Zohran For Assembly

When I moved to New York City, I made Astoria my home. Over the years, I’ve given back to my community, from distributing food at the local pantry to teaching high school students how to code. I met and became friends with Zohran while organizing together on Tiffany Cabán’s 2019 race for District Attorney. In late summer of 2019, he reached out about running for State Assembly in Astoria.

Zohran was challenging a decade-long incumbent who represented over 180,000 people. The incumbent wasn’t necessarily disliked, but many of us felt they weren’t advocating strongly enough for the needs of Astoria’s residents. With Zohran’s background as a housing counselor focused on foreclosure prevention, he understood firsthand the challenges our neighbors faced and had first hand experience of growing working class movement through electoral campaigns.

The campaign rejected large corporate donations and expensive consultants, in favor of building with community support and having a deeply engaged volunteer base run the campaign. Though Zohran offered to pay me for my work, I chose to contribute my skills pro bono, as part of the spirit of the campaign.

Working directly with Zohran, I led the comprehensive design and development process for the campaign website. I created wireframes, incorporated logo designs, and ensured the site reflected the campaign’s core branding elements. Most importantly, the site needed to embody the movement we were building by highlighting that this wasn’t just about Zohran as a candidate, but the working-class community working together demanding change.

Throughout the 10-month campaign, I continued to work with Zohran, the communications director, campaign manager, and numerous volunteers. The website continually evolved as the campaign matured, incorporating new elements like policy platforms, photos, videos, press coverage, and campaign announcements. Each update reflected our growing momentum within Astoria. With the onset of COVID the digital presence of the campaign and community support became all the more important. With effective outreach and a solid digital home we were able to win a narrow victory against the incumbent.

Website Features

The website served multiple critical functions for the campaign and contained a variety of features:

• An engaging landing page introducing Zohran, a first time candidate and housing counselor, to potential voters.
• A user-friendly platform/issues page to help voters quickly understand the campaign’s policy positions, with the ability to dig deeper into longer policy platform details.
• An interactive district map helping residents determine if they lived in the district.
• Integrated donation and email subscription systems with ActBlue and ActionNetwork.
• Listing of multiple daily volunteer events synced ActionNetwork.
• A content management system allowing staff to update event listings and add urgent banners during critical voting and fundraising periods.
• Press/media section sharing coverage of the campaign
• A visual grid showcasing campaign volunteers and embedded policy videos. Showing how this is a movement run campaign.
• Mobile-first responsive design to reach constituents on all devices
• Accessibility features for users with disabilities (alt text, proper contrast ratios)
• Multilingual content support to serve diverse community members
• SEO optimization to improve search engine visibility and user experience.

COVID-19 Response

The site gained additional significance with the onset of COVID-19, as we quickly adapted it to provide vital pandemic resources to the community. We transformed a section of the website into a COVID-19 resource hub featuring local testing locations, food assistance programs, and tenant rights information. This responsiveness showed the campaigns commitment to the community and constituent service even before taking office and also underlined the importance of having a quick, adaptable digital communications platform in times of crisis.

Technical Implementation

For the technical foundation, I chose Hugo as the static site generator and deployed the site with Netlify, and used Netlify CMS (now Decap) for content management. This tech stack delivered fast page loads even on older devices which was crucial for reaching voters with limited internet access or those quickly checking policies on their phones during commutes(Witnessed that on the subway once!).

We developed comprehensive Spanish and Arabic versions, collaborating with native speakers to ensure authentic translations of both policy content and community resources. This multilingual approach proved critical in engaging previously underserved communities in the district.

By prioritizing performance and language access, we created a platform that truly reflected the campaign’s commitment to representing all constituents. This helped bridge communication gaps and contributed to our narrow victory over the incumbent by helping us reach infrequent voters across cultural and economic boundaries.

Impact and Results

Zohran frequently shared with me anecdotes from friends and voters about how helpful and stylish they found the site. As a central hub for the campaign’s messaging and community engagement, the website contributed significantly to Zohran’s ultimate electoral success. I carried over this experience and lessons I learned to future web development experiences including developing Kristen Gonzalez for Senate website.

I take immense pride in knowing that my technical skills helped play a small role in furthering a working-class movement in my neighborhood and helped launch Zohran’s political career. He has since gone on to run for Mayor of New York City, currently polling in second place against several established political figures. My contribution to his initial assembly campaign represents exactly the kind of big-risk, high-reward and righteous work I find most meaningful. It shows the power of technology to amplify voices that deserve to be heard and connecting and empowering working people to clear goals and building power in their lives.