The Woman Who Made the Machine That Made Zohran Mamdani
On an icy Friday morning in February, in Brooklyn’s Little Caribbean neighborhood, Tascha Van Auken, the commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement, was knocking on strangers’ doors—something she’d done many times before. As the field director of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, she oversaw an operation that drew a hundred thousand volunteers and knocked on an estimated three million doors. It was the culmination of the nearly ten years that Van Auken had spent in leadership roles in the New York City chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, where, with a core of like-minded organizers, she had helped to transform what was once a sleepy vestige of the now old New Left into a central player in New York politics.
That morning, she was shadowing a team from the O.M.E.’s Public Engagement Unit as they canvassed apartment buildings, helping New Yorkers register for city services. Mamdani had appointed Van Auken to her post on his second day in office, declaring that the O.M.E. would “fundamentally change” the way New Yorkers related to city government. On one hand, this sounded like awfully sweeping rhetoric for a job that, oversees a handful of preëxisting city programs dealing with community groups and civic outreach. On the other, his claim signalled a desire to channel campaign energy into the work of governing—and, in so doing, to sidestep the kind of letdown that followed Barack Obama’s grassroots-powered candidacy. If the O.M.E. captured the ambitious idealism of the new administration, it also sparked the fevered imaginations of its antagonists. The New York Post predicted that, under the leadership of “Democratic Socialist comrade Tascha Van Auken,” the office would serve as a front for “radical activists”; more recently, the paper has crowed over the prospect of hiring “15 (count ’em, 15) comrades to provide agitprop” for an office one unnamed source compared to “the Soviet politburo.”
Van Auken bears little resemblance to any caricature of left-wing extremism. She is a soft-spoken woman in middle age with dark hair and an old-fashioned countenance; if some actresses are said to have faces that have seen an iPhone, Van Auken’s seems like it could have seen a phonograph. Yet few people have been as influential as she has in making the New York City D.S.A. a force that can reliably turn out thousands of volunteers and reshape races with its hard-fought endorsement process. Currently, the D.S.A. counts eight socialists in the state legislature and four in the City Council. “The foundations of not only our field program but our electoral strategy as a whole were created, in large part, by Tascha,” Grace Mausser, the co-chair of the N.Y.C. D.S.A., told me.
“I think the question is, why has D.S.A. been able to build a really durable organization over the last decade?” Sam Lewis, a friend with whom Van Auken co-chaired the Brooklyn D.S.A.’s Electoral Working Group, said. “What Tascha brought was a sensibility about how to treat people and how to relate to people that is now built into the DNA of D.S.A.”
This sort of politics—practiced on a quotidian human scale—was also the Public Engagement Unit’s aim that February morning. The team was registering citizens for IDNYC cards and Fair Fares, a city program that provides a fifty per cent discount on transit for low-income New Yorkers. Van Auken, entering a building on Linden Boulevard, peppered the team leaders with practical questions. (“What’s the best way not to overwhelm people?”) Those of us not actually knocking hung back in the stairwell; even so, some residents were hesitant to engage. “Pas ICE!” a team member fluent in Haitian Creole reassured one man who declined to open his door.
Van Auken’s role is, in a sense, a testing ground for what the new mayor can make socialism mean to his constituents. Mamdani has spoken admiringly of “sewer socialism,” in reference to a crop of left-wing leaders in early twentieth-century America who strengthened basic municipal services. (This week, in fact, the Mayor announced a hundred-and-eight-million-dollar investment in New York’s sewer system.) Reviving that legacy would mean cultivating a new trust in government—such that an official knock at the door might be expected to herald something good as opposed to a masked federal agent.
“The skill in developing trust quickly is impressive,” Van Auken said, watching the Public Engagement team at work. “You knock more doors, you talk to more people—it’s a numbers thing.” She volunteered to approach a door on the third floor, and, when she did, her knock was jaunty—tap ta-tap tap! No one answered. But that was only the first door; she’d keep going.
