In 2019, progressive activist and Occupy veteran Jumaane Williams ran again, this time winning his citywide race for Public Advocate; while Tiffany Cabán, backed by Ocasio-Cortez and DSA, narrowly lost her race for Queen’s District Attorney after a contentious recount.
Where progressives were victorious, they have had a substantial impact on the legislative agenda. In the New York State Senate, Julia Salazar, with the help of other progressive senators such as Alessandra Biaggi and Michael Gianaris, passed significant legislation to meet the material demands of New Yorkers.
The landmark Housing Stability and Protection Act, co-sponsored by these progressive senators, protects tenants by limiting security deposits to one month’s rent, capping rent hikes, and providing protections from unwarranted eviction.
This work, alongside the renewed popularity of the Sanders campaign in 2020, has lent further weight to the progressive agenda.
Recent polling by the think tank Data for Progress reveals that four in five New York voters support higher taxes on those with annual incomes of over $2 million, and an additional tax on investment gains made by billionaires.
Likewise, three-quarters of those polled backed a tax on people with multiple homes, and 80% supported a tax on digital advertising platforms like Google and Facebook.
Importantly, polling from Gallup in February also shows that, whilst the word “socialism” remains unpopular across the electorate as a whole, 76% of Democrats would vote for a presidential candidate who identifies as a socialist.
These findings demonstrate that progressives have been successful not just at grassroots organizing and executing strategic electoral bids, but in winning arguments on key policy issues, and shedding the stigma left over from cold war red-baiting.
The resurgence of the Democratic Socialists of America has been a fundamental part of this shifting discourse. In the first three months after Ocasio-Cortez was elected, DSA membership increased rapidly to around 50,000, and in the first half of this year alone, over 10,000 people have signed on to local organizing groups.
Nowhere has this been more evident than in New York. The NYC local DSA branch is the largest socialist organization in the United States, with over 55,000 members (as of April 2019), and multiple branches in each of the city’s five boroughs.
While the work of DSA has been pivotal to the resurgence of the American left, organizations such as Justice Democrats, Brand New Congress, Sunrise, and the Working Families Party have also burgeoned into this space, creating the intellectual and activist ecosystems to give a home to the growing number of progressive voices.
Unprecedented conditions
This growing movement has built toward a 2020 election cycle fraught with uncertainty.
As cases of Covid-19 continue to rise across the country, New York remains the worst hit US state. With over 390,000 confirmed cases, and 24,000 deaths, the coronavirus has wrought havoc on local communities and decimated the regional economy.
In a state where over a million people still have no healthcare insurance whatsoever, the public health emergency, combined with the enforced closure of businesses, and an existing housing crisis, has had a devastating impact on the material conditions of working New Yorkers.
This unprecedented context also affected the organizing strategies of insurgent campaigns. With grassroots movements like DSA no longer mobilizing volunteers door-to-door, progressive organizations pivoted to mass phone-banking and targeted social media strategies in an attempt to maintain voter outreach.
Also unique to this cycle, has been the mass mobilizations around the Black Lives Matter protests.
Across the city, from the Barclays Center in Brooklyn to Washington Square Park in Manhattan, mass protests have taken place daily since the police-killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25th.
At the heart of these mobilizations have been many of the Black and Latinx candidates running for office on progressive platforms.
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Aaron White Freddie Stuart | Radio Free (2020-06-25T19:44:03+00:00) From the streets to the ballot box: New York’s political revolution. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/06/25/from-the-streets-to-the-ballot-box-new-yorks-political-revolution/
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