrator and ensuring traffic deaths are responded to as seriously as any other public safety concern. Councilor Sameer Kanal led a resolution codifying our “Sanctuary City” reputation, prohibiting city employees from cooperating with ICE and directing city employees on how to engage with immigration enforcement. Council Morillo’s Detention Facility Impact Fee — which would disincentivize new detention facilities like the ICE facility on Macadam — will be considered by the city council this week. 

Portland DSA maintains its power through consistent street-level mobilization and a strong relationship between its members and its elected officials, ensuring accountability to the movement, not corporate donors. DSA‘s member base is expanding rapidly, because the organization produces results. 

Denouncing the Corporate Backlash: Portland Business Alliance Aims to Block “Socialist Majority”

This rising socialist influence has drawn the ire of Portland’s corporate establishment. The Portland Business Alliance has explicitly stated that its #1 goal is to “prevent a socialist majority” in the city council, a goal that is completely out of touch with the material needs of Portlanders who are struggling to keep up with housing and healthcare costs and protect their neighbors from ICE raids.

“This is not a surprise,” said Jesse Dreyer, a co-chair of Portland DSA’s electoral working group. “The Alliance represents the same corporate interests that Mamdani defeated in New York. They are threatened because we are proving that a city can be governed for the benefit of its working people, not for private profit. Their goal to block a socialist majority is an admission that our movement is growing and that their agenda is unpopular.”

Political staffer Doug Moore recently admitted that the PBA’s goal was to “stop DSA from taking over the council”, calling our commitment to bread-and-butter issues as an attempt “to take over the City Council and turn it into an ideological showcase for the rest of the country.” Similarly, District 2 Councilman Dan Ryan has repeatedly publicly questioned what the North star of the DSA aligned city councilors is. 

“The Portland Business Alliance and our local oligarchs are stuck in a self-serving echo chamber, advancing debunked arguments about tax flight and arguing that tax cuts for the rich will somehow help ordinary Portlanders who are suffering,” said Brian Denning, co-Chair of Portland DSA. “Both Zohran Mandani and Portland DSA are offering a new direction for city politics and the local economy, based on fair redistribution of wealth, functional public services, a healthy environment, and affordability for all.”

A Unified Movement for the Future

Mamdani’s victory in New York signals a national shift and provides a model for how socialists can win and govern major cities. The Portland DSA chapter, now recognized as a major power broker in the city, is committed to this same path.

“The future of Portland will be decided in the coming years,” said Mitch Green, Councilor for District 4.” We can choose a city managed for the wealthy and corporations, or we can follow the lead of New Yorkers and build a Portland for the many, not the few.”

The post An Historic Night for Socialism appeared first on Portland DSA .

By: Terence Cawley

On Wednesday, November 5, Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) announced the results of their strike authorization vote initiated on October 24.

A supermajority of 92% of SBWU voted to strike dozens of cities on one of the company’s most profitable days of the year, November 13, if Starbucks does not “finalize fair contracts and stop unionbusting.”

Baristas at unionized stores across the United States voted on whether to authorize a strike over the course of several days. The voting process coincided with a wave of seventy practice pickets occurring in sixty cities nationwide (including Worcester, MA; Epping, NH; and Providence, RI) from the 24^th through November 1, as the union ramped up efforts to secure a fair first contract for union stores. 

“Workers are done waiting around,” said Starbucks Workers United spokesperson Michelle Eisen. “We’re coming up on close to one year since the last official bargaining session with the company, so it seems like it’s the right time.”

Further strategy for the strike remains in the hands of membership, with committees that determine the timeline, duration, and scope of any future actions. “All of our escalation strategies are worker-developed,” said Eisen.

As the strike authorization ramped up, practice pickets offered an opportunity not just for workers to literally practice for a possible strike, as well as to show customers what such a strike would look like while demonstrating to Starbucks workers’ commitment to this fight.

We’re not bluffing. We’re showing how strong we are and making Starbucks ask: is this really something they want to deal with at their busiest time of the year?

A Brief History of Starbucks Workers United (SBWU)

Since Starbucks workers in Buffalo, N.Y. started Starbucks Workers United in August 2021, over 650 stores representing over 12,000 workers have unionized. However, none of these stores have reached a collective bargaining agreement.  

Starbucks Workers United’s demands include changes that will enable more baristas to make a living wage, like higher pay, expanded healthcare benefits and paid leave, and more consistent scheduling. The union is also asking for stronger protections from racial and sexual harassment, as well as the enshrinement of current benefits in a contract so they cannot be revoked by the company later. 

Starbucks initially opposed unionization efforts aggressively, leading to over 700 charges of Unfair Labor Practices (ULP) filed against Starbucks with the National Labor Relations Board. The company reached an agreement with Starbucks Workers United in February 2024 to negotiate a “foundational framework” for contracts for union stores. Starbucks then failed to meet its own deadline to agree to this framework by the end of 2024, leading to workers at over 300 Starbucks location going on strike on Christmas Eve for the largest labor action in company history. 

Starbucks Workers United and the company entered mediation in February 2025. The union has made some progress in contract negotiations, reaching 33 tentative agreements with the company on important issues including just cause, dress codes, and worker health and safety. However, Starbucks continues to hold out on the workers’ three core demands: increasing worker hours to address understaffing and ensure workers qualify for benefits, increasing take-home pay, and resolving all outstanding ULP charges. 

Eisen, who originally organized in Buffalo as part of the initial wave of unionization prior to becoming SBWU’s spokesperson, said: 

More take-home pay means workers won’t have to choose between paying rent and buying groceries. Sufficient staffing of stores means one barista won’t have to be working the jobs of three baristas.”

The most recent offer from Starbucks, which the union rejected in April, offered no raises for union workers in their first year, 1.5 percent raises in subsequent years (“it is actually pennies when you do the math for most workers,” said Eisen), and no solutions for understaffing and the outstanding ULP charges. There was also no indication that the company was willing to move on these points. 

Worker Dignity Means Customer Dignity

Beyond improving worker quality of life and repairing the damage Starbucks has done to its brand by being “the largest violator of U.S. labor law in modern history,” Eisen argues that the reforms the union is fighting for would also improve the customer experience. When she first started working for Starbucks fifteen years ago, she recalls how adequate staffing allowed stores to maintain higher quality standards for food and drinks. 

Eisen noted:

You walk into a Starbucks now, and there are two people on the floor running back and forth trying to play the role of multiple positions because the stores aren’t staffed appropriately. If I haven’t been a long-time Starbucks customer and I walk into a Starbucks now, the likelihood of me coming back, seeing the state of the stores, is pretty slim. We have to invest in the people running these stores.

