from the if-you-stand-for-nothing,-what-will-you-fall-for dept
Last week, I wrote about how the Trump administration has replaced any sort of concept of governance with governance-by-trolling—a government optimized purely for making a huge segment of the country angry while the base cheers them on. The entire apparatus of federal power has been repurposed into a machine for generating engagement through cruelty, with no actual governing philosophy beyond “own the libs.”
The usual response from Democrats has been to offer… nothing. Safe, poll-tested blandness. That kind of vacuum is exactly what allows governance-by-trolling to thrive—at least MAGA offers some vision, however deranged.
Tuesday night, New York City voters delivered a decisive rebuke to both MAGA nihilism and the traditional Democratic technocratic blandness. Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old Democratic Socialist who was polling at literally 1% in February, won the election for mayor. And he did it by doing exactly what conventional political wisdom from the Democratic political consultants says you’re not supposed to do: he ran on an authentic vision of what he actually believes in, rather than running away from anything the consultants deemed a “political third rail.”
He didn’t shy away from his support for trans New Yorkers or immigrants. He stood side by side with them proudly throughout the campaign. He didn’t play down his own religion, background, or policy ideas, even as some of them challenged Democratic Party orthodoxy.
The contrast couldn’t be starker. On one side, you had another version of the politics of cynical spite and traditional political backroom king-making—Andrew Cuomo’s campaign, backed by at least $22 million from 28 different billionaires, running attack ads calling Mamdani a dangerous radical, questioning whether he “understood New York culture” because he was born in Uganda, and quite literally suggesting he would cheer for another 9/11. Pure governance-by-baseless concern trolling, optimized to generate fear and anger.
On the other side, you had someone who said “this is who I am, this is what I believe in, and here’s my positive vision for making your lives better.” Free buses. Universal childcare. Frozen rent for rent-stabilized apartments. City-run grocery stores in food deserts. Simple, clear policies that people could understand and see themselves benefiting from.
Guess which one won?
Even if you don’t agree with his policies or political leanings, you have to be able to see that he offered quite the contrast to traditional politics these days. Even publications staffed with Never Trumper former Republicans, like the Bulwark, pointed out that Mamdani’s “socialist” policies are well within the confines of modern liberal democracy, while Donald Trump’s are not. For all the baseless fear that Mamdani will “seize the means of production,” Donald Trump is literally doing it.
Leadership Means Leading, Not Following the Polls
As Anil Dash wrote in his excellent piece “Turn the Volume Up,” one of the defining features of Mamdani’s campaign was that it started with principle:
You have to start with the principle. You must have a politics that believes in something. You can’t win unless you know what you’re fighting for. Something specific, that people can see and believe. Something that people will know when it’s been achieved. It can’t just be a vague platitude, and it can’t just be “root for our team” or “the other guy is bad”. Zohran and his team understood this profoundly well, and made a campaign focused on substance — grounded in humanist principles, and tied to extremely clear, understandable and specific policy deliverables.
This is exactly what the Trump administration—and Cuomo’s campaign—completely lack. They don’t believe in anything except their own power and the validation that comes from making their opponents angry. There’s no vision beyond “give us power” and “watch the other side cry.”
Every week, we see another crop of Democratic political consultants pushing out their big plan to win elections. And almost all of them involve the same basic strategy: ditch what they claim are “unpopular” wedge issues. Embrace “popularism”—just supporting the policies we know poll well, and avoiding anything else. Don’t talk about trans rights. Downplay your support for progressive economic policies. Take a harsh stance against immigration. Don’t talk about diversity. Find the safest, most poll-tested positions possible and stick to those.
Indeed, last week, before this election, we saw the launch of yet another of these (there have to have been at least a dozen similar things this year, it’s hard to keep track of them all) called “Deciding to Win.” It had a bunch of big-name political consultant types (David Plouffe! Matt Stoller! Nate Silver! James Carville!) sign onto it. Yet it urged the same fucking thing this group of strivers always says: “play down anything that is seen as a culture war, political third rail.” What that usually means is “throw marginalized groups like trans people and immigrants under the bus.”
It’s running scared. Not running to lead.
Mamdani did the opposite. He was a strong, vocal supporter of trans rights, immigrants, and Palestine from day one, and it didn’t hurt him one bit. The consultants from the sidelines seemed to be screaming about how he had to minimize his Muslim faith and his membership in the Democratic Socialists of America. Instead, he leaned into both.
And rather than hurt him, this authenticity became a core part of his appeal. Even voters who disagreed with specific policies responded to someone offering a genuine vision over consultant-approved talking points.
Leadership is about leading people by convincing them of your vision. Not just feeding them what the polls say will work. If you want people to follow you, it means you need to be worth following. You need to present a vision of a world they can believe in, that they want to help achieve. That’s leadership. Campaigning just on focus groups and polls gives you a median campaign, with nothing that excites people. It gives them nothing to believe in.
