A strong field operation — which includes volunteers knocking on doors and talking to voters in their homes — can tip the scales in a close election. But Zohran Mamdani and his aides say their high-intensity canvassing effort was a difference-maker in both beating Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary and then preventing the former governor from mounting a comeback in the New York mayoral general election last month, which Mamdani won by about 9 points.
Mamdani’s field operation embraced risk and de-emphasized scripts in its strategy to reach voters directly, said eight campaign officials, volunteers and political observers, offering a potential road map for Democratic canvassing efforts in the midterm elections and beyond.
Mamdani and his campaign oriented his volunteers not only to juice turnout in favorable neighborhoods along the East River in Brooklyn and Queens, but also to persuade voters in majority-Black precincts who were seen as more skeptical of his upstart bid, as well as New Yorkers who backed Donald Trump in 2024 after, in many cases, having previously supported Democrats.
And while canvassers were armed with scripts detailing how to approach conversations, the campaign told volunteers they should feel free to share their personal stories with voters about why they were willing to do voter outreach on behalf of Mamdani, the 34-year-old self-described democratic socialist.
In total, more than 100,000 people volunteered for Mamdani’s campaign, knocking on more than 3.1 million doors, making 4.6 million calls and sending 2.7 million text messages to New Yorkers, his campaign said.
“When I had been preparing to run for mayor, I had heard from many that races at the scale of a mayoral one were not contested through field programs,” Mamdani said in an interview. “And we believed differently from the very beginning that we could build a program at a scale that the city had never seen before and do so focused on the belief that our most effective messengers were New Yorkers themselves.”
Yasmin Radjy, the executive director of Swing Left, a Democratic voter outreach group, said Mamdani’s team made three strategic decisions that she believes should inform Democratic campaigns across the midterm landscape: invest heavily in a ground operation, allow canvassers to go off-script, and spend time connecting with voters who might not be in so-called targeted groups. She said Mamdani’s campaign showed that “leaning into risk is the lower-risk option” for voter contact.
Radjy’s group, which is working with several Democratic campaigns, is undertaking a project dubbed “Ground Truth,” the goal of which is to build a team that knocks on every door in battleground House districts, not just those of targeted homes, which is often where limited resources are focused.
“Our approach is that you should knock every door,” Radjy said, adding that, in her opinion, Democrats generally focus too much on targeting specific groups — a trap the Mamdani campaign avoided.
“They both went everywhere, in the sense of they went to neighborhoods and parts of the city where people typically don’t vote … and they went to neighborhoods and parts of the city where people did not like Zohran, were very skeptical of Zohran,” she added. “And rather than shy away from tough conversations, they really leaned into that. And I think that is something that as a Democratic Party writ large, we need to learn.”
Democrats have long embraced that kind of face-to-face voter engagement, a space where they have built-in advantages over Republicans, who have similarly poured resources into canvassing. Democratic-leaning areas — denser, more urban neighborhoods — are easier to traverse in less time than more spread-out exurbs and rural locales. And whether it would be college students or union members, Democrats are able to tap into a wider volunteer base to conduct some of that work.
Still, a far more expansive Democratic direct outreach effort fell short in 2024 against a Trump campaign that prioritized narrowly targeting low-propensity voters. Then-Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign spent a combined $25.4 million on text message outreach, canvassing, phone calls and direct mail in the final weeks of the race, far outpacing the Trump team’s spending.
“I think what we have seen across Democratic campaigns at every level, from presidential down to city council, school board, etc., is the metrics that we are optimizing for are how many doors knocked and how many calls made,” Radjy said. “What we are not optimizing for is how many quality conversations we are having. And that is just not measured.”
In the interview, Mamdani said he believes canvassing “personalizes” the campaign, emphasizing such conversations.