Starbucks Workers United claims on their website that Starbucks could finalize fair union contracts for less than the over $97 million Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol made for four months of work in 2024. Starbucks also covered the cost of Niccol commuting from his home in California to company headquarters in Seattle via private jet. The 2024 wage gap between Niccol and the median Starbucks worker was the largest of the 500 biggest public companies in the U.S., with Niccol making 6,666 times more than the average Starbucks employee.

On September 25, Starbucks announced that they would be closing hundreds of stores nationwide, along with firing 900 corporate workers. Of the 59 union stores included in this round of closures, eight of them were in Massachusetts. Several of those stores, like the Harvard Square and Davis Square locations, had just unionized within the last few months. 

In the weeks following the closures, Starbucks Workers United held practice pickets at stores in 35 cities, including one at the shuttered Harvard Square store and one in New York City which received a supportive visit from mayoral candidate and DSA member Zohran Mamdani. According to Eisen, the closures, rather than weakening the union, have led to a surge in organizing leads as workers are more motivated than ever to win a fair contract.

“It’s another example of the company making decisions with little to no notice and absolutely no input from workers,” said Eisen. “A lot of non-union workers are saying, ‘whoa, we need to get in on this. It’s clear the company doesn’t care about us.’” 

What Comes Next? 

The strike authorization vote and practice pickets come at a critical time for Starbucks Workers United. The holiday season, typically the busiest and most profitable time of year for Starbucks, is approaching fast. A strike during this season could add to the company’s already significant financial woes.

Starbucks stock is down 6 percent since the beginning of 2025. Same-store sales have declined for six consecutive quarters. 

Meanwhile, public pressure on Starbucks to bargain in good faith with its workers continues to intensify. In September, a coalition of 45 progressive organizations representing over 85 million people, including the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), sent an open letter to Niccol urging him to finalize fair union contracts with SBWU. Starbucks investors have also grown frustrated with the company’s unwillingness to resolve its labor issues, with several groups sending their own open letters to the Starbucks Board of Directors over the last few months.  

“Every day, more and more workers are willing to join the fight despite how they’re being treated, which is giving me hope, especially with the current political climate,” said Eisen. “If workers are willing to take on the risk to fight, how can I not fight?”

Supporters can join SBWU on the picket line and sign the No Contract, No Coffee pledge at https://sbworkersunited.org/take-action/. 

Terence Cawley is a member of Boston DSA.

The post Starbucks Workers United Supermajority Authorize ULP Strike for November 13 appeared first on Working Mass.

Christopher Columbus is widely considered one of the greatest villains ever to set foot in the Americas. His crimes have been extensively documented by modern historians, and even his contemporaries were so disgusted by his behavior that he was returned to Spain to stand trial for his crimes as a governor in the so-called “New World.”

The myth of Columbus as a heroic explorer has been shattered, in Chicago as everywhere else. In July 2020, massive protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd led to the removal of the city’s public monuments to Columbus in Grant Park and Arrigo Park. The city announced earlier this year that these monuments will not be returned to public display.

The defense of Columbus represents a reactionary effort by a small minority of Chicagoans to launder the reputation of a murderer. This group seeks to use public land and funds to push a regressive, sanitized version of a history of unrelenting violence and oppression. The people of Chicago expressed their will that statues honoring Columbus be removed from the city’s parks, and the city’s elected officials have ratified that decision through peaceful, deliberative, and democratic action.

Unfortunately, another monument that advances that exact same mission of intimidation and historical whitewashing is still on display in Chicago to this day. It was gifted to the city by Benito Mussolini himself, and it lionizes a key architect of the original fascist movement in Italy: Italo Balbo.

—

Italo Balbo started his political career after World War I as an organizer of the fascist Blackshirts in Ferrara, where he and his men spent years terrorizing and murdering agricultural workers for attempting to unionize. He trained fascist thugs as strikebreakers, and they used extreme violence to reassert control of the countryside on behalf of wealthy landowners. Balbo himself was accused of ordering the brutal murder of anti-fascist priest Giovanni Minzoni, though he was acquitted of the crime in an Italian court after Mussolini took power.

In 1922, Balbo helped orchestrate Mussolini’s March on Rome, in which the future Duce threatened to launch a civil war unless the king of Italy appointed him as Prime Minister. The king relented, and Mussolini proceeded to use the power of the police and military to terrorize his enemies and establish an authoritarian state. Balbo was rewarded for his loyalty with a position as a member of Mussolini’s inner circle (a quadrumvir on the so-called “Grand Council of Fascism”) and as the head of Italy’s Royal Air Force, where he developed the country’s military air power in preparation for the Second World War. In a leadership shakeup in 1933, Mussolini appointed Balbo as Governor-General of Libya. He served there until his death in 1940, when poorly trained Italian forces shot down his plane in the mistaken belief that it was a British bomber. Allegations that Mussolini orchestrated Balbo’s death are unsubstantiated and likely untrue.

—

In 1933, Balbo personally flew across the Atlantic Ocean from Italy to Chicago, arriving with a fleet of twenty-four amphibious aircraft to visit the Chicago World’s Fair. The spectacle was well-received by the public, especially the Italian-American community of the city, and Mussolini saw it as an opportunity to propagandize in favor of fascism.

The following year, Mussolini shipped a Roman column to Chicago to commemorate the flight. On the base of the column, he wrote the following words in English and Italian (emphasis added): 

THIS COLUMN 
TWENTY CENTURIES OLD
ERECTED ON THE BEACH OF OSTIA 
PORT OF IMPERIAL ROME 
TO SAFEGUARD THE FORTUNES AND VICTORIES 
OF THE ROMAN TRIREMES
FASCIST ITALY BY COMMAND OF BENITO MUSSOLINI
PRESENTS TO CHICAGO 
EXALTATION SYMBOL MEMORIAL 
OF THE ATLANTIC SQUADRON LED BY BALBO
THAT WITH ROMAN DARING FLEW ACROSS THE OCEAN 
IN THE 11TH YEAR 
OF THE FASCIST ERA.

The text has since worn away from the base, but the monument has remained in Burnham Park for over ninety years. During Balbo’s visit to Chicago, the city chose to further honor Balbo by renaming Seventh Street as “Balbo Drive,” a fact that made Mussolini extremely jealous. Balbo’s flight drew explicit comparisons to Christopher Columbus at the time, and the statue of Columbus that formerly stood in Grant Park was dedicated in Balbo’s presence during the World’s Fair in 1933.

Balbo died before the United States entered the war in December 1941, so he never featured in anti-Axis propaganda as one of Mussolini’s vile toadies. This is likely what allowed the monument to slip through the cracks in the country’s united opposition to and hatred of European fascism.

