The Substance

After losing the White House, scuttling their Senate majority, and watching their once-commanding margins in deep blue cities tighten, Democrats are quickly becoming all but irrelevant. The solution, according to one digital strategist, is clear: “We need to find our 2028 presidential Hawk Tuah Girl.”

In the eyes of the consultant class, the pronounced unpopularity of the so-called opposition party—the highest in decades—really doesn’t have anything to do with policy. The Democrats are just losing the battle for our attention. Republicans have proven far more adept at harnessing the dynamics of social media, in large part because the algorithmic design of the platforms rewards the right’s inflammatory content; outrage travels faster and wider than appeals to deliberation. In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, for instance, the sprawling infrastructure of right-wing media and influencer networks, including Turning Point USA and Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire, have been eyed by Democrats with jealousy for their ability to embolden the already converted, while reaching wider audiences, especially those who may not otherwise be deeply engaged in politics.

In typical fashion, the Democrats have decided that the wisest course of action is to throw money at the problem. In August, Taylor Lorenz published an exposé in Wired identifying how Chorus, a liberal nonprofit cofounded by perhaps the biggest Democratic influencer, Brian Tyler Cohen, launched an “incubator fund” backed by the dark money that cut checks to content creators for as much as $8,000 a month—with the caveat that they had to sign secrecy clauses and cede approval over candidate-related content. A slew of similar initiatives have sprung up, like AND Media (“Achieve Narrative Dominance”) and Project Bullhorn, which, with the help of Jason Berkenfeld, the primary philanthropic adviser to billionaire former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, is seeking to raise tens of millions that it will funnel to liberal creators and create a match-making service that will book them on aligned podcasts.

The much-covered hunt for a “Joe Rogan of the left” typifies the party’s approach. The Intercept reported in May that Project Bullhorn is raising $20 million to study the “syntax, language, and content” popular among highly online young men with the hope of manufacturing content that will articulate an “aspirational vision of manhood that aligns with Democratic values without alienating other core constituencies.” Such proposals mistake the medium for the message, unable to recognize that Rogan’s appeal lies not in his syntax but his willingness to say what he really thinks. A party constructed around donor interests cannot afford to cede control to anyone who might actually say something about the economy that would resonate with young men.

While waiting for the mythical force that will algorithmically reverse engineer the Democrats into virality, some candidates have embraced the “go everywhere” strategy popularized by Lis Smith, Pete Buttigieg’s millennial communications director. As Smith explains, “It’s really important today for candidates to meet voters where they are, not turn their noses up at non-traditional news outlets.” It’s certainly true that Buttigieg’s appearances on every platform—from TMZ to Fox News—help keep him on voter’s minds in advance of a probable 2028 bid.

But one man’s savvy opportunism can be another’s self-sabotage. Ritchie Torres’s ill-fated appearance on The Adam Friedland Show turned into a viral case study in how not to handle a hostile interview: when pressed on his unabashed support for the genocidal state of Israel, the Democratic Representative was reduced to stammering half-sentences about Hamas. Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin fared no better on Breaking Points, where she admitted she mainly came on the program to reach a young, online audience—only to then stumble through a half-hour of contradictions on Gaza. When the Democratic politicians who have spent their careers attuned to focus groups attempt to “meet people where they are,” they appear out of their depth, defensive, and without much to say. Salvation for the party thus lies in discovering the right influencer-politician hybrid, someone whose “genuine personality” can be juiced for an endless stream of content—so that they can go viral enough to win.

For many Democrats, this is the allure of Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist vying to become the next mayor of New York City. The Gen Z staffers who ran @KamalaHQ contrast the “culture of risk aversion” endemic to traditional Democratic campaigns with the telegenic Mamdani, who has received widespread praise for his innovative social media strategy underpinned by a disciplined message centered around affordability—praise that, of course, does not extend to his proposed solutions, nor his steadfast support for Palestine. The primary lesson of Mamdani’s campaign, according to the @KamalaHQ staffers is to “invest in the next generation. That means replacing the incentive structures that prioritizes landing mild headlines in Beltway media publications over high-impact social media content that reaches the millions of low-propensity voters the party needs to win back.”

In today’s attention economy, where our minds are never allowed to rest, videos that can pause our scrolling are central to political success. Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes describe Mamdani as the first Democrat “totally native to the medium of our time, which is short vertical videos in the algorithmic feed,” and they compare him favorably to Obama’s pioneering digital campaign in 2008. Mamdani’s breakthrough video, where he vox-popped Trump voters on Bronx and Queen sidewalks garnered 3.5 million views on X. The campaign hasn’t looked back since, with each new clip becoming another viral sensation.

