How Zohran Mamdani’s Campaign Crafted a Winning Message
We spoke to Zohran Mamdani’s campaign communications director, Andrew Epstein, about how a disciplined and creative message, mass canvassing, viral videos, and an end run around mainstream media helped the campaign break through.
Andrew Epstein takes a video of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani during his campaign. (Kara McCurdy)
- Interview by
- Micah Uetricht
A campaign for office starts with finding the right candidate. Zohran Mamdani combines world-historic “rizz” with deep socialist ideological commitment. But his mayoral campaign won because it successfully introduced that candidate — and the political vision he embodies — to millions through a mass field operation alongside a brilliant, funny, and moving communications operation. One hundred thousand volunteers knocked on three million doors, an endeavor we explored in a previous interview with Mamdani campaign field director Tascha Van Auken (who has since been tapped to lead the mayor’s new Office of Mass Engagement). Here we turn to the communications operation, in which a team of strategists, speechwriters, designers, and filmmakers painted a giant love letter to New York City and inoculated voters against tens of millions of dollars in smears and attacks.
For the Jacobin podcast The Dig, editor Micah Uetricht interviewed Andrew Epstein, who led Zohran’s communications team. You can listen to the interview here. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Political Roots
Start with your political background. What was your trajectory from initial politicization to a key player in the Zohran Mamdani campaign?
It starts pretty early, but I’ll go through it as quickly as possible. I think the first real moment of my politicization was the first week of high school, which was September 11, 2001. I was living in the suburbs, but my family worked in New York City and was able to see the destruction from the waterfront of the town. I grew in this moment of being wrenched into the world and feeling like things were not as you thought they were.
That very quickly turned into outrage at the Bush administration’s mobilization for war, partly through an older sister that was more politicized, partly through older friends, and partly through the ferment of the Iraq War movement in high school. I was pulled into that. I went to the major demonstrations in 2003 and 2004 and poured a lot of the energy into wanting to get George W. Bush out of office. I started with the Howard Dean campaign — Dean for America — and then John Kerry. When Kerry lost, and then a year later with Hurricane Katrina — my early days in college at SUNY Binghamton — those were both radicalizing events that led to a deeper alienation with the political system. That led to many years of being quite opposed, or not participating in, electoral politics — a more radical bent in college.
I don’t know that I had an entirely coherent ideology, but it was broadly the anarchism that was circulating at the time, where a lot of anti-capitalist, radical energy was concentrated — or at least where you’d get drawn in. This was before the days Jacobin magazine existed to help organize our thinking about power, mass movements, and strategy. After college, my analysis started to shift, not least because I started working and paying rent, which very quickly changes your understanding of the economy and exploitation.
I worked briefly in local politics in Binghamton, New York, became quickly alienated from those electoral politics, and then spent basically all of my twenties in grad school. I went to the University of Georgia and was living in Athens, Georgia, when Occupy kicked off. So I wasn’t part of the New York City Occupy movement, but I was part of its reverberations around the country.
I was very involved in the immigrant solidarity movement in Georgia. This is when Georgia was the second state, after Arizona, to criminalize undocumented students and enact intense repression at the state level. After that, I came back to New York around the time Jacobin was founded, which played a role in rediscovering or understanding myself as a socialist.
I continued in grad school, pursuing a PhD at Yale, where I got very deeply involved with the labor movement and with UNITE HERE’s long struggle with Yale University — starting with Local 35, going back to the 1930s, followed by Local 34 in the ’80s. I was part of the graduate teachers’ movement trying to unionize. That taught me a great deal about power, accountability, pushing each other, and what it takes to both change yourself and the conditions around you.
I did not finish my PhD program. I ended up back in New York and became part of this emerging New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA) electoral project, which leads into the past five or six years of my life working in that arena.
Your trajectory is one that feels very familiar to me in terms of initial moments of radicalization, joining the broad left that, at the time, was dominated by anarchism, and then having your politics reshaped and moving in a more socialist direction. That feels like the experience of the millennial left as a whole — probably of the average Jacobin reader and Dig listener.
Absolutely. And that I think deeply infuses and motivates the Mamdani campaign: its analysis, its sensibility, what we have all gone through as part of the Left that grew up over the past few decades. Millennials are on the cutting edge, the vanguard of the democratic socialist project.
We’re going to get into your comms work in a minute. But last night at a big event here in New York City, I was talking to Alyssa Battistoni, friend of The Dig.
A friend and comrade from the Local 33 days. We were both on the comms committee.
She mentioned that it was important to bring this up, as you did comms for your local graduate workers’ union.
Between the University of Georgia and Yale, coming out of an internship I did at the Nation magazine, and then I started working for Jeremy Scahill, when he was releasing Dirty Wars, the book and film. I did some comms work around that.
I’m sure Alyssa didn’t say this, but I ended up on the comms committee mostly because I had not succeeded at admittedly very difficult organizing assignments. We were trying to figure out if maybe I had other strengths.
It was very hard to organize that union. Everything we did felt like an ordeal. And yet, a few years ago, they won overwhelmingly. That victory built on earlier organizing. I have to shout out Lena Eckert-Erdheim, the president of Local 33. We were together back in those difficult days, and she has run with it, and they’ve won an incredible contract there.
You mentioned Jacobin. You also interned at the Nation. If you’ll permit a self-indulgent question: Can you talk about the role that left media played in shaping your understanding of politics?
I was actually an intern at the Nation when Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara wrote a cover story and when the magazine ultimately endorsed Bill de Blasio during his 2013 campaign. That’s also where I first met Bernie Sanders, who visited the Nation office. I rode the elevator down with him. Even then there were rumors that he might be looking to run for president. I asked him on the elevator, and he was like, “No, no, no, no … I don’t know about that.”
I cut my teeth on Democracy Now! — I listened to it every day. I would sometimes pretend I was Amy Goodman on SUNY Binghamton campus radio when reading the headlines on my show called Radio Not Bombs. Democracy Now! and the left media ecosystem around the Iraq War really shaped me. But that ecosystem didn’t yet have the broader project that later coalesced around Jacobin. That wasn’t just a form of a publication but a way to think about doing mass politics.
Maybe that’s kind of the heart of my evolution: going from a politics of resistance or protest (which has its role) to a politics that’s trying to win a mass public, and knowing that that’s the only way we’re going to fundamentally change the conditions that people have to live in. Jacobin was part of that.
I don’t know why I’m buttering you up so much here.
Because I’m asking for it.
Relatedly, talk about the experience of the two Bernie Sanders campaigns and the impact they had on you.
