Twenty Years Apart
In Bay Ridge, 26-year-old Zohran Mamdani is losing an election. In Astoria, they’re fighting off one of the most powerful companies on earth. Two campaigns — one victory, one defeat.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. Some filler words and false starts have been removed. Archival audio clips are noted where they appear.
A reporter calls my phone and she was like, did you hear? And I was like, what am I supposed to be hearing? And she said, Amazon chose Long Island City. We asked them, will you at least remain neutral if your workers attempt to organize? And they said, no, we will not. We will absolutely not. And I could not believe they said that in City Hall chambers, in public.
This is a story about two campaigns and two neighborhoods — separated by 12 miles, and two months. It’s a story of victory, and also one of defeat. Welcome to the People’s Republic of Astoria. This is Episode 02: Twenty Years Apart.
In November of 2018, a 26-year-old first-time campaign manager named Zohran Mamdani was about to lose an election — trying to get Ross Barkan, a local journalist, elected to State Senate in Bay Ridge. They ran a hard campaign; knocked thousands of doors. It wasn’t enough. The loss taught Zohran a painful lesson about New York City politics: the progressive energy sweeping through the city in 2018 wasn’t evenly distributed. In places like Astoria, the voters were desperate for change. But neighborhoods like Bay Ridge exist on a slower timeline.
Bay Ridge and Astoria actually are very similar. The real difference between the two is Astoria by its proximity to Manhattan is closer. Therefore, it’s gentrified much more rapidly.
In 2018, Bay Ridge looked an awful lot like Astoria had, 20 years earlier.
We never had a car, we couldn’t afford a car. So you know you walk to Steinway Street, you walk to Key Foods, you walk to school, you walk to the church. Astoria was our world. I remember the first time I went to a Mets game was in 1979. It felt like a whole different world to us because we had really never left Astoria. But I think it’s true that like, our whole lives were contained within a ten block radius.
That’s Jimmy Van Bramer. He was the first openly queer City Councilor from Queens. He served the neighborhood of Astoria from 2009 to 2018. By then, he’d watched the neighborhood change. Hell, he’d helped change it. So when the richest company in the world was gifted $3 billion in corporate handouts and tax breaks to move into Jimmy’s neighborhood, he wasn’t about to take it lying down.
I just landed and a reporter calls my phone and she was like, “Amazon chose Long Island City.” She said, “do you know this?” Like, “have you been told?” And I had to say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Let me make a couple of phone calls.”
The day that Amazon made their announcement — November 13th, 2018 — fell just one short week after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was elected to Congress. She’d carried the district with over 78% of the vote, despite being outspent by her opponents, 13 to 1. And the army of volunteers who’d just gotten her elected were hardly excited about the notion of their neighborhood being converted into a billionaire’s playground.
It’s 1872, and pianomaker William Steinway Jr. has a problem: his workers mostly live in the squalid tenements of the Lower East Side, one of the most overcrowded places on planet earth. And they’re starting to talk about things like union organizing. Socialism. So he hatches a plan. Buy 400 acres of land on a farm across the East River, in Queens, and build an idyllic company town where he would have complete control. Back then, there wasn’t even a bridge you could use to get back to New York City.
Steinway’s plan didn’t work. Just eight years after his factory moved, his workers went on strike, anyway. In 2018, Amazon would try something similar, on a plot of land just three short miles south of where Steinway’s factory still stands. Same playbook, same outcome. Just a hundred fifty years apart. Oh yeah, Steinway? They still make pianos there, these days. Proudly union strong.
—I said to them, like, how could we do that though? That’s like $3 billion to the richest man and the richest company. Like, did you guys not see what just happened in Western Queens? And they were like, well, we did it, right? We agreed to it. So there’s going to be a press conference with the mayor and the governor. And we want all the local elected officials to be there. And I was like, I’m not gonna be there. I can’t be there. I can’t be a party to this, right?
This was the new Astoria. In a few short years, the neighborhood had changed enough that a progressive councilman could take on Amazon. Could even imagine winning. 20 years earlier, that fight would have been unthinkable.
That’s wild that we would give that much money to the richest man in the world, trillion dollar company?! Anyway, that’s how I found out. True story.
