The Kitchen Tables Behind Mamdani’s Kitchen-Table Strategy

While New Yorkers broke early voting records last week, Zachary Kahn prepared to welcome a group of strangers into his home. A post-production film assistant who lives with five roommates in Queens, Kahn is one of forty-two “staging hosts” who are offering their homes to the Zohran Mamdani campaign in the final days of the mayoral race. From 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. (plus 5:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Election Day, tomorrow), these hosts provide field captains in all five boroughs with a home base during Get Out the Vote (GOTV), guaranteeing a place where they can work, stock up on canvassing materials, and recharge. Some hosts like Kahn are even handing over their keys. “I feel very safe and comfortable having all these strangers in my apartment,” he told me, laughing. “I was even excited to let them do it.”

Staging hosts have already helped power historic voter turnout, reshaping the electoral map of the city.

Like countless other New Yorkers, Kahn, twenty-seven, first encountered Mamdani on YouTube; a friend in DSA—the Democratic Socialists of America—sent him the campaign’s launch video. “I was like, ‘whoa, who is this guy?’ It was exciting,” Kahn told me, though at first he thought Mamdani would “never get anywhere.” By the spring the campaign was gaining in the polls and Kahn started donating; he pivoted to volunteering in April after Mamdani called to thank him for a $100 contribution. “It was a big donation for me,” he said, but still he was surprised Mamdani personally called for that amount. “I remember I was waiting for a delivery from eBay, and I got a call from a number I didn’t have saved, and he said, ‘Oh no, I’m not here about your eBay delivery. . . . I’m Zohran Mamdani.”

In June, Kahn’s home, along with twenty-eight others, helped the campaign generate historic voter turnout, completely reshaping the electoral map of the city in the middle of a record-breaking heatwave. That was when the campaign boasted a volunteer force of more than 50,000 people, who knocked on 1.6 million doors. According to the campaign, it has had over 90,000 volunteers ready to take on more than 20,000 canvassing shifts in the last week and a half. (The Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa, reported having 5,000 volunteers in his camp, and independent candidate Andrew Cuomo’s team did not respond to inquiries about their volunteer numbers.) To deploy volunteers effectively, the Mamdani team told me it has upped its game, recruiting thirteen new staging hosts and expanding into places like Co-op City and Borough Park, neighborhoods that overwhelmingly went for Cuomo in the primary.

These sites solve many of the practical problems that come with deploying nearly 100,000 volunteers to canvassing sites around the city in four days (free storage space! reliable WiFi! bathrooms!), but the hosts I spoke to described the experience on a deeper level, in terms that reflected the Mamdani ethos of neighborly solidarity and political possibility. “I have a deep belief in the way we gather,” Upper East Side host Kaitlyn Hamby-Fowler, thirty, told me. “If we gather well, we can change the world.”

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Staging locations aren’t new, but they’ve never been done like this before. Most Mamdani staffers and experts I spoke to credited the Obama campaign with popularizing the strategy. One 2012 Obama for America training deck that seems ancient now describes staging locations as “temporary field offices for a campaign—either at a home, business, or public space” that are “used to launch GOTV voter contact activities.” Running these Obama-era staging locations is how some of Mamdani’s top field leaders got their starts. In New York, the practice has been a potent weapon in smaller, state-wide races for working-class candidates aligned with the DSA who opt to build large grassroots operations over taking corporate money. State reps like Phara Souffrant Forrest (D), Tiffany Cabán (D), and even Mamdani himself when he ran for New York State Assembly in 2020 all relied on New Yorkers opening their homes during GOTV. What’s different in this race, one staffer told me, is the sheer size and scale of the staging locations. There’s no way the campaign could pay for the space New Yorkers are giving them. From what I can tell, New Yorkers have not opened their homes like this to support a mayoral volunteer force this large in modern history.

And it’s not a coincidence that they are doing it for a candidate who is promising to freeze the rent and fight for tenants, says Genevieve Rand, organizing director for Housing Justice for All, a state-wide coalition of tenant organizations that built popular support for a rent freeze during the primary. The Mamdani campaign, like other DSA campaigns, was “built from the beginning on the assumption that tenants are an untapped political force,” Rand told me. But “they’re less likely to turn out in elections than homeowners are,” so “you have to do huge repeat contact volunteer operations”—making it clear that the campaign is “speaking to and recognizing this ignored and underserved group of voters.” Voters then in turn “respond by trying to figure out how they can help you win,” she said. “One way is by opening the very homes you’re talking to them about saving them money on.”