When Bernie launched, it was summer of 2015. I was at Yale, I was organizing. I was still not terribly enamored of big electoral projects. It wasn’t a thing that we were thinking about. We were doing it locally in New Haven with the labor movement. But I remember thinking when Bernie announced like, okay, this is like Dennis Kucinich. It’ll be fun for a while. He’ll get some good zingers in on a debate stage, he’ll build a big email list, and it’ll fade out at some point. And he’ll have to endorse Hillary Clinton by the late autumn.
I shifted pretty quickly. I think by the fall I was Bernie-pilled. When the primary came to Connecticut, I was knocking on doors. It was very separate from the union work I was doing, and I may have shirked my union assignments to go knock on doors for Bernie in the final days of the primary. I was hyped about Bernie.
There was no field launch. I just downloaded a list from the Bernie website and went out and talked to people. Seeing the language of political revolution used in that way was incredibly inspiring and transformative. It was also obviously frustrating in that it ultimately didn’t succeed in the 2020 election.
By then, I was the campaign manager for Emily Gallagher’s assembly race. In some ways, the course of that presidential campaign led into the days of the pandemic and the George Floyd protests — it’s deeply tied to my first real New York City electoral work.
Bernie is the trailblazer. He returned questions of political economy and distribution to American politics. These were not terms he would use on the campaign trail but that’s what it was really all about. He built on currents that already existed on the Left before it, making it clear that challenging this oligarchy — “the millionaires and billionaires” — requires massive numbers of people not just organizing to elect him but sustaining pressure after election day. That lesson has been learned by Zohran and the movement that elected him.
New York City Democratic Socialists of America
I recently interviewed Tascha Van Auken …
The champion.
… the campaign’s field director, who talked at great length about how NYC-DSA reshaped her sense of political possibility after the first Bernie campaign, and how DSA helped train her in the kind of skills that she put to use in constructing this unprecedented field campaign for Zohran.
You mentioned working for Gallagher, who eventually became an NYC-DSA endorsee. What has your engagement with NYC-DSA been like?
I joined DSA in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election in 2016, like many other people trying to find a place to put their energy and focus. I wasn’t a super active member early on, in part because I was so used to the UNITE HERE New Haven organizing culture. If you don’t attend a meeting, you’re getting phone calls. And if you don’t pick up the phone, your door is getting knocked on, and you’re gonna have a conversation about how you’re prioritizing your life and what you’re putting first. NYC-DSA doesn’t work that way. So when I joined and skipped my second branch meeting, I was disappointed when no one came knocking on my door saying, “Where are you, Andrew?”
I was something more than a paper member but not somebody who was on any organizing committees or deeply involved in any working group stuff. It was in 2018 that I started canvassing. I actually started with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, mostly in Elmhurst, Queens. I was there on primary night in her Elmhurst office when she won. I looked back years later at photos, and I was like, “Oh, there’s Jabari Brisport in that photo,” and there’s all these other people I’d come to know later on. And then, there was Julia Salazar‘s campaign later that year. But this was always something I did on the side here and there. About a year later I was between jobs. I had left a job thinking another one was lined up and it fell through. I was unemployed, and I really wanted to do the kinds of things I’d seen happening and had only dipped my toes in with the New York City DSA electoral project.
At the time, there was a buzz around New York City politics at the time — the defeat of the Independent Democratic Caucus, the challenge that Cynthia Nixon gave to Andrew Cuomo. It felt like things were in motion in a real way for the first time in a long time in New York City and New York State. So when I was unemployed in summer 2019, I was looking to work in politics and kind of just raising my hand and saying, “What can I do? Where can I go?”
I think it was through a combination of Nikhil Goyal, who I knew from Twitter, and Seth Pollak, an NYC-DSA member, that I was put in touch with a Greenpoint community activist named Emily Gallagher. She was looking to run against a forty-eight-year incumbent named Joe Lentol and was looking for a campaign manager. This was somebody who had gone through the waves of millennial left politicization. She was very involved with Occupy and community organizing and all the rest of it.
She had come to this moment where she wanted to actually run for office and challenge power in a direct way. I joined her campaign about two weeks before NYC-DSA officially declined to endorse in that race. I had signed up thinking, “Okay, this is going to be a DSA race.” They declined. But Emily and I had already found a connection around politics and sensibility.
For me, this district was an early lesson that I took to the Mamdani campaign: not believing what passes for commonsense wisdom among consultants and political writers. To the degree that anybody was thinking about Joe Lentol and that assembly seat, the assumption was that he was untouchable. He was an institution. But I was looking at a district that went for Bernie, went for Cynthia Nixon. Most eligible voters in the district didn’t even know what the New York State Assembly was. If we ran on a real agenda in a really energetic way that used every kind of comms tool available to us and took nothing for granted, we could break through.
And we did — without, in that case, NYC-DSA. Actually without a single elected official endorsing us. The Working Families Party had endorsed the incumbent. No labor union, nothing. It was a core group of organizers and a district that was ready for it.
Then COVID-19 hit. It upended the field program. The George Floyd uprising and protests were also, I think, crucial to the surge in turnout that eventually led us to win. It was on the course of that campaign that I met a young man named Zohran Mamdani. We shared an election lawyer, the great Ali Nazmi. I remember meetings in Ali’s office: Zohran coming out, us going in, probably around petitioning. I immediately thought, this guy’s got rizz — who is this guy?
We weren’t part of the same slate. But in some ways our race in 2020 was not totally dissimilar from his. He was also running against an incumbent who was understood to be good enough for New York State politics. It wasn’t somebody who was considered a big, bad enemy of progressive groups or the Left. But people like Emily and Zohran wanted to raise the expectations people had about what politics and government could deliver. Good enough wasn’t good enough.
Both races were extremely tight. They were won in the recount phase — fighting over ballots with gloves and masks on in the summer of 2020 at the Board of Elections. We had that shared affinity.
In the months between the Democratic primary win in June and July 2020 and Emily being sworn in in January 2021, we started having conversations with leaders in New York City DSA about Emily joining the Socialists in Office committee. That was driven in no small part by my relationship with Tascha Van Auken, which had developed even though she was managing Phara Souffrant Forrest’s campaign, which was part of the DSA slate, while we were not.
Emily and Phara had become friends. That led, in the fall, to conversations with a whole number of people: Cea Weaver, Jeremy Cohan, and others. By January 2021, Emily was sworn in and almost immediately joined the Socialists in Office committee — the first iteration of it in Albany. That included Emily, Marcela Mitaynes, Phara Souffrant Forrest, Julia Salazar (who had been there for a couple of years), and Jabari Brisport.
Talk about what it was like to work in Emily Gallagher’s office and what you took from that. That was your last position before coming on?
