Mamdani’s Digital Machine
Mamdani’s Digital Machine
The success of Zohran’s agenda will depend on an ambitious digital strategy that transcends social media performance.
The excitement generated by Zohran Mamdani’s successful campaign for New York City mayor jolted political consultants and pollsters, especially those looking for quick ways to generate enthusiasm for Democratic candidates. Perhaps this could be a silver bullet?
Since last June, a crop of candidates has sprouted up across the nation with a familiar aesthetic: man-on-the-street-style interviews, kinetic shots, strict message discipline, and slick campaign ads. We don’t yet know the results of these campaigns, but the style may prove to mean little without the substance. They ignore a crucial aspect of Mamdani’s approach that extended beyond the realm of social media. Throughout a year of campaigning, Mamdani was singularly determined to improve the lives of working-class New Yorkers, and he inspired tens of thousands of volunteers to work for his election.
Mamdani’s online prowess did allow him to amplify his message without having to rely on traditional media. But focusing on the jump cuts and expert color grading in his campaign videos obfuscates the exceptional ways that the campaign parlayed online virality into materiality—that is, how it turned views and shares into volunteer power and donations. This work was mostly done behind the scenes, using less noticeable digital tools and infrastructure to collect emails, phone numbers, and conduct follow-up conversations to ask people to hit the streets and talk to their neighbors. In this way, the strategy was similar to old-fashioned organizing methods that use paper lists—but was conducted at a larger scale.
That’s why the creation of Our Time—a new political group organizing Mamdani’s volunteers, donors, and supporters—is among the most important actions that his allies have taken since his victory. Our Time’s small team is made up of stalwarts of New York City’s robust organizing ecosystem, as well as operatives associated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). One key element of the organization’s function, it appears, will be to keep up the drum beat on critical priorities. In December, prior to Mamdani’s formal elevation to City Hall, it had already launched a canvassing campaign across four city boroughs in support of taxing the rich to fund universal child care.
The success of Our Time, and the Mamdani agenda more broadly, will require an ambitious digital strategy over the next four years and beyond, one that transcends social media performance. Viral videos are a great way to draw attention, but algorithms are fickle and may not be well-suited to the less dramatic, more pedestrian work that governance requires. Thankfully, the Mamdani campaign has always looked beyond its follower count and compiled lists of contact information that can be used to organize support for the mayor’s most ambitious campaign promises. If New York’s democratic left is to secure the long-term transformations it desires—an affordable city where all can thrive, and a reconfiguration of Democratic Party power—it must build on the important work done during the campaign, and find ways to encourage Mamdani’s supporters to continue taking action.
A digital political strategy in a contemporary campaign has two main functions: communications (shaping the messaging, informing traditional media coverage, and boosting a candidate’s name recognition) and mobilization (recruiting supporters to volunteer, donate, or otherwise spread the word about the campaign). A vibrant social media presence can bolster both of these functions. Mamdani used his popular videos to turn the election into a referendum on affordability and mobilize huge swaths of people to act in support of his agenda.
In a political campaign, the most important task of a digital program is to build an internal list of supporters that it can regularly contact, usually over email and text message. These points of direct contact allow the campaign to recruit volunteers, fundraise, or otherwise mobilize its base.
The Mamdani campaign built its lists in traditional ways—collecting information for donations, driving website sign-ups through social media posts, and canvassing. But it also pioneered a remarkably efficient practice, one that funneled Instagram and Facebook followers directly from Mamdani’s posts into the campaign’s internal database list without supporters ever having to leave their social media apps.
Gabriella Zutrau, a digital strategist who consulted on the Mamdani campaign’s social media, piloted this integration with a platform called Manychat, which is typically used by influencers and online businesses. A given social media post from Mamdani’s account would instruct users to comment a keyword (such as “FREEZE” on a post about rent), which would initiate an automated series of direct messages, providing the user with a link to their desired call to action. The bot also responded to messages and story replies asking for a user’s name, email address, and zip code, which would then auto-populate into the campaign’s internal database. The results were astonishing. According to Zutrau, the integration added a total of 10,000 new contacts in just the final two months of the primary campaign—and it only cost $318. In total, the campaign sent over 144,000 automated messages using Manychat, generating over 45,000 clicks on their priority calls to action including canvassing, phone banking, donating, and voter registration. It’s fair to assume that some of these supporters—including many Gen Z voters—might not have been targeted had it not been for this tactic.
The success of Mamdani’s digital strategy has shaken the professional world of politics, piquing the interest of consultants and parties across the globe. It owes, in part, to the Mamdani campaign’s creativity. Zutrau maintains that Mamdani’s team, which includes many members who stand outside of the usual consultant class, “embraces a real culture of experimentation,” particularly in its approach to online engagement. “They weren’t afraid to try something new if it seemed promising,” she told me. “Because ultimately, what mattered to them was excellence in performance, so that they could win and deliver on their agenda.”
Mamdani steps into Gracie Mansion facing bipartisan hostility from a pro-corporate political establishment, a temperamental and often volatile police force, a Trump administration that has the power to starve the city of federal funds (notwithstanding the two politicians’ friendly first meeting), and a mainstream media landscape that remains opposed to his agenda.
