Zohran Mamdani Isn’t the First Socialist to Run for New York Mayor—But He’d Be the First to Win
Mamdani is continuing a proud tradition of bringing socialist politics to New York to uplift the working class. Over a century ago, Morris Hillquit mounted a similar campaign.
Miles Kampf-Lassin and Aaron Welt
In the race for New York City mayor, an outspoken, self-described socialist has a real shot at victory. New York State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani has run an insurgent grassroots campaign that’s defied the odds and shocked the political establishment, pulling neck-and-neck with corporate Democrat and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo ahead of the June 24 primary. If he pulls it off, Mamdani would chart new territory. While New York has a long history of socialists contesting and even winning elections, none has captured the top office.
The upstart 33-year-old is running on a broad economic populist agenda, promising to make New York affordable for city residents by freezing rents on nearly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments, building more affordable housing, providing free childcare, raising the minimum wage to $30 an hour by 2030, creating city-owned grocery stores, and making public buses fast and free. These and other proposals would be funded by increasing taxes on the rich. Mamdani’s policy goals, steeped in a legacy of providing material support for the working class, have set him apart from even other progressive mayoral candidates with less ambitious platforms. Mamdani has also vocally opposed U.S. support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and spoken up for Palestinian human rights and against attacks on free speech at college campuses.
Mamdani entered the New York State Assembly in 2021 with the strong backing of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which he’s stayed a member of and received support from throughout his mayoral run. NYC-DSA has helped fuel Mamdani’s massive volunteer operation, which has knocked on more than 1 million doors and made more than 500,000 phone calls to residents across the city. While previous mayor David Dinkins retained membership in DSA, Mamdani would be the first to actively identify as a socialist. He’s also received the backing of fellow democratic socialist politicians Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Mamdani hasn’t run from the label on the campaign trail, though his opponents have attempted to use it to paint him as an out-of-touch radical. Rather, he’s explained his political vision as one of redistributed wealth and power, where the necessities of a dignified life are promised and provided as rights for all. A June 11 interview on The Breakfast Club radio show illustrated how Mamdani talks about his socialist politics, when asked by host Charlamagne Tha God about the label.
Charlamagne: Nowadays, instead of just leaning on the word ‘socialism,’ they just tell people “you should have free healthcare, you should have a free education, you should be able to make a livable wage, they should increase the minimum wage.” Those are just simple concepts that are all socialism. But for some reason ya’ll still find yourselves tripping up over that word, or letting the other side use it.
Mamdani: I think it’s because there are a lot of people making a lot of money in this moment who would want Americans to think that’s the only way that life can be. And I don’t hide this. You know, it’s how I see the world. It’s the world that I want — it’s one of dignity. It’s funny, there’s this one guy who comments under almost every one of my tweets and he’s like, “he’s a socialist!” I’m like, “yeah, it’s in my bio.” You know, this is who I am. And I think it’s about being honest with New Yorkers. Because I’ve found, you know, Mayor Koch said this, that “if you agree with me on 9 out of 12 issues, vote for me. Twelve out of 12, see a psychiatrist.” And I’ve found in New Yorkers an ability to say, “look, maybe I wouldn’t call myself the same word. But I want the same things.”
After he announced his campaign in October 2024, Mamdani told Jacobin’s Liza Featherstone: “We’re in a city of far more people who are interested both explicitly in socialism but also in alternatives to this current moment. I started to call myself a socialist after Bernie’s run in 2016. It gave me a language that I didn’t know to describe things that I felt were disparate parts of my beliefs, when in fact they were all intertwined as one,” adding that his campaign will put “working-class people first and ensure that the proposals that we put forward are ones that will clearly and directly benefit those people.”
Mamdani is far from the first socialist to hold political office in New York — there are currently nine socialists in the state legislature and three in City Council, in addition to Ocasio-Cortez in the U.S. House. Over the course of the 20th century, other socialist politicians also represented New Yorkers, including Communist Party activists Peter Cacchione and Ben Davis in the 1940s, socialist Meyer London, who won a seat in Congress in 1914, and a slate of seven Socialist Party candidates who were elected to the New York City Board of Aldermen in 1917. That same year, another socialist, Morris Hillquit, mounted a spirited run for mayor and came in third place, claiming nearly 22 percent of the vote.