Yes. We started at a wild time. It was January 2021 — all the COVID protocols were basically still in effect. No one had been vaccinated. Much of the work was done remotely. Starting in Albany is hard enough, especially when you’re coming from outside of the machinery of county parties. If you’re ideologically opposed to learning everything from lobbyists, who are always available and know more than most legislators, you’re already operating in an environment where you don’t have a lot of information or guidance as to how the place works.
Add on top of that that everything is happening remotely for almost the entirety of the session, including the budget. Being in the Socialists in Office committee was invaluable, and I cannot imagine having done any of my time in Albany without it. It was a place where you could actually develop shared analysis, share information, talk about what was important, be connected to rank-and-file leaders in NYC-DSA, talk with legislators and their staff to figure out how to move collectively.
It was a heady session in 2021. We were all gearing up for the ultimate boss, Andrew Cuomo, who’d been governor of New York at that point for more than a decade.
Despite occasionally calling himself a progressive, he was very clearly opposed to our project and was funded by the people who were opposed to our policies. Then came the sexual harassment allegations, and the attorney general Tish James’s report on nursing homes. By the time we got into the budget, we had a supermajority in the Senate, an organized faction of socialists and progressives in both houses, a weakened governor, and the early days of the Biden administration — plus deep need and desperation in the wake of the lockdown.
Through coordination, through fighting, we were able to win a budget that raised taxes on the wealthiest, funded an unemployment insurance program for undocumented workers, and did a whole number of things that I think people would have considered completely impossible.
That lesson, in breaking through imposed limits on what’s possible through collective action and an outside-inside strategy, was an intense political education. It was also during that time that it became clear that Zohran was really something special: he had a lot of courage and determination and an uncanny ability to both push publicly and stake out positions while also building coalitions and winning over skeptics. At the same time, it wasn’t just one thing. It wasn’t just, “I’m going to work the kind of social networks of Albany that move things and share information,” or just, “I’m going to be here as a tribune for the agenda and shout from the outside.” It was an ability to do both.
It seems clear that what was built in NYC-DSA after the 2016 Bernie campaign was very special. It was taking power-building very seriously: the development of skills in people like you, the building up of a roster of elected officials at the state and eventually the city level as well as endorsees at the federal level. It’s a testament to what that organization has built, that they are mentioned as key pieces of your story, of Tascha’s story, and of other people who have been very involved in the Zohran campaign.
Absolutely. It’s an organization that is keenly interested in learning from wins and losses — electorally, legislatively, and in the budget fight in Albany — and continuously developing new leadership. And now here we are, with a socialist elected mayor of New York City.
What was your position in Emily Gallagher’s office?
I was chief of staff, which in Albany means like three or four people, not a West Wing–style situation. You have to wear many hats: management, advising on politics and strategy — I was also doing all the comms. I was essentially the comms director. Some offices hire a separate comms director. We didn’t.
How did you come to do comms for Zohran in this campaign?
I think that speaks a little bit to the political situation in New York in which Zohran decided, along with NYC-DSA, to run for mayor. Fast-forwarding several years from that first session in 2021, we had the combination of the end of the Bernie campaign, the disappointments of the Biden administration — most especially around the genocide in Gaza — and a deeply unpopular mayor in Eric Adams. It felt like everything was at a stalemate. The socialist left in New York City had some power, and some staying power, but the balance of forces was a little stuck.
After the resignation and scandal of Andrew Cuomo as governor, there was a real sense that there was no centrifugal force in New York politics anymore. This meant the terrain was open in a lot of ways. Meanwhile, the machinery the establishment was losing its ability to determine outcomes. It felt like the situation was ripe for a big swing.
In steps this generationally talented political figure with a very sharp analysis of the kind of campaign he wanted to run. He had a plan and an agenda. And when I got to know that plan, I was excited. At first, some of us thought, are we ready for this? We were thinking maybe public advocate in 2028.
But understanding the political landscape in New York, the kind of candidate Zohran would be, the experience that had been developed through this project, and the kind of campaign he wanted to run, it seemed like it actually could work. And not just in potentially being mayor. It could identify and develop leadership across the city, talk to far more voters than usual, and inject a muscular working-class politics into a race that lacked it. So I took the plunge.
Pivot to Zohran
You said you did comms for Emily Gallagher’s office, but that was not all you did for her. How did you come to do comms specifically for Zohran?
I remember a time when I was giving Zohran a ride back from Albany to Astoria, where I had moved a couple of years before the campaign started. So it made sense sometimes for us to carpool.
I don’t remember what the issue was, but something had come on to the scene in Albany. And it was big news. Everybody was scrambling to write their tweet about it. Zohran was thinking it through with his team on the rainy car ride home. We stopped at a rest stop — I think at Woodbury Commons — and went in to get a coffee and take a break from driving. And while I was on the line, I thought of a tweet I wanted to write for Emily. I cleared it with Emily, posted it, and it went viral and was quoted in the New York Times the next day. I think he was like: I need somebody who can do that.
He needed a poster.
He needed a poster. And I’d done a lot of the comms work on campaigns and all the rest of it. He recognized it as my greatest skill and was looking for it.
So you take the plunge. You’re the comms director. Talk to me about your understanding of the media landscape that you’re entering, the attention economy, and how that affected your approach. What are the openings for an insurgent candidate like Zohran? Where are the weak spots? And how did you craft a communications strategy that was based on the assessment of both?
I can start with what people thought the race was supposed to be about. This was a few weeks after the indictments against Eric Adams,so there was a sense this was going to be about corruption and mismanagement. And it had also become common sense among people in politics and media that the 2021 mayoral election had showed that “law and order” — narrowly understood — was going to be the dominant issue. We can nuance what people mean when they tell pollsters what their “main issue” is, but polls were showing law and order was going to be a major issue, and that’s how Eric Adams had won. (I don’t know that that’s exactly how Eric Adams won — I think he did it in a way that was much more interesting and nuanced than people remember, and he barely won — but that was the prevailing view.)
So here was Zohran proposing a different crisis in the lives of working people. And that was the crisis of cost of living. From the beginning, he was saying people don’t really have time to worry about corruption in City Hall when they can’t afford their rent, their childcare, their Metrocard.
That had not necessarily registered yet as strongly in poll— not because it wasn’t grinding people down but because for so many years they had learned through experience to disconnect cost from politics. They’d learned, essentially, that politics could not really do anything about the prices they were paying to just get by.
The first really important insight was to reconnect those things. Make a clear case that cost is crushing people and depriving people of stability, creativity, and joy in a city they clearly want to be in. And if we ran at that in creative and direct ways, we could shape a majority around that thesis.
Was that Zohran’s pitch to you from the beginning?
His pitch was: This is a cost-of-living race. And we’re going to launch with three bold, landmark policies that speak to it.
