The Democratic Socialists of America’s New York City convention on Saturday arrived at a moment of heady promise for the group.
The chapter has nearly tripled its size since Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. Members knocked on doors and canvassed sidewalks to send two more D.S.A. members to Congress and half a dozen new members to the State Legislature, where they are expected to push to raise taxes on the rich.
But New York’s D.S.A. chapter now faces a set of prickly questions about how to use its newfound local influence to change the priorities of city government, and whether to put its national influence to the test by running a candidate for president.
The resolutions debated by more than 400 delegates in a Midtown Manhattan office building were designed to set the political and legislative priorities for the next two years.
D.S.A. members debated nine resolutions, whittled down from a longer list of roughly 100 that had been submitted leading up to the event.
The highest-profile vote, whose outcome came as little surprise, was a resolution encouraging Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat, to run for president in 2028, which passed by a margin of 291 to 123. The resolution was not an official endorsement, but it made clear that the local chapter would push her candidacy, much as it did her long-shot bid for the House in 2018.
D.S.A. members also unanimously approved a resolution to pressure city government to prioritize community safety. They urged Mr. Mamdani to upgrade his Office of Community Safety to a department; expand the work of emergency responders with mental health training; and disband the Police Department’s Strategic Response Group. (Mr. Mamdani is expected to announce the overhaul of the unit on Monday.)
They voted to create a membership drive to attract more Black and Latino members, after months in which the D.S.A.’s rise had faced scrutiny from some local Black and Latino political leaders. And they voted down a resolution that would have opposed the demolition of the public housing developments known as the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses, in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.
D.S.A. members were especially giddy about encouraging Ms. Ocasio-Cortez to run for president, though there was a sizable group who dissented. Some members have criticized her for what they see as a drift away from the left during her time in Congress. D.S.A.’s national leaders pulled their endorsement of her because they felt she was insufficiently supportive of the Palestinian cause.
And when members gathered over Zoom this summer to try to decide on a process for a presidential endorsement, the effort descended into infighting, with some reluctant to move too quickly toward embracing Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s candidacy.
New York City’s D.S.A. members — who are known to be more tactical and election-focused than others in the movement — have been largely cheering her potential run. At the D.S.A.’s national summer summit in Chicago, a member of the New York chapter gave a fiery speech encouraging her to run at a “D.S.A. for A.O.C.” party. And at an election night watch party this month in Astoria, Queens, chants of “A.O.C.!” broke out.
“The last time we held our convention, N.Y.C.-D.S.A. endorsed the candidate who became the mayor of New York City,” said Gustavo Gordillo, the chapter’s co-chair. “This time our vision is no less ambitious. Our members will decide whether to ask a democratic socialist to run for president.”
Many of the resolutions debated at Saturday’s D.S.A. convention were laced with the same political complexities that the Mamdani administration has had to deal with. The mayor has confronted criticism from progressive supporters who say he has not prioritized efforts to reform policing, particularly when he decided to retain Jessica S. Tisch as police commissioner. Instead of creating a full-scale Department of Community Safety when he came into office, he made a pared-down Office of Community Safety.
And the plan to demolish the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses, then rebuild them along with mixed-income buildings, which Mr. Mamdani supports, has triggered a backlash from some residents of public housing, who don’t believe the demolition is necessary. In the lead-up to the D.S.A. convention, a slate of public housing residents ran to become delegates so they could advance the resolution opposing the project. (It failed.)
In many ways, D.S.A.’s New York City group acts as an older sibling of sorts to smaller chapters across the United States. It is about three times larger than the next largest chapter, in Los Angeles. And its soaring political ambition, which catapulted Mr. Mamdani to City Hall, has driven D.S.A. members around the nation to place a stronger emphasis on electoral organizing, according to interviews with members in other parts of the country.
When Atlanta D.S.A. members wanted to improve their own door-knocking efforts, they came to New York and studied the tactics of local organizers — finding, for example, that they should use folders instead of clipboards when door knocking, because it lightens the field campaign’s physical load.
But members of the New York D.S.A. chapter have also tussled with leaders from other parts of the country, including over the summer in a long and acrimonious Zoom meeting about how the D.S.A. should approach a presidential endorsement.
“The stakes are pretty high given the current political backdrop,” said Conrad Blackburn, a New York D.S.A. member who recently fell short in his bid for the State Assembly. “It’s incumbent on all of us, especially all of us inside D.S.A., to continue pushing for big changes and big policy ideas that are going to move the needle. People all over the country and world are looking to us right now to see how we move.”
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