Like Mamdani, these socialist predecessors fought for freedom and equality for the working class, and against the horrors of war. Hillquit adamantly objected to U.S. entry into World War I, joining fellow Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs in opposition. And with the rise of new technologies that upended economic conditions, these socialists advocated protections for workers, union rights and democratic control over the conditions of work so that New Yorkers could exert more control over their lives.
Today, Mamdani is continuing this proud legacy of bringing socialist politics to the largest city in the United States. Below is a history by CUNY’s Aaron Welt of Morris Hillquit’s 1917 run for New York mayor, the last time an open socialist came this close to City Hall.
—Miles Kampf-Lassin, Senior Editor
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In 1917, a Jewish, immigrant socialist almost became New York’s mayor. For months, detractors watched in horror as the candidate, Morris Hillquit, galvanized much of the city. In April of that tumultuous year, President Woodrow Wilson had reversed course, and bucked popular opinion, asking Congress for permission to send U.S. troops to fight in the “Great War.” Hillquit’s campaign galvanized antiwar sentiment in New York. It was also a flash-point for ethno-religious politics in the city. Jewish New Yorkers, in particular, sparred over what Hillquit’s improbable run meant for America’s increasingly immigrant Jewish population. The socialist lost the election, accruing about half as many votes as the winner, Tammany Democrat John Hylan. But his campaign was a turning point for many communities in New York, and continues to leave its mark on the city.
Hillquit’s mayoral bid was a climax in the history of Yiddish Socialism, a movement he did much to create. Born as Moses Hilkovitz in the Russian Empire, Hillquit immigrated to the U.S. amid the Diaspora of Central and Eastern European Jews. Like thousands of his fellow poor and Jewish migrants, he gravitated to the world of labor unions, the radical Yiddish press and the Socialist Party. As a young lawyer, he represented the United Hebrew Trades and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) in their efforts to organize the needle trades. When the mayor, John Purroy Mitchel — his electoral opponent in 1917 — attempted to prosecute ILGWU members for the murder of a strikebreaker, Hillquit served as defense attorney for the union officials. (A jury found all of the accused innocent.)
In 1914, socialist Meyer London won a seat in Congress representing the heavily Jewish immigrant East Side of Manhattan. While other Jewish immigrant radicals won citywide office, Hillquit ascended the ranks of the Socialist Party organization, which rested on the prestige garnered by running Eugene Debs as its perennial presidential candidate. Very reasonably, Hillquit in 1917 believed that the Socialist Party’s standing with New York’s immigrant working-class could deliver the mayor’s office.
President Wilson’s decision in April to commit American troops to the Entente war effort dominated the 1917 race. Incumbent John P. Mitchel, a moderate, liberal-Progressive reformer running as an independent Democrat, championed U.S. involvement. Mitchel, in fact, volunteered for the war effort, dying shortly after election in military training as a fighter pilot.
Hillquit adamantly opposed American entry. He saw the Great War as a catastrophic failure of European industrialists and aristocrats to contain nationalism. The rural peasantry and urban workers, he and other socialists argued, stood to gain nothing from the war even while they died by the thousands. For years, Hillquit lobbied against “preparedness” campaigns, or military training initiatives directed towards civilians. In the years following American entry, pro-war zeal prevailed. The Bolshevik overthrow of the Russian Provisional Government that October did much to split the Jewish immigrant left. But the Espionage and Sedition Acts, wartime nativism and militarism, and the postwar Red Scare all stifled Yiddish socialist politics in America.
The elite of New York City’s Jews denounced Hillquit. So-called “Uptown Jews,” the business and political leaders whose charities aimed to assimilate Jewish immigrants, viewed the socialist campaign as a major step backward. The former president and ardent war supporter Theodore Roosevelt accused the socialist of being “an agent of the Prussianized autocracy” and “a Hun inside our gates.” Subsequently, many Uptown Jews worried how Hillquit’s insurgency would affect America’s tolerance of an increasingly urban and immigrant Jewish presence in the United States. Attorney, businessman, and Democratic Party functionary Samuel Untermeyer publicly warned that a Hillquit victory “will arouse a storm of hate, resentment, and anti-Semitism such as our race has never before encountered in this country.” With WWI mobilization in full force, the prospect of an avowedly anti-war Jewish immigrant as mayor of the nation’s largest city deeply troubled the uptown faction.