The question of what the race was supposed to be about is something that everybody assumed. But it also came up in conversations I was having early on with reporters and editors who would tell me, “Interesting idea, but we all know that this is going to be a race about crime or corruption.” That’s how a lot of consultants operate. They look at what is currently extant in public attitudes and say, “Okay, we have to attune to that,” as opposed to saying, “People are feeling and experiencing a range of things” — many of which they’ve stopped seeing as political because they’ve learned what politics will and won’t do for them. I believed in our ability to raise the salience of those material issues and connect directly to them.
And that was the major thesis of the campaign — even before we knew what would work in video, or what type of video we would do. It was that message and agenda, combined with knowing that we were going to build an incredible field operation and that we were going to experiment and run with a high level of energy.
It seems obvious in hindsight that you would be able to make a successful campaign around the affordability question. Everybody knows how badly people are squeezed in this city. In the wake of Trump’s second win, affordability, the price of groceries, and inflation became huge topics. It’s sort of insane that it was not seen as a potentially winning political issue.
The proof that this worked is obviously in the fact that you won this election, but also that the word “affordability” is everywhere. It’s reshaped Democratic campaigning all across the country. You all honed in on that in a way that nobody else around the country was doing in that moment.
Definitely. And there was another piece that is worth mentioning, something that helped create the opening for people to hear and engage with the agenda — especially among younger voters, many Muslim voters, and people who were not voting at all, who had just tuned out: Zohran’s principled stand on Palestine and his involvement in the movement against the genocide. At a time when so many people who were supposed to be the base of the Democratic Party were feeling — not to overuse the term — gaslit by the party establishment about what they were watching every day and also about the strength and capability of Joe Biden up until the week before he dropped out.
Not anybody could have broken through that cynicism. Even to get as far as somebody engaging with ideas like universal childcare and free and fast buses and rent freezes required somebody who had credibility on the major moral issue of the moment — one in which people were trying to obfuscate both what was going on and the complicity of the US government.
For a lot of people that we ended up connecting with and turning out, voters and volunteers and everyone else, they needed to know that this was a person who spoke the truth. And if he was going to speak the truth about this issue, then maybe he was speaking the truth about his commitment to his agenda and what he was willing to do to get it done.
I want to be clear: the question of Palestine was not a plank of the agenda by any stretch of the imagination. But it was a deeply felt moral issue, and one that he led on — and I do think for a large number of people that we were trying to reactivate, that credibility was necessary to reach them and connect.
That goes back to my initial question: From a comms director standpoint, how do you break through in an incredibly competitive attention economy in a moment of great cynicism?
First and foremost, it was an understanding that how you’re covered by local press, while important, is no longer determinative. Just having that attitude and understanding that, knowing from the beginning that, if we were actually successful, the shitstorm was going to come down on us in some way. And I remember early conversations I had with some reporters and editors who insisted we had a ceiling: interesting idea, compelling guy, but there’s no way he gets past 5, 10, 15, 20 percent.
And some people thought it’d be great if he got like 10 or 15 percent. It would announce Zohran Mamdani and NYC-DSA on the citywide political stage. The bar, in their minds, was low.
Some consultants, from a different background than ours, would have made it their mission to argue with those reporters until they took you seriously. You know, kicking and screaming, “You will take me seriously!”
Because they’re the essential gatekeepers.
Right. They were the ones to actually win over, because then you can tell your story to the voters through headlines. But we knew that the majority of people we wanted to mobilize weren’t getting their politics from that coverage. And we knew that New York City DSA and Tascha and our movement could build on the doors. My attitude was, “You think we have a ceiling? Okay. Let’s find out.” Knowing that even long before media took us seriously, there were thousands, and then tens of thousands, of people knocking on doors, having conversations about the agenda, motivating people, and also inoculating them against what we knew was coming if we became viable: the money and the negative media.
Internally, were you explicitly saying, “These editors and reporters are not our primary audience. We do have this doors operation that’s going to really carry our message out there.”
To some degree, yes. But this was all theory — it was my first time being a comms director on a citywide campaign.
I was reminded of that when our incredible speechwriter, Julian Gerson, asked me before election night, “Is it true that you didn’t get any TV cameras for the launch of the campaign?” Julian came on after the launch, and I hadn’t even thought about it. But yeah, we didn’t.
I remember pleading with FOX 5 to run B-roll that we had shot on local news. I called news desks. I tried. They’d say, “We’ll see.”
This story is a little reminiscent of Bernie’s launch in 2015.
Yes. Wandering out of the Capitol: “I’m running for president. Goodbye.” But I never felt on that day that the launch was anything short of a huge success. We had a killer launch video. We had run around doing all this press, direct one-on-one interviews, Democracy Now! and PIX11 and all the rest; we had gotten the story we needed to in the Times. Most importantly, we had turned out a big, diverse launch rally with endorsers of the campaign: New York City DSA, Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), Beats, CAAAV (Organizing Asian Communities Voice), Jewish Voice for Peace, New York Communities for Change. And Zohran had laid out the campaign’s thesis, and it was resonating. It was hitting.
People often say, “You didn’t know you were going to win until the very last moment.” A friend recently reminded me of a text I had sent them in November saying, “I think we can win.” And it was because of the intensity we were running at, the reverberations we were already feeling, and the fact that we had months left and nobody was hustling like we were hustling.
So it was a race against the clock. But there was intentionality to it. A lot of it came out of the analysis that develops if you’ve been on the Left for a while. You see it in our attitude toward nonvoters too. After the primary, the Cuomo people were like, “Well, there’s no way we could have possibly seen this coming because they had turned out zero primes,” right? Zero primes are people who don’t vote. If you’re looking for voters, you know triple prime is your gold. These guys vote every single time. That’s who you want to go find. But zero prime, they’re not going to vote.
We had a completely different attitude. If you’re a New Yorker, we want to talk to you about voting for this agenda and for this candidate. We want you to be part of this. We went out and we believed that we could find and motivate those people. And it seems obvious on some level, but you kind of have to be outside of the narrow world of mainstream politics to even propose that.
Crafting a Communications Strategy
What were your inspirations for the comms side of the campaign? Obviously, Zohran has mentioned taking direct inspiration from Bernie Sanders for his politics as a whole, but it also seems like your campaign has learned a lot, specifically from Bernie’s media and comms operation.
There’s a great 2018 New York magazine profile, “Bernie Sanders is Quietly Building a Digital Media Empire,” that details how Bernie built this incredibly robust digital comms operation that reached millions of people, often drawing bigger audiences than mainstream legacy media at key events. And it’s clear from that piece that Bernie sees comms as very central to what he is doing in elected office. He thinks of it as essential to getting around the limits that the mainstream media puts on political discussions in the United States to articulate a different vision of what politics could look like. Your campaign seemed to recognize this, too, and run the digital operation in a similar way.
