DSA member officially launches campaign to replace Mamdani in Assembly

Democratic Socialists of America organizer Diana Moreno is launching her campaign Monday to succeed Zohran Mamdani in the state Assembly.  Photo courtesy of the Moreno Campaign

By Ryan Schwach

Over the last several months, Diana Moreno has spent much of her spare time knocking on doors, asking New Yorkers to vote for her fellow organizer and longtime friend, Zohran Mamdani.

And though the effort paid off, Moreno will soon get back to her door-knocking ways. But this time, she’ll be asking her neighbors to vote for her.

Moreno, a lifelong activist and elected leader in the Democratic Socialists of America, is running to succeed Mamdani in his progressive Astoria Assembly district. She officially launched her campaign on Monday.

Moreno received a positive response from an audience of her citywide DSA colleagues following a forum last week, and is strongly expected to secure an endorsement. The organization’s support will bring with it the progressive organization’s army of supporters and volunteers still energized from Mamdani’s historic win earlier this month.

She isn’t the only progressive vying to succeed the mayor-elect in the heart of the DSA’s voter base.

Fellow DSA members Rana Abdelhamid and Mary Jobaida, who have both run for office before, have also filed to run for the seat.

Even with the DSA’s likely endorsement of Moreno, Jobaida told the Eagle she would not drop out, setting up a potential battle within progressive ranks.

Unlike her opponents, this will be the first time Moreno is running for office, something she previously had no intention of doing.

“This wasn't my five-year plan,” Moreno told the Eagle in a coffee shop near an Astoria apartment she shares with her partner and 14-month-old child. “I was recruited by a lot of comrades that told me, ‘You should consider this. You would be good at this.’ I initially said no.”

Last year, after having her child, Moreno stepped away from some organizing to focus on her family and health, and had been doing communications work for the nurses union.

She was thrust back into organizing through Mamdani’s campaign.

She said people approached her the night of Mamdani’s primary victory, the first night it became clear his seat might actually be vacant come January.

“I was like, ‘Can you guys let me celebrate?’” she said.

Eventually, Moreno came around to the idea.

“Witnessing what is happening in our country as a whole, witnessing the rising authoritarianism of the Trump administration, the sort of dismantling of social safety nets, the abuses of ICE agents at 26 Federal Plaza, I felt compelled to play a role in fighting for my kid’s future,” she said. “I said to myself, ‘If I have a role to play in advancing our collective project of winning dignity for working people, of winning a future, a livable planet for my son, then I'm going to do it.’”

Like Mamdani, Moreno immigrated to the United States at a young age, and comes from a family where activism is something of a prerequisite.

Her grandfather was a union activist as a bus driver in her native Ecuador, and her father was also active politically in college. She was raised to “question authority.”

She recalled her first bout of activism: Wearing an anti-war shirt to school as a kid, not long after her family moved to Florida in the early days of George W. Bush’s presidency.

She spent her early formative years in Lakeland, Florida, a mid-sized town in the middle of the state.

“It was very Southern, highly segregated, not what I watched on TV growing up,” she said. “I grew up watching Full House and the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. It was not like that.”

Eventually, an internship at the Queens-based immigration nonprofit Make the Road New York led her to her current home of Astoria, and the streets she is running to represent.

“It's why I'm here,” she said of the internship. “I remember coming to Jackson Heights and living for a summer here, and feeling like this is the first time since I moved to this country that it feels like home.”

In 2019, she found a position with NICE, another Queens-based immigration nonprofit, where she worked until 2023, leaving as its deputy director.

“I was living in Astoria, working in Jackson Heights, a very sort of Queens-centric life,” she said. “Working with undocumented immigrants that were going through layers of neglect and trauma through the pandemic, because they didn't have access to the same benefits that other workers did.”

Inspired by Bernie Sanders' 2016 campaign and then Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional upset two years later, she became more entrenched in leftist organizing in her adopted home, and joined the DSA.

During Sanders’ second campaign in 2020, she worked with an upstart Assembly candidate named Zohran Mamdani.

“Zohran was the next thing,” she said.

