An insider take on Zohran Mamdani's campaign

Beyond the populist platform and shit hot social media, here's what NYC insiders had to say

It’s Zohran Mamdani. The charming, Muslim, pro-palestinian socialist who has been lighting up your social feeds and has won the Democratic nomination to be New York mayor. It was a blow-out, exceeding the most optimistic of predictions, with Andrew Cuomo conceding before the rank choice vote redistribution even kicked in.

I’ve been on the phone with friends and comrades in NYC, including operators, organisers and a staffer on the campaign who spoke to me while cycling home from Zohran’s election night afterparty.

They had some really fascinating insight that I want to share, much of it unexpected and running counter to some things I’ve read on Twitter.

I’ve deliberately left out two big planks of Zohran’s campaign - his brilliant social media operation and laser targeted populist platform - because they’ve been covered pretty extensively in the Jacobin, NYMag, NYTimes and elsewhere.

These are imperfect first reflections, but I hope you find them as useful as I did.

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■ Zohran was an amazing candidate, but Cuomo was terrible too. It’s obvious how brilliant Zohran is. Intensely charming, smart, funny and hardworking - he has fashioned a brand of corny populism that’s very different from the tub-thumping of Sanders and Mélenchon, and managed to waltz past the ‘scary and dangerous’ image Cuomo tried to paint.

Debate will rage as to what this means. How can we surface more Zohrans? Do we need initiatives like Justice Democrats to go and find them, or will membership organisations like the DSA do? Can people be trained into brilliance, or is such star quality an unteachable asset? How much do leaders matter anyway? Are we succumbing to the hyper visible, and missing the hard working staff and activists behind the scenes?

Amidst this debate, the danger is that we lose sight of Cuomo. While Zohran was brilliant, Cuomo was terrible. Specifically, he was terrible in ways that created a potent dynamic, where Zohran’s strengths told a story about Cuomo’s weaknesses.

While Zohran loves New York, out in the street with people seemingly every day, Cuomo doesn’t live there. Zohran wants to be mayor, but Cuomo sees it as preparation for a presidential run. Zohran is young and charming. Cuomo is old and cantankerous. You’d be thrilled if you daughter brought Zohran home for dinner, while Cuomo is accused of sexual harassment by multiple women. Zohran is part of the democratic base, angry at their leadership for not standing up to Trump. Cuomo is one of those leaders, who didn’t start criticising Trump until the race got close.

It’s true that Cuomo had 100% name recognition. His family is New York royalty. Many people were going to vote for him because “he’s the only one I’ve heard of”. But this cuts both ways. Cuomo’s universal name recognition meant Zohran could use him as a foil, rallying an anti-Cuomo coalition and creating a dramatic contrast. Ranked voting really helped in this regard. It meant the opposition candidates could focus on attacking Cuomo, instead of tearing each other down.

Cuomo’s big name also kept many other more palatable establishment candidates off the ballot. “If Cuomo’s going for it, I’ve got no chance” was the logic.

The establishment bet on name recognition to see them through, hoping for a low turnout non-campaign. Maybe they’d have fared better with the strategy they used against Cori Bush: flood AIPAC money behind a relatively anonymous public official with no baggage, buying name recognition through TV ads.

■ Public funding and TV ad spend were crucial. Many people on the left will want to emphasise the ground-game for ideological reasons. As someone who has helped run field operations I get this - they’re incredible collective efforts that build capacity and people-power - but all the studies show they only shift results by a few % points either way. 40,000 volunteers knocking on 1.5 million doors is a really impressive operation, but any canvasser knows that door open rates can be as low as 1 in 10. A few hundred thousand conversations are an important part of the campaign, but with 6.6 million registered Democrats able to vote - they aren’t sufficient to reach a mass audience.

The New York city public financing laws made this campaign different. After Zohran raised $1 million, the city matched it with another $8 million. This capped his spending, but meant he could build a big war chest early and with relatively little effort, directing staff and candidate time that would be spent fundraising into other activities. By way of comparison, AOC only raised $2 million dollars in her first primary, she had to work hard for every cent and only received a lot of those donations late in the campaign.

Early money meant one big thing: Zohran could run TV ads in New York City, the United States’ most expensive media market. The race was all about name recognition - could they get Zohran to enough people in time. TV ads were indispensable in making this happen. He will have spent the vast majority of his fundraising haul on ads, which enabled him to reach the voter base at scale.

It’s true that Cuomo outspent Zohran by 4-1, all thanks to his corporate backed super PAC. But the inflection point was Zohran getting on TV at all. Research by the Democrat-aligned Analyst Institute suggests that the first communication with a voter is the most important. After that, you have diminishing returns. This means having some ads really matters, and Zohran cleared this crucial bar.

■ Zohran neutralised attacks around anti-semitism. Zohran is a socialist, Muslim, pro-palestine supporter of BDS, running in a city with 1.3 million Jewish people. How did he not get Corbyn’d? He has far more radical politics on Palestine than Jamal Bowman, who got demolished in his primary by huge amounts of AIPAC money. Anti-semitism was the establishment’s main attack line throughout. The New York Times and New York Post ran with it the entire time. You only have to watch the borderline racist interview by Stephen Colbert to see it in action.

Part of the answer is Zohran himself. He is just so charming, articulate and calm under pressure - a one in a million media performer - who can turn a hostile question into audience applause in a few seconds. His line on Israel’s right to exist, for instance, was just so simple and good: “Yes - with equal rights for all, just like the United States.”

