ilustr.: Olga Micińska

Magdalena Morańda is a Polish-American member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Involved in Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign from almost the very beginning, Morańda spent months speaking with New Yorkers – including Polish and Eastern European New Yorkers wary of socialism – about what the campaign could do to make New York City more affordable.

With Polish voters facing many of the same economic concerns – like a housing crisis and rising food costs – Morańda sat down with Magazyn Kontakt to discuss the lessons Poland’s left-wing parties can learn from Mamdani’s victory.

By Roman Broszkowski

Can you tell us how you got involved with Zohran’s campaign?

I was a field lead on the campaign. I led weekly canvasses starting from January 2025 all the way through the very end, and I’m now the field manager at Our Time, an organization that came out of the Mamdani campaign, continuing on building on the work of the campaign and keeping people organized – winning the affordability agenda.

I’m a member of the New York City Chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, so I voted to endorse him back in October of 2024. When Zohran was trying to win my vote to endorse him, I remember him telling me: “Oh, I’m running on all these things” and he mentioned fast and free buses. I was super excited for that as someone who has family members who rely on the bus. After that I made up my mind: “Okay, I will knock doors for you. I’ll be there for you. I will support you in any way I can”.

In the beginning, I helped out with a lot of fundraising, hosting house parties, just plugging in any way I could. And then as soon as regular door knocking started, I committed myself to leading a voter canvassing shift every Thursday.

A lot of people stereotypically perceive the Polish and post-Soviet communities here in New York as heavily opposed to democratic socialism. Was that true? Did you find any resistance when you were talking about that with people?

Obviously, the history is still there. I think it’s a very sensitive subject and word. My mom doesn’t know I’m in DSA. I don’t use the word democratic socialist for these things. But I think there’s nuances there. It can be silly sometimes to just write these communities completely off, all because we run under this label.

At the end of the day, the issues speak for themselves. Even my mom, when I was talking to her about Zohran, she’d say, “Yeah, they call him a socialist or they call Bernie a socialist, but what they’re actually fighting for is the norm in Europe. It’s not that crazy, it’s not that radical”.

Obviously, Zohran never stopped calling himself a democratic socialist. I didn’t lead with that at the doors, I led with the issues. And hearing out people, what matters to them in their neighborhoods, what they are struggling to afford in New York, and tying it back to the campaign.

It was exciting to try it out. Obviously, I’m sure if you actually pulled the voter numbers, a lot of these communities are probably still Republican anyway, but people are tired of the status quo and are willing to vote for someone who’s honest and who understands the struggle that they’re going through, whether they call themselves a socialist or not.

I think that people were struck by the not infrequent numbers of Trump Mamdani voters. In Europe we’re seeing an increasing number of far-right parties grow in the polls. What advice do you have for left-wing parties there about convincing those types of voters to back someone like Mamdani and the DSA?

It can sound silly, but sometimes the first thing to do is listening to them. Zohran did this at the very beginning, where after Trump won, he went to these places that went the most to the right – and straight up asked people on the streets: “Why did you vote for Donald Trump?”.

And it was the same answers: “He’s promising to end the wars”, “He’s promising to make groceries cheaper”. It was all about affordability. So Zohran rolled out the municipal grocery store idea. It’s about thinking: “Okay, what I can actually do to combat this, that isn’t just blaming immigrants or just blaming outsiders”. What are these issues that you could actually focus on that people care about?

Another thing the campaign did really well – and this term is credited to other progressive New York organizations – is “surround sound organizing”.

It means being able to combat any disinformation at all levels. Not only is Zohran going viral on TikTok, he’s on your television screen in an ad, and also we’re at your door. So you’re talking to people face to face about this.  It’s not just that you see a scary tweet that’s calling Zohran an antisemite or that he’s some crazy Communist that wants to steal your car.

It’s you’re talking to these volunteers face to face, you’re getting these videos on your social media algorithm, you’re walking past a canvas in your neighborhood, you’re seeing regular people supporting this, not just the most outspoken.

It wasn’t just DSA members coming to these events. It was emergency medical technicians. It was Starbucks baristas. It was everyday people volunteering, posting about it, talking to their neighbors.

You need to be able to combat the misinformation because that is going to happen. The machine will throw everything at you. They will say it’s impossible to freeze the rent and you have to be ready both on the ground with volunteers that know how to combat this misinformation but also putting out videos that are proving these claims are not true. Ingrain the message you’re running on and make it seem not extreme every day.