The next day, Jimmy Van Bramer was already holding a press conference in Long Island City, criticizing the decision as irresponsible, bad for New York. I was there that morning, too. I’d been living in Astoria for a while by then, drawn by cheap rent, a short subway ride. I brought my phone, took some pictures, watched Jimmy stand in front of an Amazon box, painted with a frown. He was surrounded by reporters on all sides, and I was thinking, maybe I’d pitch an article about the whole thing, get back into the swing of political writing. Make a few hundred bucks. But the reporters outnumbered the protesters that day. What would I even write? I went home. Went back to work at the bar. Didn’t write a word about what I’d seen.
Jimmy? He got to work. But he was also just a single city councilor. What could he reasonably do? He sat down with another local Astoria politician, State Senator Michael Gianaris. They had a beer. Tried to hash it out.
Mike Gianaris and I had a beer that week and we both kind of said to each other, we can’t be for this, right? There’s so much pressure for us to be for it, right? They had already enlisted lots of surrogates to try and put pressure on us.
To win, they’d have to assemble a coalition unlike anything western Queens had ever seen.
You know, in some of the neighborhood groups that also got involved, some of the neighborhood activists in western Queens got involved. When more of the details started to emerge and the coalition started to take shape.
Eric Thor was just a young man who’d recently moved to the neighborhood. After Trump won in 2016, he wanted to get more involved.
I’m living in Astoria and I see AOC and… after AOC, I saw that Amazon was moving into the neighborhood… Amazon moving into the neighborhood really motivated me.
Soon, he was volunteering with the Democratic Socialists of America.
So, that’s how I got involved with DSA, around the Amazon campaign. And my first canvas was in Long Island City around the new Amazon construction there… Thinking this isn’t going to be a positive development for our neighborhood.
—we were talking with those organizations, those partners. Align and others. RWDSU obviously was huge.
Align stands for the Alliance for a Greater New York, a local organization. RWDSU is a powerful union that represents retail workers. They were both involved. But not all of the labor movement was on board. One prominent retail and warehouse union, 32BJ, was staunchly in favor of the deal. The reasoning at the time was simple: where else would unions be able to really pressure a company like Amazon to improve its labor practices?
I will say this, it was painful because Hector Figueroa was a great, great union leader. But 32BJ had signed on to the deal. And so 32BJ supported HQ2.
In a statement to the podcast from 32BJ about that support, President Manny Pastreich writes: “32BJ has engaged in efforts to organize tens of thousands of building service workers up and down the East Coast just in the past few years. New York City is where the labor movement already has the most density in political power. We supported HQ2 because we believed the labor movement’s existing power in New York could be used to crack open the door to collective bargaining for Amazon workers.”
So it wasn’t unanimous, right? There was a fight. There was certainly a grassroots coalition. And so the fights sort of started and percolated.
Where I believe I was helpful is insisting that Amazon come before the city council. I went to the then-speaker and said, no, we have a role, we have to insist on these things happening. And they did.
That was Corey Johnson. He was a city councilor for Manhattan.
And those were brutal hearings. There were two of them that went on for hours and Amazon was grilled, I think for the first time, where they really had to account for their labor practices, for the deal.
The hearings were supposed to be superficial, just some cynical political pandering to the local progressives of City Hall. Kayfabe. Kabuki. But then Jimmy and his colleagues started asking tough questions.
Do you even need that $3 billion? Do you need the $500 million capital grant to build the buildings when you’re a trillion dollar company? We were able to ask those questions.
On the final day of the hearings, January 30th, 2019, Amazon’s Vice President of Public Policy, Brian Huseman, was asked to answer a simple question. It did not go as planned.
“We asked them, will you at least remain neutral if your workers attempt to organize? And they said, no, we will not. We will absolutely not. And I could not believe they said that in City Hall chambers, in public.”— Jimmy Van Bramer
We asked them, will you at least remain neutral if your workers attempt to organize? And they said, no, we will not. We will absolutely not. And I could not believe they said that in city hall chambers, in public, and even some people in labor who were staying on the sidelines were like, holy shit, you can’t do that.
Just two weeks later, the impossible happened. Amazon backed out.
That was February 14th. That I will never forget.
And do you happen to remember where you were when you found out that they had backed out?
