How Elle Bisgaard-Church became Zohran Mamdani’s most trusted adviser

The June primary victory of Zohran Mamdani over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo came as a shock to everyone, but perhaps most of all to the consultant class, the people who make a living predicting what voters will do and trying to steer their behavior. Not only was the millennial democratic socialist candidate from outside the Democratic mainstream, but so was his campaign manager – a 34-year-old woman they had never heard of who masterminded what even Mamdani’s haters acknowledge was the best-run mayoral campaign in recent history.

This same woman – who had never managed any campaign before, let alone a citywide one, let alone a successful one – is now the architect of the likely incoming Mamdani administration. She is the closest adviser to the probable next mayor, whose Rolodex is more limited, and therefore more exclusive, than any of his recent predecessors. That’s why you might have already heard the question so many people interested in maintaining influence in New York City are asking right now: “How can I get in touch with Elle Bisgaard-Church?”

To understand Bisgaard-Church’s success, it’s necessary to note where it doesn’t come from. She does not maintain any traceable presence on X. She has never been named on a City & State Power List. Neither her birthday nor her July wedding has been acknowledged in First Read or in Politico’s Playbook. She is rarely quoted, and not on general “trends” or as an “operative.” As Mamdani’s Assembly chief of staff, she was not seen schmoozing. “A lot of people are very mixy in Albany, like always hanging out,” said Assembly Member Amanda Septimo, a close ally of Mamdani’s. “She’s just not on the scene.”

As both tell it, Bisgaard-Church was unknown to Mamdani before she applied to lead his office in the fall of 2020. “I have this distinct feeling of this distinct memory of interviewing her on Zoom, and coming away from it just knowing that this was the person,” Mamdani said. First impressions aside, he put her through four rounds of interviews, including ones with the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and the Muslim Democratic Club of New York – his two political homes. The final step was a one-on-one at Omonia Cafe in Astoria, Queens. “I can remember it vividly because he ordered chocolate chip pancakes, which immediately disarmed me. I was so nervous,” Bisgaard-Church said. “And he was just so, so lovely and put me at ease.”

Thus began a five-year partnership in which they developed the strategies and the trust that would eventually propel Mamdani’s upset victory. If Mamdani is the artist, Bisgaard-Church is the producer. She’s strategic, hungry for information and described by nearly everyone interviewed for this story as some variation of “calm” and “chic.” By all accounts, he trusts her completely. “She has been at the heart of the things that I’m most proud to have accomplished,” Mamdani said. “I would not have won this race without her steering our campaign.”

Unburdened by what has been

The relative youth and inexperience of Mamdani and his staff has been a primary line of attack from opponents. But his success partly stems from his and Bisgaard-Church’s disregard for conventional wisdom. “Imagine learning about how to run a political campaign when you’re managing a campaign for the mayor of New York City,” said writer and left-whisperer Michael Lange. “I think ironically, actually, that probably helped her because she didn’t have all these out-of-date priors.”

“People who work in New York City politics are, like, professional sickos, and we can often get pretty obsessed around drama and gossip and scoops and rumors,” said Alyssa Cass, a partner at Slingshot Strategies who worked on former New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer’s mayoral campaign. “Despite our best efforts to pull her into the mud and scheming, she always resisted.”

Aside from a modest July op-ed in The Indypendent, Bisgaard-Church hasn’t taken credit for much of anything related to Mamdani’s success at a moment when many are. “There’s no ego,” said Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance. (Bisgaard-Church required a fair bit of coaxing to participate in this profile.) But talk to her collaborators, and you’ll learn that Bisgaard-Church was instrumental in forming the DSA’s legislative analysis team and writing the guiding document in 2021 that defined how the socialist organization would interact with its elected officials. She later played a major role in convincing the DSA to back Mamdani for mayor. It was Bisgaard-Church who coordinated the elected officials who were arrested demanding debt relief for taxi workers in 2021, Desai said. It was Bisgaard-Church who had the idea for Mamdani to use a dinner with Mayor Eric Adams in 2023 as a successful last-ditch effort to get the Assembly member’s free bus pilot across the finish line. It was Bisgaard-Church who came up with the social services-focused Department of Community Safety, one of Mamdani’s central campaign proposals and a way for him to go on the offensive on public safety – usually a leftist candidate’s Achilles’ heel.

And it was Bisgaard-Church who led a vigorous mayoral campaign that did not swerve away from Mamdani’s three central policy tentpoles: freeze the rent, make the buses fast and free and provide universal child care.

“Andrew Cuomo described the city in those terms not dissimilar to how Trump described it: It’s kind of a dystopian hell zone that he alone could fix,” said Patrick Gaspard, an Obama administration alum and veteran New York City politico who began informally advising Mamdani in 2024. “And Zohran and Elle saw a different city. When they rode around in the city, they saw joy. They saw people who were excited to be here and who wanted to be fulfilled in the city.”