Van Auken grew up in Brooklyn, and her family spent a long stretch in Flatbush. Her mother, who had a staid upbringing in California, came to New York in the early sixties looking for someplace more diverse and less stifling. She raised her children (Van Auken has two brothers) to pay attention to the world around them—how the Macy’s then on Brooklyn’s Fulton Mall wasn’t maintained like the one in Herald Square, because there weren’t lots of white people shopping there. “She was very good at demystifying things,” Van Auken said. Her mother “wasn’t politically organized in any way,” but her proclivities were influential and clear. “I remember she really didn’t like Ronald Reagan.”
At Edward R. Murrow High School, in Midwood, Van Auken was a theatre kid, though not just a performer; she was also part of the stage crew. “I think I just liked collaboration,” she said. Her junior year, she and her younger brother participated in an evening of one-act plays; when they called home beforehand, their mother sounded upset but wouldn’t say why. “All day long we thought somebody had died,” Van Auken recalled. After the show, they found their parents in a school hallway, and learned that the family had been evicted. Van Auken was shocked; she’d had no real sense of their financial precarity. (Her father was an engineer, and her mother had for a time been a secretary in the same office.) “On the spectrum of folks who are evicted from their homes, we were on the luckier end,” she said. “My parents had friends with resources; we were never unhoused.”
Van Auken also felt lucky to be at Murrow—staff there were supportive and helped her to find grants and loans for college. Murrow’s founding principal, Saul Bruckner, was a legendary figure at the institution that he led for thirty years. A magnet school focussed on the arts, Murrow was a place that prized freedom over order and was premised on a fundamental respect for its students. In her speech accepting the O.M.E. job, Van Auken cited Bruckner’s profound influence; he had, she told the crowd, “taught generations of students that they mattered and that participation wasn’t reserved for someone else.”
Still, in her own life, sustained political engagement was slow to cohere. Back in Brooklyn after college at Emerson, she was appalled by the march toward war that followed 9/11. She went to protests and took the LSAT, but felt discouraged by the relative toothlessness of international human-rights law. Instead, in 2005, Van Auken took a job as a casting assistant at the Blue Man Group. It was a role that combined administrative tasks with the delicate business of assessing others’ abilities. Tim Aumiller, who worked with her there on and off for more than a decade, remembers her treating performers during auditions in a manner both genuinely respectful and “deftly diplomatic.” She got more comfortable with public speaking as she found herself obliged to address callback crowds of aspiring Blue Men. Also, she was extremely organized. “She was the first person who taught me Google Sheets,” Aumiller told me.
The 2008 recession brought layoffs to the Blue Man Group, and casting was among the first departments cut. Barack Obama, meanwhile, was running a Presidential campaign poised to channel the anger of the Bush years into a movement. Van Auken was interested in the candidate, but, even more than that, in the public energy coalescing around him. Through a friend, she got a paid job as a volunteer coördinator at a field office in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. “That campaign had a real, multiracial, working-class movement supporting it,” Van Auken said. “And it was mostly middle-aged women running everything.”
She learned about the mechanics of canvassing—how a campaign door-knocks its way toward a “win number,” the estimated count of likely voters required for a victory—and about the philosophy of Marshall Ganz, the veteran social-movements, civil-rights, and labor organizer who established the Obama campaign’s field strategy. Ganz’s approach hinged on the power of individual voters and volunteers. “Treating people like smart people who have agency, who can be there or not,” Van Auken said. “Asking people to step up and lead, so it’s not about me, it’s not about one person being a leader—this is all Marshall Ganz. He has this wonderful definition of leadership: you have to step into a moment of uncertainty and inspire other people to action toward a new possibility.” She returned to work at the Blue Man Group between campaigns, but, by then, she said, “I was hooked on organizing.”