This tracks with the conversations I had with hosts. Most were tenants with nontraditional schedules eager to leverage their homes for the campaign’s benefit. “I work a lot of nights and most weekends, so that basically prevents me from canvassing,” said Helen Ho, forty-five, a host in Astoria. But she has a porch, “the perfect place” for the campaign to store canvassing literature, which it has been doing in weather-safe containers for months now. “No one needs to be home for folks to pick things up,” she told me. Porches are harder to come by in Washington Heights, but for Shafeka Hashash, thirty-two, who stored campaign materials in her toddler’s bedroom, space is in the eye of the beholder. “Sometimes people think you have to have a gorgeous New York penthouse to have enough space but no, for a couple of weeks, to elect a mayor I believe in, I will allow people to leave boxes, folding tables, chairs, and posters in my house.” She was proud to “help bring about the future I want my child to grow up in. There’s no better use of my home than that.” The only host-homeowner I was able to speak to was also an OG Mamdani supporter. Katya Nicolaou, sixty-three, first met Zohran Mamdani in 2019, around thirty-five years after she emigrated from Cyprus to Astoria, Queens. He was working at a nonprofit housing justice organization at the time, helping small homeowners avoid foreclosure, and she was a DSA member who joined in 2017, the same year he did. In 2019 Nicolaou’s yard became one of a handful of key staging locations for then–public defender Tiffany Cabán’s longshot bid to become Queens County’s next district attorney. “I felt a little nervous,” Nicolaou said. Finding public spaces to train people “turned out to be really hard. Either we had to pay or the location wasn’t convenient.” In the final five days of the campaign, at least fifty to a hundred people came through a day, usually groups of twenty-five people cycling through canvassing shifts. Cabán lost that race but that didn’t stop Nicolaou from opening her home again to send Mamdani, the man who offered to help her navigate her home insurance, to the New York State Assembly. This time it was the summer of 2020, the height of the pandemic. There were fewer people because of COVID-19, but her yard, perfect for social distancing, still filled up. Five years later, with her house full and bustling again and Zohran on the cusp of victory, she feels more energized than ever—“gathering energy and gathering spirit and then flushing it out to the community.”

“I have a deep belief in the way we gather,” one host told me. “If we gather well, we can change the world.”

When I asked Mamdani about the value of staging hosts in late October, I mentioned having spoken to someone that fit Nicolaou’s description. Before I could finish my question, he asked who I spoke to. When I told him it was Katya, his face lit up with what appeared to be genuine recognition. New Yorkers like her, he told me, “are giving our politics a home. They are giving our campaign a home and they are doing it by opening up their own. What these New Yorkers are showing time and time again is that they will provide the foundation for us to make the case directly to our neighbors.” With Election Day around the corner, staging hosts are preparing to make that case once again, either by opening their homes or getting in some last-minute canvassing. But many have also found a deeper sense of purpose and belonging in their neighborhoods. After spending four days in June with her staging field captain who lives ten blocks away, host Kaitlyn Hamby-Fowler encouraged her to join the Upper East Side Collective Action Network, her mutual aid group. They’ll be paired again in November for round two. “A lot of learning about how best to take care of my neighbors bled out of this opportunity,” she told me. Even hosts who didn’t bond with their neighbors credited the experience with waking them up politically. “I thought I had taken a disinterested state over the last few years, but in the past couple years, I’ve realized it was more of a disembodied state,” said Chris Shay, thirty-four, a second-time host in Bushwick. “Once I engaged, I realized I care a lot.” Shay’s shift to embrace a more “embodied” politics feels like an underappreciated ingredient in the Mamdani special sauce. While loneliness and virtual life still reign supreme, the people I spoke to described the thrill of connecting with strangers, watching their toddlers play with canvassers, and coming home to find unexpected guests. And that’s exactly what happened during my call with Helen Ho, who returned to her Astoria home last week after a long day to find a stranger on her porch.

Once she realized it was a Mamdani volunteer, she started laughing. When I asked if she needed to hop off, she said, “It’s fine. They’re just getting what they need.” Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please donate here.

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