Worse, the popularism approach cedes all the framing to your opponents. They’re going to call you a radical communist Marxist socialist anyway—just ask Kamala Harris, who got labeled all of those things despite mostly running a campaign so cautious it could have been designed by the most risk-averse consultant imaginable. She started with energy and authenticity, then let the consultant class convince her to pivot away from anything even remotely appealing, to emphasize traditional Republican talking points on guns and immigration, and to downplay support for trans rights, Palestine, and other “divisive” issues.
And she lost.
Meanwhile, Mamdani got called all the same things—communist, radical, dangerous extremist who doesn’t understand America—and he just… floated above it. He didn’t waste time trying to prove he wasn’t those things. He just kept talking about free buses and childcare and what he actually believed in. He showed people what he stood for rather than spending all his energy explaining what he wasn’t. And he made it clear that he believed in his vision not because he thought it would get him elected, but because he thought it was actually the best platform to actually help New Yorkers.
As Dash notes, this required a kind of courage that’s become rare in Democratic politics:
If you run from who you are, you have already lost.
Coming on stage for a political victory to Ja Rule’s New York (I had bet that there would be some Jadakiss involvement in whatever walk-on music he picked), and walking off to Dhoom Machale, while saying with his full chest that he’s a Muslim, a New Yorker, and a young Democratic Socialist — these are the moves of a person who knows that those who are motivated by hate will never back down if you try to hide or be evasive about who you are. A coward dies a thousand deaths, and a politician who hides their identity loses a thousand elections before a single vote is cast. We see Vivek Ramaswamy tap-dancing around his faith every day, and the white supremacists that he’s cozied up to will never let him win. But fourteen years ago, the racist and hateful media falsely called President Obama’s private birthday party a “hip-hop BBQ”. And as I said years later, you should just have the damn hip-hop BBQ — they’re going to accuse you of it anyway. Lean into who you are, own it, and let the haters stay mad.
This gets at something fundamental about how to actually beat back today’s fascism and the politics of spite. You don’t do it by accepting their framing and trying to prove you’re not what they claim you are. You do it by offering a compelling alternative vision that people actually want to vote for.
The Cowardice Is Coming From Within
That kind of courage is rare in Democratic politics for a reason. Unfortunately, the consultant and donor class’s grip on Democratic politics remains so strong that even the party’s own leaders couldn’t bring themselves to support their most dynamic candidate. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand—both representing New York—refused to endorse Mamdani at all. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, also from New York, only gave his endorsement in the final days before the election and then claimed he didn’t think Mamdani was the future of the Democratic party.
Think about what that says. You have a candidate who is energizing voters, bringing new people into the process, winning a massive grassroots campaign against a billionaire-backed opponent—and the Democratic leadership is too scared to publicly support him until it’s basically over, if at all.
Why? Because they’re terrified that Trump will call them communists too? Or that the billionaire donors who supported Cuomo won’t keep supporting them? They’ve internalized the consultant wisdom that says you can’t be seen anywhere near a Democratic Socialist, that you have to keep your distance from anyone who actually believes in progressive policies, that the safest play is always to hedge your bets and play it safe.
They’re Going to Call You a Communist Anyway
The Democratic consultant class never seems to understand one simple thing: Republicans are going to call any Democratic politician an extreme leftist radical communist no matter what they actually believe or say—or how they actually lead. They called Joe Biden a socialist. They called Kamala Harris a Marxist. It’s just blatant baseline name-calling that gets deployed against literally anyone with a (D) after their name.
So if they’re going to call you that anyway, you might as well actually stand for something and give people a reason to vote for you rather than just trying to prove you’re not what Fox News and MechaHitler1488 on X says you are.
Mamdani understood this intuitively. When they called him a communist, he didn’t waste time explaining why Democratic Socialism is actually different from communism or how his policies are really quite moderate. He just kept talking about concrete things that would make New Yorkers’ lives better. He worked to front-run and mock the typical GOP tried-and-tested criticisms. Literally a day before the election, he posted a video about Vito Marcantonio, a popular NYC politician in the 1940s who was regularly called a communist, who delivered for New Yorkers.
Traditional political consultants would have told him to hide from and denounce anyone who was investigated by the FBI for his “leftist” views. But Mamdani reminded people that these kinds of scare tactics and nonsense are often used against legitimately popular politicians who deliver for their constituents.
The consultants told Harris to run away from trans rights and progressive economics. She largely did, and lost. The same consultants would have told Mamdani to do the same thing. He ignored them completely and won by a massive margin.
When Both The Message And The Messenger Are Authentic
Cuomo had everything the consultants say you need: name recognition, political dynasty, massive funding, endorsements from establishment figures like Bill Clinton. And he had the benefit of running against a young, relatively unknown candidate who by all traditional metrics should have been easy to defeat.
But Cuomo didn’t have a message beyond “I should be in charge” and “the other guy is scary.” That’s not a vision. That’s just entitlement wrapped in fear-mongering. And when you don’t believe in anything yourself, you can’t make anyone else believe in you.