—

Some of the positive characteristics extolled by Balbo’s defenders are not complete fabrications. By all historical accounts, Balbo was personable, courageous, adventurous, and sincere. He criticized Mussolini’s turn toward anti-Semitism, and he believed Italy’s alliance with Nazi Germany was a strategic mistake. He had a complicated relationship with Mussolini, and his political disagreements with the Duce became more pronounced in the final years of his life.

Fortunately for Balbo, his position in the regime afforded him the luxury of criticizing Mussolini in public. His victims in Ferrara and throughout Italy were not granted the same liberty. The crimes of the legions of jackboots he commanded are extensively documented, and Balbo is likely guilty of many acts of violence that don’t appear in the historical record. He also played a key role in amassing the fighters and bombers that later killed thousands of Allied servicemen as they liberated North Africa, Sicily, Naples, and Rome from fascist tyranny.

Balbo spent his term as a supposedly ‘moderate’ governor of Libya preoccupied with a project to ship tens of thousands of Italian settlers to the colony and eventually displace the colonized. He dreamt of an Italian empire stretching across the Mediterranean and East Africa, unconcerned with the ultimate fate of the non-citizen Arab, Berber, Black, and Jewish ‘subjects’ who were terrorized by the brutal colonial regime he helped oversee. Balbo was eager to criticize Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler only when he wasn’t rubbing elbows with the Führer himself on an official state visit to Nazi Germany.

Most importantly, Balbo orchestrated the destruction of democracy in Italy and was a senior minister in Mussolini’s fascist government. He never recanted his profoundly held belief in fascist ideology or his support for Mussolini. Nothing Balbo said or did during his lifetime can absolve him of the horrible crimes he committed.

—

There have been numerous attempts to remove the monument and rename Balbo Drive over the years, most recently in 2017 and 2020. A tiny minority of right-wing Chicagoans consistently turns out to defend the monument when it is threatened, and all City Council measures to remove the monument or rename the street have failed.

In 2018, a measure was introduced to the Chicago City Council to rename Balbo Drive as Ida B. Wells Drive. At the last minute, the Council caved to pressure from right-wing groups and chose to rename Congress Parkway instead.

In 2022, the Chicago Monument Project published a report that recommended the removal of seventeen monuments and works of public art in the city, including the Balbo Column. In their rationale for the removal of the column, the Monument Project stated:

The Brandon Johnson Administration pledged to follow the recommendations of the report upon his election in 2023, but there has been no movement on the Balbo question since.

Today, a tiny minority of Chicagoans defend the monument out of a strong but profoundly ahistorical sense of pride in Balbo’s accomplishment divorced from its context as an expression of fascist state power. Balbo’s apologists have aligned themselves with a nasty flavor of right-wing Italian-American civic pride that attempts to excuse his numerous crimes and his lifelong disdain of democracy and basic human rights.

In one guest essay written for the Monument Report, a defender of Columbus and Balbo writes “These monuments are not, nor were they intended to be, political statements. It is senseless to try and make them into a political agenda.” Indeed, most of the attempts to sanitize Balbo’s legacy seek to bring him out of the political sphere and turn him into a benign cultural figure, an Italian hero who was, at worst, ‘a product of his time.’

This is an extreme distortion of Balbo’s legacy. Mussolini saw Balbo’s flight as an explicit exercise in fascist propaganda. He followed the progress of Balbo’s ‘expedition’ with great interest, and Balbo’s men took careful note of the presence of a small number of anti-fascist protesters in Chicago and New York. The flight was an explicit attempt to legitimize Mussolini’s totalitarianism in the eyes of the American public, and the continued presence of the monument is evidence of how thoroughly this effort succeeded.

—

Balbo’s values and life’s work should be reprehensible to any person who believes in free expression, democracy, an independent civil society, and freedom from political coercion. Democratic rights are under dire threat in America, and our city’s official valorization of a proud fascist has never been more embarrassing.

Between the ongoing authoritarian takeover of the United States by the Trump Administration, the continuing death and destruction in Palestine, and a number of other emergencies at home and around the world, leftists in Chicago have had a lot of other things to focus on in recent years. But symbols matter a great deal, and our city’s continued veneration of an avowed enemy of everything we as socialists hold dear is an insult we must not abide.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution to the present state of affairs. The city should give Balbo the same treatment it gave to Columbus in 2020: rename Balbo Drive and loan or donate the column to a private historical society.

Chicagoans have the right to honor whomever they like on their own property, no matter how vile their hero’s actions were in life. Earlier this year, the Columbus statue formerly standing in Arrigo Park was loaned by the city to the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans.

I, for one, think the Balbo column would look wonderful right next to it.

—

Markus van Drenthe is a democratic socialist and anti-fascist living in Chicago. Much of the information on Balbo in this essay was sourced from the biography Italo Balbo: A Fascist Life by Claudio G. Segrè (University of California Press, 1987).

The post In Chicago, The Legacy of Christopher Columbus Lives On in Italo Balbo appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

In 1847, the Choctaw Nation donated $170 (almost $7,000 in today’s money) to a small coastal town in Ireland called Midleton. Ireland had been facing a famine and a British economic blockade for two years. Despite facing their own recent genocide that killed over 2,000 Choctaw, the nation donated what money they could to the people of Ireland.

Over a century later, the people of Midleton realized the aid had come from the Choctaw and recognized their shared histories of forced famine and ethnic cleansing. In 1995, former Irish president Mary Robinson visited the Choctaw Nation (now in Oklahoma), reestablishing ties between the two nations. Two decades later, an Irish artist named Alex Pentek created the stainless steel structure “Kindred Spirits”, which is located in Midleton’s Bailick Park in commemoration of the Choctaw’s aid. Just last year, the Choctaw commissioned their own sculpture, titled “Eternal Heart,” by Sam Stitt, an enrolled Choctaw artist.

These two indigenous peoples and their shared history reminded me of the recent Global Sumud (meaning “resilience” in Arabic) flotilla and the nearly 500 participants from 44 countries who sailed across the Mediterranean to break the illegal Israeli blockade on Gaza. Twenty-two participants from the United States sailed with the flotilla. The flotilla was established in July of this year to denounce the genocide in Gaza and call on the international community to help Palestinians in desperate need of food, medicine, and other basic supplies.

The flotilla, however, did not reach Gaza. It was illegally intercepted by the Israeli Occupation Force (IOF). While one of the boats, the Mikeno, did make it past the Gaza blockade, it too was boarded nine miles off the coast of Gaza. The participants were arrested, taken to the port of Ashdod, paraded around by far-right settler and Jewish Power party leader Itamar Ben-Gvir for Israeli social media, and shipped off to the Ktzi’ot Prison, located in the occupied Negev desert. For almost a week, the families of the American participants did not know where they were, how long they would be held, or their condition. The U.S. consulate did little to provide aid, and participants were prevented from speaking to legal counsel. 

