Life with Zohran
Reflections on a campaign
It’s been gratifying to see the attention my novel, Glass Century, has been receiving. Across the pond, in the great New Statesman, Glass Century was called “unflaggingly bright” in a new piece on contemporary fiction. (Thank you to the excellent George Monaghan!) And in the Washington Examiner, the great Paul Franz declared that Glass Century is “an ambitious and impressive work” and one that “pulses with the same spirit” as my reporting “yet reveals ever greater human and imaginative depth.”
Glass Century is available in all formats—print, e-book, audiobook—and I encourage you to buy it if you haven’t already. And please rate and review on Goodreads, if you enjoyed what you read.
Of late, I have been thinking of the time Zohran Mamdani and I played ping-pong. It was in the weeks after the September Democratic primary, the one we had lost, and it was the rare time when neither of us were particularly busy. Until you are involved with a campaign, you do not understand that leisure time, in that context, can no longer exist—not if you are trying to win. Zohran and I spent hundreds of hours together, but we didn’t hang out in the classic sense. We knocked doors together, stood in subway stations together, strategized together, and went to senior centers and churches and synagogues and mosques together. We shared, throughout this, many laughs, because Zohran has a wicked sense of humor, but there was an underlying intensity to everything we did. Zohran hated losing as much as I did. We were deeply earnest and intense young men; at the time of my run for State Senate, I was twenty-eight and he was twenty-six. Our deputy campaign manager, Genna Goldsobel, was also twenty-six, and Alex Pelliterri, who was a boy wonder of local leftist politics, had turned eighteen during the campaign. “It was like a great fair, and everybody was so young,” Sara Murphy, a friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald, said of her time with the artists and writers on the French Riviera. If I don’t miss being a political candidate, I reflect now on what it meant to be young and throw yourself into something just a bit daft. What business did I have running for office, anyway?
The ping-pong game came after dinner. We were in Brighton Beach, the neighborhood now famous for being the setting for the Academy Award-winning Anora. We went to a pool hall off Brighton Beach Avenue, just a short walk from the beach itself. I can’t recall if we intended to play ping-pong or simply wandered in, looking for something else to do. Once we saw the tables, though, I knew we’d play. I grew up playing tennis and considered myself a strong ping-pong player. Unlike tennis, I had never taken a ping-pong lesson, but I knew my way around the game, and played a bunch against my father and the boys in my college dorm, all of them beatable. I figured Zohran and I would knock the ball around a bit and get into a game I would invariably win. He was a good athlete; I just thought very highly of myself. Anyway, his primary sport was soccer, and he had a Mohamed Salah poster put up in our campaign office. What I remember most about the game, once it began, was that we played similarly—holding the paddles like tennis rackets—and that he was unwilling to give in on any points. I blasted shots that he effortlessly returned. He was good, very good. We played to twenty-one, and he got there first. I recall several games, and he won them all. I had to walk away with the realization that he was the better player. I wasn’t upset. He had played breezily but tough, very tough, and won.
I first met Zohran on December 4th, 2017. I know this because I consulted a rudimentary diary I kept of my run for State Senate. By then, I had been a candidate for two months. To run for office takes a blend of hubris and psychosis—you must believe you are the best, the hero, the protagonist destined for greatness. It was the first year of Trump’s presidency and I was restless. Activism was the high; activism was soma. Was it enough, really, to write? I was twenty-seven, a columnist for the Village Voice, penning quasi-bilious, if prescient, columns and reportage about Andrew Cuomo and Albany. I liked what I did. Yet I was suddenly hungry for a pivot of some sort. I had the Mailer/Breslin virus; I want to run for something. Luckily, I resided in a Republican-held State Senate district in a coming blue wave year. I intuited, ultimately correctly, that this Republican would lose. His name was Marty Golden. He was a problem in Albany, anti-tenant and indifferent to the fate of public transit. A ruddy-faced Irishman from the old-school, Golden’s politics were distasteful to me—socially conservative, fiscally conservative, belligerently MAGA—but he was charming in a Tammany scamp kind of way. He was Marty, and between his time in the City Council and State Senate, he had represented my Brooklyn neighborhood of Bay Ridge since I was a small child. An ex-cop, Golden was a softer-edged Trump, affable and mostly indifferent to the letter of the law. He collected a disability pension but still found time to skydive, and had once run over and killed a woman with his SUV. He owned a local catering hall where he also happened to hold all of his political events; it was an effective way to launder campaign cash. He won re-election again and again because he was well-liked—he funded a popular summer concert series—and he had a district gerrymandered just for him, slicing and dicing southern Brooklyn so conservative neighborhoods were all knit together and deep-blue apartment blocks were excluded. It helped, too, that the desiccated local Democratic organization had long forged a non-aggression pact with Golden, hoping to curry favor with him and win a dab of influence in Albany. Golden almost always sat in the majority: a little-known fact is that from the late 1960s until 2019, Republicans, with the exception of one brief period, controlled the New York State Senate.
