Everybody Wants to Be Zohran Mamdani
Short-form video helped transform an unknown candidate into the mayor of New York. Now politicians across the country are copying him, and most of them are terrible at it.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass recently released one of the cringiest political videos I have seen in a while.
A local resident had posted a video complaining about a pothole. The video went viral, so Bass responded by showing up with city employees, work trucks, cameras, and an apparent plan to demonstrate that city government was listening.
There was only one problem.
A car was parked directly over the pothole.
The crew could not fix it. Bass showed up, stood around the blocked pothole, and then released the video anyway. The mayor’s official account proudly told the resident, “We got you,” even though the pothole remained exactly where it was.
The video went viral for all the wrong reasons.
Almost anybody watching it could see the incompetence. City government mobilized employees, trucks, communications staff, and a camera crew but failed to check whether the pothole was accessible before everybody arrived.
Then whatever gatekeeping process exists inside the mayor’s office failed, too. Nobody stopped and said, “Maybe we shouldn’t publish a video of ourselves not fixing the pothole.”
It became a perfect little microcosm of government at its worst. It assembled a large group of people, produced a lot of activity, accomplished nothing, and then issued a public-relations video congratulating itself.
The intentions may have been good. The result was still fucking ridiculous.
But there is a reason Karen Bass is suddenly making videos like this.
Zohran Mamdani changed political campaigning.
Mamdani Changed the Campaign Playbook
The rise of Zohran Mamdani has been incredible to watch.
He went from being a relatively unknown state assemblymember to the mayor of New York City, the largest city in the United States and one of the most important cities in the world.
He did not accomplish that purely through short-form videos. His campaign also built an enormous field organization with tens of thousands of volunteers knocking on doors and making calls. His victory came from combining online attention with actual organizing, fundraising, policy, and voter contact.
But his videos introduced him to millions of people and gave the entire campaign its personality.
They were funny, self-aware, relentlessly on message, and directly tailored to the way people consume information online. He used them to explain policies, introduce himself, mobilize volunteers, reach different communities, and occasionally make fun of himself.
They looked good, but they were not just random content. Almost every video returned to the same basic message about affordability and the cost of living.
Mamdani understood the internet because he was already part of its culture. He understood the memes, references, editing styles, humor, music, and language. He was not an older politician asking a 24-year-old staffer to explain TikTok to him.
He was not trying to become online. He was online.
It probably also did not hurt that Mamdani grew up around performance and storytelling. His mother, Mira Nair, is an acclaimed filmmaker who directed movies including Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding, and The Namesake. He grew up in a family that understood film, culture, performance, and how stories reach people.
Most politicians do not have that background.
Mamdani also has something that cannot be manufactured by an editing team. When it is time to say “action,” he can flip a switch and become incredibly charismatic. He can speak to the camera as if he is talking to a friend he has known for 20 years.
Whether you agree with his politics or not, that is a real political talent.
We have seen this kind of transformation before.
Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign did not invent social media, but it was one of the first presidential campaigns to make social networking and digital organizing central to its operation. His campaign used the internet not only for advertising, but also to raise money, recruit volunteers, organize communities, and communicate directly with supporters.
After Obama won, social media stopped being an optional campaign experiment. It became part of the basic toolkit.
People also started copying Obama himself. They copied his cadence, his pauses, his voice, and his style of speaking. Everybody wanted to sound like Barack Obama because the Barack Obama template had worked.
The problem was that most of those people were not Barack Obama.
Now everybody wants to be Zohran Mamdani.
The same problem has returned.
You Cannot Copy and Paste Charisma
More and more mayors, governors, members of Congress, and candidates are trying to campaign in TikTok format.
Karen Bass is doing it. Chuck Schumer has tried it. Abdul El-Sayed has done everything from playful campaign videos to a Blue’s Clues parody. Politicians across the ideological spectrum are producing short clips, scripted jokes, staged confrontations, thirst traps, memes, and supposedly relatable behind-the-scenes content.
They are all trying to capture the lightning that Mamdani put in a bottle.
It is not working for most of them.
The first problem is what we call the performance face.
When the camera turns on, most candidates stop acting like themselves. Their faces change. Their voices change. They suddenly become a carefully rehearsed version of what they think a normal person sounds like.
It feels fake because it is fake.
They look like someone reading a script while desperately trying to pretend they are not reading a script. Their communications team may have studied the latest trend and reproduced all the technical elements correctly, but the person in the video does not understand why the original worked.
Mamdani does not merely repeat internet culture. He lives inside it. When he is not following the culture, he is occasionally helping create it.
Other politicians are being handed memes by staffers five days after the meme was funny.
Some of these politicians are also genuinely unpleasant people, and video makes that obvious. They succeeded through fundraising, party relationships, policy knowledge, or years of working inside political institutions. None of that means they can look into a camera and connect with another human being.
That is not necessarily a character flaw. Some people are simply not performers.
But the attempt to manufacture charisma often produces something worse than boring. It produces cringe.