Yes, for sure. A couple of things on that. Thinking about Bernie himself — it’s funny, because Bernie often gets talked about as somebody who’s incredibly stuck in his ways and stubborn and myopic. And sure, he is disciplined and relentlessly focused on his agenda and his analysis. But he’s also somebody who can recognize when things are changing, especially around the media.
He’s always understood there would be hostility from corporate-owned media. And he’s recognized the power of building your own platform and the willingness to experiment and see what works. I actually think that is a hallmark of Bernie Sanders and his team, and it’s definitely something that inspired us.
Those clips that circulated in 2020 of Bernie’s cable access show in Burlington — “Bernie’s at the mall talking to goths” — people thought that was a strange curiosity. But Bernie saw an opportunity to use a comms platform — in that case, a cable access show — to reach people, and he was willing to use whatever was at his disposal at any time. That’s why he’s talking to the mall goths.
He has a genuine commitment to go and talk to people who don’t normally get heard from in politics. But if you read his books, he’s always talking about taking seriously new kinds of media as a way to reach people in a way that the mainstream media won’t let you.
Definitely. After he had failed at a few runs as an independent third-party candidate in the ’70s before he ran for Burlington, he was like, “I’m done with politics. I’m making documentaries about Eugene Debs.” So he’s somebody who was always thinking about alternative media.
And when we produced a video in the general election with Zohran sitting across the table from Bernie, talking about Bernie’s time as mayor — afterward, Bernie gathered up the whole video team and digital team, sat us down, and was like, “Okay, how many followers do you have? How many people are in New York? Don’t you understand the power of your platform and how important it is?” He was pushing us to make content.
Bernie says post.
Bernie says post.
I want to shout out to Anthony Dimieri and Debbie Saslaw, the two people behind Melted Solids who worked with Zohran making videos for years before the mayoral campaign. They made the incredible videos around the Fix the MTA campaign, which was an incredible feat. It helped win the free bus pilot and millions more for public transit and told the stories of public transit riders through video.
Before I was even hired on the campaign, I had pitched Zohran on a vision for parts of the digital program. After that it was a lot of iteration and experimentation. When we started, that crew, Debbie and Anthony, were on for two videos a month. The first real one was the marathon video. Zohran loves a pun. “He’s running to freeze the rent,” and so forth. It was a fun, wild day tracking him around New York City running the marathon. That was two days before the presidential election.
Trump gets elected. And there was a bit of paralysis in the immediate aftermath of this election, and nobody really knew the kind of path forward. The first video that we made that really broke through and showed us how powerful the videos could be on this campaign was the video we made talking to Trump voters.
That also comes out of the sensibility and approach to what we wanted to do on this campaign, which was to recognize that working-class people have a lot of very important things to say about how the system works or doesn’t, and that their perspectives and experiences need to be engaged with if we’re going to find out how to get out of this political mess we were in. The fact that Trump had not just gotten elected but that, in New York City, South Asian, Middle Eastern, Latino, and black working-class people swung toward Trump, which means we had an opportunity to actually talk to Trump voters who might have been Democratic primary voters in another scenario.
So we went out and just got curious. That comes from a long tradition of left media, from Studs Terkel to Amy Goodman to Bernie with the mall goths, that, especially if you are struggling to understand how to move forward in the moment and not have a preset analysis of what happened, you should go out and talk to working-class people and hear what they have to say.
And what they said was, “Shit’s way too expensive. We’re spending all this money on bombs and genocide, and I don’t believe the Democrats are going to do anything about either of those things. The DNC was full of celebrities talking about how great the economy was.” The cost-of-living theme had already been determined, but that really turbocharged it. And to understand that this candidate could really connect with working-class people and disillusioned voters and former Democrats.… Other campaigns were not really attuned to or capable of really chasing them.
The basic socialist proposition is that working-class people are the reason that the world functions and are the key agent for changing the world. If that’s at the core of your politics, then you want to know what these working-class people think. You have a curiosity about them. You don’t view them with condescension. You actually want to have a genuine dialogue with them and hear how they’re feeling, because it matters how they’re feeling. Zohran clearly was comfortable in those environments and could have those kinds of conversations, in a way that is pretty rare in American politics for an elected official.
It is one of his great strengths. He is comfortable anywhere in the world. He can walk in with both confidence and humility and curiosity. We’re talking about things that should be obvious, right? Get curious about working-class people’s perspectives.
The other thing I want to emphasize with the videos and the socials is, it wasn’t just introducing you to this character, this person. It was making that person inseparable from the agenda. We wanted these policies and Zohran Mamdani to be inextricably linked.
I knew it was starting to work when people would not just recognize Zohran on the street but be like, “Hey, there’s ‘freeze the rent’ guy,” “There’s the ‘fast and free buses’ guy.” We were not just making Zohran famous; we were actually making him the avatar for an agenda that was directly speaking to people’s lives.
His charisma, his good looks, all the stuff that made him a good character on a social media video — all important — but you used that as a way to get people to engage them in a movement and associate him with a different kind of politics, rather than just pumping him up as a celebrity on your social media feed.
Exactly. And that’s where the other elements of the campaign come in. It’s one thing if you’re only interacting with Zohran on your phone. That was necessary for reaching a ton of people that are not going to find out about him elsewhere. But then having somebody knock on your door. I’ve heard so many stories along the campaign of canvassers knocking on people’s doors and people saying, “I was just watching a video about Zohran! And now you’re here and talking to me about this agenda. You’re inviting me to be part of it.” It’s not just a parasocial relationship with a person. It’s an invitation to be part of a movement.
That’s surely the first time that that’s ever happened to that person in their life. They’re experiencing the influencers, the figures coming through the phone as content to be consumed that’s going in one direction toward them, and they’re not giving anything back to that person. And then a volunteer shows up at the door and tries to pitch them to get involved, to become a character in this movement.
Another example of that: Deb and Anthony from Melted Solids made a video around the first fundraising deadline in January 2025 in which we went around and Zohran knocked on the doors of people who had donated for the first time to a mayoral race and asked them why. “What made you, in six months, seven months before for this election, for a guy that you probably just heard of, part with money for the first time in politics?” That was the field program — there was a constant availability of stories we could tell through video that then fed back into the actions we needed people to take in order to win. It became a kind of virtuous cycle of content and volunteering and donating.
Building the “Zohraniverse”
What you all did in this campaign was not simply create an effective machine for putting out talking points and announcing policy positions, telling the media where the candidate is going to be at a certain time, responding to political attacks. That’s the stuff of most political messaging operations. You all crafted an entire political and cultural world through this campaign, that people really wanted to be a part of, and it seemed like an alternative world to the one that they are used to hearing about from politicians. Did you plan to craft that world from the very beginning or did that evolve over time?