Mamdani’s presence online hasn’t been confined to the videos he produced himself. Like any good Democrat, Mamdani has received countless celebrity endorsements and appeared with a wide array of other influencers, but what is more phenomenal is the way in which his supporters have created TikToks, memes, and mashups that have extended his image far beyond the raw view counts of his campaign’s own videos. One TikTok set Mamdani’s name to “Hollaback Girl,” racking up over two hundred thousand likes and spawned a cascade of dance videos that each pulled hundreds of thousands more. His campaign quickly became less a stream of official posts than a torrent of user-generated content, flooding feeds well outside New York. What Democrats have struggled to incubate with other candidates emerged here organically, a viral current sustained by the enthusiasm and creativity of his supporters.

For many Democrats, especially those steeped in the mythology of Obama, it is natural to see Mamdani foremost as a gifted content creator: a candidate who knows how to seize the emerging medium of his time, whose aura of freshness and positivity overshadows questions about politics or policy. This is why David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, reflecting on his visit to Mamdani’s campaign office, reached for familiar rhetoric: “What I found when I went over to that office was a spirit I hadn’t seen in a while—determined, upbeat idealism. You may not agree with every answer he’s giving, or every idea he has, but he’s certainly asking the right questions.” Mamdani becomes legible to the Democratic establishment only by being folded into this lineage. The real takeaway for Democratic leaders and strategists is not what Mamdani fights for, but a certain visual and rhetorical style that they might ape to work their way back into cultural relevance.

Mamdani’s primary victory has prompted some consultants—be it Axelrod or Smith—to offer radical-sounding solutions that amount to exactly what they have always advocated. Smith, who after her work on the Buttigieg campaign advised Andrew Cuomo on how to beat his sexual harassment charges, has argued that Mamdani is a sign that Democrats must “burn down the establishment.” But what does burning down the establishment look like to a consultant whose career has been built on serving it?

The hollowness of this call is reflected in the members of the party’s supposed “new generation.” Take the other marquee races of this off-year cycle: the governor’s contests in Virginia and New Jersey. The Democrats’ candidates, Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey are, per a recent Times profile, “national security moms”: a former CIA agent and Navy pilot, respectively, who send their children to public schools and so can relate to normal people. It’s a package almost crafted out of a focus group, maternal warmth wrapped in military credentials, toughness with a dash of PTA relatability. Spanberger’s opponent has been trying to push her on the rights of trans kids to use school locker rooms. Her response, thus far, has been an ad where she speaks of worrying about her three daughters’ safety at school, before cutting to her earlier career hunting child predators in federal law enforcement, which supposedly conveys her belief that “we need to get politics out of schools.”

Neither Spanberger nor Sherill possess Zohran’s panache, but that’s not really the point. Spanberger and Sherill embody the party’s instinctive equation of electoral strength with “reach” and fundraising. Both have been prolific fundraisers throughout their congressional careers, buoyed by corporate donations and substantial support from AIPAC. There is little in their respective gubernatorial campaigns to suggest that they have disavowed big dollar, corporate contributions. In Virginia, Spanberger has outraised her Republican opponent two to one, though the race remains more competitive than the balance sheet. The “national security mom” is a half-assed renovation of the party’s image: a composite figure whose toughness soothes suburban voters while her biography reassures donors that she can keep the money flowing. For all the talk of fresh voices, this is the Democratic Party’s long-standing pathology: mistaking the size of the war chest for proof of momentum. 

Since Mamdani’s primary win, a new cohort of candidates has emerged that combines this establishment-approved toughness with Mamdani’s viral communications playbook conveniently culled of any substantive policy proposals. As Aaron Narraph Fernando identified in The Nation, there are a whole host of Gen Z candidates who, instead of “offering a real alternative to the status quo,” instead repackage “the boring, moderate politics of the Democratic establishment with inauthentic videos and forced rhetoric.” The candidate with the highest profile was Deja Foxx, a twenty-five-year-old former Kamala Harris digital strategist running for an Arizona congressional seat. The national media crowned her “the Next AOC”—though the real AOC endorsed her opponent, Adelita Grijalva, who carried actual progressive credentials and deep, organizational ties to the local community. Foxx’s slick videos and compelling personal story couldn’t compensate for the absence of any real case for why she, rather than a trusted local leader, deserved the seat.

Still, there are others who have proven more adept at mimicking the appearance of substance—candidates who at least gesture toward economic populism rather than relying solely on their youth and digital savvy. Mallory McMorrow, a candidate for Michigan’s open Senate seat, recently released an ad to mark the start of the NFL season, which cleverly frames the recent introduction of commercials to NFL Red Zone as “just the latest example of corporate greed ruining the things we love.” Her complaint is then interrupted with a Burger King jingle to reinforce the point, before pivoting to show that all the essentials to watching football—chips, chicken wings, beers, and tickets—have gotten more expensive. For a mainstream Democrat, it’s an innovative ad, and its quick-cut snappy style is reminiscent of Mamdani’s capacity to blend together a disciplined focus on affordability with a sense of humor.

