Walking the Talk
If you're getting out and about, you've got to get it all on camera
I’ve spent a fair bit of time recently watching content from a guy called Zohran Mamdani.
He’s a millennial politician from New York running to be the Democratic candidate for mayor, which basically means you win (although Eric Adams, the current mayor who was elected as a Democrat but is running for re-election as an Independent after a series of extremely funny corruption scandals were finally squashed by the Trump Department of Justice, is a total enigma so you never know).
I was typically slow on the uptake, only coming across the guy a couple of weeks ago when he was interviewed on one of the two podcasts I still occasionally listen to, Chapo Trap House.
He’s a cool guy, he’s got good policies (free public transport, lots of state housing, Free Palestine), he knows how to talk to people about the issues they care about - but his content is next level.
Although he’s been a state politician for four years, he started as a rank outsider in a race dominated by former governor Andrew Cuomo, the most tenacious current New York politician apart from the President. But Zohran, as he seems to be known by everyone, is now polling within a few points and given New York, unlike the bigger US electoral contests, has ranked preferential voting and everyone else hates Cuomo, it could be game on. If so, most people seem to agree it’s down to the reels.
Cuomo’s crap on camera - witness the moment in a recent televised debate where he repeatedly butchers Zohran’s surname Mamdani, sounding every inch the boomer as Zohran dunks on him again and again - “learn how to say it, learn how to say it.”
Cuomo, who apparently has barely been seen in public during the campaign, seemed to recognise the imbalance when they were finally both on screen. “Mr. Mamdani is very good on Twitter, with videos, but he actually produces nothing,” he said, with words, but he actually misses the point.
“Donald Trump would go through Mr. Mamdani like a hot knife through butter,” Cuomo went on. “He’s been in government 27 minutes, he’s passed three bills. That’s all he’s done.” Trump, of course, famously respects legislative institutions and definitely doesn’t absolutely waste the reputations of precisely those people who’ve spent the most time there.
Another self-described progressive candidate, Jessica Ramos, actually endorsed Cuomo last week and also appeared to endorse his primary grievance at the debate. “I thought I needed more experience,” she said when explaining her decision not to run for mayor at the previous 2022 election. “But turns out you just need to make good videos.”
Anyone who is still calling them “videos” probably can’t compete in the 2025 content economy, but it’s also a response that evokes some strong personal memories for me. A few weeks before the Australian federal election, the effervescent WA state MP for wherever the fuck David Scaife compared the track record of Fremantle federal MP Josh Wilson with unnamed others “chasing public office for the profile or recording podcasts to stroke [their] own ego”. Given that I was at that time assisting (extremely peripherally) to produce a podcast for independent candidate Kate Hulett, and was pretty sure no one else in WA politics was doing the same, it seemed a revealing swipe. Prematurely matured Labor hacks weren’t the only ones having a crack at new media exponents, either, with rival progressive candidates disparaging how “it’s all about content for you guys, isn’t it?”
To which I say, give the people what they want. And, for better or (definitely) for worse, what the people want in 2025 is content. In New York, Zohran scored the endorsement of Kareem, the phenomenon behind Subway Takes, the short video series where he interviews New Yorkers about their signature opinion on the train. In Australia, the only climate independent who ended up knocking off an incumbent, Nicolette Boehle, had her own version, T1 Takes. Kate Hulett, meanwhile, took her novelty microphone all the way to Gruen Transfer if not quite to Canberra, Street Talking Fremantle from the third safest seat in the country to the third most marginal by getting out and messaging retail politics in real time. A politician doing vox pops on camera is surely politics in its purest - not only are you out literally asking people what they want, you’re commodifying it on the fly and amplifying every voter engagement into an advertisement. The only catch is you need to know how to talk to people without making them cringe.
In New York, this is made easier by the fact that every passerby has more charisma in the little finger they spin the basketball with than the average Australian. But you also gotta do what no normal politician seems able to and actually just get out and ask people what they reckon. Pretty easy, unless you’re still stuck trying to spin news cycles like Buzzfeed never went out of business. Way back in 2016, the losing Clinton campaign’s comms director predicted that in the future every candidate would try to become the news themselves: “The communications arms of national campaigns will be more like production studios and less devoted to the ability to spin reporters.”
After Bernie Sanders lost, he turned his presidential campaign into a national progressive ground game that showed every other politician how to do what he’d just done. But more than that, he finally pioneered a way to circumvent the media blackouts and mainstream circlejerks that had hitherto foreclosed the window of possibilities for more grassroots campaigns like his. “Most comms staffers work to get their boss in the news. We were working to beat the news media at their own game,” his then media director said.
Zohran Mamdani, by force of personality and short form video editing, may be one of the first to figure out how to play new media at theirs. Whether he wins or loses next week, populist imitations should be flocking to find out how it’s done.
Further reading on Zohran from Jacobin and Bernie from New York Magazine here.