On October 7th, 2025, Nelson Mandela’s grandson and Sumud participant Mandla Mandela posted a video about his release from Ktzi’ot. American activist David R.K. Adler could be seen in the background of the video. A few days before, X, the mother of one of the participants, received word from the Japanese consulate in Jordan that the Americans were deported from Israel to Jordan and allowed to return home. 

On October 8, five of the American participants made it back to the U.S. and flew back to the O’Hare International Airport. Al Hub, a Palestinian-led youth forum based in Bridgeview, or “Little Palestine” in Chicago, formed a welcome committee for those returning. The action was originally organized for Illinoisan and former Marine Jessica Clotfelter. I was one of the people who turned out in support of the returning Sumud participants. Taking the CTA Red and Blue lines, I made my way to the international terminal (Terminal 5) to join the welcome committee for Jessica Clotfelter, Tommy Marcus (a.k.a. Quentin Quarantino on Instagram), Stephen Wahab, Logan Hollarsmith, and Paul Reid. Jessica’s family, her parents, brother, and cousin, and Stephen’s brother anxiously waited for their return.

The Sumud quintet came from across America. Stephen and Paul are from Oregon, Tommy from California, Logan from Arizona, and Jessica from Illinois. Not all of them were on the same ship during the flotilla. Stephen, a Palestinian-American, was aboard the Alma with activists Greta Thunberg, Thiago de Avila, and Mandla Mandela. Paul was sailing on the Inna with a mostly Spanish and French crew. The Ohwayla hosted Logan (who served as one of its captains), Jessica, and Tommy, as well as fellow American activists David R.K. Adler and Greg Stoker. 

It was around half an half-hour before we saw the five heroes emerge from Exit A in Terminal 5. The Sumud quintet was not expecting this small but mighty welcome home. Paul clutched his heart as he walked towards our group, clearly not expecting such hospitality after nearly a week in an Israeli internment camp.

Jessica and Stephen’s reunions with their families were some of the most heartfelt moments; you could feel the emotion between the families as they were finally reunited with their daughter, sister, brother, or cousin. Al Hub bought bouquets for Jessica’s mother to hand to her and individual flowers for the rest of the quintet. It was touching to witness families reuniting after the wrenching uncertainty of the past week. Tommy, Paul, and Logan did not expect a grand reception just for them.

Once greetings were done and calm settled over the group, some of the gathered community members, including myself and independent journalist Jackie B., asked the five activists questions about their journey to Gaza, their treatment under Israeli captivity, and their eventual release into Jordan.

Tommy Marcus took the lead in answering the first set of questions, as the rest of the group were jet-lagged and still processing the experience. “Yes, we are back in the United States, even after our own government and consulate failed us,” he said. Marcus described how the group was illegally captured by the Israeli Navy in international waters and taken to the Port of Ashdod. There, they and the rest of the Sumud participants were placed in front of Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right Israeli politician, leader of the Otzma Yehudit or “Jewish Power” party, and a known settler in the occupied West Bank. There, Israeli military media showed Ben-Gvir calling them “terrorists” and “Hamas.” This is ironic because Ben-Gvir is a Kahanist, who had a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, the perpetrator of the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre, where 27 Palestinian Muslims were murdered, in his house.

After the Israeli propaganda tour, or hasbara, they were then shipped off to the Negev to Ktzi’ot, the largest Israeli prison, or an internment camp, as David Adler called it in this “Democracy Now!” interview. According to Tommy Marcus, the camp holds thousands of Palestinians, including hundreds of children. Jessica and Logan chimed in, saying that men and women were separated into different isolation blocks and away from the Palestinian hostages. All five confirmed that some of the Sumud participants were held in 1 by 2 meter cells (3.3 feet by 6.6 feet) for up to 72 hours, a practice widely condemned by human rights groups. 

Marcus continued by describing how IOF guards would hold guns to their heads, try to break them by taking away medicine such as insulin or, in Tommy’s case, Lexapro, and zip-tying their hands behind their backs. Logan Hollarsmith, a captain of the Ohwayla, reported that they could hear the screams of Palestinians despite the isolation, and that there is a sub-level beneath the cellblock they were held in via other Sumud participants, who were familiar with the prison.

During this time, Jessica Clotfelter’s attorney, Farah Chalisa, attempted multiple times to locate Jessica by contacting the U.S. consulate, Jessica’s state representative, Mary E. Miller, and other Israeli and American officials. Representative Miller is a far-right Republican elected to serve Illinois’ Congressional District 15. She said in 2021 that “…Hitler was right on one thing: he said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’” Ironically, when asked about Jessica’s captivity in occupied Bedu-Palestinian lands, Miller’s office responded to a request for comments by stating  that she “support[s] the right for Israel to exist.”

So how did the quintet make it out of Ktzi’ot and end up in Jordan? As mentioned before, participants’ families heard about it from the Japanese Consulate, one of them being Stephen’s brother, who found out through another Sumud participant’s mother that the Americans were being released into Jordan. 

There is only one open land route between the  West Bank and Jordan: the Allenby Bridge, named after Gen. Edmund Allenby, who led British colonial forces tasked with supporting the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans in World War I. When the Sumud members were thrown into a blacked-out IOF van bound for Jordan, Tommy Marcus said he thought “…he and David Adler were going to be black bagged or disappeared and that nobody knew where they were headed”. It was Palestinian-American activist Stephen Wahab who caught a glimpse of a sign pointing to the Allenby Bridge in Arabic through a small sliver of exposed window.

In Jordan, the Sumud members were provided a 5-star hotel and traditional Jordanian/Palestinian food. The American participants stated their consulate did not provide for their comforts in Jordan and that these amenities came from the Jordanian government. After six days in prison, the quintet finally had a warm bed and food; they didn’t have to share the toilet bowl in the cellblock for water and sleep on a hard floor anymore. Before going to an official interview with Jackie B. and Fox News 32, Tommy Marcus said they, the Sumud Five, appreciated the global community for amplifying their captivity, but highlighted the importance of continuing to focus on the genocide in Gaza and the Palestinian hostages from Gaza and the West Bank, especially with the ongoing ceasefire Phase 1 talks going on at the time.

As I made my way back home with Jackie B. and Tommy, who was catching a connecting flight to L.A., I thought about the parallels between my Irish ancestors and the Palestinians. With similar experiences, they face or have faced ongoing famines and genocides. As Jackie and I sat on the Blue Line train, I wondered where future generations might place a sculpture commemorating the flotilla’s actions for the Palestinian people in Gaza. Will there be greater cultural exchanges between the Palestinians and the international community? When and how will the genocide and blockade end? I don’t know the answer, but I do know that the resilience of the Palestinian people will live on as they struggle to finally be free.

