\n<\/p>\n
There are many fair questions following Zohran Mamdani\u2019s decisive victory. Will his campaign be a template for others? Will he be able or allowed to follow through on his campaign promises? Will the Democratic establishment accept that its future could look something like this proud 34-year-old democratic socialist? But there is at least one very clear takeaway, and it\u2019s best captured by one of the campaign\u2019s final videos.<\/p>\n
It opens in the Bronx, five days after the 2024 election. Mamdani is holding a microphone in one hand and a handwritten sign in the other. It says Let\u2019s Talk Election. Most of the passersby don\u2019t bother to talk with him; the ones who do, at least the ones included in the video, speak about why they didn\u2019t vote (\u201cI lost faith\u201d) or their decision to cast a ballot for Donald Trump. Mamdani listens with a furrowed brow.<\/p>\n
Then the video cuts to October 29, just last week, in the same neighborhood. Mamdani is now one of the most famous politicians in the country; people dap him up, shake his hand, roll down their car windows for him. It\u2019s a brilliant piece of campaign material: The story is simply that, by going out and talking to people\u2014by actually hearing them\u2014Mamdani built a movement from nothing. He\u2019s had numerous viral videos over the past year, many of which reached me even here in western Washington, far from his constituency.<\/p>\n
Mamdani didn\u2019t win solely because he was good at using the internet or courting fandoms. But his campaign did offer something unique and effective: Mamdani positioned himself as an inversion of our current political dysfunction. In an era of American politics that\u2019s becoming more and more defined by trolling, shamelessness, and cheap propaganda, Mamdani proved himself to be the anti-slop candidate.<\/p>\n
Toward the end of the race, the campaign of Mamdani\u2019s major opponent, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, posted a racist AI-generated attack ad featuring \u201ccriminals for Zohran Mamdani.\u201d In the ad, Mamdani runs through the streets and eats rice with his hands as a domestic abuser, a pimp, and a drug dealer offer their support for the politician. The campaign quickly deleted the ad off its X account after the backlash, though it wasn\u2019t the only AI content from Cuomo\u2019s people. Mamdani called out the ads\u2014not so much for their racism, but for their laziness. \u201cIn a city of world-class artists and production crew hunting for the next gig, Andrew Cuomo made a TV ad the same way he wrote his housing policy: with AI,\u201d he posted, referencing reports from April that Cuomo\u2019s campaign had used ChatGPT to write his housing plan. (The campaign claimed that it used the chatbot for research purposes.)<\/p>\n
Politicians, most notably President Donald Trump, have gravitated toward posting AI-generated imagery for four reasons: It is cheap, requires little effort, attracts attention, and is a useful tool for illustrating their (often fictional) political agendas. Cuomo tried to put imagery to the concerns that Mamdani\u2019s detractors had based, I suppose, on his race, ethnicity, and previous comments about decriminalizing certain activities (and prostitution in particular). It didn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n
Contrast that with Mamdani\u2019s campaign ads, which were made for the internet but grounded in the physical space of New York City. In an interview with Defector<\/em>, Andrew Epstein, the campaign\u2019s creative director, said that Mamdani\u2019s videos were about \u201cembedding Zohran in the kind of street-level life of New York City, putting him all over the city, interacting with people over the city in a million different contexts.\u201d The message of community appeared not only to resonate with younger voters who have felt estranged from politics and city life, but to draw them out and get them off their phones\u2014to rally, to canvass, and to vote.<\/p>\n Many politicians now aim to attract attention by any means necessary. Trump\u2019s infamous AI-slop video of him in a fighter jet dumping feces on Americans protesting his administration is a great example. Mike Masnick of the Techdirt blog noted that these videos are \u201cnot a policy response. Not an attempt at dialogue. Not even a coherent defense of whatever decisions prompted the protests. Just a middle finger, dressed up as content, optimized for maximum engagement from his base and maximum rage from everyone else.\u201d This type of trolling is a bedrock principle of MAGA politics.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not limited to Trump or even Republicans. Most Democratic lawmakers have come off as feckless or awkward when it comes to generating attention online\u2014they have what the writer Brian Beutler has dubbed a \u201cterminal insecurity\u201d that causes them to dodge, deflect, and pivot, rather than court controversy. In 2024, the Harris-Walz campaign seemed timid, participating in few press conferences and potentially adversarial interviews. In March, Walz told Politico<\/em>, \u201cWe shouldn\u2019t have been playing this thing so safe.\u201d California Governor Gavin Newsom has found success essentially by parroting Trump\u2019s social-media style and obnoxious tone back at the president on X. And although it\u2019s good for engagement and cathartic for Democrats who are tired of Trump, holding a mirror up to the president\u2019s boorishness feels mostly like empty engagement farming.<\/p>\n Mamdani\u2019s campaign offered something different. In January, it posted a video addressing \u201cHalalflation\u201d in which Mamdani talks with street vendors about New York\u2019s food-cart-permit problem. Mamdani gets the vendors to explain that, because of a backlog in the process, they are having to rent licenses for tens of thousands of dollars above the city-permit rate. Without the surcharge, halal-cart food would be cheaper. The message is clear: The city has a bureaucratic problem that\u2019s hurting vendors and consumers, and nobody in City Hall cares enough to fix it. On X, Mamdani\u2019s post of the video has more than 19 million views; on YouTube, it has just under 420,000.<\/p>\n What works in New York may not work everywhere\u2014the issues and people aren\u2019t the same. But the point is that Mamdani acknowledged and spoke to the humanity of his prospective constituents, and did so with considerable discipline in staying on message. Throughout the campaign, when attacked, Mamdani seemed to respond by doubling down, not against his opponent but in solidarity with the people being attacked. At a moment when the Democratic establishment was publicly questioning how vocal it ought to be about trans rights, Mamdani\u2019s campaign let it be known that he wasn\u2019t wavering: He released a video of him speaking about Sylvia Rivera, a trans activist who died in 2002. Not long after Cuomo laughed on a radio show after its host suggested that Mamdani, a Muslim, might cheer the 9\/11 attacks if they happened today, Mamdani\u2019s campaign posted a video for Arabic-speaking voters in which Mamdani speaks the language fluently. Mamdani said in his victory speech Tuesday night: \u201cI refuse to apologize for any of this.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s America is an endless series of battles in which rampant bigotry, vicious attacks, lies, and propaganda from the right square off against a Democratic apparatus that still doesn\u2019t quite know how to handle an assault on democracy and once-agreed-upon norms. Institutional politicians have largely reacted with fear and insecurity, creating a leadership vacuum that has led to a sense that politics is a practice that gives a natural advantage to the most shameless actors. This has left some with the feeling that the cheapest, most craven campaign strategies end up being the most successful. In meaningful ways, Mamdani\u2019s campaign was a case study to prove whether a more optimistic and human approach could work in our political moment. He proved that it can.<\/p>\n