Four Hundred Pounds
This is the story of Zohran Mamdani’s 2020 State Assembly run — and a global pandemic. But it’s really about the way that people come together when everything around them is falling apart.
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.
I think every single person was just like, “oh well, if I’d just done like four more shifts throughout the six months—”
Amazon moving into the neighborhood really motivated me.
With a margin that narrow, your mind goes to a thousand decisions that you made—
I remember sliding the petition sheet that I had underneath the door of the office. [Chuckles.] You know… this was a very long year…
You know, COVID hits — it hits all of us. People are losing their jobs. People are losing work. And, you know, you could hunker down and let it pass you by. Or, you know, you could step up and fight for something new.
In New York City, steakhouses and department stores that haven’t closed their doors for over a century — not for blizzards, hurricanes, or even blackouts — have suddenly closed up shop. And in Astoria, Queens, a young activist named Eric Thor is getting to work. Outside, a global pandemic has ground the world to a screeching halt. Inside, they’ve got an election to win. Welcome to The People’s Republic of Astoria. This is Episode 04: Four Hundred Pounds.
Eric was one of the first volunteers to get involved with Zohran Mamdani’s State Assembly campaign, back in 2019. But before all that, Eric was just learning how to canvass, how to get involved — one campaign at a time. And in Astoria, Queens, where he’d recently moved, there was plenty of work to be done.
I met Zohran while volunteering alongside the Tiffany Cabán campaign… We almost won it.
So this election may be over… but we are just getting started.
When Tiffany Cabán lost her District Attorney race in 2019, she spoke those words to a crowd of dedicated activists and volunteers who’d taken her just fifty-five votes shy of a stunning upset. And it turns out, she was right — they were just getting started. In the next few years, Astoria and the surrounding neighborhoods would elect a slate of Democratic Socialists to local office: Zohran Mamdani in 2020, Tiffany Cabán in 2021, Kristen Gonzalez in 2022. Eric would go on to work on all those campaigns. But back then, he and Zohran were both just rank-and-file members of the DSA.
There’s a Facebook post of like an October 19th or whatever, where I’m like, here’s the website I made for Zohran, support him. And I guess he left enough of an impression on me where when he did ask for the website, I was like, of course I’m going to do this for you, bro. I’m going to make this for you for free. Let’s go. Let’s do this.
By October of 2019, Zohran was ready to formally launch his State Assembly campaign; the primary election was slated for June of the following summer.
I remember I was with Zohran and a few folks when they were doing that very first canvass at the Bernie rally at Queens Bridge.
They were perfectly positioned to run the kind of campaign Zohran prefers: a field-focused contest where his army of volunteers could knock on every door, talk with every voter face to face. But sometimes, the world has other plans.
I’ll never forget how I first learned about the pandemic. It was early February of 2020 and I was bartending at Mar’s, a local cocktail bar. It was a quiet night, mid-winter, and a regular came in with a friend — a kid from China who was getting his masters in the city. I got out early that night, and went and found them at another spot nearby for late-night drinks. As we stood outside, I learned about this grad student — he was from a city called Wuhan. I’d never heard of it, to be honest. But he started telling me about his family back home. “They’ve locked down the whole city,” he explained. “A pandemic. Everyone’s stuck inside their apartments. They have been, for days. No one knows anything. The authorities won’t say anything. No one’s allowed outside.”
For the next few weeks, I went to all the bars and restaurants in the neighborhood where I knew the staff. I warned everyone. Maybe I was just being paranoid. Maybe it would turn into nothing. But save some money, I told them. Just in case we miss a few shifts. Just in case. And then on March 15th, “just in case” became “holy shit.”
Eric was there at the beginning — before the shutdown, while they could still knock doors.
I had a chance to do some canvassing, especially on the earlier end. I did one shift. It was me and Zohran. One of the things that we do is those morning subway canvasses. And they are brutal in cold weather because it’s 20 degrees, you’re on the subway platform, it’s freezing. Your pen is freezing, so you have to have pens that keep the right temperature — or you have to have some pens stocked behind your jacket so they stay warm so they don’t freeze while you’re getting the signature at 7 a.m. in the morning. But you still get those signatures, right?
