Ten Perfect Strangers
In January 2018, ten people met in a park to canvass for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This is the story of that campaign.
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.
It’s June 21st, 2025 in Astoria, Queens, and next Tuesday we have a primary election. I’m standing on a stranger’s porch looking at plastic bins filled with campaign literature. Soon, I’ll bring them to my car, and take them to a staging location nearby, where hundreds of volunteers will show up to grab materials and fan out across the neighborhood, knocking thousands of doors.
My name is Tim Donovan. I’ve lived in Astoria, Queens for fifteen years, now — and counting. I spent a decade as a bartender in the neighborhood, too, at a bougie cocktail & oyster bar called Mar’s — on 34th Ave & 35th Street.
I’ve never done anything like this before in my life.
Can you believe the numbers that you’re seeing right now?
I cannot believe these numbers right now… but I do know that every person here has worked their butt off to change the future of the Bronx and Queens, that’s what I know… and that every single person is responsible for this.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory over Joe Crowley in 2018 would inspire a political revolution that transformed New York’s politics over the next seven years.
Zohran reached out to me, he told me he was going to run for office, and he needed a website—
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—
With a margin that narrow.. you know, when it’s 55 votes, it’s like—
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.
It’s funny, the first time someone called me comrade (Laughs) in 2019… It was like a little strange and I was like, okay, sir? (Laughs)
It culminated in, I was in Astoria Park, watching the sun rise over the Hellgate…
This is a story about a how a neighborhood in Queens became a laboratory for a new kind of politics — and how it took me seven years to get off the sideline and join in.
Welcome to the People’s Republic of Astoria. This is Episode 1: Ten Perfect Strangers.
Shawna Morlock started canvassing in 2018.
She’d go on to knock tens of thousands of doors.
I’d never volunteered ever before and I jumped in feet first. I think I did something like three shifts a week for like six months. [laughs]
I saw that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was running for Congress in my district.
So then let’s go back even further. So you’ve never done it before. You decide you want to get involved. What did that look like?
Yeah, you know, I’m an old, I’m a geriatric millennial, so I’m right on the cusp of Gen X. And so I was very much into Facebook at the time.
When Trump won in 2016, it just really was like eating a hole in my psyche. It was just nonstop stress, you know, the constant doom scrolling, just everything seeming like it was on fire around me.
In 2016, I got involved. I joined the Democratic Socialists of America, the Queens County Young Democrats, and for a few months, I went to all the meetings.
I showed up, I listened. I tried to figure out where I fit in.
I wanted to learn how these systems operated. But it all just felt like social gatherings, networking events, mixers.
I felt like I should be handing out business cards, holding a cup of lukewarm coffee.
What was more talking supposed to accomplish?
I didn’t last six months.
Meanwhile, Shawna was just getting started.
Actually, so the very first like local political act of activity that I did was the Women’s March protest in 2017—
—which was like cathartic and it felt good to, you know, yell. But after that happened, I was like…
OK, well, now what?
“Now what?”
It’s a question I was asking myself too, at least for a while.
In 2016, I was 31 years old, working at Mar’s part-time. Trying to make it as a freelancer, writing about politics for venues like Salon.com, Vice news. Honestly, I’d write for anyone who’d pay me. One time, I made a hundred bucks writing a piece about my cat. I’m mostly doing stories about income inequality, the student loan debt crisis, climate change — you know, fun stuff. But I really loved it for a while. I thought I’d found a way out: out of the rut I’d been stuck in, out of the restaurant industry I was coming to hate… Out of whatever vague feeling of powerlessness I couldn’t quite articulate that pervaded my life. I wanted to be a voice for all the people like myself who didn’t have the opportunity that I’d stumbled upon. And I thought that’s how I could make a difference. By being that voice, telling their stories or speaking for them. But I was wrong. Because that’s not how you make a difference. Not really. It would take me ten more years to figure that out. To meet the people who would show me a better way.
And so when I saw that AOC was running and this was like pretty early, I’d say January of 2018, something like that. I went to a local canvas in Astoria Park.
