Welcome to the Dianneverse
Dianne Morales is the mayoral field’s unapologetic progressive. It’s won her fierce and energetic supporters, but some doubt she can win over the city.
[Ed. - NYPAN endorsed both Dianne Morales and Maya Wiley]
Candidates for mayor of New York City have made their cases this year in Zoom forums and delivered impassioned stump speeches, but there may be no pitch as effortlessly engaging as a candidate joyfully dancing toward a camera, telling New Yorkers she’s “on her way to replace Bill de Blasio as NYC’s first afro latina mayor.” That’s what former nonprofit leader Dianne Morales did in one of her TikTok videos last fall, amassing over half a million views.
Morales has combined effective online communication and organizing with the farthest-left platform in the race to amass a progressive, young fan base that has propelled her from a relatively unknown nonprofit leader to a champion of the left. Morales supporters congregate on online platforms such as TikTok, Twitter and even the audio chatroom Clubhouse. On Twitter especially, fans of the candidate can be spotted easily by their profile photos set against purple, pink and orange gradient backgrounds. This sunset-colored corner of the internet is known among supporters as the “Dianneverse.” Some of her young supporters started out volunteering for the campaign and are now staffers on it, a fact they say demonstrates Morales’ reliance on young people not just for their boundless energy to knock on doors, but for their insights on policy too.
Alice Volfson, a 20-year-old college sophomore who lives in Manhattan, started off volunteering for Morales in January. She’s now a staffer on the campaign’s field team. Like other Morales supporters, she said she first discovered the candidate on TikTok. “I remember being so shocked that she was on trend, like the music choice, the way that the video itself was so accessible,” Volfson said. Early videos she remembers watching laid out the headlines of Morales’ policies or mentioned the fact that she’s a single mother – while the candidate danced along to Lizzo’s “Exactly How I Feel” or NIKI’s “Indigo.” “TikTok, in the last political cycle, has definitely been used by a lot of politicians, which I appreciate,” Volfson added. “But a lot of the time, I see TikToks that very clearly look like they’re not made by the youth.”
Morales, 53, doesn’t have that problem because her 20-year-old daughter is at the helm of her TikTok page, directing the first video in April 2020, in which the two are dancing in unison and plain text announces that Morales is running for mayor. That video also also garnered over half a million views. “It was just she and I kind of messing around in the house, you know, pandemic madness. And she was trying to teach me this dance,” Morales recalled to City & State recently. “And it just sort of took off. And then all of the sudden, we had people reaching out wanting to volunteer for the campaign. It was really just organic.”
While Morales is undoubtedly the candidate of cool, young progressives, a citywide campaign can’t be won on that kind of cachet alone. However, she has also won the backing of progressive kingmakers such as the Working Families Party, thanks to policies that surpass even staunchly progressive rivals such as New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer and Maya Wiley, the former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, in their ambition. (WFP ranked Morales second in their endorsement, below Stringer, but the organization has since pulled its endorsement of Stringer following an allegation of sexual assault against him, which he denies.) Her platform includes $3 billion in annual cuts to the New York City Police Department, a pledge to rebuild the city’s public housing complexes and move toward a model of European-style social housing, plus free tuition at the City University of New York system.
The excitement building around Morales is visible not just online, but on the ground. On a recent morning at Herbert Von King Park in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Morales’ own neighborhood, the parents of a young family with kids stopped to call out and promise her their vote – an occurrence the first-time political candidate is still getting used to. Later that day, supporters biked from Bed-Stuy to City Hall in a fundraiser-rally to support Morales’ transportation policies, including a publicly funded Citi Bike and expanded busways in low-income neighborhoods and transit deserts. “She has the energy that other people don’t,” said Nicole Murray, a 35-year-old project manager who participated in the event. “There are other candidates that I’m OK on, because I think they have OK ideas to run a city well, but it’s not that same energy to really inspire people and to challenge the way things are.”
Morales, who is currently polling around sixth place in the Democratic primary, doesn’t have the name recognition or high-powered consultants of Andrew Yang, the institutional support of Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, or even the years of government experience that Wiley, Stringer, or former Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia and former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan can cite. But the Bed-Stuy native argues that her lack of establishment ties and entrenchment in government make her more likely to deliver bold change. “The folks that have those connections and the folks that have that history have been complicit in the creation of, kind of, the dysfunction that we're in today,” Morales said.
Morales’ early career was spent in education. She helped launch the Department of Education’s Office of Youth Development and School Community Services under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, serving as its chief of operations from 2002 to 2004. She later served as executive director of The Door, a youth development organization that offers services including college advisement, nutrition education and outreach for homeless LGBTQ youth. In her latest role, she served as executive director and CEO of Phipps Neighborhoods, a South Bronx-based social services nonprofit for low-income families – an arm of the affordable housing developer Phipps Houses. “There's some value to not just having somebody from the outside, but having someone who has firsthand experience, both personally and professionally, in terms of taking on some of our greatest challenges in the city,” Morales said. Assembly Member Jessica González-Rojas said she endorsed Morales in part because Morales’ nonprofit experience is directly applicable to the job. “While a nonprofit is not a government entity as big as New York City … she's really touched on the kind of the biggest issues that we face in New York City,” González-Rojas said.
High on the list of communities Morales said she feels accountable to is, “Working-class folks, low-income Black and brown folks, immigrants and women (who) have not been historically welcomed into the political space,” Morales said. If elected, Morales would be the city’s first female mayor, the first Latina mayor, and the second Black mayor. But, as was the case for other far-left candidates in New York City, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a large chunk of Morales’ support seems to come from gentrifiers and already politically engaged voters.
For her supporters, several platform issues in particular have been galvanizing, and are easily summed up in rallying cries like “Defund the police!” and “Free CUNY!” that may have a particular appeal to younger people. “I think there’s a recognition among young people about sort of the collective good and prioritizing the collective good over individual benefit,” Morales said.
Gabriel Hawkins, a 15-year-old volunteer for Morales’ campaign, put it more simply. “I think young people on average are more progressive than their older counterparts,” said Hawkins, who did not learn about Morales on TikTok or Twitter, but from a friend in real life. Hawkins’ hunch is supported by research showing that Generation Z largely aligns with millennials in having more liberal views than older generations.