Also important, and replicable, is the positive feedback loop he created for himself by engaging with the Jewish community early and earnestly, taking advice from left-wing Jews who are part of the community, knew how he should talk and who he should talk to. It’s easy and simple things such as rooting his criticisms of Israel in international law, recognising the fear that people felt after October 7th and citing Israeli academics who have been critical of Israel that built the trust and resilience he needed to weather slip ups when they happened.

Case-in-point: Two weeks before polling day Zohran gives an interview where he tries to explain the chant ‘globalise the intifada’. The media went hard on it for a week, trying to peg Zohran as a Muslim anti-semite. The reason he was able to head it off? Brad Lander, the Jewish liberal-left New York Comptroller who was also running to be mayor, had cross endorsed him. And this guy put in a shift.

When Lander realised he wasn’t going to win, he went all in campaigning for Zohran, even spending the last of his ad budget on Cuomo attack ads - all to the benefit of Zohran. After his difficult interview Lander helped with the cleanup, doing media round after media round saying “I don’t agree with the chant, but I trust Zohran and I think he’ll do the right thing as mayor of this city”.

That’s the kind of backing you get when you start off on the right foot. Instead of being stubborn, distant and stand-offish, you engage with a community that in New York is an important part of the electorate and can give real power to the establishment’s attack line.

And Zohran did this without ever compromising his support for the Palestinian cause, or backing down on his principles. This should be shouted from every rooftop.

■ Cuomo isn’t likely to run as an independent, and the centre might not contest it either. Cuomo just got beaten hard, and is not a viable candidate to take on Zohran at the general election. Whether the Democratic establishment runs a different candidate against Zohran remains to be seen.

Zohran meets the Governor this week and a lot hangs on it. It’s significant that Zohran has the working support of some parts of the establishment, including the endorsement of Nydia Velazquez, a New York congresswoman not known for backing insurgents, the DC37 union who nearly always side with the establishment pick and the New York Attorney General Tish James.

Tish James would have won if she’d wanted to be mayor. She is of the party’s centre. She led the investigation that took down Cuomo. She wanted Cuomo gone and, interestingly, was pragmatic enough to rank Zohran third instead of excluding him. She also spoke at Zohran’s victory party last night, perhaps telegraphing an acceptance that Zohran is the candidate and should not be challenged.

This speaks to Zohran’s talent for ‘socialist reassurance’, a trait shared with our own John McDonnell. A slight of hand where you both assault the system while reassuring people that the sky won’t fall in if you win. This is important for insiders and voters alike. Many people are in a scarcity mindset and worried about hanging onto what they’ve got. They want to vote against the system but also need reassurance that our big ideas won’t wreck their lives.

■ Zohran went far beyond AOC’s coalition. AOC beat Joe Crowley in 2018 in a low turnout election by mobilsing the DSA base: disproportionately white, ideologically driven graduates. Zohran went way beyond this and turned out a coalition many thought impossible. Perhaps unsurprisingly he won South Asian Muslims by a long way, but also Latino voters and Chinese Americans. As of today more 25 - 34 year olds have voted than any other age group. He also heavily limited his losses amongst black voters, who nearly always vote for establishment candidates over insurgent challengers, unless the challenger is black. For sure, language specific outreach will have been an important part of this, but it seems all these groups got swept up in a city-wide campaign with incredible momentum.

■ Zohran loved cities, and that mattered. It’s a basic point but Zohran ran a campaign that was really urban. He clearly loves cities - being on the subway, walking around, talking to people at steaming hot intersections. In the last week of the campaign he walked the entirety of Manhattan just talking to people. There’s a certain way in which this transcended ideology: he loved the city and wanted to make the city better. He lived here and was one of us. He was in the long tradition of “sewer socialist” mayors who ran US cities in the 1920s. Cuomo doesn’t like the city. He doesn’t even live there. These things don’t affect him. There’s a lesson in this: run the right candidate for the right office. Maybe it’s not enough that their ideology or demography fits with the voter base. They have to make sense for the office they’re trying to win.

■ Cuomo didn’t attack Zohran for a long time. Zohran was the candidate Cuomo wanted. In a crowded field of more ‘credible’ opponents, Cuomo’s team was hoping that the pro-palestine, Muslim socialist with zero name recognition would emerge as their rival. This is why they held off attacking Zohran in the first part of the campaign, missing the chance to typecast him while he was still building his operation. What a glorious miscalculation.

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Does this mean there’s an anti-establishment mood amongst Democratic voters that the US left can exploit? Should establishment Democrats be scared of primary challenges across the board? Did Cuomo’s endorsement from Clinton and Clyburn hinder rather than help? My friends say it’s more complicated than that.

The Democrat base is pissed off with their leadership, it’s true. The party’s ratings have dropped to their lowest ever and by a 2-1 margin Democratic voters want their leaders to fight Trump. But this won’t automatically translate into insurgent victories everywhere. The specifics of this race are important: Zohran’s charm and brilliance, the public money for early ads, Cuomo’s heavy baggage and the dynamic this created between the two of them.

All of that said, the specifics of the race also make it a marvel. To repeat: a pro-Palestine, BDS supporting, Muslim socialist with zero name recognition has just won the Democratic nomination to be mayor of New York City. There are more Jewish people in New York than anywhere outside of Israel. Anti-semitism has been the right’s most effective attack on Western left-populists for some time.

Zohran’s election is a real cause for celebration. It really is impressive. But we must also resist reading our biases into his victory. There are lessons here for sure, but they must be learned when the hangover subside, after the exhilaration of doing the impossible wears off just a little.