How Zohran Mamdani used social media to build a movement

Zohran Mamdani, 33, explained his reasons for running for New York mayor while jogging in a marathon. He promoted his plan to freeze rent by leaping into the frigid ocean in a suit and tie.

In a Valentine’s Day post, he sang a parody of “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” and carried red heart-shaped balloons through the streets of the city. He coined the term “Halalflation” while discussing rising food costs from inside a food cart, and later explained ranked-choice voting in Urdu using cups of lassi as props.

By mid-June, Mamdani so dominated social media that a viral X post with more than 17 million views proclaimed, “you can just tweet ‘Zohran Mamdani’ and immediately get 1000 likes.”

Throughout his campaign, democratic socialist Mamdani used social media to grab attention, departing from the standard Democrat playbook to engage directly with opponents and spotlight leftist policies.

The strategy continued on Election Day Tuesday, when he answered questions from New York City-based influencers and appeared in a video shared by the Gen Z favorite Pop Crave — before finally heading to a victory party featuring young and well-known guests, including Ella Emhoff, stepdaughter of former vice president Kamala Harris, and short-lived Democratic National Committee vice chair David Hogg.

Mamdani’s underdog campaign, which pulled off an upset victory over former governor Andrew M. Cuomo, was powered by trending videos and collaborations with creators across the political spectrum. His digital presence felt savvy and authentic, Democrats strategists and voters say, with a message that resonated with young New Yorkers and blue voters tired of milquetoast platforms and personas.

National Democrats eager for an edge in the internet era are taking cues from Mamdani as they approach the midterm elections. His internet-fluent posting set him apart from competitors including Cuomo, whose $25 million campaign invested in TV ads and mailers while maintaining a relatively buttoned-up presence on social media.

While Mamdani was active on social media even before announcing his candidacy late last year, it was the last leg of the mayoral race that saw his online popularity explode. His Instagram engagement rate was 14 times that of Cuomo during June, and across social media during the same period, conversations about him outnumbered mentions of Cuomo more than 30-to-1, according to analytics company Sprout Social.

“Historically, mayoral elections have been contested on the airwaves and mailboxes, in all kinds of paid media,” Mamdani said in an interview with The Washington Post before the election. “We chose from the very beginning to not only espouse the politics that speaks directly to New Yorkers’ lives, but also to communicate that politics directly to New Yorkers.”

People on the right, meanwhile, largely scorned Mamdani for his unapologetic embrace of the left-leaning policies he has touted in his social media appearances.

“His ideas are utterly destructive, but his presentation is compelling,” wrote conservative activist Christopher Rufo in a Tuesday post on X. “He was even able to make ‘city-owned grocery stores' — an idea plucked straight from the histories of Third World communism — into a meme.”

A focus on everyday New Yorkers

Mamdani’s strategy predates his decision to run for mayor. Debbie Saslaw and Anthony DiMieri, co-founders and executive producers of Melted Solids, the firm behind many of the campaign’s viral videos, said Mamdani’s walk-and-talk, direct-to-camera approach was established during his 2022 campaign for the New York State Assembly, and the creative roots of his issue-based explainer videos trace to his “Fix the MTA” online campaign.

At the time, they said, Mamdani had to stand on the corner in the Bronx asking more than a dozen commuters to let him ride the bus with them for the video before getting one to agree — a stark contrast to his well-documented walk across the entire distance of Manhattan last weekend where he was constantly stopped by supporters.

Zohran Mamdani reacts as he walks during a watch party for his primary election in New York City on June 25.

Last August, Melted Solids pitched Mamdani on a strategy: Build a large platform, then use it to tell the stories of regular New Yorkers. Some of the campaign’s viral content, like diving into the freezing ocean, stemmed from the initial pitch deck, while others, like a pitch for Mamdani to race a city bus in an argument for faster transportation, are yet to be produced. From the start, they said, Mamdani believed that he could “win the internet.”

In addition to his work for the Mamdani campaign, DiMieri directs the popular web series “SubwayTakes,” in which guests sit on the MTA and share controversial, tongue-in-cheek opinions. The show’s success proves that audiences respond to regular people in regular settings sharing unpolished opinions, and the campaign took cues. (Mamdani has appeared on the show twice, last summer to share the take that “Eric Adams is a terrible mayor” and this summer to share the take “I should be the mayor.”)

