The Democrats Are Losing The Social Media Wars. This Young Socialist Is Changing That.

One frigid night in February, a Brooklyn comedy club is packed and buzzing. The usual pleasure-seekers with beanies, scattered facemasks and tech-adjacent professions. The usual jokes about polycules and all genders being equivalently attractive — male, female and Italian. (Don’t think too hard about it.)

But here comes the headliner with a bit you don’t usually hear in a casual place like this: “This morning, the City of New York wired our campaign $2.8 million in matching funds.”

It’s Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old democratic socialist and upstart NYC mayoral candidate who is comfortable taking stages stuffier politicians wouldn’t. In search of voters, particularly fickle young ones who need a jolt to stop doomscrolling, this former rapper and current state assemblymember will leap onto nontraditional platforms like this one. Or into the winter waters of Coney Island in a business suit for Instagram (“I’m freezing … your rent as the next mayor of New York City!”). Or into interviews with Trump voters on the street like an influencer with a microphone, not to debate them but to understand them — and, in some cases, to win them over.

It’s a literally splashy messaging strategy tailored to the shifting media environment Democrats have largely ceded to conservatives, leading to disastrous consequences for the party. With TikTok shifting young voters sharply to the right and podcasters having just played a major role in helping elect President Donald Trump, the left has been flailing in search of an effective way to utilize social media and other non-legacy platforms — and so far, it has been failing miserably. (See: last month’s infamous “Here’s what Democrats did in February” tweet.)

But that’s not the case with Mamdani. The performer’s approach he’s brought to modern mediums has paid off in massive fundraising wins. He beat the whole Democratic primary field in his first filing period and now boasts a race-leading 17,000-plus contributors, translating into those millions in matching funds. And some recent polling even has him in second place in the crowded field of 11-plus candidates — behind only former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a dynastic politician who is the prohibitive favorite to win the Democratic primary in June.

“As establishment Democrats fail to meaningfully connect with voters through nontraditional media, we’ve broken through to them — and it’s driving our fundraising and field efforts,” wrote campaign manager Elle Bisgaard-Church in a March state of the race memo.

The key to his tactics is part delivery, part content. He relays his messages in stunty, shareable packages, but the substance of that message draws on an older tactic from the Bernie Sanders playbook: Pick a handful of straightforward economic proposals that would impact the daily lives of regular people and repeat, repeat, repeat. Attendees of a Bernie rally are primed to chant Medicare for All before they even get there. Now, thanks to his social-media savvy outreach, Mamdani draws crowds ready to sing along to his own greatest hits — like at the comedy club.

“All right,” he asks, “who here knows our platform?”

“We’re running to freeze the…”

“Rent!” the crowd yells in unison.

“To make buses fast and…”

“Free!”

“To provide universal…”

“Childcare!”

He sums it up for the crowd: “It’s a platform about making New York City more affordable, because right now, the people who have built this city, the people who keep this city running, cannot afford to keep calling it their home.”

None of this is very likely to put the junior member of the state’s lower legislative chamber into the mayor’s office, given obstacles like Cuomo’s name recognition and a rightward shift in the city. But his campaign is doing something with implications far beyond New York, something that should grab the attention of Democrats around the country: He’s charting a way out of the abyss and into the new media age, one video at a time.

As Democrats around the country debate moderation, doing nothing or pursuing a politics of abundance — calling for government to stop getting in the way of things like building housing with over-regulation — Mamdani is an example of another path, one that follows in the footsteps of Sanders by lifting up concrete leftist policies toward a social safety net and affordable cost of living. Like a small but growing number of younger Democrats, he is experimenting with a progressive, economics-first message with a very 2025, podcast-era sensibility: Don’t lecture viewers with your proposals — entertain them.

