'The ultimate guerilla hating campaign:' DREAM helped beat Cuomo. So what's next?

It’s never been a better time to be a New Yorker who hates Andrew Cuomo.

One of the central rallying cries of the recent democratic mayoral primary was “don’t rank Andrew Cuomo,” and boy did it work — Cuomo was losing so badly to Zohran Mamdani on election night that he conceded just a couple of hours into the count. By the time all the votes were tallied a couple weeks later, Mamdani’s campaign had earned more votes than any campaign in New York City primary history. And as we stare down the barrel of the November general election, recent polling has Mamdani with a 10-point lead over the detested former governor, who may or may not even remain in the race.

Much of the groundswell of pure, uncut Cuomo loathing was thanks to the strategic work of the DREAM for NYC campaign, which first stood for “Don’t Rank Eric or Andrew for Mayor” then quickly pivoted to “Don’t Rank Evil Andrew for Mayor” after Adams dropped out of the primary to run as an independent in early April. The movement gained near-instant momentum after launching in late February, with buzzy, well-designed merch flooding the streets and our Instagram feeds, a memorable slogan that included an actually understandable ranked-choice directive, and eager adoption from influencers and local politicians alike (Brad Lander was among the early boosters).

At some point people were literally bootlegging our designs and selling them on the Lower East Side, someone sent us that they had seen bootleg DREAM shirts at the Mermaid Parade. That’s how you know you’ve made it in New York City.

While the anti-Cuomo contingent isn’t exactly resting on their laurels — the disgraced ex-frontrunner is still weighing his options for the general and trying to convince Eric Adams to drop out — it’s reasonable to ask: once you’ve defeated the politician your entire organization was created to defeat, what happens next? 

We’ve gotten a glimpse of potential next steps during the primary as DREAM’s messaging expanded to become more explicitly pro-Zohran, and in the weeks since his win, with the small super PAC using its platform to call for Sen. Kristin Gillibrand to resign following her racist anti-Mamdani tirade on Brian Lehrer, and pushing for New Yorkers to call their legislators to advocate for taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers.

This week we caught up with Charlie Heller, one of DREAM for NYC’s organizers, for a deep dive about how this whole thing got started, running campaigns that don’t rely on the mega-rich or stuffy institutions, and the power of being a true hater.

First things first: where did DREAM for NYC come from, and who’s the team behind it?

We all met through the DSA, specifically climate organizing, and were really involved in the campaign to pass the Public Renewables Act, the first statewide Green New Deal program in the U.S., that passed in 2023.

A lot of us on the comms side all had different backgrounds, I had a journalism background, another of our organizers, Lawrence Wang, has an advertising background. Some of us started a communications co-op called Greenpill that did messaging for [Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha] and State Sen. Kristen Gonzales. We kept working on the Build Public Renewables act until it passed.

Some of us also worked on the Jamaal Bowman campaign last year in different capacities. In that one we encountered AIPAC spending the most money ever on an election, bludgeoning with infinite money, and they won.

We thought, they have infinite money, they’ve found this thing that works, they’re going to keep doing it every time to stop progressive candidates. 

And how did the focus turn to the mayoral race?

We started even before Trump got re-elected, and it was just Eric Adams in the race. We knew he won by just 8,000 votes in 2021, and it’s very possible that if people knew how ranked-choice voting worked we’d have a different mayor.

The ranked-choice slate thing is a very wonky thing. How are you going to explain that to people who aren’t politics people? We knew there was the ranked choice strategy stuff, and then there’s needing to make sure everyone is turning their fire on the worst candidates, which didn’t really happen last time.

We had a core of probably a dozen people organizing in different ways, including our lead designer Sofia Demopolos and video lead Brandon Tizol. Some were paid, but it’s mostly volunteering, people doing this outside of work. Over the course of the thing we amassed probably 70 volunteers in different capacities.

The overall idea was we need to turn all of this into a mass rallying cry that feels like New York common sense. You get your bacon egg and cheese, you get your coffee, take the subway, don’t rank Cuomo.

And what about the DREAM messaging and acronym, specifically?

We were considering a couple ideas, one was more zombie themed, that was more Adams, the idea that these corrupt execs have a way of hanging around.

We ended up going with DREAM because here’s an acronym with instructions, but it’s also not purely negative; we can dream of a better New York City.

The overall idea was we need to turn all of this into a mass rallying cry that feels like New York common sense. You get your bacon egg and cheese, you get your coffee, take the subway, don’t rank Cuomo.

