Clippable and viral moments, community-centered interviews, charisma and humor, and, most importantly, concrete and relevant promises – these are the pillars of a modern social media campaign that works with the algorithm, not against it. Gone are the days when political figures campaigned through the radio or the newspaper. Ironically, many conservative politicians have embraced this radical change with open arms, leaving Democratic politicians behind.
A recent article in The Guardian laid out the problem. For years, Democrats have been failing to keep up with the clickbait, outlandish videos that many conservative politicians, primarily President Donald Trump, now rely on to grab voters’ attention. One of President Trump’s most effective social media strategies – yelling out absurd, hateful, and even untrue claims to forcefully grab Americans’ attention – goes against the principles of the Democratic Party, set out most prominently by former First Lady Michelle Obama at the Democratic Convention in 2016: “when someone is cruel, or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level – no, our motto is, when they go low, we go high.”
Ever since President Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign aligned American politics, specifically the youth vote, with social media’s ever-changing attention economy, Democrats have been in a stalemate, stuck choosing between professional but ineffective tactics on the one hand or dirty but attention-grabbing social media strategies on the other. Being stuck in this way has hurt the Democrats. As Nell Srinath pointed out in a 2024 piece in The Progressive, Democrats have been gradually losing the youth vote via right-wing podcasters, influencers, and politicians.
At least that was the state of the case until former Queens assemblyman and New York City’s new Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani tapped into a nuanced, rule-defying social media strategy of community-based campaigning and radical, concrete promises delivered using the same algorithm-friendly formulas as President Trump's campaign.
According to NBC reporters Angela Yang and Bruna Horvath, Mayor-Elect Mamdani’s first few videos launched him from an unknown newcomer to a nationally known political figure almost instantaneously. This progression can be charted on TikTok. The first videos he made as an assemblyman, in which he campaigned passionately for free buses, have only a few hundred or a thousand likes. Almost immediately afterwards, though, his videos started to gain more traction, with only one clear change. While the videography quality stayed the same, the content, for all intents and purposes, was now designed to grab the audience's attention in the first few seconds with large claims and promises filmed in a refreshing, concrete setting.
His first truly viral video on TikTok brought in the Israel-Hamas War as a controversial attention-grabber, but in later videos, he embraced a popular social media trend, setting himself up as a street interviewer and organically interacting with everyday New York City voters in a way few politicians have before. His earliest viral video from January 2025 captured his method perfectly. Candidate Mamdani stares directly into the camera, surrounded by halal food stands, and says, “New York is suffering from a crisis, and it's called Halalflation.” He goes on to interview real food vendors face to face, letting their own words expose the truth behind street food inflation – government inefficiency – and interviews passersby who would like the inflation to stop. He then turns towards the camera and uses this evidence to urge voters to see these failures as the result of inaction by Eric Adams, the mayor he is running against. He ends by promising voters that he will pass the exact legislation Adams is neglecting to implement if they elect him to be mayor.
The video garnered more than half a million views and many comments from real New Yorkers lamenting about food prices that had doubled in less than five years. Significantly, one commenter wrote, “I genuinely appreciate you pulling up on real people and getting our perspectives.” That is exactly the response Mamdani’s team wanted. With some light humor, charisma, a familiar social media niche, a physical setting, and a concrete, relevant promise, his campaign framed him as a mayoral candidate for the people in whom the people could actually see themselves.
In his campaign, Mamdani did not actively work against social media algorithms; instead, he framed his major ideas as attention-grabbers. Instead of heckling marginalized groups to create attention-getting controversy, as President Trump has done on numerous social media platforms, Mamdani relied on the inherent radical and controversial nature of his campaign, circumstance, and policies to hook viewers across the city. When President Trump and other opponents claimed his early childhood in Uganda with his Indian parents and Islamic upbringing made him a threat to New York, he answered by posting viral videos across all his social media accounts speaking Urdu and Hindi to voters, embracing his South Asian heritage and blunting the attacks on him in the process.
During the campaign, candidate Mamdani continually beat his opponents at their own game by being unafraid to stake out his positions. His first TikTok video to reach one million views is a perfect example of his expert use of social media strategy. It is a reel with only two photos. The first contains a picture of an X post that targets Mamdani by sharing the headline “Socialist NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani wants to hike corporate taxes to pay for loads of freebies.” At the top of the picture, Mamdani has placed his bold response – “My name is Zohran Kwame Mamdani and I approve this message.” The next photo shows Mamdani smiling while holding another newspaper calling him a socialist. Without even picking up the camera to record, Mayor-Elect Mamdani garnered the attention of a million people by unabashedly embracing his most potentially polarizing policies.
Lastly, and most surprisingly, Mayor-Elect Mamdani took a page directly out of President Trump’s handbook by aiming to reach young audiences. Unlike President Trump, however, he did not use conservative podcasters to send out his message. Instead, he worked with local influencers who do street interviews targeting specific communities in the city. For example, he went on the street interview show “Gaydar with Anania,” which enabled him to show his knowledge of NYC’s queer history and culture and to use the platform to talk about how his policies would directly benefit queer New Yorkers. Not only did candidate Mamdani meet young voters where they were online, he also found them in real life. On Halloween, days before the election, he traveled to multiple gay bars in one night, hyping up party-goers to vote for him at the polls.
Mayor-Elect Mamdani broke all of the rules for traditional Democratic social media campaigning: he leaned into his controversies, collaborated with niche influencers instead of far-reaching celebrities, and built a platform on extreme, polarizing politics. Yet, we are now referring to him as Mayor-Elect Mamdani. His win does not just signify a new chapter in New York politics, but also a new opportunity for Democrats in the entire United States. Instead of shying away from controversial left-leaning politics like universal healthcare, DEI policies, and transgender rights, Democrats can take a few notes out of President Trump's campaign strategy and actually lean into their issues. To grab voters' attention today, politicians must defy the rules and norms of traditional campaigning and safe politics, and Mayor-Elect Mamdani did just that – without hurling a single racist insult or muting his socialist views. Mayor-Elect Mamdani has paved a clear path for the Democratic Party’s political resurgence; it is now up to them to take it.