To run in the New York State Assembly, candidates try to collect 1,500 signatures from legal residents of their district.
It was breakneck. I’ve never seen anybody so impressive getting petition signatures — amazing work. So while Zohran’s collecting these signatures, he’s wearing a keffiyeh and this lady sees this keffiyeh and she’s Palestinian. And she’s like, oh my gosh! So she sees his keffiyeh, she’s like, let me grab my mom. And I have a photo of it too of the three of them standing together.
And then, on March 15th, interactions like that had to stop. “Field work” — going door to door — was at first illegal, and then later terrible optics, political suicide. Zohran’s greatest strength as a campaigner had been effectively neutralized. Would the campaign even continue? How do you run for office against an entrenched incumbent during a global pandemic? Could the grassroots, field-focused model even work when the world had shut down? Eric, Zohran, and thousands of others were ready to find out.
We had to shut down the office. We had to shut everything down. And we had to get serious about — hey, are we going to follow through with this campaign? And we decided, hey, you know, we’re going to follow through with this. After that, we had a chance to use the campaign office for a little bit. That was the canvassing opportunities that we had in the beginning. And then for a lot of the middle of it, it was a lot of phone banking.
I really hate phone banking in a way that I can’t really describe.
Shawna Morlock was there, too. Coming off a heartbreaking district attorney loss, she volunteered constantly — forcing herself to do something she absolutely hated, a few days a week.
I did a few Zohran phone banks and I had to do it for like, I don’t know, five or six months? It was terrible. It was all phone banking in 2020. But his campaign — the scripts that they had written for the phone banks and like the answers that they had to commonly asked questions — were so well written and natural and like easy to understand and easy to articulate. It really was a joy getting to call through people. It was just honestly the best run phone banking I’ve ever, ever seen. And I guess it would kind of have to be, because that’s all we were doing for a long time.
There was a lot of fear, I think we all had right when the pandemic first hit. There was a lot of mutual aid. A lot of scrambling and like a lot of like, how do we stand things up?
In New York City, in the summer of 2020, the tension was palpable. Despite a global pandemic that was still actively spreading, tens of thousands of New Yorkers emerged from their apartments and homes — masked up and ready to protest.
When George Floyd was murdered, you know, that was also like very much a turning point in the energy and the access that we had — or what we felt we were allowed to do — in terms of community organizing and support during COVID.
That’s Benham Jones. He’s president and co-founder of the Astoria Food Pantry, an organization founded during the pandemic. But back then, he was just part of a small group of friends who wanted to do something concrete. Tangible. Real.
So a bunch of us started going out at first on foot to protests with just like legal aid info and water and snacks and a medic. And then we ended up — we just kind of graduated. The protests just continued every day and kept getting bigger and bigger. Then when we couldn’t do that anymore, we were renting U-Hauls. And then we eventually got this truck that we’re in right now, which was community funded — and also half of the cost was a fundraiser by the great American rock band, Big Thief.
This truck functioned as what we called at the time the People’s Bodega — that’s kind of the loose name of a project of like a mobile mutual aid unit.
At the time, there were immediate needs posed by the crisis — and sometimes, opportunities. What had started as a state assembly candidate’s humble campaign office was transforming into something new.
We were having volunteer shifts where I would go down and we would bag food to be served. I think it was during Ramadan actually that year. And it was really brutal — we were giving out, you know, bagging food for mosques and then people would come by while we were bagging the food, asking for food as well. And we had a few to give out. At some points there were some moms there where I had to say, I only have four meals here and you’re going to have to divide it between two or three of you or something like that.
Activists were creating nonprofits. Campaign offices were transforming into food pantries. Throughout Astoria, people like Benham and Eric were getting to work. I was, too — in my own way. When the shutdown finally hit, I was wracked with survivor’s guilt: my wife had an office job that went remote on Day One, so we were never in financial jeopardy. But that wasn’t the norm among my coworkers — current or former. So even before Cuomo announced, I was already building a website, putting together a GoFundMe. It was called “The Astoria Service Industry Emergency Response Fund,” and to finance it, I solicited donations from the small handful of people I knew with disposable income to spare.