And while Zohran had this inspiring heart of New York campaign, we were harnessing a different part of being a New Yorker which is being a huge hater. We look at it as, we ran the ultimate guerilla hating campaign. We made hating Cuomo into a citywide phenomenon, and harnessed the renewable energy that is New York’s desire to hate some asshole. 

The candidates spend a lot of time defining themselves, but they don’t spend a lot of time hating, and that’s what we can do. Even with Trump, there wasn’t that much hating. But that’s how normal people think about stuff. This guy sucks, we should just say he sucks, and say why. We don’t have to wrap it up in all this stuff. 

And we can do that because we’re running our own thing. Once there’s all these institutions involved, people don’t want to go full hater. You can tell the truth in a way that feels true and you don’t have to bury it in weird language that no one ever uses in conversations. 

Well speaking of running your own thing — where did the money come from? How do you get attention when the other side has a $25 million war chest?

We’re technically a Super PAC, and we raised around $100,000. Initially The Jewish Vote Pac gave us around $5,000. They totally got it. The institutional progressive funder world was not very supportive for a mix of reasons. 

We’d like to have done broadcast [TV ads] if we had the budget, but because we didn’t, we emphasized other things that were working. Merch, working with influencers. We made our entire strategy public and called it the DREAM box. Normally you want to keep it close to the chest. We’re thought, we don’t have the money to do a $10 million ad campaign with this theme. All we have is people. 

So we made all these influencer toolkits, regular people tool kits, put all these assets on our website like logos and info so people could make their own stuff and we could push these talking points into the press. 

At some point people were literally bootlegging our designs and selling them on the Lower East Side, someone sent us that they had seen bootleg DREAM shirts at the Mermaid Parade. That’s how you know you’ve made it in New York City.

How are you looking at things as we head into the general election (and while we wait for Cuomo to decide if he’s actually running or not)?

I would like some proof that Cuomo is still alive. [Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi] is just writing these unhinged press releases, what is going on? I would say, we don’t know exactly who the candidates are and what level of support each will have. What we do know is the same people are going to try to keep Zohran from winning and prevent him from doing the stuff New Yorkers elected him to do. 

The way we’re looking at it is twofold. First of all we do need to finish off Eric Adams. I don’t think he’s going to win but he’s there. And then there’s laying groundwork for the bigger fight to make these things happen, like taxing the rich. We had this big Tax the Rich fight in 2021. I think there were 5,000 volunteers on that campaign, essentially against Cuomo to stop him from closing hospitals and to tax the rich [instead]. 

Now there’s something like 50,000 Zohran volunteers, and they’re not going anywhere. They’re still going to live in New York City. The question is how do we keep up that fight and the story of ordinary New Yorkers versus billionaires. Institutions are already trying to stop it. I do think they’re going to spend even more money on the general. They could even spend $100 million, I would not be surprised.

You’ve built this audience and infrastructure, what does that look like once the mayoral race is over?

There’s a few different routes we can take. In making this a bigger battle thing, our role is still attacking the enemies. In a way that candidates generally can’t do as much because they have to talk about their own vision. We’ve built this as a model to defeat these Super PACs with a lot fewer resources. And it worked. In some ways it’s proof of concept that you can use these unconventional strategies to win this stuff. We want to figure out ways to take this model to other places.

[Calling for Gillibrand’s resignation] is part of the bigger fight. The primary is over, all of these people who didn’t want that outcome are trying all this other stuff. We want to create a popular understanding that that’s what is happening. Not just that they don’t like [Zohran], but that people who benefit from a status quo where everything is really unaffordable, and the idea of something being better is essentially not allowed, they are there and going to try to prevent this stuff from happening. And we can beat them again. 

I would like in 2028 for people to talk about the billionaire problem the way they talked about the border [in 2024]. “What are you going to do about the billionaires?”

If ordinary people come together, we’ll beat them. That’s how history has always worked. We have something they’ll never ever have, which is that we are right. Morally right and factually right. And when we can convey that to a mass populace — and convey how to act on it — we win. People really want to know what to do. 

I think that New York City can lead us out of this fascist mess. And I think that’s what a lot of these people are afraid of who are trying to stop it. If you can do this, what’s next? Maybe everyone can be in a union?  Maybe we can have a better world? It’s about what could be next, and that’s why they’re so unhinged. 

I would like in 2028 for people to talk about the billionaire problem the way they talked about the border [in 2024]. “What are you going to do about the billionaires?”