A politician I actually feel like fangirling over
NYC Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is making the left fun again, and we should pay attention
For the past fortnight I’ve been poring over dozens of articles profiling Zohran Mamdani, watching his TikToks, and admiring the t-shirt designs of Hot Girls 4 Zohran.
Why am I so invested in a mayoral election across the ocean that won’t have any impact on my life? Well, I’ve been having conversations recently with other campaigners about how left-wing movements these days tend to be decidedly…unfun, for want of a better word.
I need to put a huge caveat here: of course it is. In the UK, off the top of my head, we’ve got the following (amongst many other) issues: the ongoing eradications of trans rights funded by the wizard woman, the ongoing eradication of disability rights pushed forward by the Labour Party’s nasty narrative, and a former Prime Minister fighting against policies meant to halt the worst effects of climate change.
That being said, how can we find some joy when it comes to campaigning for progressive change? Because the thing is, we can see that campaigning against the worst policy and practice isn’t pulling enough folks from the centre, the moderates, the small “c” conservatives to meaningfully change things in the way we need. The alt-right political machine provides a vision of making people’s lives better, much as I loathe the bigoted, unrealistic and individualistic vision that is peddled.
When it comes to campaigning for good things alongside stopping bad things, I think Zohran’s campaign playbook is one worth copying. So here’s my rundown on the lessons to take away.
Celebrate the wins, and energetically ask for help with whatever is next
When the campaign reached the maximum fundraising target, they released the news with a simple formula: big news → thanks to you → here’s what we can do → here’s the next step → brief description of the ambition → social proof → call to action.
It’s great, and not just because of what they said - it’s also what they didn’t say:
If you didn’t donate, you can volunteer instead
If you donated, you’ve already done so much, and we’re sorry to ask for more
Donations aren’t enough, we need…
We won’t win unless…
[insert candidate name] has [insert resource] that we don’t, that’s why we need you to…
It’s gratitude without being overly indulgent, it’s telling you that you can join a movement that could be historic, it’s practical and clear next steps and how you can play a role, and it assumes that you want Zohran to win if you’re watching it so it doesn’t waste time telling you why he should.
Make change seem simple, and explain how that change will make people’s lives better
Getting a new law brought in or striking down an unfair one is pretty sexy, but it’s also difficult to pull off. So it should be one mechanism for change that we use, but we should focus more on looking for open doors. That’s what Zohran does here: here are bills that will make it cheaper for food vendors to sell their plates and that in turn would make it cheaper for you, and I promise to put those bills through.
These kind of open doors can be found for all sorts of issues, and it makes your job as a campaigner ten times easier. If you’re mobilising people around a new law, you have to do all the legwork of convincing them how your methods to introduce this will work before you can even get into the business of why it’s a good idea. If it’s an open door like stalled bills that just need to be implemented - that’s a much easier sell, and you can spend your time explaining in a jargon-free way how it makes people’s lives better.
Treat your posts intended to reach new people on digital platforms as digital door knocking, not the end goal
Mamdani, for his part, likened campaign content creation to door-knocking.
“If you knock, someone may open, but keeping it open depends on what you have to say,” he said. “The policy has to be at the heart of it. The content doesn’t work otherwise.”
Indeed, while his videos are often tongue-in-cheek, they’re also earnest attempts to promote his ambitious (and arguably expensive) policy platform that includes free child care, free buses and city-owned groceries.
“I began this race with most New Yorkers not knowing who I am, but if I want to change that reality I have to be everywhere all at once,” he said. “I have sought to fulfill that commitment by physically going to three to four boroughs in a single day and also by ensuring that when New Yorkers open their phone and they’re scrolling through Instagram or Twitter or TikTok, they may also see a video from this campaign.”
For someone who specialises in digital campaigning, I sure do bang on about how useless social media KPIs are for impactful campaigning, but it’s because virality does not do anything unless it is paired with action. As this article points out, Kamala is brat didn’t win the US election.
The Zohran team understands that their very funny and popular social media content won’t translate from followers into voters. The end goal is that when someone has another contact point with the Zohran team, it’s increasing the time spent on how important it is for people to get out and vote instead of time spent explaining who Zohran is and what he stands for.