Shawna was new to organizing, but even the people running it back then were inexperienced.
It’s funny, at that time, it was really like a scrappy, you know, project. It was just like one of maybe 10 people at this canvas, which is a lot. But for a congressional campaign, you need to like really hit as many doors as you can. So I went out on my own from the very beginning. Yeah, I was just feet first.
The campaign staffers that day were cynical about their chances.
I do remember one of them saying, we’re not going to win this campaign. Joe Crowley is just like too powerful. You know, we’re just really like trying to build out infrastructure and like, it’s wonderful that you’re here and thank you. But, you know, maybe trying to set expectations low.
“We’re not going to win this campaign. Joe Crowley is just too powerful. We’re really just trying to build out infrastructure.”— Shawna Morlock
Because back then, Astoria was different.
Western Queens had always been politically moderate-to-conservative—
Donald Trump comes from Queens, Andrew Cuomo comes from Queens, Archie Bunker comes from Queens—
—Archie Bunker territory.
EDITH BUNKER (Archival): “No, his uncle got it for him!”
(Laughs)
Astoria’s still got some of that old New York feel — butchers and fishmongers still exist, though fewer and fewer, as time goes on.
There’s a street called Steinway, filled with Egyptian grocers and hookah lounges. The sweet smell of shisha overwhelms your senses as you walk down it. And… Astoria’s an old ethnic enclave, too. Mostly Greeks and Italians.
A place stuck in the past.
Or at least, it used to be.
—she comes up and picked me to do the, you know, do a trial run, I’ll be the person on the doors and you be the canvasser. And I was so awkward and weird and nervous..
But yeah, I remember thinking back to what that guy was telling me that like, we can’t win. And I was like, I don’t know. I think she might actually be able to, you know, there’s that thing with her. I was like, I think we can do it.
So Shawna started knocking on doors. Repeatedly.
I probably had the same turfs. Like, so a turf is an assignment for you, like for, you know, a number of doors to go knock on. And I probably did that same turf five times. I don’t know. [Laughs]
I did the same doors over and over. People were like, “I’m so sick of seeing your face, go away.” [Laughs.]
While Shawna was learning how to canvas, a young activist named Michael Thomas Carter was trying to make a decision: Should he hold it, fold it, or go all in?
I’m always looking for that line, that play that maybe you win with it, maybe you lose with it. It’s almost like when you’re playing poker, right? And like both the world where you win and the world where you lose exists simultaneously in that moment.
Michael was a young man in his 20s living in Brooklyn, and the Bernie campaign had just lost. He was asking himself the question: Now what?
I was initially living in New York, kind of making ends meet, auditioning as an actor also. And I started to volunteer.
I worked the last five days of the primary. My first day was the Washington Square Park rally with 20,000 people, which was wild.
But through the Bernie campaign, he’d joined a young movement. And that would lead him to new opportunities.
And so when I heard that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was running, I got an email in my inbox saying, I’m running for Congress against Joe Crowley.
Michael replied to the email. He would become the second paid employee of the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez primary campaign.
And I said hey, if there’s anybody who we as a movement could take out and make a huge impact, it would be Joe Crowley.
In 2008, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was just a 19-year-old sophomore at Boston University, her father died suddenly of a rare form of lung cancer. For the next four years, her family would find themselves lost in the Byzantine processes of the Westchester County Surrogate Court System. In interviews she gave 10 years later, during her congressional campaign, she described a system of court-appointed lawyers who were, quote, “shaving off fees.” To stay afloat, her mom worked two jobs while she bartended. In a Newsweek piece from the time, her mother Blanca described real estate people coming around, snooping outside their house, taking photos. You can almost picture their mouths watering.
AOC declined to be interviewed for this podcast, but she’s spoken publicly about these experiences.
My first interview with Alexandria was after an abolish ICE protest in Foley Square. We kind of like went to the protest and then we had a talk. Like, kind of in the square, in the street. About the race, how to move forward, plans to win, all of that. And then I was brought on board.