Over the next month, I got over 40 donations, and raised almost three thousand dollars, which we donated directly to local restaurant and bar workers in need. But once the money was distributed and the donations dried up, I didn’t bother to keep it going. I patted myself on the back, pleased that I’d done some good. And I had, for a while. For a few years after the pandemic, I’d always find a drink bought for me if I ran into certain people in the neighborhood. It was a reminder — what I’d done had mattered. But then I’d stopped.
Benham? He was just getting started.
My comrade Cody was really the one who first got to connect. She had this line on this incredible amount of waste that an industrial gourmet bakery up here in the Bronx was getting rid of every day. So the organizer in the South Bronx was utilizing the connection for as long as they could. Let my comrade Cody know about it. And we kind of took over what is now this Tuesday pickup, when we go and — we estimate on a good day — we’re picking up 400 pounds of bread.
The need was obvious, and Benham and his crew were filling it. But the elected official Zohran was trying to primary, Aravella Simotas, she wasn’t scandal-ridden. And her voting record was solidly progressive. Why even bother?
So we needed to kind of really make our case. And I think it needed to be aggressive, because a lot of times there’s a lot of skepticism about this campaign. Why are you trying to primary this nice progressive lady who’s been an incumbent for the past 10 years?
Aravella Simotas and Mike Gianaris were moderate… inoffensive.
In just a few short years, the political winds in Astoria had shifted. People like Mike Gianaris jumped on board — he’d opposed Amazon HQ2, endorsed progressive candidates, and survived. But politicians like Aravella Simotas — still deeply tied to the old machine — risked getting run over. This primary challenge wasn’t really about Simotas’s policies or her platforms. This was a movement testing its strength. Seeing whether or not they could send one of their own to Albany. They wanted a rank-and-file member to represent them in the heart of the People’s Republic.
A lot of people didn’t show up for us. Our lit didn’t have too many organizations on it. AOC did not endorse our race.
For people like AOC, endorsing Zohran carried little advantage — and plenty of risk. Simotas was well-liked, in good standing with her constituents. But in 2020, the whole world had turned upside down, and Zohran was there to offer a more radical vision of what was possible.
The messaging and the comms of the campaign were not shying away from any of these big fights. And one of the things that we did, I think, was just really stigmatize taking money from police unions, which I believe our opponent did.
In late May, just a month before the primary election, local DSA activist Aaron Fernando released a spreadsheet documenting political donations from police unions to a number of mainstream New York Democrats — including Aravella Simotas. Simotas immediately scrambled, promising to donate the funds to a local charity. But it was too late. This was a “change” election, and the incumbent had just been painted as a creature of the old machine.
While Zohran and Eric were ramping up the State Assembly campaign, Benham and his friends were plotting something more local, more focused, more immediate. They were asking themselves: was there a way to turn this ad hoc community organizing into something bigger? Something more sustainable? Maybe. But first, they’d need to find a space.
And then, I mean, as the mythology goes, Zohran was doing the 2020 campaign, had an office he couldn’t use, so he gave us use of that space to do all those classic food pantry things — food distributions and coat drives, that sort of stuff. What became the Astoria Food Pantry, which I think originally started out of our friend Michaela’s car.
In that moment, during the crisis of the early pandemic, the walls between “activism” and “organizing,” between electoral politics and mutual aid — they were dissolving. What mattered now was feeding people. Helping neighbors. Coming together.
Mutual aid networks and community support systems have always been going on. I would say that the COVID experience certainly catalyzed a certain level of activity or interest in access and just — once you realize that wow, the rug could really get fully pulled — you want to know that there is a place that you can go. Or you lose your job and you just don’t know what to do and you’re in a state of paralysis — who are we going to look to for that support now that we know that the veil is pretty thin?
When the pandemic happened and all of the old way of doing business just didn’t seem to make so much sense anymore, I think there were a lot of people in Astoria who were like, immediately — cause it’s the drama club crew — they were like, how can we help? What can we do?
