How Zohran Mamdani Changed Politics Forever

Zoran Mamdani just did the impossible. A failed rapper, immigrant, and unknown 34-year-old, today is the mayor of New York City. It all started with one viral video 10 days after Trump won re-election. With a few simple questions, Mamdani captured the frustrations that would animate his meteoric rise to power. The message, the strategy, and the attention all align perfectly on his social media platform. On February 7, 2025, Mamdani showed up in an early Democratic primary poll tied for last place. He had less than one percent of the vote.

of the vote. Within two weeks of that poll, Mamdani had raked in more small-dollar individual donations through his videos than any other candidate on the ticket, including the current mayor, Eric Adams, and former governor, Andrew Cuomo. As the primaries loomed, he even dropped another video, Please Stop Sending Us Money. All year, the campaign slogans flashed, Free Child Care, Rent Freezes. His own made-up economic terms, like halal inflation. New York is suffering from a crisis, and it's called halal inflation. From that first viral moment, Mamdani honed in on his message, persuaded the public, commandeered the attention of the world, and a few months later, New York elected its first democratic socialist mayor.

Some compare him to 2016 Trump, updated for a 2025 online arena. The establishment on both sides of the aisle watched in disbelief, Mamdani going viral on their feeds, thinking, but socialism always fails. He has no experience. He has bad ideas. Why don't the kids see he's going to burn it all down? The thing is, the kids did see that, and they loved it. According to The Guardian, younger voters proved to be Mamdani's. Strongest base. Precincts where the median voter was 45 years or younger are where he held the biggest lead.

Those viral reels spoke to deep, deep rage, anger, and the eternal optimism of youth that harnessed the city's biggest voter turnout in decades. Whatever Mamdani was selling was exactly what Gen Z was looking for, where they were looking for it. He isn't the first, and he certainly won't be the last long-shot winner, but he did do something new, something worth thinking about. Set aside your feelings for him. We just witnessed one of the greatest political upsets in American history, marking the death of the old guard.

Mamdani, it seems, has mastered the new politics of the 21st century, and others will soon follow suit. Welcome to the age of TikTok politics. But first, a word from our sponsor. Did you know that the Catholic Church recommends a powerful way to protect your home and everyone in it from evil?

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FDR had the new deal for America. Bill Clinton had it's the economy, stupid. Voters have long moved with their tribes following the spirit of the age, and it has also always been the politician's mission to persuade the people who put him in power that he's the right man for the job. Older forms of communication, live speeches, print, letters, slowed our passions down.

Barriers to entry were also steeper. Thought leaders had to be formed. You read, you studied, and let's be honest, you belonged to a political dynasty like the Cuomos, or paid homage to the gatekeepers to persuade them to elevate you. Then, you had to persuade the public to vote for you. Persuasion was a slower task. And debates, articles, and speeches reflected a culture that could still think in long form.

Now, old political campaigns feel like relics from another world. In his remarkably prescient Amusing Ourselves to Death, Dr. Neil Postman said of TV culture, If politics is like show business, then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity, or honesty, but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether. He said, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result.

Substitute smartphone for television and Postman is vindicated. Our revolutionary leaders, like Mandani, today are by necessity also niche influencers, fighting for engagement on platforms that flatten every thought into a headline or a meme. They're not leading the way to a new politics, per se. They are reacting and adapting to a new electorate. Smartphones have given voters unprecedented access to more information than ever before, and at the same time, made us less wise. and more incoherent. Screen time disrupts memory, focus, and reasoning.

Reliance on our devices to think for us reshapes the brain, dulling the very faculties democracy requires. Democracy means rule by the people, and we have to acknowledge the fact that TikTok politics grew up as the people have grown less rational, increasingly detached from real life. And searching for authenticity among all the slop. Long before doom scrolling came to be, the founding fathers understood the dangers of popular government. As H.L. Mencken famously put it, democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

The founders feared for generations of Americans to follow. In Federalist No. 10, Madison predicted that in the years to come, American voters would be able to do what they wanted. Inevitably be persuaded to elect men who were anything but enlightened statesmen. He was right. We are primed to elect socialists who want to tear the American order to pieces.

Mamdanis have always been a possibility because in America, in theory, anyone with the winning message and the power of persuasion and a whiff of authenticity can win. This was true even when Americans still read long-form papers and sat through debates like Lincoln Douglas. Elections have always been morally fraught. The moment the crowd decides, and the crowd can be, and often has been, deceived. But message and persuasive argument and even nepotism aren't enough in politics, TikTok or otherwise. You also have to get in front of the crowd.

Here's where TikTok politics gets really interesting. For the past 80 years, gatekeepers have looked a lot like the RNC and the DNC. They've looked like Walter Cronkite. Fox News and the New York Times. The new gatekeeper, though, is the algorithm.

Mamdani understood how to use that to bypass the establishment and get in front of New York City. Public commentators and intellectuals, who in the past might have guided the electorate on how to understand political candidates and policies, have also been forced to adapt or lose their public platform. Take the New York City mayoral debate this year. People mocked Mamdani for delivering lines and ending every sentence with a posed smile. What they didn't get, and he did, was that the debate wasn't for persuading the people in the room, or even the audience watching the whole thing live.

