Tim Donovan

I was celebrating my 40th birthday, on vacation with my wife and a few friends, when I got a text message out of the blue from the owner of the bar I’d been managing. He wanted to let me know he’d closed the place, effective immediately. Wanted me to hear it from him, first.

All I could feel was a deep, deep sense of relief.

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

I wasn’t upset.

I was ready for a change.

And so I asked myself… now what?

A few months later, Trump was reelected president.

Without a job, I signed up to do some mutual aid work. And then my wife suggested I go canvas for a local candidate running for mayor, too.

Pretty soon, I was falling into the orbit of the Zohran Mamdani primary campaign.

And by the time primary day arrived, I’d been pulled in completely.

I wasn’t alone in having this experience back then, in the spring and summer of 2025 in New York City. From January through November, an army of volunteers working to elect this man mayor swelled to 100,000 strong, collectively knocking 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?

This project is the culmination of that delusion: nine 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.