Abdul El-Sayed’s videos are a useful example, although they also complicate my argument. His Blue’s Clues-style voting video was mocked after resurfacing online, but El-Sayed still won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary.
So an awkward video does not automatically destroy a candidate. It also does not prove the video helped him win.
That distinction is important. Viral mockery can create attention, but attention is not always persuasion. Sometimes people are just laughing at you.
Internet Points Are Not Votes
Spencer Pratt may be the clearest recent example of the limits of social-media campaigning.
Pratt entered the 2026 Los Angeles mayoral race with a massive online following and decades of experience as a reality television personality. He understood performance. His videos generated millions of views. His TikTok account had approximately 2.5 million followers and more than 92 million cumulative likes by the end of the primary.
He also raised millions of dollars.
Then he finished third.
Pratt received approximately 25.5% of the vote, behind Karen Bass and Nithya Raman, and failed to advance to the general election. An analysis of the race found that Pratt’s enormous online reach did not translate into enough support among the voters who actually decided the primary. TargetSmart’s post-election analysis compared Pratt’s massive digital audience with his third-place finish.
The internet helped him raise money, gain attention, and become a serious candidate. It did not win the election.
Kat Abughazaleh offers another example.
Abughazaleh entered the Democratic primary for Illinois’ 9th Congressional District with a large online following and an established identity as a political influencer. She understood internet culture far better than most of the people running against her. Her campaign raised money, attracted national attention, and turned her into one of the most recognizable candidates in the race.
She still lost to Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, who received about 29.6% of the vote to her 25.9%. Again, going viral is not the same as winning.
Internet points may translate into small-dollar donations. They may generate media coverage. They may help a candidate who was previously unknown become viable.
But the people liking, sharing, and commenting on a video may not live in the candidate’s district. They may not be registered to vote. They may not know anything else about the campaign. They may not even like the candidate.
Some of them may be watching because the video is a train wreck.
The internet can giveth, and the internet can taketh away.
Karen Bass wanted to show that she was responding to a constituent and fixing a basic city problem. Instead, thousands of creators, commentators, and ordinary users took the video, ripped it apart, and turned it into evidence that she could not manage a pothole repair.
Once a politician posts something, the campaign no longer controls it.
Politics Is Becoming Slopulism
The larger problem is not simply that politicians are bad at making videos.
The problem is what short-form video is doing to campaigns.
Political arguments are increasingly reduced to whatever can fit inside a 30-second or 60-second clip. Complicated policies become slogans. Every issue is flattened into one simple promise designed to survive the algorithm.
Freeze the rent.
Make the buses free.
Fix the pothole.
Lower the prices.
Regardless of the merits of any individual proposal, complicated questions about funding, implementation, legal authority, trade-offs, and unintended consequences rarely make it into the video.
The politician points at a problem, announces a solution, inserts a trending sound, and waits for the views.
Call it slopulism.
It is politics reduced to algorithm-friendly content. It is endless simplistic videos created in the hope that one of them goes viral. It rewards the person who can perform a solution more effectively than the person who can implement one.
That is really fucked up.
Campaigns have always involved performance. Candidates have always delivered rehearsed speeches, staged photo opportunities, kissed babies, visited diners, and pretended to enjoy county-fair food.
But I do not think political campaigning has ever been reduced to this level of simplicity and stupidity.
If this becomes the dominant way campaigns operate, we may end up selecting candidates based on their ability to make short-form videos. People who are serious, thoughtful, nuanced, and maybe a little boring could become less competitive because they cannot perform for the camera.
Some of those boring people might be better leaders.
They might understand government. They might be able to think through complicated problems. They might be willing to admit that a policy has costs, limitations, or trade-offs.
They might be able to fix the pothole without filming themselves standing beside it.
Mamdani’s Actual Lesson
Mamdani’s victory does not prove that every politician needs to imitate Mamdani.
It proves that authenticity, clear messaging, digital communication, and actual organizing can reinforce one another when the right candidate brings them together.
His videos worked because they matched the person, the campaign, the message, and the political moment. They were part of a much larger operation that eventually mobilized an extraordinary number of volunteers and voters.
Copying the editing style without understanding the substance is not campaigning.
It is cosplay.
I do not think most lifelong politicians can suddenly transform themselves into charismatic, video-friendly personalities. They are not theater kids. They did not grow up around performance. They cannot simply turn on a camera and become someone else.
Maybe that is the one upside.
Maybe most of these imitations will fail because voters can still recognize when someone is faking it. Maybe online attention will continue helping candidates raise money and become known without completely replacing the parts of campaigning that require real organization, real voters, and an actual message.
Mamdani changed political campaigning, just as Obama did before him.
But the lesson is not that everybody should talk like Obama or make videos like Mamdani.
The lesson is that when a rare political talent changes the game, copying the surface of what worked is not the same as understanding why it worked.
And if all your video proves is that you brought an entire city crew to a pothole and still could not fix it, maybe do not post the fucking video.