Four Hundred Pounds

It’s March 15th, 2020. In New York City, steakhouses and department stores that haven’t closed for over a century are suddenly shuttered. Zohran Mamdani is nine months out from a state assembly primary — and his greatest strength as a campaigner, knocking on doors face to face, has just been made illegal. The campaign has to decide: do they keep going?

They keep going. For months, Shawna Morlock and hundreds of other volunteers do something she openly hates — phone banking, hour after hour, week after week, in an apartment she can’t leave. Meanwhile, a small group of friends led by Benham Jones starts showing up to protests with water, snacks, and a medic. When the protests wind down, they rent a U-Haul. Then they get a truck — half-funded by a Big Thief fundraiser. And then they find a line on 400 pounds of bread a week being thrown away by a Bronx bakery. That’s how the Astoria Food Pantry starts.

In June, Zohran wins his primary by 262 votes. The celebration is in Astoria Park, in a torrential downpour, everyone masked. Three years earlier, ten strangers had met in that same park to start a revolution. Now they’re planting a flag.

This episode is the story of Zohran’s 2020 campaign — but it’s really about what happens when a community decides that a crisis is an opportunity. Campaign offices become food pantries. Electoral organizing and mutual aid turn out to be the same thing. And in Astoria, it turns out that everyone is like a bisexual do-gooder.

Zohran Mamdani ran in New York’s 36th Assembly District against ten-year incumbent Aravella Simotas, a moderate Democrat with a progressive voting record but deep ties to the old machine. The primary was held June 23rd, 2020 — three months into the pandemic, with in-person voting extremely low. Zohran led by 600 on election night; after nearly a month of absentee counting, he won by 262 votes. Simotas conceded on July 22nd, 2020.

In late May 2020, just weeks before the primary, local DSA activist Aaron Fernando released a spreadsheet documenting police union donations to mainstream New York Democrats — including Simotas. She quickly promised to donate the funds to charity, but the damage was done. In a change election, it recast her as a creature of the old machine at exactly the wrong moment.

Founded during the pandemic by Benham Jones and a group of friends who started by bringing supplies to protests. They eventually used Zohran’s idle campaign office as a distribution space. Today the pantry operates out of a storefront on Steinway Street near 28th Ave, running a weekly bread pickup from a Bronx bakery — 400 pounds on a good day — and distributing to masjids, churches, and free fridges across Queens.

Zohran’s 2020 win was the beginning of a run: Tiffany Cabán won Astoria’s city council seat in 2021, Kristen Gonzalez won a state senate seat in 2022. Eric Thor worked on all of them. The movement that had started with ten people in Astoria Park in 2018 was now consistently electing candidates across western Queens.