The “Zohraniverse.” Maybe not explicitly as such, but I think it came from a couple imperatives. Zohran from the beginning was always saying, “I want us to break out of the world of New York City politics and into the world of New York City.” That came from an approach to this campaign in the city that stood in such incredible contrast to the picture that Andrew Cuomo would paint — of people who actually love this city. We want to live in this city. It is a struggle. It is too hard to live in the city. But we’re not here because we’re trapped here. We want to be and stay here.
And there’s an incredible million settings in which you could bring that to life. We had this disciplined message and agenda and theme, but then brought it into these incredibly eclectic places throughout the city and interwove it with the experience of buying halal food at a food cart or the Polar Plunge or anything else. Making New York City a character in this, and Zohran being a person who was taking you through this city as it’s facing this affordability crisis while deeply loving the city as well, that was the kind of universe we were existing in and wanted to create. It allowed us to be in such stark contrast to the deeply reactionary and gloomy vision of New York City that Andrew Cuomo was proposing when he came onto the scene.
When you have a campaign that is set in various settings of New York City and engaging with the incredibly diverse tapestry of people who make up this city and engaging with the actual history of the city, which is one that built the closest thing that we’ve got to a social democratic stronghold in the United States — that both has an inherent political character to it (saying that the social democratic history and diversity of the city is good and that’s why people want to live here) and it invites people in — check out what it’s like to live here in New York City. We’re under assault from all sides on our ability to live here. But living here is pretty great. That came through very strongly. I have to wonder how many people decided to move to New York after watching Zohran videos and feeling like, “I want to hang out in this world that this guy is occupying in these videos.”
I went to a wedding in Gainesville, Florida, right after the election, and my partner Liana was in a gas station and literally overheard like a group of teenagers being like, “We’re going to New York, baby! it’s Zohran’s New York. Let’s go!”
Crafting the Message and Tone
How did the core messaging of the campaign come together? You said earlier in our conversation that affordability was articulated from the jump as what it was all going to be about and that there were the three core demands that were there from the beginning. Was that always settled? I’m thinking of past left campaigns like Bernie Sanders’s or Jeremy Corbyn’s, where it seemed like there was a long laundry list of issues that were being advocated for — obviously reflective of the long laundry list of problems that we have to overcome in the world. But then the policy demands list was so long that it actually stopped the campaign from breaking through — it felt too pie-in-the-sky. Whereas if you’ve got three core demands, they’re memorable, but also then it feels a little bit more doable.
Before I started, the premise was that we were going to run on three banner policies that all spoke to the affordability crisis. There’s a number of reasons to do that and why it’s successful. One is just going back to that attentional structure and economy. You have to get to the meat of it pretty quickly, or you’re going to lose people. Also, all of these things are nonreformist reforms — things that are achievable. They’re not predicated on a complete overturning of the society. But there are things that can widen the scope of possibility for working people that can also create more space in people’s lives, either for creative pursuit or for organizing in their workplaces. These are things that point to a better world and give people time to help build that.
And the way we win them will be transformative inthat people will find power in delivering them. We wanted to ensure that people knew both what to expect and what to fight for, and that they were not voting simply for a person but for an agenda that they were then going to be called upon to continue fighting for until it was seen through.
I felt like I saw in a lot of the campaigns, especially with Cuomo, it was so much about, “Here’s my resume.” We should be putting things on the table that we’re going to deliver and do, not just “My resume is long.”
Many articulations of left politics tend to be negative and denunciatory in tone. That means that the Left is often associated with a kind of single-note, hectoring tone that many find off-putting. That tone was not the tone of this campaign. It was a fundamentally positive and inviting tone. Was that a conscious decision from the beginning?
Absolutely. It’s an organizer’s mentality to want to find areas of common interest and concern, to build solidarity across different axes of difference. And what I’m proud of our ability to do, Zohran in particular, is to put forward an agenda that a majority of people can see themselves in. And to say, on the one hand, that we have no expectation that you agree with him on this other set of issues, but to join this movement and vote for him. We want to find common ground on the agenda we’re running on and at the same time never throw anybody under the bus — not trans people, for example, who are under an incredibly brutal attack right now. I think people appreciate that. This comes with the question of Palestine and genocide: our coalition was bigger than the people who felt or talked about that issue in the way Zohran does.
I do think people appreciate principled disagreement or being direct about what you believe, saying, “Here are the things that I believe, and I also want to bring you on board with this agenda.” People respect that a lot more than all of the contortions that so many establishment or moderate Democrats do. And I don’t think people respect willingness to throw people under the bus. Forget the moral dimension of it — just as a political matter. I mentioned this earlier again, specifically around Palestine. People believe you’re actually sincere about the agenda you’re fighting for and your desire to actually deliver it if they see you being principled about all your other commitments and beliefs.
Do you think this is part of the reason why the attempted scandal generation by other candidates or the media never really took hold for Zohran for any issue, because he appeared to be fully honest about what he actually thought on every issue?
He has an incredible ability to defuse attacks and pivot to the message and to be relentlessly disciplined. We’re also just operating in a different moment. Besides being abominable and deeply Islamophobic, going all in on the attack around his principled opposition to genocide was political malpractice. It’s not the moment a lot of these people think we’re in. The way he can also talk about things as kind of common sense — I think about the first debate moment where they’re asking what seems like an open-ended question about where you’ll travel after you become mayor. But as they’re going down the list to get to Zohran, you know they’re going after him on Israel.
And for him to just say, No, I’m running to be mayor of New York City. I’m not looking to go anywhere. Being upfront about that, being kind of lighthearted about it — we had done a lot to raise his profile online and had gone viral multiple times, but that was a moment where it broke containment, where I started opening up social media and seeing that moment reacted to or remixed by people I had never heard of, each of whom were racking up millions of views. It really connected with people.
Right after that happened, I was on the doors in Sunset Park, and I asked a guy if he had ever heard of Zohran Mamdani, and he said, “Yeah, I saw that debate. Why were they asking him so much about Israel? That was so weird.” I could see in his face, he was genuinely confused.
Totally. There were a whole bunch of people who had that reaction. There was also a whole bunch of people that had already been talked to by the campaign. By the time Cuomo started dropping millions of dollars in ads, people had already developed a relationship to him and the agenda online or through canvassing, or usually both. A great number of New Yorkers felt they wanted to defend him. They felt protective of him.
By the time we got to the point in the campaign where you couldn’t turn on the TV or watch a YouTube video without grainy images of Zohran at protests, calling him all kinds of terrible things — that was where, man, did they make a huge mistake in underestimating us. I don’t know that they would have figured out the right attack line if they had gone in sooner. But Cuomo really wanted that one-on-one matchup. So nobody was really spending against us through February, March, and April into May — at which point we had already talked to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of voters. So the attacks landed in a terrain we had already been cultivating and working through. It hit differently as a result of it.