Though the five Americans we greeted at O’Hare are now safely home, the danger for other activists continues. As of press time, there is one participant from Spain, Reyes Rigo Cervilla, still being held in Israeli captivity. He is imprisoned alongside participants in the recent flotilla “Thousands Madleens to Gaza” that sailed after the Sumud. We stand in solidarity with him and all who sacrifice in the name of a just peace for the Palestinian people.

I cannot begin to describe the bravery of the Sumud quintet had for joining a global flotilla sailing to Gaza to bring aid to the Palestinians. I see very clearly the parallels between the Global Sumud and its heroes and the Great Hunger, which my own family experienced in nineteenth-century Ireland. Even after hundreds of years, colonial tactics remain the same. While there is an ocean between our five heroes and Gaza or the Choctaw and Ireland, there is hope, solidarity, and resilience between all of us. Despite the current situation in Gaza and the horrible violence elsewhere around the world (in Sudan, the Congo, Kashmir, Myanmar, Ukraine, etc.), everyone can do their part, no matter how small. May we all live to see a free Palestine and where all international struggles and the oppressed are free from their shackles of Western imperialism.

The post Famines and Flotillas: From Ireland to Palestine  appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

Zohran Mamdani and New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA) won the biggest electoral victory of the socialist movement in my lifetime and may have started a new era for the socialist movement. What comes next is up to every organized socialist in DSA and every soon-to-be organized socialist inspired by victories like Zohran’s. 

The post Zohran Won and You Can Do It Too appeared first on Democratic Left.

Digital organizers from the Catherine Connolly campaign give insights into the tech tools that helped drive Connolly and Zohran to victory.

By Dan Albright and Henry De Groot

In the last two weeks, two monumental electoral victories have reenergized the international left: Catherine Connolly’s landslide victory in the Irish Presidential Election, and Zohran Mamdani’s heroic triumph in the New York City mayoral election.

The two campaigns were won both on the doors and online. In addition to both campaigns being powered by massive volunteer participation from broad layers of the socialist and progressive left, the two also utilized almost identical digital infrastructure and strategies.

Here are five of the digital approaches which won it big in 2025.

1. Dynamic Video Content: Instagram, FB Reels, and TikTok

It is almost a cliche now to note that Zohran has found success through his dynamic use of video content, and most especially his man-on-the-street and walk-and-talk style videos. And the same has been noted about Connolly’s campaign, with the commentariat noting her campaign’s use of relatable content (like her keepie-uppies) to drive accidental virality. There is no doubt that video played a significant role in both campaigns, both in conveying a coherent political message capable of assembling a winning coalition and in bringing joy and whimsy into the political arena.

What is also interesting to note—at least for future campaigners seeking to replicate this video-campaigning style—is the use by both campaigns of supporter-sourced content in addition to high-production-value videos. Mamdani’s appearances on popular podcasts, as well as tags in videos by social media influencers and spontaneous volunteers, became a symbol of his popular appeal.

Similarly, on the Connolly campaign, we leaned into the grassroots’ desire to help the campaign, assembling a volunteer video team to edit timely and fun, if imperfect, videos and reels. Staff resources were limited, but the pool of volunteers was almost endless. The entire campaign HQ made it a priority to give volunteers runway to contribute to campaign content, making the social media their own platform as well as Catherine’s, and giving personification to the campaign slogan “Raising Your Voice.” The core team created a brand kit with template guides and graphics, which we shared on easy-to-use, collaborative platforms like Canva and CapCut. With some guidance and feedback, volunteers were able to make significant progress on or almost entirely independently edit content such as other volunteers’ testimonials, event recaps, and candidate appearances on popular podcasts, TV, and radio shows. This freed up the core team to bottom-line to develop key target content to build the core of the campaign’s political narrative and prepare high-production content for paid ads.

It never would have been possible to have the social media presence the campaign achieved without the addition of the volunteer-sourced content, which bulked up the core content with a steady stream of supporter-submitted Instagram and Facebook stories, eventually building up to multiple video and reel posts every day for the last weeks of the campaign. This formula is especially important to note for those candidates who seek to win on a constrained budget.

But for both Zohran and Connolly, the secret sauce was neither greater volume of social content nor jumping onto the trending formats of each week. The key to replicating the video approaches that resonated this election season is presenting the candidate authentically by channeling their idiosyncratic voice, style, and perspective. And that is precisely why phony, corporate candidates trying to replicate the style will come up short.

In her trademark stubbornness to her convictions, Catherine Connolly refused to do anything staged or gimmicky for self-promotion. She’s the polar opposite of Mamdani’s social media-ready style. So instead of trying to copy the now-cliched Mamdani walk-and-talk format or force a TikTok fad recreation, we let the cameras roll and let Catherine do Catherine. What we discovered and leaned into was Catherine’s lighthearted and vulnerable side—her way with children, musical and even dance skills, her game on the court—a balance to the sharp political conviction with which she spoke that she was relatively known for before the campaign. As Catherine spoke of building a movement, simple, supporter-shot moments of Catherine engaging with the people proved to be some of our most viral clips.

2. Attention To Activation: ManyChat

It is no secret that Mamdani and Connolly used video to great effect. But how is attention on Instagram, Facebook, X, or TikTok actually translated into people power?

For a content creator, attention fuels brand deals or direct payments from social media platforms, and for a candidate, attention alone does lead to increased voter awareness, and therefore votes. But raising voter awareness through online means alone is not enough to secure support from voters who are not digital natives.

Rather, even in 2025 victory still lies through winning conversations at the doors. It is deep organizing, not digital, that can build a political coalition which expands beyond pre-existing progressives. And hitting the doors requires a volunteer operation.

Online volunteer sign-ups are nothing new to digital organizing. But the increasing pivot to video-first campaigning introduces a challenge for link-sharing. Instagram does not allow links in posts, “see link in bio.” And as any digital organizer knows, extra steps cost conversions.

Mamdani and Connolly worked around this by integrating their Instagram accounts with third-party software. Applications like ManyChats allow for social media managers to auto-message users a sign-up link in response to a pre-set comment. The Mamdani campaign integrated this directly into its video production, designing entire videos *like the one below from before the primary) with the purpose of driving volunteer signups.

For the Connolly campaign, the comment-conversion feature was used to drive sign-ups not only to canvasses but also to a wide range of events, as well as to drive donations and sales to the campaign’s web shop.

