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MAMDANI’S WINNING FORMULA: FUSE THE MESSAGE AND THE MEDIA  
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Greg Sargent
July 28, 2025
The New Republic
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_ If politics is ultimately about communicating in appealing ways,
Mamdani is charting a new way forward for the digital era by the
deliberate fusion of personal appeals with substantive ones. _

A Mamdani video about sluggish traffic in Manhattan (not typically
viral material) enjoyed 2.3 million views on Instagram, nearly 50
percent among nonfollowers, screen grab

 

Despite being mired in a cutthroat New York mayoral campaign, Zohran
Mamdani recently released a video
[[link removed]] announcing
that he was taking a vacation. A vacation, that is, in his childhood
home of Uganda. In the video, he mocked right-wing trolls for telling
him to go back to Africa and joked that his return there showed that
he’s “listening” to those “critics.” He offered New York
tabloids suggestions for headlines mocking his African heritage—one
read “MIA? MAMDANI IN AFRICA”—and invited the tabs to feature
them on their front pages.

As campaign messaging goes, this was unusual stuff. Yet the video has
now racked up 4.5 million views on Instagram, according to internal
campaign data supplied to me—and 56 percent of those were among
people who weren’t following Mamdani on the messaging site.

Whatever happens in the mayoral race, Mamdani is already making a
major contribution to a huge debate among national Democrats: over how
to compete digitally in the age of Donald Trump. Much of this debate
has turned on how to use paid digital spots in nontraditional ways and
how to empower influential “Joe Rogan of the left” podcasters—or
some other similar network—to achieve the penetration into the
culture that matches whatever it is Trump achieved, which is elusive
and hard to define.

But the Mamdani campaign seems to be achieving a version of this
penetration with _unpaid_ social media videos that
communicate _directly_ with voters. The goal is to achieve a kind of
Trumpian ubiquity: Andrew Epstein, the campaign’s creative director,
says it’s designed to ensure that if you are “on your phone,”
you are “going to see Zohran.”

Internal campaign data on the reach of Mamdani videos—provided at my
request—illustrates the point. All these went up after Mamdani won
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Democratic primary by 12 points several weeks ago:

* A Mamdani video
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sluggish traffic in Manhattan (not typically viral material) enjoyed
2.3 million views on Instagram, nearly 50 percent among nonfollowers.

* A video
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Mamdani describing his primary win and ascribing it to his relentless
focus on the “needs of working people” got 2.1 million Instagram
views, nearly 55 percent among nonfollowers.

* A video
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Mamdani getting endorsed by a Haitian American assemblywoman got 1.6
million Instagram views, over 43 percent of them nonfollowers.

“His campaign is earning these numbers because they’re putting
digital practitioners in charge who understand what’s going to
resonate online,” said Danielle Butterfield, executive director of
Priorities USA, the super PAC charting
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digital strategies for Democrats.

The party has long been overly reliant on issue testing and polling to
make ads. But Butterfield notes that Mamdani’s approach is based on
the intuition that “letting him speak authentically to what he
believes” will “break through” on the internet, understood as an
“entertainment and social vehicle” where the competition for
eyeballs is relentless.

Tech writer Mike Masnick points to another telling sign: At least 10
of Mamdani’s recent videos have garnered over one million views on
TikTok in particular. “To consistently pull really high numbers,
even with wonky material, shows something is really working,”
Masnick told me. “People spend a lot of time on short-form video
apps looking to be entertained by real people. He’s been able to
produce political content that meets _that_ need.”

Consistency, as Masnick says, is the key here: All those numbers come
after Mamdani’s Instagram content amassed 236 million views during
the final month of the primary, per Politico
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In an intriguing way, Mamdani’s media strategy is deeply intertwined
with his approaches to other conundrums gripping Democrats. Take the
question of how to talk about issues like affordability and functional
government, demonstrated in the video about Manhattan traffic:

traffic:

Note Mamdani’s insistence on making “moving around our city safer,
faster, and _more enjoyable_.” Emphasis mine: Much of Mamdani’s
messaging is about fixing the government so it makes people’s daily
lives more livable. The positive vibe that New Yorkers are fortunate
to live in such a great city—and that it can be made even more
awesome—suffuses everything.

At a time when Democrats are talking about the new “abundance”
agenda
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Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson—which would reform government to
facilitate production of essential social goods—this messaging shows
it’s possible to communicate about making government work in a
concrete, accessible way that, critically, also works on social media.

Watch how Mamdani applies this to affordability in this well-known
video on “halalflation”:

What makes the affordability issue accessible here is the
plain-language, can-do suggestion that it’s downstream of bad
governing choices and bottlenecks that can be fixed. Klein recently
suggested
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Democrats can project authenticity and appeal by talking like an
“angry moderate.” _Contra_ that, Mamdani—who is also
campaigning on tax hikes for the rich and making
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service free—offers what you might call “cheerful populism.”

Then there’s immigration. Watch the video of Mamdani getting
endorsed by the Haitian American assemblywoman, Brooklyn Democratic
Chair Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn:

One underappreciated reason for Mamdani’s success thus far is that
his campaign is overtly pro-immigrant. Mamdani teaching Hermeylan how
to pronounce his name is standard New York sentimentality; a
generation ago, city comptroller candidate Frank Macchiarola ran
similar ads. But it works here because it’s authentic and captures
contemporary New York.

