Mamdani names Elle Bisgaard-Church chief of staff after she pushed DSA to back him for mayor

New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani selected Elle Bisgaard-Church for chief of staff on Monday, who is a self-declared democratic socialist. Bisgaard-Church was also serving as Mamdani's chief of staff while he was at the state assembly. She was also reportedly one of the major political players who pushed the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to back Mamdani in the NYC mayoral race.

Bisgaard-Church was also a chief advisor for his campaign that led Mamdani to victory over former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo as well as GOP candidate Curtis Sliwa on Election Day, per the New York Times.

Bisgaard-Church was the architect of Mamdani's campaign, which included promises of freezing the rent, raising the minimum wage to $30 an hour in New York City, city-owned grocery stores, free childcare, free transportation, and a laundry list of other left-wing policy ideas, including the confiscation of housing by the city if property owners do not keep up with code or pay fines.

According to City and State New York, Mamdani said Bisgaard-Church has been "at the heart of the things that I’m most proud to have accomplished" and that he "would not have won this race without her steering our campaign."

The outlet reports that Bisgaard-Church was also key to forming the Democratic Socialists of America legislative analysis team as well as penning the document from 2021 that guided how DSA would interact with politicians. It was Bisgaard-Church's efforts to hold Mamdani focused on the core policies of freezing the rent, making buses free, and providing free universal childcare.

She later helped convince the DSA to back Mamdani, according to the outlet. Bisgaard-Church grew up in a single-parent home in California and went to graduate school at Columbia as well as the London School of Economics because she wanted to have more impact on policy concerning wealth inequality.

"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. Bisgaard-Church got involved with DSA during college.

She applied for Mamdani's chief of staff, because it wanted someone who had "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 told reporters. “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.”

City and State reported that as Bisgaard-Church was holding meetings with New York City officials and leaders, one of those meetings was a standing weekly meeting with the heads of the New York DSA chapter during the campaign.