What We Must Learn from Zohran

Mamdani's 'happy warrior' campaign has lessons for Democrats, no matter how far away they are from NYC

America’s levels of trust — in media, government, each other, and, most importantly for this post, Democrats — are incredibly low. We chose a convicted felon to be president over a competent politician they saw as representing a continuation of the status quo. Democrats have been arguing over how to win in this environment for a while now. Enter Zohran Mamdani.

[With every post, I’ll be recommending a musical piece to pair with it]

Zohran’s campaign is a roadmap for Democrats who want to regain America’s permission to prove themselves as agents of real change for working people.

If anything, the road should be even easier for other candidates to follow. Mamdani faced an uphill battle. At the beginning of the race, Zohran had virtually zero name recognition. He had a non-Anglo name. He wasn’t just accused of being a Muslim (see Barack Obama) — he is one — running in America’s Jewishest city at a time of peak mistrust across ethno-religious lines. He also had almost no record of making a difference in people’s lives. Also: “socialist."

He was up against the New York Democrat with perhaps the best name recognition in Andrew Cuomo — a man who, yes, resigned in disgrace after being credibly accused of multiple instances of sexual impropriety, but who also won a special place in many New Yorkers’ hearts when he modeled calm competence during COVID and stood up to Donald Trump.

The Zohran campaign’s incredible victory, despite these obstacles, demonstrates how powerful their strategy and tactics were.

What Zohran’s Campaign Did

What they did so well — unlike most Democratic campaigns in recent memory — was grab and hold voters’ attention, signal that his values aligned with people’s emotional needs through simple policy messaging, and draw stark contrasts with the other side that tied the opponent to the status quo without alienating voters who thought they had reason to be wary. Together, these moves gave people hope that real change in NYC is possible. And hope equals votes.

Finding Voters Where They Are and Holding Their Attention

Mamdani definitely has the x-factor. Anyone who saw him — in person or on video — could tell instantly that he is magnetic. But the campaign’s triumph was its ability to get him in front of people’s eyeballs. As far as I can tell, there were three main ways they did this:

1. Telling Captivating Stories

They made creative, informative, and visually stimulating videos where Mamdani spoke directly to voters in places the voters recognized (compare that to the Kamala videos that stitched together moderately-inspiring parts of speeches with disembodied voice overs), reaching people where they were already spending time — on Instagram and TikTok. When you watched a Zohran video, you felt: Wow, he put in a lot of effort to reach people like me! As the son of an acclaimed filmmaker, it makes sense he was able to do this, but it’s not rocket science. It takes inspiring, embracing, and trusting a creative team (including people for whom politics is not necessarily their main gig) instead of empowering unresponsive, RCT-obsessed consulting firms.

2. Running in Apolitical Cultural Spaces

On that note, his campaign embraced the broader culture (of which politics is maybe 5%). Mamdani — and, eventually, his also-running surrogate Brad Lander — was everywhere. Nearly all the big apolitical content channels on social media seemed to have a Mamdani interview, cross-post, or collab: music, comedy, sports, you name it. There was a bandwagon effect. The more they did this, the cooler his brand became, and the more influencers wanted to have him on. This takes a candidate who is charismatic, on message, and relatively quick on their feet. But is that too much to ask for in most races in 2026? If we make running for office look as fun as Zohran did, maybe it will be a bit easier to recruit great candidates…

3. Having Serious Ground Game

The campaign channeled its growing support (volunteers and dollars) into a truly comprehensive organizing effort that made at least five passes (door knocks) in my purply sub-neighborhood of Italian Williamsburg — Cuomo country. It was the Obama 2008 model, where New Yorkers found belonging, made lifelong friendships, and channeled their anger and frustration at the state of the world into knocking on doors to talk to people about a long-shot candidate with “a funny name” who clearly cares about real New Yorkers.

From what I’ve heard from people involved, the ground game and the content creation game were iterative and built on each other, creating a virtuous cycle of real listening and engagement and then using that to inform storytelling in videos, which led to more engagement, etc.

All three of these things have one thing in common: they met voters where they were — in person and online. They spoke to them in a verbal and visual language that resonated with voters because Mamdani’s team was genuinely listening.