“We have tried, in fact, to make political arguments in non-political settings,” Mamdani says. That includes the comedy show and a party where people watch the Oscars — but still chat about transportation. It includes copious doorknocking but also two highly-produced videos a month, supplemented by shorter, deadpan, often direct-to-camera bits. In almost all of them, policy is colored with a secondary secret weapon: “Humor is a very effective method of communication,” he says. Hence the bouncy pitch for a city-owned grocery store in each borough as a “public option for produce” and the viral video from the ice-cold waves of Coney Island. Some of the snappy Trump voter interviews even have an affable sense of humor about them.

“Your energy is…” one man in the Trump video said, searching for the right word before settling on a simple thumbs up.

“The central North Star of this campaign is if I can make the city more affordable,” Mamdani says, “and it’s that North Star that will help us break beyond the typical constituencies.”

That mission is resonating early in the NYC mayoral contest, with Mamdani climbing the polls despite his youth and lack of managerial experience. “Zohran is one of the few serious communicators the socialist and progressive left has now in America,” said Ross Barkan, a political writer and former political candidate who once employed Mamdani as his campaign manager. “I think a lot of the left lost the plot,” Barkan said, in terms of “emphasizing cultural issues at the expense of economic issues. I think Zohran has been very smart to run a cost of living campaign.”

It’s not that Mamdani has abandoned identity. While Democratic stars like California Gov. Gavin Newsom are advocating a tactical retreat on certain debates in transgender politics, Mamdani showed up at a protest supporting medical care for trans New Yorkers. He also readily talks about his immigrant background as a practicing Muslim who was born in Uganda. Instead, he’s advocating a “yes-and” version of leftist politics: Yes, maintain progressive principles on social issues — and emphasize an economics-first message. Without compromising his positions on issues like trans rights or Palestine, Mamdani nonetheless offers a clear-eyed view on the limits of identity politics. There is a “ceiling” on the power of representation, he has said, because “people cannot feed themselves and their family on someone looking like them.”

A connection with economic issues and a talent for performance run deep for Mamdani, whose father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a respected Marxist scholar at Columbia University. His mother, Mira Nair, is a film director who worked with the likes of Lupita Nyong’o and Denzel Washington and was nominated for an Academy Award. (Before his political career Mamdani once joked that “nepotism and hard work goes a long way” when asked about his work on music for one of his mother’s movies.)

The younger Mamdani moved to New York with his family at 7, but spent time in both Africa and the U.S., sometimes rapping under the name “Mr. Cardamom” or selling mixtapes for less than $1 in a Kampala taxi park, an experience that “taught me how to deal with rejection,” Mamdani notes wryly today.

After working on various progressive local campaigns in Brooklyn and Queens he eventually ran and won for himself in 2020, quickly landing lots of press for his hunger strike advocacy for taxi workers mired in debt. He also experimented with swanky online presentations of his policy proposals to improve mass transit, unusual in a town where the assembly website looks like it hasn’t been updated since 1995.

Those early efforts have come to fruition in Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, which has reshaped the race following the federal corruption charges against scandal-plagued Mayor Eric Adams, who was expected to be the frontrunner. (That also gave Cuomo a chance for a comeback following his resignation in 2021 in the face of a series of sexual harassment claims.)

As the chaos played out, with a field of candidates jockeying around the unexpectedly up-for-grabs Democratic nomination, Mamdani flooded the zone with fundraising appeals and videos. In his first filing period, he amassed over $640,000 in contributions, nearly six times as much as Jessica Ramos, a fellow left-leaning state legislator running for mayor who might have energized a similar slice of the electorate. Mamdani celebrated with another viral video of him knocking on donor doors to personally say thanks for their cash, sometimes the first they’d ever given for a mayoral race. In the second filing period from January to March, he raised even more, nearly $850,000. He has attracted the interest of some outside funders, too: There is now also a super PAC to support his run. (Mamdani found time this year to get married in a civil ceremony, as well.)

Throughout, he has churned out content. His affordability-themed videos rely on creative acting and editing to elevate them above dutiful blips of unclickable content. In one recent video, the camera lingers on two grumpy white guys in a greasy spoon arguing whether Cuomo or Adams is better. Mamdani shows up to their table and reminds them that there are more options in the race.