Or take James Talarico, the Texas seminarian who launched his Senate campaign with a video decrying the way that billionaires divide the country—which, presumably, doesn’t include Miriam Adelson, the casino mogul who backed his reelection to the state legislature last year. In the video, he stands in the bed of a pickup truck in what appears to be a small prairie town square, complete with a church steeple in the background, evoking the same kind of place-based authenticity that Mamdani brought to New York’s subway platforms and street corners, though tailored for rural Texas sensibilities.

In their videos, McMorrow and Talarico offer the diagnosis without the cure. They address affordability as an issue, and, like Mamdani, they identify corporate greed as responsible for price increases. But unlike Mamdani, they don’t have a discernible fix. Mamdani’s campaign has put forth clear policies that speak to the economic difficulties that New Yorkers face: a rent freeze for rent-stabilized tenants, free buses, free childcare, and city-run grocery stores. McMorrow and Talarico offer, at best, underspecified commitments to make “big corporations and the ultra-wealthy pay their fair share.”

But even when forced to acknowledge Mamdani’s policy agenda, Democratic commentators find ways to reframe it as primarily a matter of style. In identifying these as “mimetic policies” that garnered substantial attention, commentators like Ezra Klein and Kyla Scanlon lament that their success reflects the way in which modern media flattens nuanced policy to “bumper-sticker” communications. They link the simplicity of these announcements to Trump’s “build the wall” and Bernie’s “Medicare for all,” seductive in theory but ultimately unachievable because, in Klein’s words, “a lot of policy is built on compromise.”

Mamdani’s message resonated not just because it was meme-ready, but because it spoke directly to the lived experience of New Yorkers: rent that keeps climbing, childcare that few can afford, and spiraling grocery prices. These policies don’t come from data-addled triangulation but from his experience organizing in what remains of New York’s associational life. As Waleed Shahid notes, Mamdani’s “campaign grew from years of organizing, frustration, and grief, especially among young progressives, immigrants, and Arab and Muslim communities who had long been pushed to the party’s margins. He didn’t just run against Cuomo. He ran against the political amnesia that forgot the people who showed up when it mattered.”

What makes Mamdani distinct is not that he “goes everywhere” in the sense of turning up on Joe Rogan, but that he is available: present in neighborhoods, mosques, synagogues, tenants’ meetings, and activist circles that in many other campaigns are treated as peripheral or disposable. As Andrew Epstein, the campaign’s creative director, notes, the idea behind the videos was to pitch Zohran as a “tour guide to a city amidst an affordability crisis” and, through his love for the city and his interactions with its people in “a million different contexts,” showcase how “the city is the living breathing antidote to the narrow politics of the Trump administration.”

Since securing the nomination in June, Mamdani’s campaign has continued this approach of making politics more participatory. The campaign launched a citywide scavenger hunt, turning political education into a community activity. Mamdani has released videos highlighting the city’s history of activist-led change, which frame contemporary struggles as part of a longer tradition of collective action. Rather than asking supporters to simply consume content or donate money, the campaign invites them to actively participate in both learning about and continuing this political legacy.

This approach extends to the volunteer mobilization effort that underpinned Mamdani’s primary victory. Over 50,000 volunteers signed up for the campaign. In the lead-up to the primary, the campaign reportedly knocked on over 644,000 doors and made more than 261,000 phone calls, which dwarfs anything seen in recent New York political history. What makes this mobilization distinctive is not just its size but its depth: 4,000 people signed up to volunteer after having their own doors knocked, turning the act of being contacted into an invitation to participate.

Mamdani’s test will be whether this vision of a more progressive and participatory politics can survive the transition from campaigning to governing. The substantive policies that made his videos compelling will face fierce opposition from a hostile Republican federal government and centrist Democrats in Albany who control the tax and regulatory levers. Any implementation delay—or indeed a viral photo of empty shelves at a city-run grocery store—could easily become fodder to undermine his mayoralty, and the feasibility of more progressive candidates elsewhere. The question facing Mamdani is whether the political power that he has constructed through the marriage of community organizing with social media virality can be sustained to withstand entrenched opposition in a social media environment that disdains nuance and rewards outrage.

For the Democratic establishment watching from the sidelines, the conclusion is already clear: Mamdani’s struggles against the obstacles they place in his path will justify the argument what the party really needs is someone who can produce the videos without the inconvenient insistence on actually delivering change.