There’s probably no politician more popular in America right now than Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old mayor-elect of New York City. And he’s quickly vaulted beyond the political realm into the national consciousness — he’s Google’s most searched person of 2025.
The democratic socialist’s campaign and election win has also ushered in an attendant rise in awareness and energy in the Democratic Socalists of America, an organization that has seen its national membership grow 10 percent, from 80,000 to 90,000, between October and November. Locally, Cleveland’s DSA chapter attracted 220 members this year.
There’s a different agenda, and a different flavor, to democratic socialism as it’s evolved since Bernie Sanders helped bring the movement exposure during the 2016 presidential election.
“What’s distinctive today is that the appeal is driven by very immediate concerns around affordability and economic security,” Bhaskar Sunkara, a DSA member and author of The Socialist Manifesto, told Scene in an email.
That “people who work for a living share common problems no matter their background,” he said, “and those problems won’t be solved unless we organize together.”
Nothing better represents this pathway from organizing to election win locally than Tanmay Shah’s recent (and now official) victory in the race for Cleveland Ward 12’s City Council seat. A good deal of Shah’s volunteers that knocked on doors this year are DSA members, and at his watch party on November 4, nearly half the room at Bosworth’s Tavern were affiliated with DSA in some form.
And Shah’s win isn’t entirely unique on the local level. Tristan Rader, a state representative and former Lakewood City Council member, won his current seat in 2024 as a self-avowed democratic socialist (and received a DSA endorsement). As did State Senator Nina Turner in 2008.
But can Mamdani’s brand of democratic socialism—with its lofty promises of free buses and free childcare for a coastal city of eight million—translate to a place like Northeast Ohio?
“There’s a big, big chasm here that we need to close,” Rader told Scene. “It helps having people like Tanmay in City Council, me in the Statehouse,” along with colleagues “more in the liberal side of things who I think want some of these same things” we do.
“But, you know, New York’s not fighting a Republican supermajority and we are here,” Rader added. “Sure, it’s different. Just means you got to get more creative.”
Shah, for his part, is continuing to use his voice and social media presence to extol the virtues of DSA.
“In order to create a better city and fight back against the billionaires, we will need to create pressure and hold our elected officials accountable, including me,” be recently posted on Instagram. “This is why I am encouraging you to join Cleveland DSA. We all need someone to hold us accountable and to support us — none of us can do this alone.”
In interviews with six democratic socialist politicians across the region, all six said their campaigns couldn’t have blossomed or earned them their seats without some kind of organizing body as its base. Whether that be the DSA, the Working Families Party, or the Party of Socialism and Liberation.
And, in turn, those organizing bodies relied on, and still rely on, up-and-comers like Shah to test if a progressive agenda—city-owned grocery stores or city-owned apartments—can be formalized into legislation that turns into actual law.
Which is why Shah and his platform was so appealing to Aleena Starks, the Ohio director of the Working Families Party. And why, in her mind, democratic socialism has a chance to continue to catch fire in Cleveland politics.
“There are so many people, politicians especially, those more centrist and moderate, that aren’t thinking outside of the box, aren’t bold enough to say the thing that people really want and need,” Starks said. “That’s why Mamdani’s so popular. That’s why Bernie Sanders is so popular.”
Both reasons, she said, why WFP’s membership also grew “exponentially” this year in tandem with DSA’s.
“What we both have in common is an alternative to the two-party system,” Starks said.
Before the Bernie Sanders era of democratic socialism, it was a well-known rallying cry for turn-of-the-century rail and factory workers. By 1912, the DSA boasted 920,000 members in a movement that pushed Eugene Debs, a former rail worker himself, to run for president five times. (The last time during a three-year stint in federal prison.)
What those like Mamdani have done, it seems, is adapt a political theory going back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to times that demand new interpretation.
“What democratic socialism means to me is a commitment to dignity,” Mamdani said in campaign video for his 2020 bid for the New York State Assembly. “A state to provide whatever is necessary for its people to live a dignified life.”
In the localized sense, that means Cleveland City Hall should, through its own budget, provide Clevelanders help with clinic bills (like City Council’s recent medical debt relief effort), scholarships to trade schools, lifts to food banks, or access to free or cheap internet (like through DigitalC).
Dignity, in Chad F.’s eye, that demands a fight even after big election wins.
“If you want to provide that dignity to everyone,” Chad, 29, a Cleveland DSA member since 2017, said, “you have to actually get together and organize and create a structure and let’s the popular will be executed, right?”
He clarified: “The DSA is having its moment because the DSA is the structure that that energy can go into to become an actual tool capable of that.”
As Cleveland DSA’s membership coordinator, Chad has is working to decide how to best not let a national trend slip through his grips.
Recently, Scene sat in one of DSA’s membership meetings, in a white-walled space at the Brooklyn Library, where Chad led an open discussion of about 20 things to come for the party having its spotlight moment.
Over two hours, Chad and fellow comrade Justin W. carefully (and, must we say, democratically) combed through an agenda. Should there be an email blast for new members? Should we canvass churches to warn immigrants about ICE’s latest tactics? Should we make everyone attend Socialism 101? (Is that truly socialist?)
But the policy shift, if it was one, was pretty obvious: Cleveland’s DSA agreed to do whatever it could to ensure those 220 new “on paper” members became hyper-focused, on-the-ground organizers themselves. Future Shahs, Raders and Mamdanis, to put it cheekily.
“The thing to remember, especially for leadership, is the best leadership is the one that delegates the best,” Justin W. told the roundtable and those attending via Zoom. “We want to help and direct everyone else so that they can be the ones to be the next organizers.”
Chad, who wore a tribal necklace and a loose flannel shirt, stressed what DSA calls one-on-ones: personalized training sessions, from organizer to new member.
“We want to try to make it so that everyone else can then replace us,” he said.
And of course help out with the minutiae of a growing organization. With running text banks. With befriending newcomers in Akron or Stow. Or even applying to become Cleveland’s DSA first official janitor when, early next year, they move into their permanent home in the Brownhoist Building in Midtown.
In other words, keeping a democratic socialist organization truly democratic socialist. And that meant keeping a tidy house.
“You know,” Chad told the room, “Karl Marx didn’t anticipate this.”
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