Andy Blumenthal (אברהם נפתלי)

The DSA’s winning power is not socialism, it’s the fusion of the socialist electoral machine with Muslim/South Asian community organizing and an SJP-bred candidate coalition, bound together by anti-Zionism. And everyone wants to talk about communism because that’s actually not the issue deciding these last races in New York. The voter surge that delivered the mayoral race was Muslim and South Asian, and Mamdani said so on tape. “We increased the turnout of Muslims by 60%, the turnout of South Asians by 40%.” South Asian turnout went from 15% in 2021 to 43% in 2025 (DRUM Beats’ analysis of Board of Elections data, reported by City & State and Democracy Now!). The campaign canvassed 100+ mosques and reached 200,000 Muslim voters (DSA’s own Democratic Left, and Jacobin). 87% of South Asian voters went for Mamdani. The candidate ground game comes out of the campus Palestine movement, not labor. Mamdani co-founded SJP at Bowdoin; Chevalier co-founded Columbia’s CUAD with Mahmoud Khalil and led the encampment (JTA, JPost, Times of Israel, all mainstream). The organizers being converted into officeholders trained in SJP first. The coalition’s founding story is the Muslim-immigrant/radical-left fusion. DSA’s own writers date it to 2017, Mamdani as paid canvasser for Khader El-Yateem, “the alliance between Muslim immigrant communities and radical politics that contributed heavily to Mamdani’s primary win.” The binding issue, is Zionism, not capitalism. The 2025 convention made support for Israel an expellable offense. They de-endorsed AOC and tried to purge Bowman over Israel before he was ousted. There is no parallel purge over economic heterodoxy. The decisive electoral weapon against the establishment was Palestine. Chevalier beat a five-term Hispanic Caucus chair in a district with few Jews, running on Khalil’s detention and “bought by the Israeli lobby.” JTA: first time incumbents lost seats for being too pro-Israel. The DSA is not a communist movement that happens to hate Israel. It is an anti-Zionist coalition, built on Muslim and South Asian community organizing and a candidate class bred in the campus Palestine movement, that happens to use communism. Socialism is the Trojan horse; the Muslim-Palestine axis is what actually generates the candidates, the new voters, and the only cause the coalition will enforce on threats of expulsion. Strip the Palestine-Muslim alignment and the socialism reverts to the shrinking debating society it was in 2024. The capture is real, the people entering like Maurice Isserman took the house, but the thing that captured it isn’t Marx. It’s anti-Zionism, carried by the organizing networks built around it.