In the campaign’s first viral video in November, Mamdani conducted man-on-the-street style interviews in neighborhoods with large immigrant populations that moved toward voting for Trump. In preparation for the conversations, the campaign’s communications director, Andrew Epstein, watched a video of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) interviewing mall punks in the 1980s, according to DiMieri.

“At the time, I thought that was a little overkill. And now I think it was actually genius. That’s kind of what set the tone and the foundation of how to approach media from a more listening perspective and empathetic perspective,” DiMieri said, who argued that Democrats have “massively” failed at talking to people that disagree with them.

Throughout it all, they said, Mamdani himself has been central to the direction of the content. Mamdani’s mother is the celebrated “Mississippi Masala” director Mira Nair, and before entering politics, he tried his hand at rap — with old videos surfacing throughout the campaign. He has offered his own feedback and pitches, with plans often originating in a group chat between Mamdani, Epstein, the Melted Solids team and video director Donald Borenstein, who joined the effort in January and is responsible for much of the vertical direct-to-camera style content.

Borenstein, who also directed the campaign’s videos in Urdu and Spanish, said the team looked to their backgrounds in documentary filmmaking and New York-based films with a handheld, intimate aesthetic for inspiration.

Their guiding principle was to always tie the content back to Mamdani’s policy proposals, he said.

“We generally avoided explicitly referential stuff, except for when it made sense,” Borenstein said. “We have fun in the videos sometimes, but we never want to make a joke of what’s going on.”

Engaging directly with opponents

Mamdani’s campaign frequently collaborated with outside influencers, reaching beyond audiences who typically follow primaries by appearing in content with creators who don’t typically post about politics.

“In the final days of the campaign, I felt like many of the creators, influencers, media or entertainment figures that I know in New York suddenly had selfie pictures with him on their feeds,” said Jordan Uhl, a digital strategist for progressive organization MoveOn. “What he created was this kind of political gravitational pull. Everyone wanted to be part of this.”

Mamdani also appeared in new media and podcasts not sympathetic to his candidacy. For instance, after diverging from other Democrats in his stance on policing — saying he’d get rid of the New York Police Department’s overtime budget and avoid hiring more officers, Mamdani went on a podcast hosted by two former NYPD officers who largely disagreed with his proposals.

“Hey, at least we had the opportunity to have him on,” said one host after Mamdani’s segment ended. “At least he speaks from a place of honesty.”

Zohran Mamdani speaks during a Democratic mayoral primary debate, June 4, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura, Pool)

The campaign also participated in interviews with social media channels traditionally seen by campaigns as risky, like “Gaydar,” a vertical video social media show that quizzes guests to determine if they’re “gay, straight or a homophobe.”

Amelia Montooth, a content creator and the CEO of Mutuals Media, which produces the show, argued “people looking at 2026 and beyond need to have that kind of fearlessness.”

Mamdani’s interview — in which he guessed that the acronym WLW, meaning “women loving women,” stood for “win loss win” — got more than 2.5 million views before the election. The host guessed Mamdani was straight, but “one of the good ones,” and endorsed his campaign in the video. Other politicians are following suit, with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-Michigan) set to appear on an episode airing later this week.

Revising the left’s social playbook

Political strategists and social media experts alike caution that Mamdani’s online magnetism was due in large part to his platform and personal charisma, which may make repeating his success a challenge for other Democrats. They also underscored his campaign’s strong ground game — in a cyclic fashion, the online content fed the in-person movement and vice versa.

Still, Democrats are looking to his approach for inspiration. The campaign’s nontraditional media choices served as “authenticators of him as an agent of change,” said David Axelrod, a Democratic political strategist.

“It wasn’t just what he was saying — although I think the affordability issue was enormously important — it was how he said it, where he said it, the authenticity with which he said it that allowed him to overcome what in the past would have been traditional barriers that would have been impossible to penetrate,” he added.

Politicians on the right have generally seen more success with new media as establishment Democrats lag behind, said Brenna Parker, a Democratic digital director who worked for Vice President Kamala Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in the Biden administration.

“The internet is so dominated by the right that it’s hard to break through, so if you can take risks and be creative and really allow your digital team to be thoughtful and creative, the results pay off,” Parker said

“Mamdani was in the 21st century and Cuomo was in the 19th century,” summed up Mitchell L. Moss, a professor of urban policy at New York University who advised Mike Bloomberg during his 2001 mayoral campaign. “That’s all there is to it.”

Sarah Ellison contributed to this report.