In office, Mamdani’s exceptional ability to communicate with supporters will be among his most important tools to blunt attacks from legacy media outlets invested in the status quo (even the New York Times has spent months stoking apprehension among its readers). His social media platforms provide him with a perch to speak directly to millions of New Yorkers on his own terms. Still, his team will need to develop a thorough and vigorous communications strategy to shape the discourse in traditional television, print, and radio outlets, which remain critical sources of information for millions of New Yorkers.
On the organizing side, Mamdani and his allies also arrive armed with one of the strongest subnational grassroots operations in recent political history: a volunteer corps of over 100,000 people, along with tens of thousands of individual donors. This base will be essential when it comes time to pressure targets who seek to obstruct the mayor’s goals.
The Mamdani team will hopefully avoid the mistakes of Obama for America. Shortly after Obama’s election to president, and under pressure from the Democratic Party, the candidate’s team dissolved his 2-million-volunteer-strong campaign organization and siphoned off members’ data to the Democratic Party, where it would languish, virtually untouched by a national party apparatus uninterested in grassroots politics. Obama, for his part, hardly put up much of a fight to preserve his “grassroots army,” seemingly content to ride its energy (and free labor) into the Oval Office, before letting it wither.
Our Time has been established to channel supporters’ energy over the coming years. As a 501(c)(4) organization, it is not legally permitted to coordinate directly with the mayor’s office, but given how explicit Mamdani’s priorities are, that shouldn’t pose much of an issue. And as a (c)(4), it will be far less restricted on how it can raise and spend money across the city, especially compared to a PAC. According to David Duhalde, former political director for Our Revolution, the Bernie Sanders–inspired (c)(4), “the (c)(4) is the consensus position that post-campaign organizations are going to go towards for the foreseeable future, absent some major change in campaign finance law.”
According to reporting in Gothamist, the Mamdani campaign has already donated its volunteer list to Our Time, meaning that the organization can flex its grassroots muscle from day one. This will be especially invaluable in rapid response moments—for example, if the governor refuses to cooperate with the mayor’s agenda, or a set of hostile council members blocks funding for a policy priority. Our Time will be able to precisely target, disaggregate, and geolocate its supporters by city council, state assembly, state senate, and federal congressional district. Within minutes, thousands of Mamdani supporters in a given constituency could be notified via text or email of a call to action—whether that’s phoning an elected official’s office, showing up to a meeting, or protesting an event. Local politicians are, by and large, unaccustomed to facing this level of organization and zeal from their constituents, and they may end up more pliable than we would imagine.
The material force of this sprawling digital operation will soon become clear. With the click of a button, the Our Time email and SMS lists will have the potential power to raise tens of thousands of dollars to fund primary campaigns of local- and state-level politicians, or to recruit dozens of volunteers to support Mamdani’s policy goals. If scaled up correctly, Our Time’s digital operation could become a modern-day political machine, with the capacity to bend local politics to its will.
During his 2020 presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders activated millions of people across the country in service of a political revolution that would reimagine American society. To harness this organic enthusiasm, his campaign built out a mammoth digital program, which helped propel Sanders to early frontrunner status. Up until February 2020, the Sanders campaign obliterated its Democratic primary opponents in both small-dollar fundraising and volunteer metrics (not to mention social media metrics). It proved to be the most tech-forward operation of the cycle, unafraid to pilot new tools that challenged conventional wisdom. The BERN application, which powered the most successful relational organizing program (a mode of organizing where supporters methodically contact their family and friends) to date, was one such intervention.
Despite its early successes, Sanders’s presidential aspirations abruptly ended on Super Tuesday. The Sanders juggernaut—even with its strong digital presence—crashed up against a harsh reality of American politics: the Democratic Party machinery’s commitment to the status quo was too entrenched, and its political power too strong, to be overcome at the national level. Its hold could only be weakened by a series of robust efforts to challenge each power structure locally.
Five years later, Mamdani’s triumph represents the most significant electoral win that the democratic left has enjoyed since the Sanders campaign’s early primary victories. It’s a victory that, at its core, was powered by a steadfast message of affordability, one that took seriously the plight of working New Yorkers and offered tangible, redistributive solutions in response. It’s a message that reached millions of people across the city (and the globe) thanks, in part, to a razor-sharp approach to online communications. But without the digital tools in place to turn that enthusiasm into action at scale, Mamdani might have remained little more than a social media star. In other words, while those viral videos caught people’s eyes, it was the follow-up actions taken by the campaign—the efforts to capture supporter information and to ask them to donate and volunteer—that ensured this attention was harnessed into something more powerful.
With Mamdani now in office, the “long march through the institutions” (to quote the West German student activist Rudi Dutschke) must commence if this political revolution is to endure. Mamdani’s communication skills make him well-suited to marshal the support required to bring a new politics to the nation’s largest city, and perhaps even to turn New York into a bulwark against the unabashed fascist creep advanced by the Republican Party. But no amount of digital savvy can substitute for political vision, energy, and grassroots support—something the new mayor will do well to remember.
Arvin Alaigh is a historian and former campaign staffer. His first book project, on the antiwar Catholic left and the 1972 Harrisburg Seven trial, will be published by Liveright (U.S.) and Oneworld (U.K.).