Zohran was able to reach a lot of low-propensity voters. How did you do that, and is that replicable elsewhere?

It started with the way they built the universe of voters we were reaching. There were three main portions of the universe. One third were these typical progressive voters you could rely on – it’s the people in Mamdani’s Assembly District who voted for him, the people who voted for Bernie five years ago. Another third were rent-stabilized tenants. The campaign really wanted to reach tenants as a voting bloc and show them as a politicized class of people. Then, finally Muslim and South Asian voters, who usually people write off. These are the people who swung for Trump in November, but for Mamdani in June. So the outreach varied depending on who you were reaching.

For a lot of these South Asian Muslim communities, it took having campaign literature in their languages, it took having the right volunteers going to these doors, it took actually having canvases in places that people don’t usually canvas. There were a lot of cases of people having their doors knocked on and saying: “You’re the only politician who’s ever spoken to me” or “I’ve never had a volunteer come to my door about this”.

In the progressive block, how do we get more young voters? It just took including them in the universe. In typical political campaigns, people rely on what they call “triple prime voters”. It’s these people who vote in every single June Democratic primary. They’re used to voting. They love civil politics. They’re super engaged. But also, these people usually tend to be more conservative.

So what we took was people who maybe haven’t voted since the 2016 election. Maybe they haven’t voted yet at all! We talked to people who weren’t even registered to vote yet, and made sure people actually registered. Expanding who we’re talking to both by neighborhood and also age range – that’s how we ended up knocking a million doors before June.

What were the important steps that organizers took to get to the point where they could run a successful mayoral campaign?

It took a lot of losing elections. New York City DSA’s electoral project has been going on since 2017, when they ran their first city council race, which Zohran was actually one of the field organizers for. So the project has been in place for a long time, and it’s come with a lot of losses.

But each of those losses was getting us closer. You’re learning how to refine your field. You’re learning that we need to expand the universes of voters. It’s also helping push the elected officials who were challenged more left and changing the landscape. It’s been 10 years of trying and failing, winning nine socialists at the state level, two at the city level, but also basically just as many losing races to get you there.

Coalition building, not just with progressives and socialists, but with quite a few mainstream, center-left politicians, was a key part of Zohran’s campaign. What advice do you have about building a successful coalition between the left and center-left in a way that doesn’t dilute left-wing ideals and power?

You have to agree on the issues. I think our tactics will always differ. I think people more left will always want to push harder, maybe even be more agitational. It’s walking this fine line of compromising, but not compromising your values. We all agree on the same thing: that we want these material changes for the working class, that we want to make people’s lives better.

Think about what can you agree on to build this broader coalition that will make sure someone like Andrew Cuomo or Curtis Sliwa won’t get elected – someone who ruins everyone’s chances of any kind of progress.

I think there’s also been a lot of realignment recently – you see this around immigration. There are protests now like the No Kings, No Wars, No ICE March, that are both co-sponsored by the Working Families Party and Indivisible, which are these more liberal or social democratic groups, and then also the Democratic Socialists of America and a lot of other socialist orgs.

It’s knowing that you do really need the other in order to succeed, being open to compromise, but also having enough outside pressure that can push what you’re fighting for and for the more left position.

When Zohran started his campaign, he was polling at less than 1% in a super crowded field. What helped the campaign gain ground and stand out?

The comms program and the field program kind of work together and were intertwined. Of course, the field was the muscle of this campaign. It’s what won us it. A lot of that kind of turning out of people was only possible because Zohran was also making these videos that were catching people’s attention.

People were seeing this. It was breaking the narrative and it also always ended and came back to: “knock doors, if you want this, you have to get involved, you have to come join us”. It was always very issued forward. A lot of canvassers would come and say: “I saw a video on Instagram and now I’m here. I don’t know how to canvas.  I don’t even really know what this is, but I wanted to get involved”.

The comms also highlighted the field and showed how beautiful canvassing is. You had all these videos of people talking to their neighbors or even videos of Zohran knocking doors and showing how impactful it is actually talk to your neighbors and it became this self-reinforcing circle of taking pictures and videos at every single one of our canvasses that are getting posted and then get new people to join and what this is. That helped very quickly with the name recognition.

I also think it’s what kind of blew him forward beyond Brad Lander, who seemed he’d be the left candidate at the time. It showed that this was something different. This is something exciting. This was a very direct, clear message that people could understand.