There are a lot of like Mr. Rogers neighborhood helpers. And that has given rise to a whole amazing infrastructure of new social spaces and community support spaces. And thank God too, because this whole community and generation of dive bars and art spaces that we had building in Astoria were mostly decimated by the pandemic, you know? So yeah, it turns out that everyone in Astoria is like a bisexual do-gooder.
June 23rd, 2020. It’s primary day in New York City. Humid but not too hot — the turnout would have been strong most other years. But in the summer of the pandemic, in-person voting was extremely low. Most New Yorkers opted to stay home. In New York State Assembly District 36, only 8,000 ballots were cast that day, with Zohran leading that night by just 600. But there were ten thousand more absentee ballots yet to be counted, and it would be almost a month before the final tally was announced. For volunteers like Shawna, it was all like a bad dream. Deja vu, all over again.
So like that year we were doing vote counting like in that same courthouse, you know, in the Queens County courthouse.
So you went back.
Yeah. And just masked this time and the stress was like through the roof again.
So one of the first election districts they counted was Queensview in Astoria. And they strongly went with our opponent. And that was the first one we kind of got in and we’re like, it’s over.
So like the earlier votes were really good for the campaign. And I think the later election districts that were counted were maybe less good for the campaign.
But as the additional ones kind of came in, they were a bit more mixed, a bit more favorable. We were seeing the gap close.
They were seeing the totals kind of going down — their lead going down — and were very stressed. I think everyone was like, oh God, not again. Thinking we might have a repeat of the Tiffany race.
I have this one sheet of paper in this drawer where we were all doing this bizarre sort of math — like, okay, there’s only this many votes left, but we have enough of a gap where they can’t, now they can’t make those votes up.
Yeah, you could see that everyone there was like sick, so stressed. Not like physically sick, but like pulling their hair out stressed.
Okay, we’re losing ground, but how much ground are we going to lose? And at first it looks like we’re going to lose all the ground and we’re going to lose. But over time it looked like — okay, actually we’re going to win. So it was really down to the last minute there.
When the final tally came in, Zohran led by just 262 votes. But the young progressives in Western Queens had already learned that it didn’t matter if they won or lost. Not really. Aravella Simotas would concede on July 22nd, 2020.
Later that day, there was a torrential downpour and we’re in Astoria Park and we’re in this torrential downpour. We’re also wearing masks because we’re still thinking about COVID and stuff like that. And it’s outside, under the bridge. Our umbrellas are getting thrown around. It was wild. It was wild. It was a really great experience.
Just three years earlier, Shawna and ten perfect strangers had met in that same park to attempt the impossible — and in the process, started a revolution.
You just have to go for it. When you see that there is kind of lightning in a bottle, you know, you can squander that by sitting back and taking a break and you know, trying to be more analytical. Or you can figure out the things that worked, try and work on the ones that didn’t work… but you just can’t stop moving.
Back then, DSA was young and untested. AOC’s win almost felt like a fluke. Now? Zohran, Eric, Shawna, and the rest of Astoria’s Democratic Socialists were planting their flag in the ground. And even as Zohran headed up to Albany to start serving Astoria in the State Assembly, Benham, Eric, and the rest were getting back to work. At the Food Pantry, they secured a storefront property in the heart of the neighborhood by 28th Ave and Steinway.
The Zohran-era AFP campaign office hybrid thing was not the most conducive to doing food… we did a lot of clothes out of there and stuff. But yeah, the first bread pickup we did in this truck, we filled this truck top to bottom and we did it out of my friend Cody’s kitchen, in which you literally could not move — it was like a wall of boxes and bags. Yeah, it was pretty serious business. But yeah, it was crazy. It took days. It took days.
For Benham, what started as a way to help his community has become a way of life.
I’ve learned so much about how the community will step in if you ask for help or if you say you need to step away.
In 2020, I stepped away. My Emergency Response Fund had finished distributing the money I’d raised. And for the rest of the pandemic, I lived a comfortable, unemployed life. When vaccines were finally available, I went back to working at the bar. It was chaos. Chronically understaffed, wildly busy. For a few years, I was working all the time. I told myself they needed me, and in a lot of ways, they did. But it seemed easier, too. Easier than committing to something that I might have to sustain. Just around the corner, in storefronts and home offices, my neighbors were busy. Doing the work. Showing up. It would be five more years before I got on board.
