Interesting interview with the field director of the Mamdani campaign at City & State NY about the nature of their ground operation:

It wasn’t just the TikTok videos.

Zohran Mamdani’s primary upset was powered by an army of tens of thousands of volunteers who knocked on doors and phone banked for him. The campaign’s field operation was a scaled-up version of a tactic that the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (which I’m a former member of) has been honing for the past several years.

Much of the credit for Mamdani’s unprecedented canvassing operation belongs to Tascha Van Auken, the campaign’s field director. Van Auken has years of experience with these kinds of field operations. She worked as a field lead on former President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign before managing Julia Salazar’s successful 2018 state Senate campaign and Phara Souffrant Forrest’s successful 2020 Assembly campaign (both of which were backed by DSA) and then served as the New York Working Families Party’s deputy campaigns director during the 2022 cycle. In between all the campaigns, she worked as a casting director and artistic direction manager for the Blue Man Group.

According to Van Auken, more than 50,000 people signed up to volunteer for Mamdani’s campaign – and more than 30,000 of those volunteers worked as canvassers, knocking doors or phonebanking. (The campaign also hired 40 to 50 specialized paid canvassers, largely to reach voters in less accessible areas of the city and to reach voters who spoke languages that few volunteers were familiar with.) The Mamdani campaign’s volunteers knocked on doors 1.6 million times, which led to 247,000 conversations with voters at their doors. To put that in perspective, Mamdani’s field operation ended up speaking to about a quarter of the total number of people who voted in the mayoral primary. 

City & State spoke to Van Auken about how a DSA-style volunteer field operation actually works and what it takes to manage tens of thousands of volunteers.