It was New Year’s Day on Coney Island, where the annual Polar Bear Club Plunge drew out some of the city’s more daring characters: a group of friends dressed as rubber duckies, a couple in Spiderman and Wonder Woman costumes and Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, who donned a $30 business suit he had bought the day before from one of his constituents’s thrift stores on Steinway Street in Astoria, Queens.
“I’m freezing … your rent as the next mayor of New York City,” Mamdani said to the camera. “Let’s plunge into the details,” he continued, before jumping into the 40-degree water and emerging soaking wet to talk about his affordable housing proposal.
The video went on to garner more than 800,000 views across social media platforms.
As the youngest of the nine candidates in this year’s crowded mayoral race, the 33-year-old Democratic Socialist has passed only a few bills in his four years in the state Assembly. But the digital native has set himself apart on voters’ Instagram, X, Tiktok and other social feeds by mixing big policy proposals with a little silliness to try to draw New Yorkers who don’t necessarily know him to his campaign.
Twitter may not be “real life,” but Mamdani’s viral appeal is showing signs of real-world success. While he doesn’t have the largest campaign war chest, Mamdani collected contributions from more New Yorkers than any other candidate during the most recent fundraising cycle — and the most total cash in a single cycle of any candidate so far.
“I think that you’ll find more people heard about my policy on freezing the rent by me jumping into the water than me being at any number of political forums where I’ve said the same thing,” Mamdani told THE CITY in a phone conversation about his social media strategy on Wednesday.
“There’s gotta be a willingness to engage with the cringe if you want to represent 8.3 million people in New York City.”
Two days later, his campaign released a sincere video of him talking with some of the New Yorkers who gave to his campaign. That clip quickly racked up more than half a million views on Twitter.
Part of the reason Mamdani’s been able to appear so comfortable in front of the camera, he said, came from his experience of being a self-described C-list rapper — including attempts to sell CDs on public buses in visits to Kampala, Uganda.
(He was born in the African nation to award-winning indie filmmaker Mira Nair and noted scholar of postcolonialism Mahmood Mamdani before they moved to New York City when he was a child. Despite her filmmaking expertise, Nair hasn’t offered her son tips for his campaign videos, he said.)
“I would rap to passengers who sat there while the conductor was seeking to fill every seat,” Mamdani said. “And once you’ve done that and had no one buy your CD, you can start to become a little bit more prepared to put yourself out there.”
Those moments of “humiliation,” he added, were part of what prepared him for the harsh truths of the campaign trial, especially the early morning attempts on subway platforms to stop people for petition signatures when they’d rather not speak to anyone.
“You have to throw yourself out there, you have to put yourself out there, you have to also just crave rejection like water on your back.”
He continued: “Because if you don’t, if you’re so convinced that you’re correct and that any of these kinds of attempts and efforts are beneath you — what business do you have running for office?”
‘I Have to Be Everywhere All at Once’
The representative of what’s been nicknamed “the People’s Republic of Astoria” has dressed up as Santa to remind prospective donors of a campaign finance filing deadline; partnered with a NYC-based comedian influencer for a satirical, infomercial-style video to sell his policy agenda; and opined that “Eric Adams is a terrible mayor” on the popular “SubwayTakes” account months before officially launching his candidacy. (“SubwayTakes has half a million followers on Instagram, and nearly 700,000 on Tiktok.)
He’s following in the footsteps, he said, of younger progressive politicians in New York City and nationwide who’ve leaned into content creation to attract new supporters, specifically naming Brooklyn Councilmember Chi Ossé, a master of the form, and his Congressmember, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as inspirations.
This kind of social media strategy hasn’t always materialized into votes for candidates who generate buzz and virality, especially if they can’t connect that back to their policy platforms, said Alyssa Stevens, director of social media and influencer marketing at the Boston-based ad agency Connelly Partners. Remember Kamala Harris’s brat summer?
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.
Part of the reason Mamdani’s strategy is working so well, Stevens reasoned, is because his young age gives his content a seamless feel.