Emotionally Resonant Policy Storytelling

The campaign diagnosed the predominant emotion for New Yorkers — insecurity. We feel financially insecure — powerless to combat yearly jumps in rent and other costs — and many feel insecure in public spaces, like the subway… or midtown. They judged correctly that the first was most important, but did great work to address both:

1. Affordability

In my opinion, rent freezes are a suboptimal policy, but they are very easy to understand. And they communicate Zohran’s values (as a fighter for working people) clearly to people whose busy lives don’t give them time to read up on policy or the economics of housing supply. Mamdani, along with the other candidates, embraced Democrats’ new Ezra Klein-fueled abundance moment, by committing to building more housing — but that wasn’t the front-and-center message. As a message, building housing doesn’t hurt, necessarily, but it sounds slow, noisy, and indirect in its effect on prices (all of those things are true!).

The genius of committing to rent freezes for rent-controlled apartments is that it’s something he could actually deliver on as mayor. And keeping commitments is how we humans build trust. And more trust means more winning, and more opportunities to build trust, and on and on.

2. Community Safety

When it comes to insecurity in the subway, they had a harder job to do. The reality that society’s failure to care for all New Yorkers is exposed for all to see on the subway has always been true. But it’s also true that the risk of being yelled at, encountering human feces, etc., feels higher than it has in a while. And then there are the random acts of violence that stick in people’s minds.

The usual playbook is to throw more police at these problems, arrest people, etc. But Mamdani bet on the fact that New Yorkers sense we’ve been doing that — and it’s only marginally helping, or at best, it’s like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Instead, he proposed a new Department of Public Safety that would employ professionals trained to deal with mental health and substance abuse issues, letting cops focus on violent crimes. It’s hard to say whether this message broke through, but it was his video about this that got me to commit to voting for him.

In 2022, I tested this exact message in two rounds of polling in battleground states. We found that Americans on both sides favored “investing in public safety, including alternative first responders to deal with mental health and drug abuse,” over “funding the police and hiring more law enforcement officers” (and over “defunding the police”).

Biden’s team saw our report but President Biden chose instead to say, in his 2023 State of the Union:

The answer is to… fund the police. Fund them. Fund them. Fund them with the resources and training — resources and training they need to protect our communities.

The signal the Administration was sending was that it had no new answers. They were dimming the contrast between themselves and the Republicans — who will always be perceived as “tougher” on crime.

The signal behind Mamdani’s policy messaging, on the other hand, was: “I understand this is a problem, the status quo solutions aren’t working, and I actually have a new idea that makes logical sense and we should try.”

The sweet spot is policies that communicate our values clearly and simply, are repeatable across channels and cultural arenas, and are achievable in the short term, at least in part.

High Contrast, Low Contempt

Mamdani drew stark contrasts between himself and Cuomo. But Andrew and his friends’ efforts to paint Zohran as inexperienced, dangerous, and antisemitic didn’t stick. They might have if Zohran’s tone had been more reminiscent of the worst of the internet left — focused on the world’s problems rather than solutions, quick to judge and to hate. But Zohran came off as a happy warrior.

When he opened his mouth, it was to speak clearly and passionately about the issues New Yorkers face and his positive vision for the future. Cuomo represented only an obstacle to that vision, not someone to hate (many of his supporters likely used a more hateful tone, but he didn’t). He smiled as he called for taxing the same rich New Yorkers bankrolling Cuomo’s campaign — not because billionaires deserve to be punished for their success (even if he does believe that), but because that’s what was needed to achieve his vision for New York.

In Conclusion

Mamdani’s victory shows it’s possible to run a straightforward, high-contrast campaign with a positive vision of the future with real people at the center of it that does not pander to the theoretical median voter with the least offensive, most boring ideas — all without coming across as moralizing.

It confirms that Democrats are tired of the old guard — and that the old guard is tired (see Cuomo’s lack of public appearances, or his concession speech) — and that we are desperate for some new faces. It should also remind us not to be too discouraged by labels, hard-to-pronounce names, or ethnic or religious backgrounds that would be “firsts” or are unfamiliar to many voters — especially when many of our potential 2028 presidential candidates would be “firsts” in one way or another.

If Democrats nationwide replicate even half of this blueprint in 2026, this election could mark the moment the Democratic brand began to turn around — driving turnout among young, disenchanted, and infrequent voters who’ve tuned out business-as-usual politics. The actions of some leaders in the party have given me hope that we have already learned some of these lessons, but we need to learn faster. If we don’t, we will continue to lose voters to the things they find more interesting — which, right now, include both not voting and Donald Trump.

Assuming he wins in the general election, I hope Mamdani continues to show us the way by continuing to keep our attention — on his efforts to help working people — and modeling an approach that rejects the cynicism and insincerity that turns people off from politics.