Knocking Golden out dovetailed nicely with my ambitions. I wanted, truly, to bring change to Albany and pass a host of pro-tenant and criminal justice reform bills that had been bottled up for decades. If I loved writing—my first novel, Demolition Night, would come out shortly after the campaign—I was now bitten by this strange new political bug. It was Year One of Trump and everyone, it seemed, was doing some kind of activism. This would be mine. I mulled, in the spring and summer of 2017, a campaign, telling almost no one except my family, my girlfriend, and a few very close friends. The youth were all off and running. Earlier in the year, I had interviewed a fellow twenty-seven-year-old named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who was mounting a long-shot bid against the boss of the Queens Democratic Party, Joe Crowley. Her energy was infectious. On October 3rd, when I kicked off my own State Senate campaign—the Voice’s reaction was rather spot-on—AOC immediately sent words of encouragement on Twitter. “Whoah! This is incredible, thank you for running. Please let me know how I can help or if you’d like to hop on the phone sometime,” she wrote. “Now that a handful of us have run outside the establishment, there are areas where you won't have to totally reinvent the wheel. Best of luck to you, and good job on starting early. It’s exactly the amount of time you need!”
“Yes, let’s definitely collaborate. Would love to. You're doing great work running against Crowley,” I wrote back.
Being in different boroughs, it would grow hard to actually collaborate beyond sharing some campaign volunteers and cross-endorsing. We would message periodically, though, and she would offer thoughts about the endorsement process for the Democratic Socialists of America, one that would be more successful for her than for me. DSA backed her congressional race but not my campaign for State Senate.
As intrigued by AOC as I was, I was more focused on what was happening in my neighborhood of Bay Ridge. In the months before I kicked off my own campaign, there had been a fierce Democratic primary for an open City Council seat. The frontrunner was a staffer for the outgoing city councilman, Vincent Gentile, and he was backed by the usual coalition of politicians and labor unions. He was an establishment creature and did not interest me at all. His top rival was a Palestinian reverend named Khader El-Yateem. Father K, as he was known, had the endorsement of DSA, which was then enjoying a surge of popularity in the wake of Bernie Sanders’ run for president, and he was making a real run against the institutional Democrat, Justin Brannan. Father K’s canvassers were everywhere. They knocked my apartment door multiple times and left literature behind. They were wildly enthusiastic and very young. For my own campaign to succeed, I would need a field operation like this one. I would need this energy, manpower, and vision.
Father K came close but did not win. Still, I was encouraged. Once I became a candidate for State Senate, I met with Kayla Santosuosso, Father K’s 27-year-old campaign manager. (A magic age, I suppose, and none of us were dead rock musicians.) Who, I asked, would you recommend I hire from Team Father K? Kayla, I knew, wasn’t able to work for me—I recall she was headed to law school, and was also tacitly supportive of the Democrat I would have to defeat in order to face Marty Golden in the general election—but she could point me in the right direction. She gave me two names. One was a top organizer who would go on to marry Shahana Hanif, the current city councilwoman for Park Slope, and the other was Father K’s canvassing director, a charismatic Manhattanite by way of Uganda who was about to turn twenty-six.