3. The Central Database: Solidarity Tech

Both campaigns relied on the same database software to collect and manage signups and volunteers: Solidarity Tech. This contact relationship software (CRM) built for organizers grew out of the rideshare organizing movement before being taken on by larger institutional unions to facilitate new organizing drives, in the auto industry and elsewhere.

Each campaign’s Solidarity Tech database was the central node of the campaign, where signups could be directed towards campaign events, WhatsApp groups, or volunteer shifts. The databases were used to source specialized volunteers or surrogates for video content, allowing for campaign HQ’s to maximize volunteer participation. Features including email and over-the-phone surveys were used to collect the data needed to drive deeper engagement through targeted or micro-targeted content like volunteer pages in Irish or Bengali, or issue-based sign-on forms such as Artists For Connolly.

And both campaigns made use of Solidarity Tech’s contact automation feature to build out layers of pre-set email and text progressions to allow campaign organizers to engage consistently at scale. Along with the CRM’s standard event reminder features, these automations freed up campaigners from endless outreach so that they could focus more time on in-person conversations on the doors or cultivating good vibes online.

As Solidarity Tech did not yet have full call and SMS features working Ireland, the Connolly campaign required some work arounds or substitutes to compensate for these lost features. The campaign was able to phonebank, but it lacked the campaign staff at HQ to run a full scale phone-banking operation. Irish campaigns are still far more local and in-person based than modern US-based campaigns, and the political culture has yet to fully embrace phone-banking as a mainstay of campaigning.

In the US, on the other hand, phone banking at scale has long been a fundamental of progressive grassroots electoral efforts. The Zohran campaign made more than 2 million calls through Solidarity Tech’s phonebank feature, activating and re-activing volunteers in more than a dozen languages. Especially helpful was the ‘predictive dialer’ feature, which allows a group of several simultaneous phone-bankers to work rapidly through a call list by automating dials to reduce volunteer wait-time in between conversations.

Micah L. Sifry, who runs the tech blog The Connector, interviewed Solidarity Tech founder Ivan Pardo on the details of the Zohran campaign’s use of the software.

Micah: How is the Mamdani campaign using solidarity tech? I was astounded to learn last week that they’re managing something like 90,000 volunteers on a backbone of just a few dozen paid field staff.

Ivan: They’re using it essentially for organizing their army of volunteers. If you go to the field office, you’ll seeing everybody’s screen having their Solidarity Tech text inbox open. That’s where the field teams are spending a lot of their day. There’s been a lot of attention on how they’ve used social media, making catchy little videos that captured a lot of attention. But what happened next is typically, they’d follow it up, say, if it’s on Twitter, the tweet right after it would be a link to the volunteer page. All those pages are hosted on Solidarity Tech. Every session, whether it’s canvassing, phonebanking, or whatever event the campaign is hosting, they capture all the RSVPs through Solidarity Tech. Every form essentially acts as an intake form, getting people into the system. And then we want to, first ensure that people show up for the event that they committed to. So first we send all the reminders that come with all of that.

But then there’s the processes that the app facilitates so the campaign can work to try and get the most out of the existing volunteers. There’s automations via text/email from an initial email with a calendar invite, to text/emails with confirmation links, to aggregated emails/texts reminders with all your shifts during a given period. And then there’s the ability to do smart targeted outreach to past volunteers to get further engaged. And everything is tracked in one place. They’ll be doing the phone banking, the text banking, the volunteers, emailing to volunteers throughout with, you know, with the product, taking attendance of everybody who showed up at events, plus the passive tracking of an influence map of built from referral tracking, knowing who’s bringing who–all of that lives in the product.

So they have this really clear picture of every volunteer’s level of engagement and what they’ve done. And that can inform future asks that they make of those volunteers. All of that lives in the product. Much of the mechanics of how they’ve been engaging volunteers is campaign specific. But the app is designed in such a way that it allows you to figure out that strategy and enact it really well.

Check out the full interview if you want insight into more technical details of running a mass engagement internal tool.

4. Online-To-Offline: Volunteer Event Maps

The Zohran campaign built its own custom volunteer map page to geographically display its array of Solidarity Tech RSVP pages, taking innovation from a tactic used effectively in the Bernie 2020 campaign. 

Volunteer event maps helped facilitate engagement at the hyper-local level, helping supporters clearly visualize volunteer opportunities, and therefore driving the high levels of door-knocking which was needed to win the campaign in the field. Eventually the Zohran campaign had literally hundreds of canvass shifts available for sign-up at ZohranForNYC.com/volunteer/events. Traffic was driven to these events both directly from social media (via the comment-engagement feature explored above) as well as re-targeting through email appeals, text blasts, and phonebanks.

Within weeks, the feature was replicated by the Solidarity Tech team so it could be used by the Connolly campaign. The Connolly campaign replicated the basic function of mapping canvassing shifts. But it also used created a second campaign map page to highlight locally-organized cultural events, including trad music nights, nature walks, and pub quizzes, as well as opportunities to meet up with Catherine as she traveled the country twice over. Although the page has now been decommissioned, you can get a sense of what it looked like by viewing the saved instance in the Wayback Archive.

In this way, the campaign leaned into a vibes-based, personable approach to campaigning. This was not only run in parallel with a more target-focused, traditional canvassing turnout approach, but also served as an accessible entry point to active supporters beyond the “usual suspects” to engage a new layer of progressives in political activism. 

5. Digital, But Local: WhatsApp Communities

There is a long-standing dispute within DSA about which is a better messaging tool: Signal, WhatsApp, or Discord. And I hate to say it, but this election season has proved the WhatsApp supporters right. 

With the introduction of WhatsApp Communities in 2022, multiple group chats can be integrated into one ecosystem, or “Community.” This replicates the depth of engagement made possible by apps like Discord, without the same obstacle of accessibility.

The Zohran campaign made use of local WhatsApp communities to powerful effect, to bring together supporters in local areas as well as to connect voters from the same language or interest groups. Basing the campaign on WhatsApp allowed the campaign to more easily access the countless immigrant communities in New York City, many of which already use WhatsApp to communicate among themselves and with family back home. Although the main contact management work primarily lived in Solidarity Tech, these functioned happened in the back-end. For most supporters and volunteers, ‘joining’ the campaign online meant participating in a local WhatsApp group.

The role of WhatsApp was perhaps even more prominent on the Connolly campaign, where, in Ireland as in many countries, it is already both the primary way to message and the existing predominant choice for coordinating progressive groups. Local WhatsApps were formed across the country and also among ‘affinity groups,’ like Students For Connolly or Artists For Connolly, in order to facilitate collaboration. The Connolly campaign even built an in-house “WhatsApper,” which facilitated the text-banking of contacts stored in Solidarity Tech through WhatsApp, a workaround necessary to replace the CRM’s SMS feature, which is not yet operational in Ireland.