“What I often share with canvassers is that they will likely be the only person that many New Yorkers speak to about this race beyond the people that they already know in their life,” he said. “They will be the ambassador of this campaign, and the most compelling thing that they can do is not memorize a talking point or a statistic but rather tell the truth of why they are walking up six-floor walk-ups, building after building, why they are going through 10 consecutive not-homes to still knock on that 11th door where they are spending hours of their day speaking to strangers about the city that we all love. That is, in fact, the most compelling thing.”
Mamdani’s campaign said the effect of its field program on last month’s election can be seen in a few ways. For starters, more than 150,000 voters who registered since the 2024 election cast ballots last month, a phenomenon his aides believe was driven in large part by his candidacy and buttressed by tenacious volunteers who helped register new voters. They also point to efforts in majority-Black neighborhoods like Canarsie and East New York, where Mamdani won by 20-plus points last month after Cuomo ran up substantial victories in the primary.
“Don’t be afraid to talk to people,” Tunbosun Oyenuga, a Mamdani volunteer who canvassed Black voters initially set on backing Cuomo, told NBC News of lessons Democrats can take forward. “Just talk to them, especially neighborhoods that you think are standoffish. If you’re willing to hold a town hall in Republican districts, why can’t you talk to your constituents about the problems that they have and do something about it?”
Oyenuga, who had previously canvassed for former Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., during his failed primary campaign against now-Rep. George Latimer last year, said Mamdani, a left-wing candidate in alignment with Bowman, had several advantages Bowman did not, aside from a far more favorable electorate. Oyenuga said voters he spoke with were much more open to Mamdani’s perspective on the war in Gaza, which had, by Election Day, reached its second year, than they were to Bowman’s a year previously.
And Mamdani’s focus on affordability was a campaign theme that could attract people across the ideological spectrum.
“It was easier,” Oyenuga said, “being able to talk about other issues, as well. Everyone’s going through a cost-of-living crisis. Everyone is dealing with affordability.”
What’s more, Mamdani and his team have cited exit polling that showed he won 1 in 10 Trump voters who turned out to vote in November, another sign that his efforts to reach out to skeptics bore fruit.
Laura Kane, a Mamdani campaign volunteer who was initially leaning toward supporting Cuomo, said Mamdani’s affordability message, combined with his willingness to engage with skeptics, set the tone for his operation.
“Mamdani’s intent from the beginning was to go out and engage with people whose views were different from him,” she said, adding, “There’s probably something in that I think Democrats could learn from.”
Rich Azzopardi, a senior aide to Cuomo, said the Mamdani canvassing effort was “a factor, but not the whole story” in his win, adding the divisive race “inspired turnout on both sides.”
“In many ways he was one of the weaker nominees in history,” Azzopardi said, adding, “Mamdani got barely over 50%, meaning nearly half the voters took time out of their day to vote against him. Now he needs to govern for all New Yorkers.”
NBC News spoke with five of Mamdani’s volunteers, as well as Tascha Van Auken, the campaign’s field director, who said the canvassing operation reinforced the importance of Mamdani’s affordability focus, which was similarly an easy subject for volunteers to speak about with voters off the cuff.
“You just have to be speaking to what people are dealing with,” Van Auken said. “And definitely in New York City, before this campaign, it really felt like there was a lack of people, leaders, elected officials acknowledging what people were dealing with on a day-to-day basis. So I think that’s a big piece of it. And then that allows people to come in and speak from the heart … because they’re seeing it, they’re feeling it.”
Van Auken said the field operation was able to provide the campaign with important feedback in the final weeks of the race — including that voters were repeatedly bringing up concerns at the doors about how Mamdani would handle Trump’s ramped-up attention on the city should he win, expressing concerns over potential National Guard deployments or new Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids.
The campaign was also able to bolster its volunteer ranks with some novel events — including a soccer tournament and a scavenger hunt — and it also distributed campaign merchandise that could be earned only through volunteer work, not purchased. Van Auken recalled the first such merchandise drop at a canvassing event over the winter for blue beanies.
“The sign-ups just skyrocketed,” she said. “The excitement was just incredible. And it was really cool to have all these canvasses launching across the city and everybody wearing these beanies.”