“You should talk to Zohran Mamdani,” she said.
For reasons I can’t recall, Zohran and I met at a fast casual bread and soup spot near City Hall. What I remember most were Zohran’s questions. He cared about my message and my purpose, but he wanted to know, above all else, I wasn’t fucking around. He did not want to work on a vanity campaign. He wanted to know how much money I thought I could raise and if I was actively raising money. (I was, and the goal was $100,000, which I would eventually hit. There were no public matching funds for state races.) He wanted to know what my path to victory would actually be. To face Marty Golden, I’d have to beat a Democrat, Andrew Gounardes, in a September primary. Gounardes was the counsel to Eric Adams, the Brooklyn Borough President and future mayor, and he was well-wired with the establishment. He’d have more money and more endorsements. He was dull but would be difficult to actually dislodge. He had collected a lot of chits and would now cash them in.
Zohran was up front with me. He’d like to work for my campaign, he said, but he was weighing an offer from the Working Families Party. They needed field organizers for a big 2018 state legislative battle and he was in demand. The word was out about Father K. They had lost, but they were clearly stocked with talent. Zohran would get back to me. We had a phone call on December 8th—I don’t recall what was discussed—and wouldn’t talk again until January 30th. Zohran was savvy: he was waiting to see what I could fundraise. In mid-January, the first campaign filings went public, and this was how I could prove I was committed to running more than a shell campaign or loopy project in service of a future book. (I would get accused, periodically, of running for office merely to write a book, and I had to explain that memoirs by ex-State Senate candidates weren’t exactly saleable.) My internal goal had been to raise $50,000 by January. If I broke that number, I would be treated as more than a curiosity. Zohran’s advice to me in December was to take fundraising seriously, and I did. With a mixture of live events and aggressive online asks, I crossed the threshold.
I was a real candidate.
By February 1st, Zohran wanted to work for me. I went to the Muslim Democratic Club, where I saw him pick up an award, and we confirmed his hire on February 9th. At the time, his title was to be field director. We did not have a formal campaign manager. I had a consultant who lived out of state and occasionally dipped into New York, and various volunteers. In time, Zohran’s duties would increase, and by the late spring he would become the formal head of the operation, the true campaign maanger. Zohran’s strength was the field: training human beings to knock on doors for hours at a time and disseminate, properly, the message of the campaign. He himself was something of a master canvasser, able to charm even the frothing MAGA men at the doors who were still, out of laziness or spite, registered as Democrats. Zohran relished persuasion. A hostile voter was merely an opportunity. Other than knocking doors for socialist Jabari Brisport in a Brooklyn housing project with 17-year-old Alex Pelliterri—another preternaturally strong canvasser—I had no experience doing this. I did not like bothering strangers.
Zohran and I talked issues. Palestine was most important to him. It helped that I was an Israel-skeptical Jew, the son of a man who had lived on a kibbutz in the 1960s and later renounced Israel for being too right-wing. Unlike some other activists on the pro-Palestine left, Zohran was deeply schooled. He had studied the Middle East, his father was a renowned scholar, and he never stumbled over a word. He was, then, an anti-Zionist, and I wasn’t far from where he was, if some sort of muscle memory still drew me to the Jewish State. But Zohran was more practical than other leftists and very aware of political realities. The State Senate district we were competing in had both a large Palestinian and Orthodox Jewish population. Zohran was not asking me to shout about BDS in Manhattan Beach and Midwood. In fact, with Zohran’s support, we devised different palm cards for different neighborhoods, stressing campaigns issues we thought could resonate better depending on where we were. (Foreign policy never ended up on any palm cards.) For Bay Ridge, which had a progressive and anti-establishment streak, we could boast that I backed Medicare for All. In conservative Gerritsen Beach and Marine Park, we would stick to nonpartisan issues like environmental resiliency, since both areas, a few years earlier, had been blasted by Hurricane Sandy. He knew, too, I’d have to work with the conservative Chinese Democrats in Bensonhurst who wanted me, very strongly, to defend the specialized high school exam known as the SHSAT. Zohran, a graduate of a SHSHAT school (Bronx Science), had mixed feelings about the test, but he let me operate in such a way where I could court Chinese voters. He did not mind when I marched in one of their protests over the Brooklyn Bridge.
