The ascent of Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old socialist Muslim, to New York City’s mayoralty once seemed an almost absurdist dream. Yet, propelled by an army of 100,000 volunteers who took on the city’s political machine from below, the question now is not whether someone like Mamdani can win but whether his victory can carry beyond the borders of the Big Apple.
Here in Texas, to the Republicans and the billionaires whose power they entrench, the prospect of the Lone Star State being swept up in a similarly insurgent candidacy still sounds like its own far-fetched fantasy. Perhaps fearful that movements here might recover our state’s buried but rich left-populist past, the GOP has spent decades building fail-safes against the emergence of grassroots power anywhere under these big blue skies.
Indeed, it would be implausible to say that Mamdani’s municipal victory bears directly on our infamously repressive state as an abstract unit. But Texas and the State of Texas are not exactly one—this sprawling place we call home contains five of the 15 most-populous cities in the country. All lean to the left, all see their power currently suppressed, and all are where the lessons of Mamdani can apply.
I have spent more than 10 years organizing in localities across this great state, participating in grassroots issue campaigns, labor union drives, voter registration and turnout efforts, and multiple legislative sessions. I’ve come to know hundreds of community organizers, from Denton to the Rio Grande Valley and everywhere in between. I’m a co-founder of a statewide nonprofit, and I’ve co-chaired a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) chapter. More than mere credentialing, I share this background so you’ll know my optimism has survived the trenches—and to explain how I know there is a Texas Left out there waiting to be cohered, a disjointed chorus that could one day speak as one.
What Mamdani’s victory reveals for me, once stripped of novelty, is not really a suspension of political gravity but an alignment with forces that were waiting for the opportunity. Electoral success followed social organization. The campaign operated squarely inside a Democratic primary while rejecting the assumption that party politics must be donor-driven, consultant-managed, or ideologically thin. Independent organizations stepped into roles once filled by mass parties. Tenant unions, labor locals, socialist chapters of the DSA, and community groups built a base, trained leaders, disciplined messaging, and turned people out at scale. The formal party remained hollow; the social party did not.
This distinction matters because Texas Democrats have been attempting the inverse maneuver for a generation: trying to win elections without taking into account the eroded civic foundations of the state.
The last time Democrats won statewide office in Texas was 1994. That year coincides closely with an important index of organizational power: peak union density in the state. Since then, union membership has declined, along with one of the few remaining sites where ordinary people routinely practice collective decision-making. Unions do not simply bargain wages and benefits. They’re democracy in practice. When this erodes, campaigns lose their most reliable partners and are forced into a position of paltry substitution: mere messaging for the credible threat of deep organization.
Even the still-too-rare candidates who adopt a populist bent in their speeches can get only halfway there—naming Texas hardships but missing the link with organizations undertaking class formation to call upon. Calls to “get involved” are too vague. We need candidates who implore voters to form unions, who can teach the hows and whys of that process, precisely because they see themselves as organizers bound to a theory of change and not just as leaders pursuing their own ascent.
Texas is not truly devoid of forces like the tenant organizers and taxi drivers’ union of New York; they’re at work now, often in isolation from electoral politics. Starbucks workers striking across the state. Unite Here members walking out of Hilton hotels in Houston. Airport workers in the DFW region picketing for higher pay. Alongside them, community organizations are fighting against everything from omnipresent debt traps and predatory fines to voter intimidation and language exclusion. These are not sideshows of the Texas political scene, distractions from turning the state blue. They’re the nerve endings of Texans’ shared experience, yet they pass through election cycles largely unacknowledged.
This frequent gap between organizers and candidates sharpens into a set of questions that Mamdani’s victory makes salient: Do Texas candidates regularly embrace these fights as their own? Who has treated them as the base of a campaign rather than as background noise? Who has said plainly that winning office means carrying these struggles forward, co-planned the actions, and even engaged in civil disobedience?
The stakes of these questions could hardly be higher. We lead the nation in the share of residents without health insurance. After the state’s abortion ban took effect, hospitals reported sharp increases in severe pregnancy complications. These are not marginal injustices. They are life in Texas, and they demand a different politics than that offered by most of the state’s fleeting Democratic stars.
In reorienting the left politics of this state, we need to learn to use our history, as Mamdani did in hearkening back to his city’s earlier struggles over housing, labor, and public provision. Texas campaigns often shy away from this, yet our state has a deep and usable political history.
“Red Tom” Hickey gave Texas socialism a public voice through journalism and agitation when class politics still carried mass meaning. Emma Tenayuca helped lead the 1938 pecan shellers’ strike in my hometown of San Antonio, organizing thousands of Mexican-American women against starvation wages and brutal conditions. Jovita Idar used journalism and organizing along the border to confront segregation and build institutions for Mexican-American dignity. La Raza Unida Party and San Antonio’s Committee for Barrio Betterment demonstrate that independent political vehicles have been built when existing parties refused representation. Barbara Jordan and Ann Richards stand as reminders that movement pressure has, at moments, translated into governing power without surrendering moral clarity.
This historical reframing is especially crucial here. As Mamdani showed, you must love a place to lead it—and so you must love its story, yet Texas mythmaking has long reinforced the state’s reactionary spirit despite its long history of insurgence.
Mamdani’s strategy artfully mined New York City’s complexity, past and present, its richness and its diversity. People did not come together because they shared one identity. They came together because they were all trying, and often failing, to make ends meet as New Yorkers. Texas cities live inside the same reality. People may worship in different buildings and speak different languages, but they shop at the same grocery stores, ride the same buses, and open the same overdue bills.
The lesson worth carrying forward is not necessarily, then, about a city or a candidate but about what might be called syncretism. Mamdani’s campaign made clear that unlikely victories are built by bringing together things that are usually still avoided in mainstream politics. Texas politics has been organized to frustrate efforts at getting those same elements to ever meet. Union-busting, zealous preemption, and bootstrap austerity have hollowed out civic life, leaving campaigns and movements each adrift and bereft of one another. The affordability crisis is placed neatly into policy silos instead of being treated as the class war that stands between us and better lives. History is conceded, books are banned, and the grassroots is kept at arm’s length.
And yet the raw material remains: cities full of people facing the same costs, workers organizing against long odds, and a past that shows Texans have fought together before. The idea that a Mamdani-esque politics cannot happen here is not an iron law; it is a disbelief locked in place by power. It will break when candidates truly come from the rank and file and believe, as testified through consistent action, that they will accomplish little unless the ranks behind them grow alongside their electoral wins.
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