My first day of work was in Alexandria’s apartment in Parkchester. She had a sign on her wall that said Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for Congress. And it was like me, Vigie and her boyfriend Riley and her.
As Michael was getting involved in AOC’s campaign, I was just working at Mar’s. Not involved.
But when I heard that a young bartender was running against a local congressman, I asked myself: How the hell would she take down Joe Crowley?
Joe Crowley at the time was the head of the Queens Democratic Party machine, somebody who was widely touted as being the next speaker of the House for the Democratic Party. So a very powerful person in a lot of different ways.
Astoria was part of the Democratic machine. It was very Greek. It was very pro-police.
Ross Barkan is a journalist, novelist, contributor to the New York Times magazine, and former state senate candidate. He’s been writing about New York and Queens for years.
The old machine bosses had machines. They had clubhouses and people they would turn out.
There are three lawyers in the Queens Democratic Party of that era, and they’re still around, actually. Sweeney, Reich and Bowles, who created a system whereby they would automatically represent people who were in foreclosure or inheritance disputes and thereby make millions of dollars from the loss of homes by working class people in Queens…
In Westchester, that same system had been bleeding fees out of the small nest egg left to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s family when her father passed away suddenly in 2008. For Alexandria, this whole story was personal, and in Queens, where she was running, Joe Crowley’s allies? They had it down to a science.
And the reason they were able to control that is because of the control they have over the judge selection process. Really there’s been a lot of writing about this, a lot of coverage, a lot of journalism that you can look up.
Crowley, through his position in congress, through the fact that he was a very good inside operator. The fact that he had a lot of influence in the city council, he was very close to Christine Quinn who was the powerful council speaker. His predecessor, tom manton, had helped pick council speakers as well.
I mean you had real patronage operations. The Queens Democratic Party had a patronage operation through the court system, somewhat, and through city hall as well, through the city council. But it was not nearly as extensive as kind of the old line patronage operations were.
The machine was not really a machine anymore. There was very little political organizing the Democratic Party in Queens did by the 2010s. But he wielded a lot of soft power.
And he didn’t live in the district! He lived in Virginia, he lived in a very nice house in Virginia — which was known!! I mean, AOC very wisely made an issue in the race and in her great ad, still to this day, maybe the best political ad ever created…
She made that point very plain about how Joe Crowley did not breathe the air and drink the water we do.
And that was very compelling.
“That election was about a progressive candidate versus a centrist. But really, it was also about someone who was organizing the district against someone who wasn’t.”— Ross Barkan
And that election, I mean, it was about progressive, you know, was about a progressive candidate versus a centrist and the defeat of the center by the left. But really, it was also about someone who was organizing the district against someone who wasn’t.
By the time primary day rolled around, AOC’s army of volunteers had knocked over a hundred thousand doors in her district, spanning the Bronx and Northwest Queens.
Crowley’s campaign stuck to the old method, tried and true. Blanket the airwaves with TV ads. Hit radio. Get glossy mailers in every mailbox.
He’d raised over 3 million dollars, most of it from corporate PACs and financial firms.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez only raised 800,000, mostly from small donors… people like me.
The machine still had the money. It still had the endorsements.
What it didn’t have…?
When there’s a real ideology, you get a level of commitment money can’t buy.
And so, yeah… just hit hit hit doors in my area. It works. We really crushed it in Queens.
As spring arrived in 2018, the volunteer lists were growing.
…I’m gonna grab her, she’s right here—
Ohhh my god!!!!
She realized she won on live television on New York 1.
How are you feeling? Can you put it into words?
Nope
But I do know that every person here has worked their butts off to change the future of the Bronx and Queens, that’s what I know, that’s what I know—
…the Queens that I beheld. It was Joe Crowley’s Queens.
They called him the King of Queens.
That’s Michael Lange, a local journalist who specializes in New York politics.
But then the first time he has to run a real race in a long time against someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, he is kind of revealed to be more of a paper tiger, exposing the machine’s lack of actual political power with the electorate in places like Western Queens where you have younger, newer-ish residents who just have no reason to obey the quote unquote political machine who have no ties to any of these institutions.