I do. Really, really poignantly, I was with my mom in Astoria. My mom lived on 44th Street in Astoria until she passed away last year. And I had gone to see her that morning. And I was sitting there in her living room, and my phone started to blow up. I looked at my phone, and like reporters and other people were writing, did you hear about Amazon? Amazon pulled out. I thought it was like a prank or something.
But it was Valentine’s Day, not April Fools.
And then my chief of staff called. You have to get back to the office like right now. Amazon just pulled out of the deal.
A working class kid from Astoria had just taken on one of the biggest companies in the world — and won.
And I was like, my God. And I knew something wildly significant had happened in my life. So I turned to my mother and I was like, I have to go right now. I said, Amazon just pulled out of the deal and I have to go. I have to leave right this second, mommy.
—went back to the office and the phone was just off the hook all day long. Cuz it was just… it was just wild. Press, the rally that sort of got interrupted by Heckler famously.
At some point that day, Jimmy almost stopped worrying about Amazon completely. That’s because he had other things on his mind — like a red-eye flight he was supposed to catch at JFK airport that very same evening with his husband Dan. They’d planned a Valentine’s vacation months ago.
Dan and I were going to Puerto Rico that night, like a midnight flight. And the whole day I was thinking, I just have to get on that plane. I just have to get on that plane and it’ll calm down.
Just two months prior to the Amazon fight, in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bay Ridge, a 26-year-old campaign manager named Zohran Mamdani is about to lose the first campaign he’s ever led. His candidate, a journalist named Ross Barkan — you might have heard him help explain the Queens Machine in Episode 01 — they ran a hard campaign. Knocked thousands of doors. Mobilized real grassroots energy. It wasn’t enough.
Around 2017, I started to get the political bug. So I decided to make a pivot, which surprised a lot of people, and run for office myself. When I decided to run, I wanted to be a serious candidate. I didn’t want this to be a vanity campaign. I was from Bay Ridge and I grew up there. So I knew the area well. It was a very strange district because it was gerrymandered.
Ross didn’t know what he was looking for quite yet, but he liked what he’d seen when a local Palestinian-American pastor and Democratic Socialist named Khader El-Yateem was knocking on doors in his neighborhood the year earlier.
They did not win, but the campaign did very well. And they knocked on a lot of doors. My own door in Bay Ridge was knocked on several times. And I hadn’t experienced this before really, seeing this many canvassers in the district. It had always been very sleepy politically. I just was really taken by the energy and then I wanted to tap into some of that, you know, some of that verve and have a field-oriented campaign.
So he reached out to Kayla Santosuosso, who’d been the campaign manager for El-Yateem.
She gave me two names. One seemed like he couldn’t do it or didn’t want to do it. And the other person she recommended was this 26-year-old organizer. His name was Zohran Mamdani. And we had a very good conversation. He was very interested in what I was doing. I was very drawn to him. I thought he’d be great for the campaign. And we decided to reassess in January because that was after the first campaign finance filing deadline.
After losing the previous election with Khader El-Yateem, Zohran was hesitant to embark on another losing campaign in Bay Ridge. But he’d seen the possibility of a community that was changing. Huge influxes of new immigrants had transformed the ethnic character over the past three decades. Now, young progressives were moving in, too. The question was: would it be enough?
He’s not looking to be part of a vanity campaign. He was not looking to run to lose. He’s a very pragmatic person and he wanted to see if I could raise money. Once I’d posted my filing, I’d raised north of $50,000, which, you know, for a State Senate race is decent. It’s not a huge haul, but it’s enough to show you’re serious, you mean business. That was the goal — to break 50 — and we did.
It was a test of whether Bay Ridge in 2018 could do what Astoria had done earlier that year: build a grassroots movement strong enough to defeat an entrenched incumbent. Zohran was ready to take the chance.
He signed on — I want to say early February. He joined up that winter and he became initially the field director. We’d have a designated campaign manager, but the plan was to move him there. And that’s what happened. And he became the campaign manager.
Ross had never done this before. He didn’t have any experience on the ground.
In the beginning of the campaign, he was teaching me how to canvass. We’d go out and knock doors together. Eventually I would actually knock doors by myself.
Even back then, Zohran had pretty strong ideas about how to run a campaign — and how not to.