“Who the fuck are you?” one man asks.

As upbeat music swirls, Mamdani fast-talks about his universal childcare, rent freeze and grocery store ideas. In a burst of outer borough realism, the spot ends with the elders devolving into argument again about early morning construction noise, as Mamdani slips quietly away from the table.

Spots like this have garnered nearly 14 million views on Instagram in the last 90 days, as well as over 200,000 likes on TikTok in a similar period, according to Mamdani’s campaign.

That’s the kind of modern face-time exposure that digitally-literate lawmakers like California Rep. Sara Jacobs, with her “get ready with me” videos, are eager to pursue. And it makes them stand out in a Democratic Party that’s still mostly more comfortable debating white papers or talking to legacy media. “If you go to consultants, what they will prescribe you is that which may have worked 10 or 20 years ago,” Mamdani says. “So much of what is driving our campaign is a desire to go beyond simply the political context of New York City into the cultural context, the civic context, the city itself.”

Mamdani’s race may be an early indicator if it’s working, at least for younger voters. Heading into an Astoria bagel shop at the end of February, wearing a plain black Uniqlo jacket that was a far cry from the loudly-labeled MAYOR coat the incumbent prefers, Mamdani was nevertheless recognized by a woman with a half-shaved head who said she was eager to vote for him. The candidate took it in stride as he went to the counter and ordered. (“How’s it going, boss?” he said to the employee.)

Mamdani thinks that voters like that young woman can be engaged with what he calls a “direct” politics, in both form and function: “Your policies should not require translation. They should speak directly to a person’s life, and I think the medium through which you convey that message should also speak to that same directness.”

Over a bowl of oatmeal that would be one of the last daytime campaign meals he’d have before Ramadan, he argued that on the national level, this directness could translate to a fighting stance against the Trump administration. Democrats should be contesting the GOP narrative with muscle and shining a light “on whose lives are actually being torn apart by these policies.”

It was something Mamdani demonstrated in March in a crowded state Capitol hallway in Albany, where he tried to confront Trump’s border czar Tom Homan over the little-explained detention of Mahmoud Khalil, the green card holder and activist. In video of the encounter, Mamdani’s voice rose above the pack. “You believe in the First Amendment, Tom Homan?” he shouted as a state trooper kept him back. “How many more New Yorkers will you detain?” Homan didn’t engage, just munched on an apple as he left, but Mamdani’s framing and sense for the camera nabbed headlines — and some $250,000 in fundraising in the following days.

MTA advertising is expensive, but one recent weekend the phrase “VOTE ZOHRAN FOR MAYOR TO FREEZE THE RENT!” could be seen graffitied over a StreetEasy ad (the campaign was not responsible).

Mamdani himself has been in the subway, too, doing the ritual petition-gathering that every candidate needs to do to officially be on the ballot for June. On the last Friday in February, he was up early with a trimmed beard to hunt for signatures at Steinway Street Station in Queens.

It was the usual object lesson in the place politics actually plays in civilian lives. Some people refused to look up from their phones. Others only had flickers of memory about who is running.

“I don’t like the other guy,’ one woman said after signing, eventually landing on a name which has been in the public sphere for two generations, “Cuomo.”

Which makes it all the more surprising to see what does in fact break through.

There’s simplicity: One of Mamdani’s volunteers informed him that trying to freeze the rent has been the most successful hook to land people. “I love his ideas,” said one straphanger, pointing to rent stabilization in particular. Repetition pays off.

Then there’s the band-discovery appeal of finding new music. One woman quietly admitted that her daughters like Mamdani. Other tired commuters perked up out of the usual subway trance at his approach.

“Oh my god,” shouted Stephanie Garace. “It makes me so happy to see, like, somebody who gives a shit about this city.”

The 31-year-old public school teacher went on: “I love watching all of my friends discover your campaign and just discover your politics. And I’m like, I was in on the ground floor.”

Mamdani laughed. “You got in early!”