Van Auken’s biography hits a series of beats common in histories of left-wing awakening in the twenty-first century. September 11th and the wars that followed were the occasion for disillusionment with the Democratic establishment; Obama’s first Presidential campaign offered a glimpse of an alternative, followed by further disillusionment. When Occupy Wall Street took off, Van Auken went to dozens of meetings but grew frustrated by the movement’s lack of structure. (“I mostly learned what not to do by trying to get involved with Occupy,” she told the Danish scholar Fabian Holt, in an interview for his 2025 book “Organize or Burn.”) She worked on a handful of causes in the years after 2008, but nothing pulled her in as the Obama campaign had until Bernie Sanders’s first Presidential run. The way he talked about the country’s problems energized her, and she could tell it was energizing other people, too.
In the summer of 2015, she went to a meetup of Bernie supporters at the Union Square Barnes & Noble and, at first, was disappointed. “It was sort of just a group of people being like, We should get this person to endorse him,” she recalled. On the subway trip home, though, she got to talking with another attendee about the Obama campaign, and about her interest in building a volunteer operation with the same degree of seriousness. “Could we get access to the voter files the way that campaigns do?” Van Auken remembered musing. Her new friend happened to be “really into data and building data systems.” By the end of the train ride, they were planning a Brooklyn for Bernie meeting on his apartment rooftop.
That first gathering grew into Team Bernie N.Y., an independent volunteer organization. The official campaign had focussed its resources on Iowa and New Hampshire, which left a late-primary state like New York with few channels for supporters’ enthusiasm. Van Auken’s group filled the void. When the Sanders campaign finally arrived in New York, in the weeks leading up to the election, “they very much came in and steamrolled a lot of the work that people had been doing,” she later told Holt. “But we gave them almost fifty thousand IDs that we had collected of supporters across the city.”
Van Auken had met members of the D.S.A., and, after Donald Trump’s first election, one of them suggested that she check out one of its meetings. The D.S.A. has been around since the early eighties—in 2015, it had around six thousand members nationally, but the numbers grew dramatically after the 2016 election. As of February, 2026, there are roughly a hundred thousand members nationally, and fourteen thousand in New York alone.
“I don’t know if she’d want me to,” Sam Lewis, her friend and fellow-organizer, told me. “But I’ll say that my recollection is that when she joined D.S.A. she was kind of iffy on even describing herself as a socialist.” Lewis did describe himself that way, but Van Auken gave him a new understanding of what that meant. “Like, what’s the point of being a democratic socialist if it’s just a book club? The ideology is that regular working people can take control of their political and economic circumstances—and, if we’re not doing that, what are we doing?” Lewis had recently helped form Brooklyn D.S.A.’s Electoral Working Group. “The proposal we wrote was, like, We want to build the grassroots electoral arm of a democratic-socialist organization,” he said. “But I had not built the grassroots electoral arm of anything at that time.” With Team Bernie N.Y., Van Auken had.
The new Electoral Working Group set out to create an organization that could run a campaign. Van Auken was skeptical of consultants and other paid experts. “Her attitude was, Elections are actually pretty straightforward,” Michael Kinnucan, an organizer who worked alongside her, told me. She hoped to avoid what she saw as mainstream campaign culture—one that is, as Kinnucan put it, “macho,” where “everyone is trying to pull rank on everyone else.” Van Auken insisted on respect for all participants, including respect for their time. “When people walked in the room for a meeting, they walked out with a plan,” Kinnucan said.
The reinvigorated D.S.A. lost the first two campaigns it ran (for a pair of City Council seats, in 2017). Then, in 2018, some D.S.A. members recruited an organizer named Julia Salazar to run for a State Senate seat; Van Auken managed the campaign, with Kinnucan as her deputy. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had achieved her upset victory in the months before Salazar’s primary, and though Ocasio-Cortez hadn’t risen through the democratic-socialist ranks, she had been endorsed by the group. Her star power brought heightened attention to the D.S.A. candidate. Salazar defeated her opponent—an eight-term Democratic incumbent—decisively, becoming the D.S.A.’s first socialist in the state House. A wave of five more would follow in 2020, among them Mamdani.