I have been involved in lots of different kind of community projects over my years in Astoria, and I love this neighborhood and I’m so grateful for it — and this is just the one that I really want to see stick.
Every Tuesday, Benham and his crew of happy dumpster divers take their truck to the Bronx and back, where a group of some dozen-plus volunteers awaits in Astoria, ready to unload the bread. Wearing masks and gloves, we’ll sort through the haul, cutting baguettes and sourdough loaves into smaller pieces. Some will get put outside in the fridge — people are always waiting. Others will be loaded onto cars and trucks, to be shuttled to masjids and churches, free fridges scattered throughout the borough of Queens.
I want to go away and come back in a decade and be like, hell yes, the food pantry is still there. And it might look really different, it might serve a very different function or whatever. But as long as it’s still there and people know that it’s a place to go to when you either need help or you want to help — that is a success to me.
Six years after I started the “Astoria Service Industry Emergency Response Fund,” you can still pull up GoFundMe and find my page. I raised 59% of the goal — $2,939 out of $5,000 attempted. My last donation was a hundred bucks, six years ago now. Building something is often the easy part. It can happen by chance, or out of sheer necessity. But sustaining it? Building upon it? Watching it grow? That’s the real work.
These days, Benham Jones is the President of the Astoria Food Pantry — an honor, he’s quick to clarify, that was chosen out of a hat.
I almost joke that I say I’ve never enjoyed living in New York more. Even though we lost all these incredible spaces — to see Astoria kind of reorganize itself, with the food pantry or the mutual aid network, or even just the concept of community-supported infrastructure as the nucleus, has been really exciting. And honestly, it came just in time to save my life, because I was like — I can’t keep living in bars anymore, I can’t keep doing this.
Since that primary campaign in 2020, Eric Thor’s involvement with local politics has only grown. Later that year, he was elected as co-chair of NYC DSA. And in 2024, for his final act in that position? Formally endorsing Zohran Mamdani for mayor.
These campaigns, and the politics that you put so much of yourself into… if it matures, and you plant these seeds, and they grow and they bear wonderful fruit or whatever… that feels really great! You recognize that you’re doing something that you’re gonna carry with you for the next 10, 20, for the rest of your life, you know! But if that work is in turn rewarded and is seeing positive results… I think we’re all approaching this as: we’re building something bigger than ourselves.
I go with Benham to the Bronx, these days. Ride along, and help carry the bread from the rolling bins where they’ve left it waiting for us, neatly bagged, back to the truck. I don’t go every Tuesday, but I go a lot. I started out last winter, when I was newly unemployed and a friend invited me along. I never expected that it would change my life. But in the year since, I’ve plugged into local politics, I got to be part of an historic political campaign — I even started this podcast. But honestly? Nothing beats the humble, thankless, anonymous work we do for one hour every Tuesday afternoon.
It’s something real, immediately helpful. Blissfully simple, and entirely concrete.
“People ask me, they’re like, what’s the secret to the work? And I’m usually like, I think it’s just showing up on time and just being reliable.”— Benham Jones
For me it’s also… there’s something to be said for just… to just really show up in service is a way to both humble yourself and learn… to shut your mouth and just pack chickpeas or pack bread or something, is a good way to remember — what are the things that people really need.
You know, I was almost the whole way to Inwood — it’s like 190th Street or something? And my body is just shutting down—
6 am to 9 pm polls are open, and you are there all day… and then obviously afterward, you are partying. I screamed “we’re the mayor” a thousand times I think that night, because we were the campaign.
See you next time in the People’s Republic.
People ask me, they’re like, what’s the secret to the work? [Laughs.] And I’m usually like, I think it’s just showing up on time and just being reliable.
Chapter 05: Twenty-Six Hours
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 Eric Thor, Benham Jones, Shawna Morlock, Ross Barkan, and all the guests who shared their stories.