Bisgaard-Church is undaunted by a steep learning curve. “An incredible workhorse. I don’t know when she sleeps,” said democratic socialist state Sen. Jabari Brisport. She calls it the ability to “extract the knowledge you need.” For the Department of Community Safety proposal, her research included interviews with mental health experts, public safety bureaucrats in other cities and former NYPD Chief of Department Rodney Harrison. Morris Katz, who would become a key strategist on Mamdani’s campaign, first met Bisgaard-Church over beers in the spring of 2024, months before Mamdani would launch his campaign in October. As Katz remembers it, he was casually describing how to build momentum: After launching the campaign, they would need to raise a serious amount of money to demonstrate viability. Then that fundraising would need to be validated by a poll. She stopped him: What are the exact dates these things need to happen? Exactly how many days should separate these milestones? What would be the metrics for success? A Google doc was opened at the bar.

“That was literally the first time we’re talking, and she’s just drilling on an implementation plan for momentum,” Katz said.

Mamdani’s campaign was unusual in many ways. He was able to reach the fundraising cap early and with a huge number of small donations – largely but not exclusively thanks to the DSA. He also benefited from an enormous door-knocking operation, also supported by the DSA. Mamdani was steadfast in his criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza, which he called a genocide, despite the commonly held wisdom that you couldn’t win citywide in New York City if you were too critical of Israel. But the campaign was most notable for its clear, consistent messaging around affordability and how it foregrounded Mamdani’s strengths in a way that could only have been designed by someone who knows him well – and trusts him completely.

“True by our actions”

Those hoping to replicate Bisgaard-Church’s approach – or hoping that she brings a nonideological perspective to Mamdani’s inner circle – may be disappointed to learn that her rubric is inextricable from a lifelong preoccupation with wealth inequality, the carceral system and the injustices of war. She is not just an effective operator on the left. She is a diehard believer.

When she was growing up the only child of a single mom in California, church lessons about kindness and service were reinforced by regular trips to volunteer at a homeless shelter. That experience “demonstrated to me at a very young age the incredible suffering and hardship that so many people needlessly experienced,” she said, “and it was upsetting.” As a student at Swarthmore College, a private liberal arts school in Pennsylvania, she produced an anti-war radio show. After graduation, she had a few nonprofit jobs in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., focused on adult literacy and decarceration. The Coro public affairs fellowship brought her to New York City in 2016, where she led an adult literacy program.

She decided to go to graduate school because she thought she might have more impact by changing policy. “I thought, if I’m interested in critiquing and reforming our system of taxation, I better go study formally what a tax is,” she said. That curiosity took her to a dual master’s degree of public administration program with the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs and the London School of Economics and Political Science. Bisgaard-Church was then a “paper member” of the DSA, meaning she wasn’t deeply involved with its work. She initially thought she would end up at a government agency, but then, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, she watched five democratic socialist candidates win their primary elections in Brooklyn and Queens. The job description to be Mamdani’s chief of staff called for someone with “demonstrated experience in bettering the material conditions of working-class people.”

“I still feel daily, deeply ashamed to live in a place where we allow people to sleep on concrete at night … and I fundamentally believe it doesn’t have to be that way. It represents (a) political choice,” Bisgaard-Church said. “The place where I have seen that shared sense of rage at such a moral failure has been in a handful of movement organizations, including New York City DSA.”

If you take a close look at Mamdani’s time in the Assembly, you can watch his and Bisgaard-Church’s evolution from a confrontational activist approach to a deft inside/outside strategy. During his first budget in April 2021, Mamdani and other lawmakers slept in the state Capitol’s War Room overnight to call attention to an assortment of things: from taxing the rich to more housing assistance to the opacity of the budget process. That fall, Mamdani went on a successful hunger strike with taxi workers to pressure the city to guarantee their loans and help restructure their crushing debt, and Bisgaard-Church organized a letter to the mayor signed by dozens of lawmakers.

Beyond the now-familiar focus on free buses, you can see the seeds of the mayoral campaign to come in the Assembly office’s ambitious 2023 Fix the MTA campaign. There was a launch video produced by Melted Solids, the same outfit that continues to make videos for the mayoral campaign. There are clear and specific policy goals outlined on a bespoke website. “We probably had hundreds of hours of meetings,” Bisgaard-Church said. “And not just with progressive minds in the transit world.” There was a strategic alliance with influential state Senate Deputy Majority Leader Mike Gianaris, whose Senate district partially overlaps with Mamdani’s Assembly district, and a long list of cosponsors. The bus pilot included a line in every borough – a way to get citywide buy-in. They launched an effective media blitz – especially for a second-term Assembly member. There was even a field campaign.