He believed that it is a waste of manpower to pair up for canvassing. That was something he would push back against. He wanted people to eventually go solo. So you can have double the number of people in the field. He’d be out in the field himself. He would be driving my car, taking volunteers places. With Zohran, we were able to organize quite a bit in southern Brooklyn and bring in a lot of good, strong people. We were able to have a real volunteer core, and a paid canvassing operation that was also quite good. And it was quite good because of Zohran. I mean, that’s his specialty. It’s getting out in the field. It’s training people. It’s inspiring people.
Our field campaign was very strong and that was all door knocking. That was all me in the subways. That was all Zohran sweating in the streets. We worked incredibly hard in that campaign.
While losing in Bay Ridge, Zohran was learning something, too. That sometimes, knocking on doors can only get you so far. Sometimes, you’ve got to use the whole playbook.
We were a campaign that made some real tactical mistakes… We did not send any campaign mailers in part because we felt we didn’t have enough money to do it. We wanted to focus on field.
Like most losing candidates, it’s hard for Ross not to think about what else they could have done. The distance between where they finished and where they needed to be was so very small.
And our field campaign was very strong — we got 42% on a raw field, but we lost. The Democrat I lost to ended up being the Senator, beating Golden in the general, which did confirm my suspicion in 2018 that Golden was vulnerable. I think had we sent mail, I don’t know if we would have won, but we would have gotten closer.
The trip from Astoria to Bay Ridge is about 12 miles, and the time from when Ross lost his primary to when Amazon announced their new headquarters was just two months. But the distances that separate these places can’t be counted in months. They can’t be measured in miles. And sometimes, those distances obscure how similar the places can really be.
In Astoria, people like Jimmy had been building the foundation for a grassroots movement for decades. But he couldn’t have done it alone. It took an entire community of people to make it happen. Some of whom will never appear in a history book or Wikipedia entry. People like Donnie Dunn.
He died many years ago and I just like to say his name. But my babysitter and my mom’s best friend had a son, Donnie — Donnie Dunn — and he was gay.
He was the first person that I ever saw who was gay, but I didn’t really know the word as a kid. But I would also hear the other teenagers, how they talked about Donnie and his friend when they passed by, saying words that made it very clear to me even as a little boy that they were making fun of Donnie. Donnie would wear these big bell bottoms, jeans, and he had long flowing hair, and he had a good friend, another guy that he would hang out with.
Jimmy adored him.
But the problem for me at the time is that the closet was so painful for me. And I thought, you can’t be gay and be an elected official, right? Those two things could never be one. So I gave up on that dream.
In 1988, Jimmy Van Bramer enrolled at St. John’s University, right here in Queens. For nine years, he’d kept his identity bottled up inside, afraid to show his true self to the cruel boys of the streets of Queens. But no longer.
—finally came out of the closet. And from there, I was an activist and I very, very quickly got involved in campaigns to elect openly gay candidates.
Ed Cedarbaum was the first out queer person to run for office in the borough, back in 1998.
There were lots of mentors in the queer political community who encouraged me to run. But at Ed’s election night party, he thanked all the volunteers and the staff. And when he came to thank me, he said, one day Jimmy’s going to do this. And it was a very important part of my life. Though he fell short, he said I would do it. And I lost my first race in ’01, but I finally won in ’09.
Jimmy would become the first openly gay member of City Council from Queens. From his home in Sunnyside, not far from Astoria, Jimmy doesn’t have a lot of regrets looking back. But he also won’t sugarcoat it. None of this was easy.
It was a really difficult day, you know, if I’m being honest, because there was a lot of hatred and a lot of anger directed at me in ways that I had not really yet experienced. And a lot of those really powerful forces who were not used to losing.
“Billionaires don’t lose, right? Trillion dollar corporations don’t lose. Real estate developers in New York City don’t lose. And when they lost, they were f***ing pissed.”— Jimmy Van Bramer
Billionaires don’t lose, right? Trillion dollar corporations don’t lose. Real estate developers in New York City don’t lose. And when they lost, they were f***ing pissed. I think history has proven us to have been correct that that kind of giveaway of billions of dollars to the richest corporations in the world was not good policy. Amazon continues to be anti-union to this day. That has not changed. They were never going to change how they view unions and allowing workers to organize, right? We’re seeing that to this day in Queens. It was just a rally for the drivers.