I’d say on every single one of my canvases: “You don’t have to be a policy expert”. I still to this day have not read a single one of those policy memos. I just know we’re running to make New York more affordable. Most people can get behind that. And I also think this field muscle builds up almost a fear-of-missing-out experience. It became the norm in certain neighborhoods. People made friends. There were socials after every canvas. You got to know these people in your neighborhood. People would meet who lived in the same building at canvases and didn’t even know each other. So people were getting to know their neighbors and it became the talk of the town very quickly.

In Poland, the center bloc presidential candidate has been the same candidate for the past two elections, losing both times to the right and the far right. It mirrors the loss of Hillary Clinton and the loss of Kamala Harris. How did the campaign reach out to those more centrist liberal voters and convince them to come aboard without attacking them?

It’s not about berating people. The centrist establishment has this problem of telling voters: “You’re too dumb to understand, you don’t get what’s going on, I know better than you”. And our campaign was never about that. It listened to people. Every canvasser was told to ask the person what they care about first and then tie that back to the campaign versus immediately jumping in with: “I’m so excited, Zohran’s going to seize the means of production, blah, blah, blah”.

There’s a lot of centrist or middle leaning people who I talked to who would say: “I don’t know, I don’t care about the buses, I don’t take them” or “I don’t have kids,” or “I’m not a rent-stabilized tenant, I don’t understand what this does for me” or “Aren’t rich people going to leave the state if we raise taxes?”. But by hearing them out and tying it back and saying: “But your groceries are too expensive, aren’t they?” we were able to reach them, because that was true for everyone.

People, no matter where they are on the political spectrum, share a lot of fears and worries. They just want stability; they don’t want to think about a lot of these things. They just want to live a regular life. Success came from being able to tie it back to personal stories about this is why I care about Zohran. It was about saying I hear where you’re coming from but also this is why I think Zohran’s the best choice.

I also think Andrew Cuomo is kind of a ghoul, and it’s easy to convince centrist or radical liberal people to not vote for him. A lot of people remember him as governor. They remember how awful he was. There was a clear enemy. However, the messaging was always positive and it was more voting for a vision versus voting against someone, which is I think something that didn’t happen with Hillary or Kamala’s campaigns where it’s was kind of just voting for the lesser evil, kind of “I’m doing this because Trump is evil and I don’t want him in office” versus “I see this positive vision of a more affordable New York”.

Zohran never spoke badly about any of the candidates on the left running, except for Andrew Cuomo. He made it very clear that this was our enemy. This was the only person he would attack. If he said anything bad, it’d be about him, but also his main thing would be this positive message of a better New York versus “Can you just vote for the status quo so we don’t have the evilest person possible running it?”.

What advice would you give to Polish democratic socialists based on what you’ve learned from the Zohran campaign?

My biggest takeaways for the campaign are: one, have a very clear message. The Mamdani campaign’s main platform revolved around freezing rent increases for rent-stabilized tenants, making NY buses fast and free, and universal childcare. I think message discipline went so far in this campaign. Figure out the three main things you’re running on and make them very tangible, and also something that affects everyone. I think that was very clear and so helpful at the doors. Two, you have to run on something that actually differentiates you from everyone else, and that’s also very tangible that you can actually change because then people will associate that with you forever. Three, be willing to talk to people that you may not normally talk to and try giving people something to vote for, versus just against.

What should leftists in Poland take away from not just the Zohran experience but the experiences of DSA in general?

A huge aspect of this campaign – and of people wanting to continue to be part of it and actually willing to do the grunt work of talking to strangers – is making the actual culture of the campaign you’re running or the org you’re running very friendly and very easy to plug into.

Do this by making it so you don’t have to be an expert on all these things; you just have to be willing to try something. By always pairing people up when they’re out canvassing so they make a friend! Having socials after every event, etc.

You cannot take away the social aspect of this. People are doing something hard and annoying, and something that’s strange. People are not used to having their doors knocked on! And by being able to be there for volunteers afterwards and listen to what went really well, what went really badly, and by being able to have a beer or coffee afterwards.

People are not just looking to create change, they’re also looking for community and to meet friends for the first time who share their political beliefs, and showing that it is so much bigger than just themselves. A lot of people feel alienated, that they’re the only person who thinks this way, the only person who sees what’s wrong with the world.  And a campaign can show that no, it’s not just you, you’re not crazy, a better world is possible. And all of us are here doing it together.