Don’t worry about your social metrics until you’ve figure out what they’re paired with for impact.
Stand for something, and do it with integrity and intersectionality
In 2021, Mamdani went on a 15-day hunger strike to protest of predatory loans that targeted the taxi drivers who purchased “medallions”, the physical certificate required to operate a yellow cab. The city eventually caved and struck a deal with medallion loan guarantors, securing $450m in transformative debt relief for these drivers.
It was just one of the “handful of times” Mamdani was arrested for a cause.
Mamdani was arrested again earlier this year at Hunter College, where the city’s rent guidelines board voted to increase the rents of rent-stabilized tenants 2.75% on one-year leases and 5.25% on two-year leases. If elected, Mamdani says he will immediately freeze these tenants’ rent upon assuming office.
“We are here to say these struggles are interconnected – whether it’s BLM or BDS, it’s all about justice. We are here to say you cannot disentangle this fight for freedom. You will not scare us away from this call for justice,” Mamdani said into a loudspeaker in Astoria Park during a 2021 protest against the Israeli occupation in the aftermath of violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
“As we’ve seen over the past year with the genocide that our country has funded and continues to fund – an Israeli military bombing campaign that has expanded into Lebanon and Syria and Yemen – we are continuing in this country to find money to kill kids while we tell public housing tenants that we don’t have enough money to fix their boilers.”
Politicians on the left have become increasingly centrist, often dabbling in right-wing policy and practice as a reaction to the rise of alt-right and right-wing beliefs. It’s illogical: those that favour right-wing ideology are unlikely to align themselves with the diet version, and those that favour left-wing ideology become disillusioned.
“If you listen to them you really understand that, on the whole, these voters didn’t skip voting because they viewed Kamala as too liberal or too woke, and the vast majority of them, if they had shown up, would not have voted for Trump. They are not swinging to the right, it’s more that the Democrats lost them,” Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the co-founder of Way to Win explains. “They’re deeply disappointed with the Democratic Party. They’re skeptical of government. They’re skeptical of politics in general — but they are gettable. They’re persuadable.”
What’s fascinating about Zohran is that he proudly calls himself a politician, and I can see it becoming something of an advent of a rebranding for a term that carries negative connotations these days. Why? Because it’s evident that he lives and breathes his politics, and instead of remodelling his image to what he thinks people want to hear, he instead proudly wears his values. Even better, he can explain why he holds these beliefs, and why other people should hold them as well.
Zohran shows up for and with the people he wants to represent, shows how their struggles are connected, and isn’t afraid to irk other politicians in the process. That irking isn’t the type we’re used to, though, where we see the Democrats in the US campaign as the anti-Republican party and Labour in England campaign as the anti-Tory party. Instead, it’s pointing out how Zohran’s opponents don’t live up to Zohran’s values and circles back to why those values are so important. And there’s a clear legacy of belief that shows these haven’t been picked up recently to try and win favour with voters.
Zohran is a media chameleon (because he’s trying to get people who share his politics to get out and vote)
NYC Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani Explains His ‘Uniqlo Uncle’ Style - Heven Haile for GQ
There’s plenty of traditional broadsheet examples in my other points where Zohran gives a good interview, but I wanted to pull out these less traditional examples. It’s the same message told in different ways, always adapting to the style of the outlet doing the interview. Part of this is pure talent, part of this being a millennial, but a chunk of it is a political media strategy that recognises that different potential voters are consuming different media in different ways.
It’s a strategy that knows there are people out there who can vote for you that share your views and values, but that they need to know who you are and what you want them to do - so show up in their spaces and talk their language.
Can Zohran win? I honestly don’t know. What I do know is that regardless of the outcome, this campaign strategy is one to remember. If he wins, the lesson isn’t that we all need the same snappy TikTok videos. If he loses, the lesson isn’t that he was too left-wing.
The lesson is that Zohran is doing things differently, and people are EXCITED. It might take a few more runs for this type of strategy to start to meaningfully change things, but it’s one we should all be thinking about copying.