Everything Zohran does, he takes very seriously. We remain friends after that campaign and stayed in touch. The way he was when I met him isn’t any different than he is now in terms of his level of people engagement, charisma, his sense of humor, the ways he’s able to just inspire people and organize people. I saw this firsthand.
But I do think that elected officials have a bully pulpit, right? They do have the microphone and they have the ability to amplify and uplift the messages that are coming. The gentrification of Western Queens and Astoria in particular has produced a different neighborhood in some ways, but I’m just not the kind of person who’s like, that’s always bad. And I resent the newcomers and I resent the hipsters, quote unquote.
It’s been very fun to see the world know him now. So yeah, this is someone I knew. I’m also glad I did not win in retrospect. I’ve enjoyed my career since. I don’t want to be — nothing against Albany — but I don’t want to be a state legislator. I don’t want to be in politics. I have a lot more freedom to speak my mind, pursue my projects, burnish my career. So I love writing. I don’t love politics… but it was a great experience. I’m really happy the experience happened.
Zohran would apply the lessons he learned from losing in Bay Ridge in 2018 to his state assembly campaign that he would run in Astoria two years later, and to his mayoral campaign in 2025. He’d still assemble an army of volunteers knocking on doors — Zohran will always be a field-first candidate — but he would also use social media, mailers, TV ads during Knicks games, interviews on Fox News… whatever it takes.
When I stood outside on that cold November morning, watching Jimmy give his press conference to a gaggle of reporters, I thought the distance between us was a product of circumstance. Happenstance. He was the councilman, I was the bartender. He was in the fight, I was on the sideline. But what I didn’t understand at that time — what I wouldn’t learn until seven years later, volunteering myself — was that we weren’t separated by mere circumstance. The real distance was time. Effort. Engagement.
Jimmy had spent 20 years building the relationships, the credibility, the coalition that would make that moment possible. You can’t just show up and lead a fight like that. You have to be a part of something first. Lucky for me, they managed to win anyway. Didn’t need my help.
And so there is a natural evolution and change to neighborhoods in big cities… That’s part of what’s happened here. It’s produced a better politics, right? One where a queer kid like me might have the space to come out earlier as opposed to what I experienced in 1979 in Astoria watching Donnie Dunn get called a f*****t.
And so there is a natural evolution and change to neighborhoods and big cities. That’s part of what’s happened here. Astoria is in many ways a freer place for lots of people to bring their full and authentic selves to the neighborhood in which they live. And that’s a good thing. And lots of people made that happen over decades, right? That is queer people like Donnie Dunn, living their lives and saying, I don’t give a shit what you’re calling me behind my back. I’m gonna walk down 42nd Street in Astoria in my bell-bottom jeans and long flowing hair and defy you, right?
I’m like, “I can’t wait to sleep!” And then the person was like, “no, no, there’s no sleeping.” [Laughs] “We have a district attorney race to win!” And I was like… “what?”
With a margin that narrow, your mind goes to a thousand places. Like, you know… when it’s 55 votes. It’s like, maybe that Saturday or Sunday… if it hadn’t rained the canvas…
—like if there was a penny, or a paper clip or something like that, this person’s choice got thrown away.
The People’s Republic of Astoria is written, narrated, and produced by Tim Donovan. If you’re enjoying the show, please subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. For show notes, more information, and episode transcripts, visit our website at peoplesrepublicpod.com. Music by Pyrosion. Special thanks to my wife Alice for all of her great ideas, her endless support. Without her, none of this is possible. Thanks to Daisy Larom and Sarah Noe. Special thanks to Ross Barkan, Jimmy Van Bramer, and all the other guests.
See you next time, in the People’s Republic.
You’ve gotta be ready!
Chapter 03: Fifty-Five Votes
Read Transcript →Written, narrated, and produced by Tim Donovan.
Music by Pyrosion, used under Creative Commons license. Full licensing details available at peoplesrepublicpod.com.
Special thanks to Alice, Daisy Larom, and Sarah Noe. Thanks to Ross Barkan, Jimmy Van Bramer, Eric Thor, and all the guests who shared their stories.