What Zohran and I shared was a similar level of ambition and energy. We each, I felt, had an internal rotor that compelled us to keep driving forward to almost inhuman lengths. We maintained a campaign schedule that was, in retrospect, slightly insane, but we both embraced it with equal fervor. I knocked on doors seven days a week, at least four hours per day. I went to subway stations five days a week, beginning usually at 6 and no later than 6:30 in the morning. I stayed until nine. We kept a rotation of stations, moving between the four R stops in Bay Ridge and the many N and D stations that were scattered around Bensonhurst. Zohran’s philosophy, really, was that you did not sit down. If I returned to the campaign office in the late morning or early afternoon, I was only permitted to linger for a few minutes. Why I wasn’t I knocking on doors? Or hanging out by a supermarket to pass out palm cards? Or visiting a senior center? If I wanted to sit, could I at least get on the phone and raise some money? The only allowance to leisure Zohran gave was my Sunday morning fastpitch softball games. Luckily, we usually played in-district. I’d get on the field at 9, be done by noon, and rush home to change, shower, and hit the doors.
Of course, the campaign wasn’t all Zohran. I would have been nowhere without my girlfriend at the time, Vanessa, who offered invaluable advice, helped form our messaging, canvassed repeatedly, and was the original brain trust of the operation. We had many volunteers who showed up and helped not just because of Zohran. One of Zohran’s great powers, though, was hiring the right people. Genna Goldsobel, our deputy campaign manager, was another canvassing whiz, even better than Zohran. She had the supernatural ability to wander virtually anywhere and return with five new campaign volunteers. She was the kind of person who could knock on an apartment door, find Satan standing there, and convince him to do a few evening canvassing shifts for Jesus. (It didn’t matter that Genna was Jewish.) Zohran empowered Alex who, despite being eighteen, had as much or more campaign experience as any of us, having volunteered and worked for local campaigns since early high school. Since we were an underdog campaign, we were always mulling how, exactly, to get an edge. Before petitioning season started—in New York, you need to collect a certain number of signatures from registered Democrats to reach the ballot—we wanted extra contact with voters where they’d sign something of some sort. We created a petition campaign for transit accessibility. At the time, none of the stations in the district had an elevator. Zohran and I would hop from subway car to subway car gathering signatures until an MTA worker invariably chased us away. It was good practice, at least, because when it came time to reach the ballot, we got five times the signatures needed and our petitions were never challenged. Zohran had approved of our hiring of an excellent and well-compensated election lawyer.
For the first month or so, I went on the doors with Zohran. I had to learn how to talk to people and he needed to coach me. Hi, are you X, I am looking for X (always important to say the person’s name, since you had that info on the voter file that was held on your phone.) Smile, make eye contact, and do not look threatening. It’s fine to have an extended conversation, but cap it at around two minutes. You’ll need to hit a lot of doors and one voter cannot gobble up all of your time. The goal was to get positive ID’s—strong commitments to vote for you—and to not fudge the data. Zohran frequently weeded out canvassers whom he believed were lying about their numbers. Lousy data could kill any campaign. He had a sense for when a shift was too good to be true, in part because he was out in the field so much. It wasn’t uncommon for Zohran to take my car, a 2013 Hyundai Elantra, to drive canvassers around.