And I think that would have fallen apart eventually, I do. But without AOC, it would not have moved on an accelerated timeline. I mean, the collapse of it came very rapidly. Once Joe Crowley was beaten, a lot of people understood he was not the only one. That you could run primaries. Tiffany Caban almost beating Melinda Katz in the borough of Queens was massive. Seeing the turnout for her in Western Queens, again, the new era had arrived.
So how do ten people in a park beat the ten-term incumbent congressman with $3 million in the bank, who has all the union endorsements, all the political endorsements — who controls the whole local political machine?
The answer turns out to be simpler than anyone could have expected: You just show up.
Oh… also, it really helps if your opponent doesn’t.
—veteran New York City Democratic congressman Joe Crowley has gone to primary defeat tonight, After he sent a stand-in to represent him at a recent debate, the NY Times editorial board wrote, ‘If you want to be speaker, don’t take voters for granted.’
The establishment had gotten lazy.
When young voters are given a stake in politics and really reached out to as they have been in a couple places, they do show up, right? You’re betting on college educated young people who grew up in the era of Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Trump, or already extremely politicized because that is the world we’re living in. It’s like that’s actually kind of a good bet.
Couple things happened. One of those things is that many of those folks are downwardly mobile in some way. Maybe their dad was a lawyer and they’re not, and they’re trying to be an actor or an artist or they’re a barista and they’re struggling for the first time in their life.
…with money, with rent, with the million daily indignities that you go through when you’re a working class person. The other aspect is they see what happens to their neighbors and to their neighborhoods. They see this huge sweeping change, talk to people who are in their neighborhoods and they realize the injustice they have. And then in many cases they have the education and the tools and the wherewithal and the resources. They have the ability to be a volunteer.
I’m not the best you know, educated, well-read, socialist, you know, not doing the book clubs. I’m more of just like a person who arrived to this place because I deeply care about my neighbors and wanting to take care of everyone, no matter who they are, where they live.
And it’s like, we can do this over and over and over. It’s not just one shot or two shots. And it’s like building up a culture of service.
Six years later, in 2024, Donald Trump was reelected president, and now, a whole new generation of activists were sitting at bars, doomscrolling on their phones. But this time, there were organizations to plug into. Magdalena Moranda was just a 24-year-old activist. When Shawna was working to get AOC elected, she was still just a child.
I remember watching AOC’s campaign launch video and crying. Like was in high school, I showed all my friends, it was super exciting. I was still in the mid Hudson Valley at the time then, so no connection to the People’s Republic yet. But yeah, that was instrumental.
By her freshman year of college, she was already phonebanking for a housing justice organization in the Hudson Valley, where she lived.
And so yeah, that was my first dip into community organizing. And I was like, wait, I kind of love this. It’s like, we passed this thing. We got this person elected and then this thing passed. And now the city has rent control. Now the city has good cause eviction. So I feel like getting that sense of, it’s not just things online. It’s not just voting. You can actually go out and like, have some sort of agency over these things and being able to create change.
Soon, she was joining the Democratic Socialists of America. By the time she moved to New York City in early 2024, she was fully plugged in with the organization.
I just loved canvassing in the city so much because you get to talk to so many people and there’s no driving involved. Like literally your turf could be one block & you’re talking to so many people. I was like, this is incredible.
DSA had like a rose card system where it’s like a punch card. I ended up filling like two and a half, think I have them hanging on a wall somewhere. So the punch cards had like 10 for 10 canvases and I filled up like two and a half and I was like, this is great.
And then this rumor had spread through the summer then early fall like Zohran is like, yes, he filled out this candidate questionnaire. He’s like talking to everyone.
Much like Shawna, Magdalena would be at Zohran’s first campaign canvas. She got to work immediately.
I set out being like, I want to canvas once a week. And especially towards like that final month, it ended up being more like three, four days a week, honestly.
November 6th, 2024.