The distributed nature and possibilities for mass participation that WhatsApp groups facilitated was not without its headaches. Campaigns are ultimately responsible for ensuring all of their spaces live up to the campaigns values, and this includes group chats. It should surprise no one that some supporters lack discretion or good manners, and so campaign HQs must establish correct oversight principles and source volunteer supervisors to ensure that local WhatsApp groups do not end up tearing the campaign apart.

There is also the issue that assembling supporters in a WhatsApp group is not exactly ‘job done’ organizing. Often the same small group of supporters make up the vast majority of posts, leaving less engaged supporters feeling overwhelmed. It takes more targeted and persistent engagement over-and-above simply existing in a group chat in order to secure active participation from less engaged layers of supporters. But nonetheless, these group chats allow for supporters to take initiative at the local level, bolstering centralized ‘broadcast-style’ channels based at HQ with a healthy dose of horizontal self-organization. Empowering local activists take initiative increases their investment in the campaign and can genuinely lead to some fantastic innovations not thought of by HQ.

International Solidarity, Parallel Victories

In fact, it was no accident that the two campaigns share a number of similarities in both political messaging and organizing methods.

The multi-party alliance which assembled during the Connolly campaign from its early days—including People Before Profit, the Social Democrats, the Green Party, and independent leftist trade union and housing activists—was in some ways the exact Irish parallel to the early Zohran coalition of the Democratic Socialist of America’s New York City chapter and its close allies like the New York Communities For Change.

In both cases, an early consolidation by the political left allowed the two campaigns to pick up less radical endorsements, such as the Working Families Party and the Irish Labour Party. Then, this momentum paved the way for support from the institutional center-left, with Brad Lander and many Democrats joining the Mamdani wagon between the primary win and the general election, while Sinn Féin endorsed Connolly around one month before the Irish election, consolidating her place as the official candidate of the opposition.

And the two campaigns were not only built of virtually identical political coalitions, but also almost identical campaign technological infrastructure, with the Zohran campaign providing the Connolly campaign with tactical insights in its early days.

The relative similarity in district size and election-day results further underlines the parallel nature of the two campaigns. Despite the tremendous, almost comical stylistic differences between Zohran’s triumph in metropolitan NYC and the Gal From Galway’s successful run for the Irish Presidency, the actual election results in both cases are quite similar.

New York City has a population of some 8.5 million, with around 5 million registered voters. Turnout in New York was around 40 percent, and Mamdani won 1,036,051 out of 2,055,921, or 50.4 percent to Cuomo’s 41.6 percent and Sliwa’s 7.1 percent.

The Republic of Ireland has a population of around 5.5 million, with some 3.6 million registered voters. Irish turnout was around 45 percent, with Connolly receiving 914,143 out of 1,656,436 total votes, or (when including spoiled votes) 55.1 percent, to Humphrey’s 25.6 percent, Gavin’s 6.2 percent, and 12.9 percent of ballots spoilt, mostly by right-wing voters.

A Playbook For 2026

With 2025 elections drawing to a close in the United States, the 2026 midterm season has officially begun.

As DSA chapters and candidates look to build on Zohran’s win, they will no doubt seek to also replicate his digital strategies. And American organizers can also learn much from Connolly’s win. And the corporate Democrats will undoubtedly also try to ape this digital playbook to gain an edge for neoliberal centrists.

And while much can be learned by studying the 5 digital tactics explored above, it also worth remembering the political fundamentals of the two campaigns which they were deployed on top of in both cases: an authentic, charismatic candidate; an ambitious, radical-minded campaign staff; a program which speaks to the needs and dignity of everyday people; and a vision of a better world.

Digital tactics weren’t the secret sauce, they were just the plate upon which to platform radical candidates with powerful movements behind them. So we know when the corporate Democrats try to replicate these tools in 2026, their plates will be empty.

Dan Albright is a founder and the Board Chair of Working Mass. Henry De Groot is an editor and a founder of Working Mass.

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The post Winning Online: 5 Digital Tactics That Powered Connolly and Zohran To Victory appeared first on Working Mass.

[[{“value”:”

Digital organizers from the Catherine Connolly campaign give insights into the tech tools that helped drive Connolly and Zohran to victory.

By Dan Albright and Henry De Groot

In the last two weeks, two monumental electoral victories have reenergized the international left: Catherine Connolly’s landslide victory in the Irish Presidential Election, and Zohran Mamdani’s heroic triumph in the New York City mayoral election.

The two campaigns were won both on the doors and online. In addition to both campaigns being powered by massive volunteer participation from broad layers of the socialist and progressive left, the two also utilized almost identical digital infrastructure and strategies.

Here are five of the digital approaches which won it big in 2025.

1. Dynamic Video Content: Instagram, FB Reels, and TikTok

It is almost a cliche now to note that Zohran has found success through his dynamic use of video content, and most especially his “man on the street” and “walk and talk” style videos. And the same has been noted about Connolly’s campaign, with the commentariat noting her campaign’s use of relatable content (like her keepie-uppies) to drive accidental virality. There is no doubt that video played a significant role in both campaigns, both in conveying a coherent political message capable of assembling a winning coalition and in bringing joy and whimsy into the political arena.

What is also interesting to note—at least for future campaigners seeking to replicate this video-campaigning style—is the use by both campaigns of supporter-sourced content in addition to high production value videos. Mamdani’s appearances on popular podcasts as well as tags in videos by social media influencers and spontaneous volunteers became a symbol of his popular appeal. Similarly, on the Connolly campaign, we leaned into grassroots desire to help the campaign, assembling a volunteer video team to edit timely and fun, if imperfect, videos and reels. We made it a priority, time allowing, to give volunteers runway to contribute as well as a platform for their work that they could be proud of. The core team created a brand kit of template guides and graphics that we shared on easy-to-use, collaborative platforms like Canva and CapCut. With some guidance and feedback, volunteers were able to make significant progress on or almost entirely independently edit content such as other volunteers’ testimonials, event recaps, and candidate appearances on popular podcasts, TV, and radio shows. Alongside high production value content we created, this content helped provide a steady stream of IG/FB story content and even video and reel posts throughout every day of the campaign. 

But the secret sauce was neither greater volume of social content nor jumping onto the trending formats of each week. The key is presenting the candidate authentically by channeling their ideosyncratic voice, style and perspective. In her trademark stubbornness to her convictions, Catherine Connolly refused to do anything staged or gimmicky for self-promotion. She’s the polar opposite of Mamdani’s social media ready style. So instead of trying to copy the now-cliched Mamdani walk-and-talk format or force a TikTok fad recreation, we let the cameras roll and let Catherine do Catherine. What we discovered and leaned into was Catherine’s vulnerable side—her comradely athleticism, musical skill, and playful way with children—the perfect counterbalance to the moral clarity and conviction that she was known for before the campaign. As Catherine spoke of building a movement, moments of Catherine engaging with the people proved to be some of our most viral clips.