“There’s this term that sometimes emerges on campaigns—‘super-volunteer,’ ” Salazar told me. “Tascha hated that term.” In Van Auken’s view, talk of “super-volunteers” trivialized the contributions of others who could afford to give only a couple of hours of their time. The last weekend before Salazar’s primary, Kinnucan told me, “a big endorser who I won’t name” proposed doing an event with a d.j. “Tascha was, like, Julia will be canvassing. I hope you can do your d.j. thing without the candidate and without our team, because our team will be on the doors.”
Mamdani’s primary upset in June, 2025, marked a triumph for Van Auken’s electoral philosophy. It also arrived at a difficult moment: ten days later, her mother died, following a long illness. “She would have been very excited by all this,” Van Auken told me.
After the primary, she was put in touch with Ganz, who had been watching the campaign with interest, and who now teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “She’s for real,” he told me. “That’s no small thing.” Since then, they’ve continued to talk about the challenge of translating a movement campaign into government. “We have a lot of experience with that not working,” Ganz said. “This is an opportunity to make it work.”
The day-to-day responsibilities of public service lack the bright clarity of a campaign: there is no win number once you’re in office. When I asked Van Auken how she’d define success in her new role, her answer was direct but general. “If we’re able to launch a city-wide initiative around a mayoral priority that allows thousands of New Yorkers to participate,” she said, “and continue organizing together and working together long term, beyond the initial campaign, that is how we’re defining what we want to do.” The Office of Mass Engagement has not yet announced what campaigns it might undertake, though it has been staffing up. “Government only works when it’s accountable to those it serves,” Mamdani said in a statement. “Tascha’s work is a testament to that belief. It’s never been about one election.”
Van Auken has some experience translating her field skills to a position within government. In 2020, she managed the D.S.A. member Phara Souffrant Forrest’s campaign to represent a State Assembly district in Central Brooklyn, and, after Souffrant Forrest won, Van Auken stayed on for about a year as her chief of staff. Once Van Auken was in office, Souffrant Forrest told me, she wanted to keep knocking on doors—for example, in buildings owned by the Pinnacle Group (which Mamdani has targeted in his efforts to protect renters). “The goal is not just to win but to turn people to socialism,” Souffrant Forrest said. This meant showing voters that their problems were “organizable.”
This summer’s Democratic primaries will test New Yorkers’ response to the D.S.A.’s efforts in the Mamdani era. Notably, in the race to fill the retiring congresswoman Nydia Velázquez’s seat, both the Mayor and the group have endorsed State Assembly member Claire Valdez, who is running against Velázquez’s preferred successor, Antonio Reynoso—a contest between city power brokers old and new. Meanwhile, as Mamdani navigates the reality of actually being mayor, media observers have scrutinized his relationship with the D.S.A. for signs of a potential rupture.
The D.S.A. represents a fractious collection of fellow-travellers, including plenty who have been dubious all along about the compromises involved in any electoral campaign. Van Auken, like a number of D.S.A. members associated with Mamdani, is part of the group’s Socialist Majority Caucus, which seeks to build a socialist mass movement through democratic means. This is the wing of the organization most inclined to mainstream compromise. In 2023, Lewis wrote an essay warning that a tendency to create “litmus tests that can be used to punish elected officials” was “a dead-end approach to advancing socialist aims.” For the D.S.A. figures central to helping Mamdani succeed, his success represents an avenue to wider legitimacy; to undercut it would be self-defeating.
“I was pretty skeptical of Zohran’s decision to run, which shows what my opinion is worth,” Kinnucan told me. He was relieved when he heard Mamdani was hiring Van Auken as field director. “If Tascha is on the campaign, then win or lose, something is going to be built. People are going to get engaged in politics.” To Kinnucan, Mamdani’s choice to work with Van Auken spoke well of his judgment; her choice to work with him spoke well of his potential. “Tascha isn’t someone who idealizes candidates and, conversely, isn’t crushed when they disappoint,” Kinnucan went on. “They’re just people to her, like the next volunteer you engage in the campaign is a person.” ♦