Presidential election night, watch party was at Katch…
Zohran actually came in to the watch party that night.
We knew what was happening. We knew Trump was getting elected. It was actually like very nice to see Zohran and like get to say hi…
For Magdalena, that question — “now what?” — it already had its answer.
This is what we need to focus on. We are going to elect this man. This man is going to become our next mayor.
The politics, the policies, the doomscrolling, the rage. That might have been the impetus for this work at first. But for Shawna and Magdalena and thousands like them, that’s not what kept them coming back.
Oh, I’m like creating real change, but also like, I love doing this with these people.
I’m still to this day friends with a lot of people that I met through that race, like, and even people that aren’t even necessarily like doing electoral organizing any longer.
Largely a lot of the people I hang out with and like a lot of my social circle is people who do this kind of work.
You know, we’re very intentionally trying to make DSA a home for people, not just for politics, you know, but just as a communal space for people who, you know, deeply care about society and like taking care of your neighbors and trying to, I guess, rebuild those places that we’ve lost.
The post-canvas social is so crucial to building a canvas. That’s where the bonds form. That’s where people want to come back and canvas with you again the next week.
You know, usually people substitute this with their work. You know, you make your work friends and then you go to another job and like, you probably don’t keep in touch with those people anymore… but I’m seeing the same people year after year after year after year with our electoral campaigns.
I don’t remember if I was working at Mar’s the night that AOC won, but it wouldn’t have made a difference. Places like that exist as a refuge from politics. It’s a place to sip cocktails and forget about real life.
Shawna Morlock had knocked on doors three nights a week for six months with a four-year-old child at home. Michael Thomas Carter went all-in on a 10% chance.
Ten people in a park had transformed into hundreds, and then thousands. And a 29-year-old bartender had just taken down a 10-term congressman — and won. In a few short months, they’d done something real. Something that actually worked.
And me? Joined a few organizations, quit them the moment it seemed pointless. I tried to make a difference, but… decided it was a waste of time. So I deleted Twitter, stopped reading the news.
It was comforting, to not watch the world fall apart.
And I told myself they didn’t really need me — not here, in the People’s Republic.
I could take comfort in the fact that I was happy. I really was. I really am. My wife has a great job. I’ve got great family, great friends. I get to spend my days — in the greatest city in the world.
But what I didn’t have? Was an answer — to a simple question that Shawna and Magdalena and Michael had all figured out.
Now what?
That’s because for seven years, I’d stopped asking completely.
Every volunteer thing, you’re fighting the couch. It’s either you, or someone staying home on their couch. So it’s like, you need to make it enticing enough that someone wants to come talk to strangers and knock on doors at 7 pm on like a Tuesday—
Really the political leadership in New York sowed the seeds of their own demise. They imported a bunch of people that they thought would sort of act politically in the way that their parents might have acted, but they put them in a context that led them to act politically in a much more radical way than they anticipated.
There’s lots of people that are going up and down here. And I think that it’s very, it gives you the opening to accept that the world can be better and that like, we really have a position and like we have a job to do to try to make it better. You can’t just wait for other people to do it for you. And it feels good. Once you win that first campaign, right?
She gave me two names. One seemed like he couldn’t do it or didn’t want to do it. The other person was this 26 year old organizer they hired and his name was Zohran Mamdani.
I mean, 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 fucking pissed.
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 constant advice, her endless support. Without her, none of this is possible. Thanks to Daisy Larom and Sarah Noe. Thanks to Shawna Morlock, Michael Thomas Carter, Magdalena Moranda, Ross Barkan, and all the other guests.
See you next time in the People’s Republic.
You gotta be ready!
Chapter 02: Twenty Years Apart
Read Transcript →Written, narrated, and produced by Tim Donovan.
Music by Pyrosion. Full Creative Commons licenses available at peoplesrepublicpod.com.
Special thanks to Daisy Larom and Sarah Noe. To Alice, for her endless support. And to Michael Thomas Carter, Shawna Morlock, Magdalena Moranda, and Ross Barkan.