As we were anticipating Cuomo getting into the race, which was like a multi-month kind of windup, I remember thinking, “I really hope this guy is as arrogant as I think he is and runs a rose garden campaign and just tries to coast. Because that’s just not going to work. We’re going to outhustle them, and we have a better message than them.” I’m so glad he lived up to my expectations of being arrogant and lazy, with small-minded people around him, because we took advantage of it.
I was shocked throughout the campaign at the way it felt like you all were basically in full control of the narrative from the beginning, that you managed to make the campaign about what you wanted it to be about, which was about affordability, and that you were able to dodge or deflect the attacks that were incessant from the other candidates. How did you do that?
There was a moment, which we can talk about, where I did feel like we were knocked back for the first time. But Zohran is preternaturally locked in, and was from day one, from before day one, when he was spending a lot of the summer talking to NYC-DSA members about this and winning their support and then getting 80 percent of the endorsement vote, right? He never wasted an opportunity and instilled that in the whole campaign, about the kind of uncertain political landscape of New York, the stalemate. No one’s really going for anything. So to have somebody with a message and a ton of energy and a movement behind them — you can shift the terrain of the debate. And we did. And it was not by inventing a crisis. It was about actually speaking to an ongoing crisis and politicizing it and saying this is actually in the domain of politics and municipal politics.
And what was the moment when you felt knocked off?
The moment was when I woke up to a headline in Politico that said Zohran Mamdani declines to condemn the Holocaust. I don’t know if you remember this.
Of course. But that had no legs.
It didn’t. But it felt like it did. That was a long day. First of all, it was disingenuous. Deeply.
Nobody actually believed at that point that Zohran didn’t condemn the Holocaust.
It’s funny because I’m like, why did I feel so knocked off course by that?
You assumed that they had pushed the nuclear button, and the way we know political media to work, no matter how disingenuous the attack, now you were in trouble.
Yeah. But I had been so good up until that moment, having perspective about the state of the media and its inability to shape and change what people are thinking. Maybe it was also because I thought about how far it would go, and then coinciding with all the inspiration and momentum of the final months of the primary. The final month of the primary saw an unbelievable amount of Islamophobia and racism. I’m not saying that was exactly what motivated that article. It tapped into it.
As bad as that was for me, it was much more painful for Zohran. But even that day, we cut a video addressing it directly and immediately explained exactly why what they were saying was completely off base and wrong, and what his actual values and commitments were. We put it out into the world and then we just kept moving. Later that night, we went outside Madison Square Garden after the Knicks were heading into the conference championships, out on the street, talking to people, connecting with people, just keeping it moving. It was a day that felt like a century. But also it demonstrated our ability to deal with an issue head-on, then get back on the saddle.
That was the only moment?
When that terrible mass shooting happened in midtown in the summer, and he was out of town when it happened and rushed back — that had the kind of makings of something that could spiral narratively — putting aside the deep human tragedy of it — just how it would be metabolized by the press. But his deep, deep humanity and connection with the victims’ families, and putting himself in it and in front of it — that diffused it and got it to a different register.
The Question of Public Safety
One area of attack that his opponents thought was going to take hold was about public safety. Zohran approached public safety in a way that both absorbed some of the arguments for new policy positions of the post–George Floyd era, like the Department of Community Safety — a desire to see a different way of doing public safety in the city and in the world — and at the same time rejected the rhetoric of “defund the police” that he had previously embraced. He talked about public safety in a way that seemed qualitatively different from that George Floyd moment. And it worked. He got elected, but also it never became the kind of defining issue that the Andrew Cuomos of the world wanted it to be.
What was it like internally to discuss the fact that you were dealing with your candidate actually saying that the way that I spoke about this issue in the past is no longer the way that I think about it now, while also still putting forward a genuinely novel and progressive approach to public safety?
Zohran was showing real leadership for the Left in naming a change that we were all grappling with. I don’t think it was him alone who felt like that slogan [“defund the police”] was ineffective for winning a majority to a better vision. It felt like a slogan of austerity and withdrawal to a lot of people, a negative vision instead of an affirmative one. That was coupled with a genuine difference that happens when you are in elected office and talking to and working with police officers. This was certainly the case for me going into government and working with police officers and knowing their role, but also where their training and mandate is limited to dealing with the social problems of this economic system. It was important to name that change, to not waver on those areas where he believed policing needed to significantly change.
People said that Eric Adams won because he was a law-and-order candidate, and the belief in early 2024 was that this mayoral election was going to be all about how people understood that. But I remember listening to Adams’s interview on The Brian Lehrer Show at the height of the George Floyd protests, where he was talking about riots as the cry of the oppressed. So he was always tapping into other language. But he always said that New Yorkers need not choose between safety and justice: that the police need to be reformed, and he modeled himself as a police reformer but also somebody who was connected enough to working-class life in New York City to understand the deep instability created by violence and crime. A larger number of voters in New York, even if crime is understandably a high concern for them, are genuinely interested in new approaches to dealing with it, because they know full well that doing the same thing again and again and again is not producing the safety that we need.
It was the combination of all the things and having a thoughtful policy that was not just about where something is being scaled back but where something is actually being invested in and moved forward. Public health workers and social workers, connecting people with care and long-term housing, not having police respond to mental health calls — there was a real appetite for a different way of talking about those issues. And we owned it, in a way that might have been at times uncomfortable for some people on the Left. But I do think this points to the more affirmative vision that we need. And if you look at the original policy document that laid out the Department of Community Safety, it starts with a long table-setting that says, We fundamentally believe that public safety is created by well-resourced schools and neighborhoods and jobs with solid wages — that’s the vision. But where there are fractures in the social safety net or violence, those things can’t be ignored.
The Question of Palestine
You brought up Palestine several times during this conversation. You refused to back away from a principled opposition to the genocide in Gaza, while also refusing to allow that issue to become the centerpiece of the campaign. You faced an attempt to take the campaign off the terrain where it was strongest, which was on affordability, and move it into foreign policy, where his opponents could then call Zohran antisemitic and all of the rest. Zohran managed that very well.
You said earlier that Zohran’s Palestine position was essential to establishing him as a trustworthy elected official in general. This was an issue where there’s actually a lot of political opportunity for people who are running for elected office: people are desperate for someone to stand up and say that what has happened in Gaza is crime against humanity.