“Elle is in the business of persuasion, not just the business of mobilization,” Gaspard said. “Those are two very different things that most New York operatives just don’t understand anymore.”

But just as the Fix the MTA campaign was a major strategic accomplishment, the failure to get the bus pilot renewed perhaps pointed to Mamdani’s limitations. Politico New York reported that the expanded pilot was killed when Mamdani informed Assembly leadership he planned to cast a vote against the state budget in April 2024 in concert with other DSA lawmakers. Mamdani maintains he was waiting to see the results of the pilot and denied that his protest vote had anything to do with its discontinuation. Bisgaard-Church noted that the Assembly office continued to advocate for free buses in the 2024 and 2025 sessions, though they haven’t been successful. “I am worried that when push comes to shove, he will not make compromises if that involves angering DSA,” said one Democratic Assembly colleague who endorsed Mamdani. “My hope is that he is surrounding himself with a wide ideological diversity.”

As the primary election results became clear on June 24, Mamdani’s team was scrambling. They had prepared a concession speech and a “too close to call” speech, expecting that the final result would only be announced once the ranked choice tabulations were finished a week later. They had not prepared a “Cuomo concedes before 11 p.m.” version. While aides finished editing Mamdani’s speech, Bisgaard-Church took the stage to give them a little more time. It was a big moment for her as someone who prefers to be out of the spotlight.

“Five years ago, before my first day as Zohran’s chief of staff, we sat together and we articulated the vision for the movement that we hoped to build. Each day, we would work to embody the values of a better world,” she said. “We would campaign, legislate and organize in a way to make these values true by our actions.”

Maybe he can be mayor

The summer before the public campaign launch, Bisgaard-Church, Mamdani and Katz came up with three loose phases for their primary campaign, each named for the desired reaction. The first three months were known as: “Maybe this is a real campaign? (Yes it is.)” This was when Mamdani’s Trump voter video went viral, when he did the polar plunge in a suit to symbolize freezing the rent, when he first reported dominant fundraising. The second phase was called: “Maybe he can win? (Yes he can.)” It was marked by surges in the polls and a huge rally at Brooklyn Steel. The third phase, marked by more formal stand-up press conferences and a cross-endorsement with Brad Lander, they called: “Maybe he can be mayor? (Yes he can.)”

Bisgaard-Church, whose title is now chief adviser, is no longer running Mamdani’s campaign. She is fully immersed in phase three. She has been inundated with meeting requests from current and former city, state and federal officials, from advocates, from people she called “interested individuals who are seeking to volunteer their time and insights, and excited individuals beyond that.” On a recent day, that looked like nine back-to-back meetings. She is in charge of vetting potential deputy mayors, agency heads, timelines and policies. She’s also thinking a lot about co-governance: how to incorporate leadership from the movements that got Mamdani here. That includes a standing weekly meeting with the leaders of New York City DSA.

But this work remains hypothetical until November, because formal transition planning cannot begin until after the election, and of course it isn’t certain that Mamdani will be the city’s next mayor. Under pressure from Cuomo and his allies to consolidate the field to defeat Mamdani, Adams ended his reelection bid. Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa is facing calls from the never-Mamdani set to drop out as well. Mamdani is clearly the front-runner, but Cuomo now seems determined to challenge him even among the constituencies who most supported him, showing up at mosques after hardly stepping foot in one while he was governor, and hitting Mamdani, who is Muslim, for supporting the decriminalization of prostitution. He has resurfaced a picture of Mamdani with a homophobic Ugandan politician and accused Mamdani of disrespecting 9/11 first responders through his association with the leftist streamer Hasan Piker. It’s messy and negative, but Cuomo is clearly willing to try anything. Meanwhile, Mamdani’s still adjusting to the massive spotlight, the security detail and the weight of a broadening coalition.

And even after Mamdani’s stunning primary upset, the critics continue to beat the drum of youth and inexperience. “Zohran Mamdani’s brain trust is full of young, privileged lefty radicals with little government experience – who could one day lead NYC,” blared a recent headline in the New York Post.

“It speaks to just the hubris that people enmeshed in the establishment or in a traditional way of politics feel,” said Grace Mausser, co-chair of the New York City DSA. “I mean, they look at someone who just beat them, who handed Cuomo his ass, and they say, ‘Oh, well, she’s only 34, so what does she know?’”

Asked if she feels powerful, Bisgaard-Church said she feels “energized” by how people respond to Mamdani. Recently, the two were running late for a meeting near the U.N., and their police detail car was stuck in Midtown traffic. They ended up leaping out of the SUV and running on foot through Midtown to get to the No. 7 train. It was a burst of action and spontaneity in a day to day that has become more limited, scheduled and secured since the primary. She said people who looked up and recognized Mamdani beamed and shouted as they passed, sprinting through a city that could soon be theirs to run.