2. Attention To Activation: ManyChat

It is no secret that Mamdani and Connolly used video to great effect. But how is attention on Instagram, X, or TikTok actually translated into people power? For a content creator, attention fuels brand deals or direct payments from social media platforms, and for a candidate, attention alone does lead to increased voter awareness, and therefore votes.

But attention can also lead to volunteer activation. Like the Mamdani campaign, we leveraged Manychat to direct message actionable links to engaged viewers. This led to thousands of contacts we could feed into our supporter development pipeline.

3. The Central Database: Solidarity Tech

Both campaigns relied on the same database software to collect and manage signups and volunteers: Solidarity Tech. This contact relationship software (CRM) built for organizers grew out of the rideshare organizing movement before being taken on by larger institutional unions to facilitate new organizing drives, in the auto industry and elsewhere.

Each campaign’s Solidarity Tech database was the central node of the campaign, where signups could be directed towards campaign events, WhatsApp groups, or volunteer shifts. The databases were used to source specialized volunteers or surrogates for video content, allowing for campaign HQ’s to maximize volunteer participation. They were also used to drive deeper engagement through targeted or micro-targeted content like volunteer pages in Irish or Bengali, or issue-based sign-on forms such as Artists For Connolly. And both campaigns made use of Solidarity Tech’s contact automation feature to build out layers of pre-set email and text progressions to allow campaign organizers to engage consistently at scale.

4. Online-To-Offline: Volunteer Event Maps

The Zohran campaign built its own custom volunteer map page to geographically display its array of Solidarity Tech RSVP pages, taking innovation from a tactic used effectively in the Bernie 2020 campaign. 

Volunteer event maps helped facilitate engagement at the hyper-local level, helping supporters clearly visualize volunteer opportunities, and therefore driving the high levels of doorknocking which was needed to win the campaign in the field.

Within weeks, the feature was replicated by the Solidarity Tech team so it could be used by the Connolly campaign. The Connolly campaign replicated the basic function of mapping canvassing shifts. But it also used the campaign map to facilitate locally organized cultural events, including trad music nights, nature walks, pub quizzes, and opportunities to meet up with Catherine as she traveled the country twice over.

In this way, the campaign leaned into a vibes-based, personable approach to campaigning. This was not only run in parallel with a more target-focused, traditional canvassing turnout approach, but also served as an accessible entry point to active supporters beyond the “usual suspects” to engage a new layer of progressives in political activism. 

5. Digital, But Local: WhatsApp Communities

There is a long-standing dispute within DSA about which is a better messaging tool: Signal, WhatsApp, or Discord.

And I hate to say it, but this election season has proved the WhatsAppers right. 

With the introduction of WhatsApp Communities in 2022, multiple group chats can be integrated into one ecosystem, or “Community.” This replicates the depth of engagement made possible by apps like Discord, without the same obstacle of accessibility.

The Zohran campaign made use of local WhatsApp communities to powerful effect, to bring together … This also allowed the campaign to more easily access the countless immigrant communities in New York City, many of which already use WhatsApp to communicate among themselves and with family back home.

The role of WhatsApp was perhaps even more prominent on the Connolly campaign, where, in Ireland as in many countries, it is already both the primary way to message and the existing predominant choice for coordinating progressive groups.

The campaign even built an in-house “WhatsApper,” which facilitated the text-banking of contacts stored in Solidarity Tech through WhatsApp, a workaround necessary to replace the CRM’s SMS feature, which is not yet operational in Ireland.

International Solidarity, Parallel Victories

And it’s no accident that the two campaigns share a number of similarities in both political messaging and organizing methods.

The multi-party alliance which assembled during the Connolly campaign from its early days—including People Before Profit, the Social Democrats, the Green Party, and independent leftist trade union and housing activists—was in some ways the exact Irish parallel to the early Zohran coalition of the Democratic Socialist of America’s New York City chapter and its close allies like the New York Communities For Change.

In both cases, an early consolidation by the political left allowed the two campaigns to pick up less radical endorsements, such as the Working Families Party and the Irish Labour Party. Then, this momentum paved the way for support from the institutional center-left, with Brad Lander and many Democrats joining the Mamdani wagon between the primary win and the general election, while Sinn Féin endorsed Connolly around one month before the Irish election, consolidating her place as the official candidate of the opposition.

And the two campaigns were not only built of virtually identical political coalitions, but also almost identical campaign technological infrastructure, with the Zohran campaign providing the Connolly campaign with tactical insights in its early days.
Despite the tremendous, almost comical stylistic differences between Zohran’s triumph in metropolitan NYC and the Gal From Galway’s successful run for the Irish Presidency, the actual election results in both cases are quite similar.

New York City has a population of some 8.5 million, with around 5 million registered voters. Turnout in New York was around 40 percent, and Mamdani won 1,036,051 out of 2,055,921, or 50.4 percent to Cuomo’s 41.6 percent and Sliwa’s 7.1 percent.

The Republic of Ireland has a population of around 5.5 million, with some 3.6 million registered voters. Irish turnout was around 45 percent, with Connolly receiving 914,143 out of 1,656,436 total votes, or (when including spoiled votes) 55.1 percent, to Humphrey’s 25.6 percent, Gavin’s 6.2 percent, and 12.9 percent of ballots spoilt, mostly by right-wing voters.

Dan Albright is a founder and the Board Chair of Working Mass. Henry De Groot is an editor and a founder of Working Mass.

The post The Digital Playbook: 5 Tactics That Helped Connolly and Zohran Win appeared first on Working Mass.

“}]] 

Rochester DSA congratulates our comrades here in Rochester: Stanley Martin and Kee Kee Smith, on election to Rochester City Council! We also congratulate our comrade Zohran Mamdani in New York City, along with other DSA candidates, on electoral victories across the country.

These victories, just like those in the June primary, demonstrate that the working class is done with the neoliberal status quo. Hundreds of thousands of working class New Yorkers turned out to vote for socialism because they know that socialism will address their material needs; and that socialism is the only means to effectively combat fascism.

These victories come from the efforts of over 50,000 volunteers who – from knocking doors to managing social media – contributed an untold amount of work into these campaigns. However, our work has only just begun. An electoral win is not the final victory. Our Socialists in Office need the community to support them along the way. The working class must organize in the workplace and in the streets, as well as the halls of power, to bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.

A better world is possible; let’s build it together: dsausa.us/join.

The post Chapter Statement on Electoral Victories first appeared on Rochester Red Star.