“People want to stop and see what he has to say because he’s creating the content in a way that feels really authentic and natural to the platform that they’re consuming it on,” she said. “Whereas if you had someone that is in more of an older age group, I would think it’s not as natural.”
Zeve Sanderson, executive director for the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics, also acknowledged that Mamdani’s strategy could potentially help with turnout.
“With low turnout events, any bit of turnout matters a lot,” Sanderson said — especially when New York City’s last two mayoral contests were effectively decided in Democratic primaries where the winner was the first choice of not even 300,000 voters.
“So actually having meaningful social media engagement that especially can translate to boots on the ground turnout efforts can be really helpful for the primary.”
But Sanderson also cautioned against drawing direct correlation between social media views and donation volumes with turnout and votes.
He pointed to Andrew Yang’s mayoral campaign in 2021, which also leaned into humor on social media. That campaign was rewarded with an early lead in the polls, a big following on social media and a lot of donations — only for the candidate to finish fourth in the ranked-choice primary.
Mamdani, for his part, said he is also relying on traditional campaigning methods to reach voters.
“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.”
‘Beyond the Bubble of New York City Politics’
Cassie Willson, 29, first met Mamdani while attending a Democratic Socialist of America meeting in November.
“I saw him speak, and I learned more about it, and I was like, ‘Yep, that’s what I wanted to put my focus on,’” she recalled.
The Brooklyn-based content creator has been posting comedy on YouTube since she was 13 years old, and now has a following of 126,000 on Instagram and 263,700 on TikTok.
Willson got her big break poking fun at the way the beauty industry preys on young women, she said, but has become especially focused on political satire over the last year.
She started paying special attention to local politics after last year’s presidential elections, she added, while also watching Mayor Eric Adams’ scandals unfold from the sidelines.
Willson recalled Mamdani’s team addressing a crowd of about 300 and talking about how he wanted to reach people who aren’t paying attention to local news.
“If you guys out there, if you know influencers, podcasts, come up to me,’” Willson recalled from their pitch. “So after the meeting, I just introduced myself and I kind of quietly said, ‘Well, I’m an influencer LOL’ — it’s kind of an uncomfortable thing to announce to someone and can feel embarrassing.”
Willson ultimately decided to volunteer her time and platform for the campaign for free, she said, because she believed in Mamdani as a candidate. That video — a satirical infomercial style video about Mamdani’s platform — ended up getting nearly 200,000 views on Instagram and more than 500,000 on Tiktok.
“I think humor often is far more effective at having someone open up to even consider you,” Mamdani said. “And I think so much of politics has become so dark and so cruel that it’s thought of as that is the language of politics when that doesn’t have to be. There can also be a language that’s light and that has moments of humor in it because that’s what life is like.”
Politicians are increasingly drawn to partnerships with influencers like Willson, Sanderson noted, because of the authenticity they offer.
Voters “want something a little less scripted, a little less prescriptive, a little less of ‘vote for this candidate,’ and more of ‘how can I understand this candidate,’” he said.
But Mamdani’s isn’t just working with content creators. He’s also becoming one of them.
In several of his videos, he’s taken on the role of the interviewer for man-on-the-street style chats, including with New Yorkers who voted for Trump, tenants who are getting harassed by their landlord and halal food street vendors who’ve had to navigate the city’s complicated permitting system.
It’s a lesson on political communication that Mamdani had learned, he said, while organizing and hunger-striking with taxi workers drowning in debt back in 2021.
“We faced this difficulty of how to bring interest back to something many considered old news, and how to revitalize this fight in the eyes of the public and the eyes of the media, and what we sought to do is tell the stories of those drivers and humanize them,” Mamdani added. “I think that’s how you actually get beyond the bubble of New York City politics and get into the world of New York City.”
Politicians, he added, can sometimes fall into the trap of wanting to talk more than listen, while “what people desperately want is to hear from New Yorkers themselves,” he said.
“And you’ll find more nuance and more clarity oftentimes in those New Yorkers’ words than you will in a politician trying to summarize it. I’m interested in breaking through the caricature and actually getting to the characters.”
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