And I mean, there's lots of debates about sort of the meaning of his win, which we'll get on to in a moment. I suppose the thing that everyone agrees on is that he's, or he was, he is a very charismatic, effective, talented politician. And I suppose there are people from actually all wings of politics everywhere sort of saying, where can we find someone like this? And I know sort of, you know, the ins and outs of the Democratic Socialists of America well. You've known of Zoran for a while. How did that happen? How was he found? How did you get this process where someone who was a charismatic, effective communicator, who, let's be honest, aren't always that easy to find, managed to rise to the top in this case?
Well, there's several candidates that the Democratic Socialists of America have run that you could say we recruited and were found. Zoran's a little bit different in that Zoran was a cadre of our organization. He joined DSA. He was involved helping to lead canvassing efforts. This was actually my first brief encounter with him was when he was organizing canvassers for this local, actually Palestinian candidate we were running in Bay Ridge, New York. And I was just a canvasser. I met him in passing then. This was years ago, must have been 2017 or in that range if memory serves me right. He was involved with some other campaigns. He was involved as a DSA member, and then he obviously had natural gifts as a politician. So he decided to run for state assembly in Queens.
Then from there, I mean, it was my view that out of this network of state-elected officials in New York, Zoran was certainly not the one I had the closest connection with. Far from it. I probably only had maybe four or five meaningful conversations, maybe less, in my life with Zoran one-on-one. But he was the one that always struck me as the most dynamic at the level of being a communicator and the one destined for national politics. It was really my goal and my dream. I think I told him as much in like December 2023. I told him, you know, we need to get you in Congress in the next few years. And obviously he had different plans with this mayoral run, but he always had that kind of talent and ability. But it should be noted that he wasn't this talented person that we recruited. He kind of came to DSA because of his own ideological conviction, and he was an activist. He actually did work in our organization.
I hate to sound like a politician myself, but I'm going to say a little bit of all three of them. So, one is Zoran is an incredibly charismatic and effective politician. He also surrounded himself with very talented people. His video team was objectively very talented. His canvass operation was incredibly impressive. The way he handled the media at the level of not just Zoran, what Zoran said on camera, but what opportunities his team decided to pursue, how they decided to kind of respond at brief moments of crisis or little mini many scandals in the race and things like that, all were super effective. So he maximized on that purely subjective level. I think the objective part of it was he did run a campaign that was laser focused on affordability.
In the last couple weeks of the campaign, you could say that some of his appeals became more identitarian in the sense of foregrounding his own identity. I think you could probably chalk that up to, I'm not hearing this from the campaign, it's just kind of my guesswork, a mobilizational technique to make sure that he turned out Muslim and other immigrant voters in New York, New York City. And also to kind of counter the assault by people that were saying Zoran's a threat to Jews in New York City. If you're Jewish, you have to mobilize, you have to vote, you know, whatever. I think it kind of changed the narrative to be able to talk about his own identity, the way in which he sees New York City, and so on. But in general, it was a laser focused campaign.
I remember I want to say I chatted with Zoran in like February. I reached out and I said, you know, we're going to do this event in New York City with John McMillan. John's coming into town. There'll be five, six hundred people. Do you want to like say five minutes of words, you know, just to get in front of those people? And he said, I'll think about it, but I think I'd rather be in, I forgot where, but like some part of Queens because he's going to a smaller event, but he'd rather try to reach 100, 200 potential like non-voters or persuadable voters than kind of rally the base at this moment. And at that, I totally appreciated the response and I totally accepted the logic, but at that point I was like, this guy really thinks he could win. He's polling around 3%, 4%, but he really thinks he could win.
And he's someone on the left enough that he knows exactly what friends it's amazing, he knows exactly that it was like, you know, potentially a cool thing that he would have jumped at, you know, at any other point in his life. But it was really laser focused on affordability and it did sort of fit this mobilizational theory of politics that says run as a principled left-wing progressive candidate, talk about economic issues, and you will rally a new base around your candidacy. It did work in this instance. It didn't work in the two Bernie campaigns broadly. And I think it necessarily won't work everywhere as far as can this message work outside of deep blue areas.
Well, I do think there needs to be some level of social and cultural coding and the way in which we communicate our values, our egalitarian economic values, our egalitarian values, the level of being for the dignity of ordinary people and being against oppression and so on, that language will have to change in different areas. So if you're in an area like Nebraska and you're running for statewide office like Dan Osborn was, I actually think it's perfectly progressive as someone who's on the far left of the immigration issue in the US. I think it's perfectly progressive for Dan Osborn to say, listen, I'm with Trump on securing the border, but I don't believe that we should be separating mothers from their children. I think we should have a pathway for citizenship for people who are following the rules and are here even if they're here illegally.
That to me in a deeply pro-Trump, plus 14 or so percent pro-Trump area is incredibly progressive and I won't get on Dan Osborn because I disagree with this, that, or that approach. So I think we have to be totally open to, especially on cultural and social issues, especially on some of these thorny issues, to allow some grace for our candidates that are left populists in other areas. So you see lots of people saying Zoran Mandani proves you never have to compromise. It's like, well, he ran in a very progressive place. You might have to compromise a...
compromise for what it's worth on a lot of issues. I mean, he's someone who, I mean, in my brief kind of chats with him past, like I've had debates on policing and other things where I think I land where honestly from my experience a lot of the British left is, policing is a social good. It could be done in a really nasty reactionary way or it could be done in a way that, you know, more community engagement, better trained officers, less racist policing and so on. So I always advocated for plenty of police but reformed police and I think that's where Zoran landed from his original position which was much more of a defund position. I think now he's seeing police as a social good that needs to be funded and in fact you have better outcomes with better funding and training and he's evolved on that and a host of other issues.
And I think he's explained where his positions have changed. So it's not like he totally just decided to think about his commitments that he had in 2020 and 2021 and bury his head in the sand. He's actually been evolving on a host of both issues and also how he chooses to communicate to voters has changed as well.
Because I follow lots of people from all different persuasions, I suppose especially the wonkier side of sort of like political commentary, and he does keep sort of like pleasing people. They're like, oh, I'm pleasantly surprised by Zoran Mandani. The one I noticed the most is that he's, you know, he's into rent controls but he's also very YIMBY. So all of the kind of YIMBY Democrats who are more associated with the abundant Cedric Klein crew, they're like, actually, I like what this guy says about building houses. So he has been a very big tent politician as far as I can see. Let's move on from elections. Everyone loves talking about elections and then once the person gets elected, we often sort of forget about it. But this guy is, I mean, one of the rare occasions where a democratic socialist is going to have a significant amount of power. What power does he have? Actually, I'll open up that question a bit more. What power does he have and how would he use it?