What older voters thought was a debate about ideas and policy was in fact a performance geared to capture viral, clip-worthy gotcha lines, and to get smartphone users on his side. Compare that to the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which also included their fair share of pointed insults. Lincoln-Douglas were debating to persuade the people who were literally in the room with them. The New York City debate wasn't held to engage with ideas and persuade people in the room. The candidates talked past each other for an hour for sound bites and clips to go into algorithms.

The struggle session has replaced the debate. And then we vote. So, TikTok politics is an entirely new tool applied to the same old political strategies, messaging, persuasion, and attention. To some, Mamdani is the Trump of the left, the populist, confident, perfectly attuned to people's pain points, authentic. But instead of descending on escalators from gold towers, he's standing in bodegas and housing complexes. Instead of Make America Great Again, his pitches make New York affordable. He mastered the feel of social media politics, highly online, but also personal.

No AI, no corporate gloss. The algorithm loved it. So did the kids who can't afford a studio apartment. A campaign video of Mamdani announcing his vacation and mocking tabloids got 4.5 million views on Instagram, and more than half of these views came from non-followers. Another campaign video on Manhattan traffic problems. Got 2.5 million views on Instagram. His Valentine's Day love song for New York City, Corny, 1.6 million views. Valentine's Day is coming up, but I've been thinking about us.

I know you've been let down so many times. The whole working class has been let down. This time, I want it to be different. I see us riding on a bus. That bus is fast and free. We're on our way back to our union-built, rent-stabilized home.

Maybe we're shopping for cheaper groceries at a city-owned supermarket, and who knows, one day we have kids, and I want them to have universal child care. I know it's not yet Valentine's Day, but I can't wait any longer.

He didn't talk about vibes or movements. He talked about groceries, child care, and rent and food trucks. And in doing that, he exuded the vibes and harnessed a movement. The man who masters the most personal and personalized medium in human history, social media, wins. And now, New Yorkers are going to give democratic socialism a chance. We have to continue to elect more socialists. I'm a democratic socialist. That means I believe in dignity for all people. There are also other issues that we firmly believe in, whether it's the end goal of seizing the means of production.

Call it democracy or call it democratic socialism, there has to be a better distribution of wealth for all of God's children in this country. Social media platforms, as big business, love it. They don't want a reflective electorate. Reflection slows the scrolling. It gets people off their platforms. The platforms are the new newspaper stands selling yellow journalism.

TikTok politics is just as dumb and reactive, stoking rage and fear and tribalism, and it's working. Americans, more than any other nation, say social media has made politics worse. A Pew study found that while other countries feel more empowered by TikTok politics, the U.S. public feels exhausted. Researchers at the Texas National Security Review broke it down further. Social media weakens strong democracies. It intensifies authoritarian regimes, radicalizes weak democracies, and destabilizes weak authoritarian states. We Americans fall into the first category, a strong democracy that's slowly being hollowed out.

Our founders assumed an informed citizenry, people capable of self-governance because they could govern themselves. But self-control is hard when your political campaigns are driven by dopamine and push notifications. But here's the thing about the winners of TikTok politics. Once you win, you have to rule. Mamdani may believe the socialist state can fix New York City. Maybe he's sincere. But sincerity doesn't make the rent cheaper, or crime go down, or inflation disappear. Sooner or later, every ideology meets the limits of the real.

It's not that we've gotten dumber. Humans as a group have always been pretty dumb. I mean, Jesus calls us sheep for a reason. We might not be able to grapple with ideas as well anymore, but the thing is, ideas still have consequences, and really, really bad ideas, like rent control, they're still really bad, and people are going to suffer. They just won't be able to understand what went wrong. Natural consequences, though, are God's built-in guardrails for humanity. We try something crazy, we get burned, and some of us turn back.

In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's main character, Montag, meets one of the book people as he flees from the self-destructive path of his society. Granger comforts him, saying, But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last. Reality always wins, but I'd like to spare America pointless suffering before- Before we really do blow the world up. It's no use lamenting TikTok politics. This is the train we're on right now.

Sure, I could host a think tank roundtable on why social media erodes the American order, and maybe we should. But for now, the rails are laid, the old guard is gone, and the barriers to entry have collapsed. That's both thrilling and terrifying. Power vacuums don't stay empty for long. The same tools that can elevate new, principled voices with great ideas can also amplify grifters, ideologues, and worse. So, who's it going to be? Are we going to get more Charlie Kirks or more Zoran Mamdani's?

Here's the good news. Anyone with courage and clarity can still step up. You don't need Tammany Hall or the RNC. With the right message, you can expose corruption, awaken apathy, and even topple a Cuomo. So, take a page from the Mamdani playbook, understand the pain points, craft the message, learn how to go viral, then win. Because what comes next is real life. Call on the angels, strengthen your virtues, and build a mind that lives offline, then bring it online with fire and grace.

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