What does the calendar of a New York City DSA co-chair look like? On a recent week, Grace Mausser, 31, convened an emergency steering committee meeting to decide how to respond to the surprise military extraction and detention of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. After the group decided they should respond, she began meeting daily with other groups to plan the No War! No Kings! No ICE! rally that took over the streets of Manhattan on Jan. 11. That week, she also had calls with some of the DSA’s many 2026 candidates, met with the new People’s Majority coalition, went to congressional candidate Claire Valdez’s campaign launch party and had her monthly meeting with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s team.
Being co-chair requires a massive amount of diplomacy. DSA members are highly politically active and informed, and they have strong opinions. Factions are always burgeoning; there are public disagreements, internal politics and pressure campaigns. Increasingly, there is external exposure to the press, both flattering and hostile.
Mausser, recently reelected to a second term by the chapter’s nearly 13,500 members, declined to estimate how many hours per week she spends on her duties for NYC-DSA, but it’s safe to say it’s at least as many as she spends on her actual job. That’s right, she has a day job.
“I would not have the patience to do what Grace does,” said left whisperer Michael Lange, who is also a member of the DSA. “It’s an unpaid full-time job where you just have to shovel shit seven days a week.” That may be, but along with her co-chair Gustavo Gordillo, Mausser has led the chapter to the height of its political power. “DSA was the backbone of the Zohran campaign in a lot of ways, and Grace was leading that,” said Sumathy Kumar, a former DSA co-chair. State Sen. Jabari Brisport, whose 2020 campaign Mausser helped lead, called her “extremely level-headed and calm.” Mamdani’s chief of staff Elle Bisgaard-Church, who met with Mausser weekly throughout the campaign, called her “principled” and “judicious.”
NYC-DSA is clearly hungry for more victories. Mausser has been focused on building connections across the constellation of left and labor groups to make that happen. “Grace has especially been driving efforts to build a bigger coalition,” Bisgaard-Church said.
Mausser grew up in a Houston suburb. Her mom was a Democrat (who is now a DSA member) and her dad is a Republican. She said: “Through high school, I guess I self-identified as a moderate, perhaps in an attempt to get both my parents to love me?” She went to college at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where she had “a series of wake-up calls” that pushed her further left, including a seminar on homelessness. She moved to New York City after graduate school in 2018, and started knocking on doors with the DSA to promote tenant protection laws.
“We were lucky enough to move into a rent-stabilized apartment,” Mausser said. “Then I got to knock on doors in my new neighborhood and talk about something that me and my neighbors had in common.” She has continued to do so ever since, including as a field lead on Mamdani’s campaign.
“It demands a lot, but it’s also arguably the most important moment for socialists, and leftists more broadly, in the U.S. in a century,” she said of being co-chair. “It’s a lot of pressure, but it’s really exciting too. So it feels worth it, even as I am doing stuff for basically 15 hours a day.”