In launching her own campaign for the same Astoria district, she hopes to expand and build upon Mamdani’s mayoral win, as well as other recent DSA victories in other districts, like Claire Valdez in District 37.

She said her reasons for running for office are both local and national: “To deliver on Zohran’s affordability agenda, and to fight back against the rising tide of fascism.”

Her favorite of Mamdani’s three trademark campaign proposals is universal childcare, which she said would be her number one legislative and policy priority at the state level.

“This one's deeply personal to me,” she said. “Childcare costs are crazy, and Astoria has a lot of young parents.”

Moreno and Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani, who she hopes to succeed in the Assembly.  Diana Moreno/X

“Child care costs are driving working parents out of the city,” she added, remembering a young Latino couple she met canvassing for Mamdani who told her they were moving to New Jersey due to high costs.

She also named affordable housing and tenants’ rights as key issues in her campaign.

District 36 includes the Queensbridge, Ravenswood and Astoria NYCHA complexes, which, when added together, make it the largest public housing development in the country.

“I think ensuring that our renters, myself included, have strong tenant protections, is really important,” she said. “And of course, additional access to deeply affordable housing, and that also includes maintenance and investment in public housing.”

Moreno isn’t the only DSA member hoping to capitalize on Mamdani’s win.

Other DSA-aligned candidates have already filed campaigns in other districts, including Mahtab Khan, who is primarying Assemblymember David Weprin in District 24, and Aber Kawas, who will receive the DSA endorsement in District 34.

Moreno called the mayoral victory a “shot in the arm” for the organization.

“We feel that we have the responsibility to build on this historic victory,” she said. “I don't think that folks are interested in making the mistake of being a shiny, bright light that burns out pretty fast…We're still very much strategizing around seats that are winnable.”

Her seat is certainly winnable, at least for the DSA, and anyone with Mamdani’s blessing.

Mamdani has not weighed in, and his transition team did not respond to a request for comment on the race to fill his shoes in Albany.

The mayor-elect won 70 percent of the vote in his home district, which overlaps with districts represented by City Councilmember Tiffany Cabán, State Senator Kristen Gonzalez and AOC, making it the only place in the country represented by democratic socialists at all levels of government – it’s since been dubbed the “People’s Republic of Astoria.”

On Wednesday, Moreno was the only D36 candidate to show up for a DSA endorsement forum, City & State’s Peter Sterne reported. Around 96 percent of her fellow DSA members voted to support her run.

It will come down to members of the Queens chapter of the DSA and a committee of citywide leaders to determine if she will ultimately get the organization’s endorsement.

Regardless of if she’ll get the endorsement, Moreno will have competition for the seat in Jobaida and Abdelhamid – setting up a potential fight within the DSA ranks.

“I think we have to make our case individually,” said Moreno, who knows both of her opponents through the DSA. “We have to show a record of involvement and sort of loyalty to the work that we have done.”

“My sincere hope is that we do so in a way that's above board and principal, so that at the end of the day, the three of us can continue to work together in whatever capacity we end up serving this community,” she added.

Jobaida said she wasn’t included in the forum, and already feels left out of the loop, calling it “discrimination” in a social media post.

“I am here to fight for authentic representation of the people who have lived here for decades and continue to face the ongoing challenges of gentrification, as well as to stand up for immigrants’ rights,” she told the Eagle.

Abdelhamid, a nonprofit leader who ran for Congress in 2022 before redistricting moved her out of the district she intended to run in, could not be reached for this story.

Mamdani’s vacating of the seat is also likely to kick off a special election, which would mean the establishment Queens Democratic Party could nominate its own candidate to take a shot at the seat.

The Queens Dems could try to claw back the power it lost in AD36 when Mamdani primaried and beat the seat’s former holder, Aravella Simotas – at least until a DSA candidate has a better chance in a normal primary later next year.

“I think this seat is symbolic, because it's obviously our future mayor's district that he leaves,” said Moreno. “It really is a privilege to have the opportunity to sort of continue the legacy that he's leaving behind, to continue serving our district.”

“It would just be an honor to sort of follow in his footsteps,” she added.