You used the word “gaslit” before. There’s certainly many people who feel that way — that they see all of these images streaming through their phones, and someone turns around and says that actually, to oppose those images they’re seeing on their phones means that they’re antisemitic. And people are feeling insane. They know that their opposition to what they’re seeing is rooted in their basic concern for humanity, rather than hatred of the Jewish people. So when Zohran came along and refused to back off of that position, I think there were a lot of people who said, “Finally, finally someone is actually running for elected office and is not running the opposite direction on this issue and staying true to it.”
First of all, Andrew Cuomo: it wasn’t just that he spent all of this money attacking Zohran on these issues in ways that were really obscene. He also, as an opening gambit to his forthcoming run for mayor, made a big public thing about joining the legal defense team of Benjamin Netanyahu in his case at the International Criminal Court, clearly believing this would be an electoral winner for him. And there’s all the things that you said, which are true about the credibility and principle of Zohran’s position and how that opened the doors to further engagement with him and the agenda.
It also happens to be true that this is where the Democratic primary electorate is at. The kind of people who talk about “popularism” or poll-testing everything and finding exactly where voters are — this one often gets excluded or dismissed.
“Popularist except Palestine.”
Exactly. It reminds me a little bit, going back to the beginning of our conversation, with all of these people saying that Emily Gallagher could never beat this forty-eight-year incumbent. But I’m just looking at a district that voted for Bernie in 2016. Sometimes evidence for stuff is just staring people in the face, and they’re just refusing to believe it could be true. I don’t remember exactly when in the genocide it became a supermajority of Democrats who believed it was such and that the United States should stop funding it. But it was certainly true by the time we were running this campaign.
There’s many ways it can get whipped up in the media that can deeply confuse and polarize people around the wrong questions. But it was also just a very basic recognition that the terrain we were on was different. Which is not at all to say we would have done it differently if that’s not what the polls were showing. But they happened to be showing this. And the failure to reckon with that continues to baffle me. This is as close to a consensus on an issue you can get in a party right now, and it has been for some time now — that this is a genocide, and that people want no part in facilitating it, and that Palestinians deserve peace and freedom.
This is surely part of the reality-distorting effect of, when you utter statements of reality like “This is a genocide and we should stop funding it,” there’s an entire well-funded apparatus that springs into motion to slander you as antisemitic. That is still very much with us, even if they’ve lost the issue in terms of public polling.
Two things to say on that. One, it’s so dangerous and disgusting to call opposition to genocide antisemitic. Because there is antisemitism genuinely in this society and around the world. And it’s dangerous. And I have encountered it. And especially in moments of rising fascism, you will find it almost always coming from the Right — not exclusively, but almost always. It is so dangerous for organizations to ignore that and then cast outrage at genocide as antisemitism. I feel that as a Jewish person, with an identifiably Jewish name.
The second thing that was really crucial to the campaign was that this was an issue that resonated in a different way. When Mahmoud Khalil was abducted from the lobby of his apartment for First Amendment protected speech and disappeared into a detention facility for months, that was also a time where it was crucial to speak up not just about the position he was taking that found him in prison but the fact that this was a direct assault on a New Yorker for a constitutional right.
And when Zohran confronted [Trump “border czar”] Tom Homan in that video, he was asking the question, “Do you believe in the First Amendment?” That’s an incredibly important set of questions to be asking. It resonated beyond just people who were already speaking out against the genocide. It also was about his disposition and the rhetoric of this campaign, about New Yorkers, whether they’re documented or undocumented, whether they hold one position or another. There’s a kind of New York solidarity that was invoked in this campaign and fought on in this campaign, and was part of the vision of the city we want.
The Rubber Hits the Road
What is your understanding about what the comms side of this campaign did and did not accomplish, and how did the comms operation interact with the other parts of the campaign, like the field operation?
I’ve spoken a little bit about how the strength of the field and the movement it was building allowed me to take a different approach and attitude toward the press and their skepticism and allowed us to withstand the tens of millions of dollars that were spent. It was also a rich vein of stories to tell. And Tascha spoke about this a lot in her interview, that it’s not just about mobilizing people to take action — it’s also about developing leadership and community and people finding themselves as agents of politics. I felt a responsibility, as did the whole video team, to tell those stories of people becoming agents in this process. There were times in the campaign when I was frustrated that the press was not paying enough attention. But then at some point I realized we can just tell this story ourselves — and let them underestimate what it means.
Do you think that underestimation was good for the campaign in that it gave you space to develop?
Definitely. Another thing I’ll say about the comms team and the videos in particular, and why it may not be so immediately replicable to other campaigns: I recently read a piece about how centrist candidates are struggling so much to break through online. No kidding. If you don’t have anything really to say that’s speaking to the actual conditions in people’s lives, it’s not surprising it doesn’t work.
Another reason that our videos were so successful was that the people making them were both leftists and artists, real filmmakers — people with tremendous cinematic vision and aesthetic sensibility. I mentioned Anthony and Deb; Donald Borenstein really developed a lot of visual grammar that came to be associated with the Zohran style; and Olivia Becker had an incredible ability to tell the story of the campaign and the city that it was moving through. I think about her work on the video that we made from the walk from the top of Manhattan to the bottom, or the final pieces of the campaign, the final long-form videos of the campaign, including the one on the final day. That’s not replicable without artistry and ideology.
This was a historically successful insurgent campaign and historically successful comms operation. And now we are in the Zohran mayoralty. He is up against an incredible amount of opposition. You succeeded so well in building this campaign: you successfully brought millions of people to be a part of it and to conceive of politics being done in a different way, raising their expectations very, very high. But the rubber is about to hit the road here. And it seems inevitable that the beautiful world that was created through this campaign is about to get some reality checks, and that is probably going to involve some level of people becoming dispirited and even cynical. And it might not be something that you can “comms” your way out of. Do you worry about that?
Where we are even now is a situation that many deemed impossible a year ago. We have to ground ourselves in how much we have already pushed and the possibilities that that points to in the future. Zohran was clear throughout the whole campaign and in the period after that he cannot deliver this alone. The good news is that more than 100,000 people participated in this campaign as organizers, as leaders; raised their expectations for themselves and the city around them; and genuinely see themselves as agents of this agenda and this moment. Certainly that’s the message Zohran is giving, that New York City DSA and the broader left firmament that came around the campaign — everybody is extremely clear-eyed that this is difficult and only achievable through continued organizing, continued pressure. People are really ready for that.
We’re seeing an emerging consensus being built, for instance, around universal childcare. Obviously there’s a lot to figure out in detail, in scope. But we’re working with all of the challenges that you named and also the tremendous opportunity that has been won through all the years of organizing that preceded Zohran’s campaign and a relentless message that it needs to keep going. Nothing is certain. But as long as people remain engaged and understand themselves as just as much actors in politics as the people that they elect, the possibilities are really open here.