An immigrant who naturalized in 2018, Mamdani’s outreach to other
immigrant groups helped drive his primary win. He ran up big vote
totals
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neighborhoods with large Latino and South Asian populations.

Mamdani has of course opposed Trump’s immigration agenda, vowing to
resist ICE raids as mayor, as this confrontation with Trump border
czar Tom Homan shows:

But there’s more to his pro-immigrant posture than this. Mamdani’s
campaign goes out of its way to be _affirmatively_ pro-pluralism and
pro-cosmopolitanism.

This appears rooted in a particular understanding of the city.
As John Ganz notes
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attacks on Mamdani as an antisemite—he’s a Muslim who didn’t
denounce the phrase “globalize the intifada”—failed to prove
decisive partly because so many voters actively recoil at the
fomenting of “ethnic hatreds” in New York. They love the city
precisely because it demonstrates that it’s possible to maintain
peaceful coexistence (admittedly not always successfully) even when
events and demagogues threaten to incite ethnic strife.

Mamdani speaks directly to that deep impulse. When he and Brad Lander,
the Jewish New York City comptroller, cross-endorsed each other in the
city’s system of ranked-choice voting, Lander addressed Middle East
violence by saying
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“There is something quite remarkable about a Jewish New Yorker and a
Muslim New Yorker coming together to say, ‘Here’s how we protect
all New Yorkers.’”

In that regard, it’s worth appreciating how Mamdani’s
communications sometimes show
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others _talking while walking and eating_—and while _sharing food
across ethnic lines_. Anyone who has lived in New York knows that the
ever-present option of strolling from one ethnic neighborhood to the
next while sampling varied local fare is one of the city’s great
bounties. When I asked the campaign’s Andrew Epstein what messaging
role this eating and sharing of ethnic food plays, Epstein said it
captures what’s essential about the man himself: “The generosity
around food is so much of who he is.”

This affirmative cosmopolitanism is visible in the campaign’s
broader media strategy, too. His aides point out that he regularly
gives interviews to very obscure foreign-language media outlets. Among
them: South Asian television
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channel [[link removed]], Punjabi TV
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Bangla newspaper [[link removed]].

“We are going to heavily feature him in these places throughout the
fall,” Zara Rahim, a senior campaign adviser, told me. “When you
say ‘freeze the rent’ or ‘free buses,’ it’s plain-spoken,
and translates cleanly into every single language, lowering the
barrier to entry for immigrant voters often dismissed as ‘low
information.’” In this, the campaign’s emphases on affordability
and pluralism and digital innovation all intersect.

The vibe to all this—the halal carts, the sidewalk-eating, the
enjoyment of ethnic neighborhoods, the celebratory tone toward New
York’s pluralist way of life—is a bit like what you might imagine
localized patriotism in historical city-states looking like.

I don’t want to sound overly Pollyannaish. There are tons of
caveats. The traffic and halalflation videos address relatively small,
targeted problems—Mamdani will have to demonstrate that this mode of
intimate appeal can effectively communicate bigger solutions and a
bigger vision.

Mamdani will also have to spend many millions on traditional TV as
many voters remain hard to access digitally. He will face an onslaught
of TV ads depicting him as untested, soft, lacking in executive
experience, and friendly to terrorists. He will need to appeal to a
broader general election coalition involving older New York
constituencies like working-class Blacks and outer-borough whites. He
will need to reassure additional persuadable Jewish voters.

Mamdani knows all this: He has qualified
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“intifada” stance and he’s expected to amplify his pledge
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police. And as Mara Gay details
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he’s explicitly pitching “affordability” as the thing that
unites New Yorkers _across_ ideological lines.

Obviously, not every Democrat can emulate Mamdani’s charisma and
political talents, which drive his digital success. But Mamdani’s
real innovation isn’t just personal. It lies in the deliberate
fusion of personal appeals with substantive ones. He has figured out
how to make talk about community boards and city council bills go
viral by being a dude you want to hang out with and get to know better
on social media. As Epstein told me, what’s critical is the
combination of “demonstrating a positive agenda that improves
people’s lives” while putting “this full person front and
center.”

Win or lose, his campaign will have much to teach Democrats. If
politics is ultimately about communicating in appealing ways, Mamdani
is both charting a new way forward for the digital era while also
getting back to basics at the most fundamental level of all.

_Greg Sargent [[link removed]] is a
staff writer at The New Republic and the host of the podcast The
Daily Blast
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seasoned political commentator with over two decades of experience, he
was a prominent columnist and blogger at The Washington Post from
2010 to 2023 and has worked at Talking Points Memo, New
York magazine, and the New York Observer. Greg is also the author
of the critically acclaimed book
[[link removed]] An
Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Disinformation and
Thunderdome Politics. _

_The New Republic [[link removed]] was founded in 1914 to
bring liberalism into the modern era. The founders understood that the
challenges facing a nation transformed by the Industrial Revolution
and mass immigration required bold new thinking._

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_We’re determined to continue building on our founding mission._

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* Zohran Mamdani
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* elections
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