Zohran Mamdani's win in New York’s mayoral primary has inspired socialists around the world. Suddenly, America’s largest city is on the verge of being governed by a mayor committed to arresting Netanyahu and bringing down the cost of living for millions of workers. Everyone who cares about fighting against authoritarianism at home and genocide abroad is talking about Zohran and the movement that the campaign built – and who was behind much of it: socialists.

DSA has a real claim to being the most democratic mass organization in the United States. DSA members all across the country elected over 1,200 delegates for our upcoming Convention. Members have been and will continue to read and discuss hundreds of pages covering 100+ proposals for our organization and delegates will elect our leadership from a crowded field of candidates. 

This culture of democracy is why our movement has the vitality and participation it takes to run winning campaigns and build working-class political power. Delegates will make decisions at Convention based on the lessons from the elections and pressure campaigns and union drives and contract fights that they have been a part of leading. 

We should harness the unified energy that a successful Convention will represent and turn it outwards to expand our ranks. Building our movement requires resources, and growing our party’s membership is one of the core ways we can generate sustained revenue, diversify our demographics, and develop new leaders.

When we ask prospective members to join DSA, we can tell them that we are building DSA so that we can organize workers to make political interventions at a national level, which is what is required to end the genocide and fight climate change. We can train members’ organizing skills and build our base of support by launching local winnable campaigns and running chapter leaders for local offices. We can merge the socialist movement and the labor movement by fighting alongside organized workers and unifying the socialist movement behind a short set of widely- and deeply-felt issues: Medicare for All, Bring Down the Cost of Living, End Political Corruption, Unions for All, and End U.S. Militarism.

To launch this membership drive, we should start a national campaign organizing committee to coordinate recruitment. This should start with a national launch call, followed by weekly meetings open to all active recruiters. We can use relational organizing and pre-existing lists and other organizational links as sources for recruitment. We should recruit convention delegates to participate in the recruitment drive. Below, we lay out an outline for this campaign. 

At least 100,000 members by January 1st, 2026

• Relational organizing:

  • 5,000 members get 1 other person to join as part of the drive (roughly equivalent to a majority of active members) 

  • In collaboration with the NLC, we can organize union members to recruit their coworkers to DSA, providing templates for organizing conversations and support for new union members in DSA

• Existing lists of potential members

  • Tap DSA for Bernie lists and other old canvassing contact lists such as California's Prop 15 campaign from 2021

• Turning medium sized chapters into large chapters

  • Medium-sized chapters can become big chapters that can then launch campaigns at the beginning of the year

• Developing new leaders

  • Chapter leaderships can appoint points of contact for the membership drive – ideally someone who is ready to take on a chapter campaign but hasn’t yet

• Convention delegates 

  • Delegates represent the most active layer of members and should be expected to bring additional members into the organization

• New members since Zohran 

  • These members may be eager to organize and should be quickly given the opportunity to do 1-on-1 organizing

• Relevant lists (including lists of delegates, members who have joined since June 24th, and chapters based on size)

• System to create unique join links to track who is recruiting new members

• Creating a leaderboard system and page where members and chapters can compete for recruiting the most new members to DSA

• Organizing rap for recruiting prospective members, including specialized pitches for coworkers and union siblings

• Picture and quote template for social media testimonials

• Membership drive overview

• Instructions for using the leaderboard and unique join links

• Chapter email template