The socialist projected himself as the candidate of true American values. In his speeches, Hillquit wrapped himself in the American Constitution. To him, President Wilson and Mayor Mitchel’s wartime policies of censorship and surveillance had brought “a sad hour for American liberties, a sad hour for the future of our republic.” At one rally, in a display of boldly patriotic, anti-war political imagery, two fully uniformed Army privates carried Hillquit out on stage atop their shoulders.
Hillquit’s campaign also appealed to a sector of New York’s growing Black population. Thousands of Black Southerners fleeing Jim Crow persecution arrived in New York and its war-fueled job market during this period. One of these migrants, A. Philip Randolph, served as Hillquit’s campaign manager in Harlem. That November, the future Black civil and labor rights icon managed to pull a quarter of Harlem’s vote for Hillquit. When Theodore Roosevelt stumped for Mitchel in the neighborhood, Black socialists heckled the aged but sturdy war advocate. In the decade after Hillquit’s campaign, the historically African-American enclave gave rise to a Harlem Renaissance of Black, and very often leftist, politics and culture.
But the war question divided socialists, sometimes in the most intimate ways. For instance, the socialist husband and wife John G. Phelps Stokes and Rose Pastor Stokes. John Stokes, a native born and Protestant tycoon sympathetic to socialism, supported American entry into the War. Over 1917, he renounced Hillquit, left the Socialist Party, and supported Mayor Mitchel. Rose Pastor Stokes came from a Yiddish-speaking, immigrant family and after toiling for years as a factory hand became a labor journalist. When Rose Pastor interviewed the left-leaning businessman John Stokes, the two fell in love and later married, eventually becoming the New York press’s favorite radical family. But unlike her husband, Rose believed “the greatest menace to American unity today” in 1917 was the “profit patriot,” the munitions profiteers who animated war hysteria. For Rose, Hillquit offered the best hope to ending the Great War. Other families faced a similar divide as did John and Rose.
Just before Election Day, Rabbi Samuel Shulman of the prestigious Beth-El Temple in midtown Manhattan stepped into the fray. Rabbi Shulman urged Jews to disregard warnings of an anti-Jewish backlash and to vote their conscience. He chastised voices in the community that attempted to set the appropriate boundaries for the Jewish electorate. “This to my mind,” the Rabbi excoriated, “is the extreme of political audacity.” In a swipe at Untermeyer, Rabbi Shulman fumed, “I consider such action as nothing less than a crime against Jews and Judaism.” Though Rabbi Shulman too denounced Hillquit, he maintained that “there is no such thing as a Jewish vote” and to “encourage and spread the dangerous myth that there is such a thing as a Jewish vote en bloc is certainly one of the most unpatriotic acts and a slander of severest sort.” As other Progressive Era commentators observed, and as the 1917 election proved, Jewish politics in America bent towards disagreement rather than consensus.
With all the votes cast at the end of election night Hillquit came in a respectable third place, just behind incumbent mayor. With Mitchel in the race, the reform vote split in the winner-take-all U.S. model, paving the way for Tammany to regain power. The winner, Judge “Silent” John Hylan, a loyal machine operative, had refused to take any public stances on the major issues of the day, including American entry into WWI. Nevertheless, Tammany mayors continued to govern New York until the tenure of Fiorello La Guardia in the 1930s.
While Hillquit lost, however, his impressive 1917 bid offers important insights for students of American history. Although many leaders, including Jews, tried to dismiss him, Hillquit’s race electrified working class, immigrant, and Yiddish-speaking New Yorkers. Labor historian Melech Epstein writes of “Hillquit’s stirring campaign” that what began as a humble operation, sparked by the unrest of WWI, “progressed into a buoyant hope, bordering on conviction, that the largest city in America would elect a socialist mayor.” Indeed, nearly a dozen socialists won seats to city and state offices that year. The race marked the high point of Yiddish Socialism in the United States, the moment at which workers and immigrants perhaps most shaped the politics of America’s largest city.
—Aaron Welt
Miles Kampf-Lassin is Senior Editor at In These Times. Follow him at @MilesKLassin
Aaron Welt is a doctoral lecturer at Hunter College who teaches courses on American Jewish history.
