Tim Donovan

It was my 40th birthday, and I was on vacation with my wife and a few friends. We were away in Massachusetts, enjoying the beach after the summer tourists went home, our vacation almost over. And then I got a text message out of the blue, from the owner of the local bar I’d been managing. To let me know he’d closed the place, effective immediately. Said he wanted me to hear it from him first.

Honestly? I wasn’t even upset.

After two decades of working in the hospitality industry, my body was exhausted. Constantly sore.

I was ready for a change. And so I asked myself… now what?

A few months later, Trump was reelected president. And that question — “now what?” — took on greater urgency.

A friend was volunteering at the Astoria Food Pantry, and convinced me to tag along one Tuesday afternoon. A few weeks later, I saw there were canvassing shifts for a local state assemblyman’s longshot bid for mayor of New York. So I signed up for one of those, too.

I went to a Thursday canvass, not expecting much, but even back then, the excitement around Zohran was undeniable. Rare. So I went back the next week, and pretty soon I was falling into the orbit of the Zohran Mamdani primary campaign. By the time primary day arrived, I’d been pulled in completely. And I wasn’t alone: from January through November, an army of volunteers knocked 3,000,000 doors across the five boroughs.

In Astoria, it felt like watching history unfold from your stoop. Just seven years earlier, we’d shocked the world by electing a 29-year-old former bartender to Congress. Now, that same movement was on the doorstep of Gracie Mansion.

An eruption of joy. A shower of beer, raining down upon us as we screamed and hugged and cried on primary night. I was fully in the moment. But slowly, as the adrenaline began to fade, I caught myself asking a question that I couldn’t answer: how had my dorky neighborhood become ground zero for a political revolution? Why was this new movement so successful in Astoria?

It felt like a story that needed to be told. And I started to wonder… should I just tell it myself?

It was a wild idea, with one major problem: This didn’t feel like an article, it was too long. There were too many characters, too many people involved. It wasn’t a book, either. It felt more like a podcast — a format I knew next to nothing about. I barely listened to them, back then. Hell, I barely listen to them still.

This project is the culmination of that delusion: twelve months (and counting) of labor and learning, of false starts and surprising discoveries.

And of course, this is my story, too. Because I’d already joined in the campaign before this project was even imagined. I was already in way too deep. Pretending to have journalistic distance would have been absurd.

No, this would be a podcast about a movement — as told from the inside.