Zohran and I traveled to many events together. He prepped me for both debates, one a raucous clash with Gounardes where we packed out the room in Gravesend, and another on NY1. Occasionally, if I couldn’t be somewhere, he’d speak on my behalf, or, if we held a rally or some kind of get together at the campaign HQ, he’d introduce me. I knew, from his public speaking alone, he was going to run for office one day. He was crisp and always compelling. His verve was Obamaesque. Unlike Obama, he was actually Muslim, and his connections allowed me to campaign frequently at mosques and speak at Eid prayers. I don’t know how many Democrats I reached, but I did speak, at one point, in front of many thousands of Muslims for Eid. The Muslims did not mind that I was Jewish and I certainly didn’t hide it. My sense, really, was that they were thankful I showed up at all. It was unfortunate there was so much segregation of the sexes. To reach Muslim women, we had to speak to separate women’s group, United Arab Women.
In the heat of the campaign, we made mistakes. We didn’t manage our money all that well, which I take the blame for because it was a task I never specifically delegated to Zohran. I didn’t delegate it to anyone. Our field operation, by the late summer, was immense, teeming with volunteers and paid canvassers, and the word had gotten out that there was a progressive spark in southern Brooklyn. But we hadn’t budgeted for mail—those glossy pieces that hit thousands of mailboxes at a time and let Democrats across the district know that you exist. Mail, on its own, isn’t terribly helpful, but the absence of it can kill you if your opponent has plenty of it. Our Democratic rival had the support of the teachers’ union—they were hammering mailboxes on his behalf—and he had the money to pay for some on his own. We’d encounter random voters who knew him and not me because of this mail, even though, in the subway stations at least, I was something of a minor celebrity or a major annoyance, constantly trundling up and down the platform, passing out palm cards. We believed—Zohran certainly did—a bit too much in canvassing. I wonder, sometimes, if I could’ve knocked doors five or six days a week instead of seven. Could I have chilled out a bit?
But my memories of that summer are warm, and I always appreciated Zohran pushing me, whether it was physically or politically. We traveled to Bensonhurst to take a photo to commemorate the anniversary of the murder of Yusef Hawkins. We spoke up for Palestinian rights at a time when most political campaigns said nothing about their plight. We fought for renters in the district. It wasn’t until August—a month before the primary—when I found out Zohran had been a rapper, and a good one. His parents, Mira Nair and Mahmood Mamdani, came down to volunteer for the campaign, which I appreciated immensely. We believed, sincerely, we’d win, and it was a great blow, on September 13th, when we did not. Gounardes got 58%, and I got 42%, or 6,616 votes, a number I won’t forget. Respectable. I was proud most of the fact that, unlike most leftist insurgent campaigns, we actually outperformed the establishment rival in the working-class sections of the district. My best precincts were the rental buildings near subway lines. I also managed the trick of winning over right-wing, Jewish Democrats in Manhattan Beach and pro-Palestine Arab Americans in Bay Ridge. Andrew Cuomo, running for a third term, was on the ballot the same day as me, and he had easily fended off his challenger, the great actress and activist Cynthia Nixon. Funnily enough, I ran ahead of Nixon in the district, which meant there were a fair amount of Cuomo-Barkan voters. If only they knew what was to come.
As devastating as the loss was at the time, my father consoled me and told me that while he wanted me to win, he thought I was better off not going to Albany. “You’re supposed to be a writer,” he said, and he was right. Zohran, too, was where he needed to be, heading off to his next campaign and plotting a political future. I recall, once the race was done, driving around with him as we mused about what might come next. He was considering, briefly, whether to run for City Council in the Manhattan neighborhood he grew up in or for Assembly in Astoria, Queens, where he was taking a new job. We thought Astoria, where the incumbent was lax, might be better. I didn’t, in 2018, imagine that he’d be a top tier mayoral candidate by 2025, but I am not surprised at all that he is where he is now. He is tremendously talented. I enjoy seeing talent rise. In that way, politics can be a meritocracy. Zohran is superior, and now the world knows it.
Many egg-headed technocrats like me look longingly at Brad Lander and somewhat skeptically at Zohran because of his "lack of management experience"... this article definitely settled my nerves, thanks for sharing.
Thank you for the insight. Zohran comes across as the impossible pragmatic progressive that pundits swear didn’t exist—I’m glad he does.