Mamdani, by contrast, is an exceptionally skilled communicator who understood how to meet people where they are. His campaign’s mastery of social media—from TikTok to Instagram to YouTube—wasn’t just about being “very online.” It was about authentically connecting with voters in the spaces they actually occupy, rather than demanding they come to him. He also showed it daily, all over New York City. Over and over again, the clips you saw of him showed him walking the streets in all five boroughs, happily talking to people all over.
Mamdani kept reinforcing a clear, simple, positive message that people could understand and see themselves benefiting from. As Dash explained:
They have to be able to talk about us without us.
This is one of the refrains that comes up most when I’m talking to people about communications, in almost any context from organizing to business to building a community. A message has to be simple enough, memorable enough, and clear enough that even someone who’s just heard it for the first time first time can repeat it — in high fidelity — to the next person they talk to. The Mamdani campaign nailed this from the start, focusing not just on “affordability” in the abstract, but specific promises around free buses, universal childcare, and frozen rent in particular. The proof of how effective and pervasive those messages have been is that detractors can recite them, verbatim, from memory.
That’s a message. That’s something people can understand and repeat. “Free buses, universal childcare, frozen rent.” You don’t need a focus group to tell you whether people want their rent frozen or free bus rides.
Compare that to the typical consultant-approved Democratic campaign message, which usually amounts to “we’re going to fight for working families by implementing sensible, pragmatic solutions that move us forward, not backward.” What does that even mean? How do you repeat that to your neighbor? How do you know when it’s been achieved?
Hope Beats Hate
There’s one more element to Mamdani’s success that’s worth highlighting: joy. As we’ve written about before, Mamdani’s citywide scavenger hunt wasn’t just a campaign stunt—it was a demonstration of what politics could be when it’s about creating something positive rather than just attacking opponents.
Thousands of New Yorkers came out not because they were angry at Cuomo, but because Mamdani offered them something joyful to participate in. He showed them a vision of NYC where politics isn’t just about endless grievance and combat, but about building community and celebrating what makes the city great.
Indeed, this vision even meant that he won by a huge margin among young men, a group that many consultants have written off as permanently MAGA fans of Joe Rogan-style podcasts. Mamdani got people excited across the board in nearly every age group and demographic.
This stands in stark contrast to the politics of spite that defines MAGA. As I wrote last week, Trump’s entire governing strategy is optimized around one question: how mad can we make the other side? There’s no vision beyond that. No positive agenda. Just endless trolling and performative cruelty designed to generate engagement from the base.
Mamdani proved you can beat that by offering something better. Not by trying to out-troll the trolls or by running away from who you are to avoid their attacks, but by presenting an authentic, positive vision that gives people something to vote for rather than just against.
The New Republic’s Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling captured this at Mamdani’s victory party:
Hope over tyranny, hope over big money and small ideas, hope over despair. We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible, Mamdani said. We won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us. Now, it is something that we do.
The Path Forward
Mamdani’s victory doesn’t solve all of the Democratic Party’s problems. One mayoral election in New York City isn’t a national political revolution. But it does offer a clear roadmap for how to actually beat back the politics of spite and fascism. Especially given that across the country, in almost every election where Democrats were on the ballot, they won handily. They took the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections, with Virginia’s being against an actively transphobic Republican campaign. They even won elections in surprising places like Georgia and Mississippi.
Running campaigns where you show what you’re for, instead of cowering in the face of attacks, can work. People want a positive vision of the future. They don’t like the constant attacks. But they also want authenticity and a vision for the future.
The roadmap is sitting right there: Don’t accept your opponents’ nonsense culture war framing. Don’t waste time trying to prove you’re not what they claim you are. Don’t let consultants talk you into abandoning the issues and constituencies that need you most. And definitely don’t try to out-troll the trolls.
Articulate a clear, positive vision of what you actually believe in. Be authentic about who you are. Give people concrete reasons to vote for you, not just against the other side. Be joyful about the opportunities of the future for everyone. Trust that voters are smart enough to see the difference between someone who believes in something and someone who’s just performing for engagement metrics.
The politics of nihilism and spite, whether it’s Trump posting videos of himself dumping shit on citizens or Cuomo running racist attack ads, is ultimately hollow. It has no vision, no substance, nothing to offer beyond the temporary satisfaction of making your opponents angry, scared or both.
Mamdani proved that the politics of belief—of actually standing for something, of offering people hope and a positive vision—can win decisively. The Democratic Party establishment probably won’t learn that lesson. They’re too invested in the consultant and billionaire donor class that keeps feeding them the same failed playbook.
But candidates don’t need the party establishment’s permission. And voters don’t need to wait for the consultants to catch up. Mamdani won because he ignored the people telling him to play it safe and instead trusted voters to respond to something real. That option is available to anyone willing to take it. The blueprint is right there, proven and tested. All it takes is the courage to actually believe in something beyond politics.
Filed Under: andrew cuomo, authenticity, donald trump, nyc, politics, polls, popularism, principles, zohran mamdani
