Despite being mired in a cutthroat New York mayoral campaign, Zohran Mamdani recently released a video 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.”
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.
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.