Drawing from sources as audacious as Bernie Sanders, to the savvy street-smarts of a New York City film production team, Mamdani has given voice to a new generation and forever changed the way progressives will win elections.
He didn’t do it by himself. His policies, creativity and undeniable charisma were seamlessly fused in a new political art form so compelling that it catapulted the 33-year-old Muslim to a surprising 12-point primary victory over his main rival, former NY Governor Andrew Cuomo, who just one month earlier, according to one poll, enjoyed a 24 point lead. Cuomo funders forked over $25 million (by some counts, as high as $36m) to run a tired, formulaic campaign dominated by “nasty, negative, unfair” TV ads, and the postage stamps needed to send the same content over snail-mail. Yet even with millions of dollars and their best efforts to villainize him, Mamdani’s ability to counter the slurs attacking his identity, and the care and promise he expressed for New Yorkers reached a generation feeling the pain of living in a city that had for too long bowed to the Wall-Street ethos, fueled by elite political power. The campaign energized a new youth vote and defeated the cynical politics we’ve long suspected to be only a cosplay of democracy.
From the beginning, Mamdani was a longshot, labeled a “Muslim socialist,” by Andrew Cuomo, but Zohran Mamdani’s momentum was building over social media and his creative, human-center media spoke a compelling language of compassion that was absolutely believable.
Commentators have listed his most celebrated videos—they were fun and crisp. He talked about running for mayor while running in a marathon (:34) and illustrated his promise to freeze NYC rents by jumping into frigid waters off Cony Island (1:00) in a suit and tie. With Bollywood scores and clips inserted, and speaking Urdu (with English subtitles) to a group of “aunties,” in a (2:24) video, Mandani explained ranked-choice voting using mango lassi, a yoghurt-based drink from the Punjab region of India.
The videos shot on location all over the city depended on the film production expertise developed over recent years by New York City Indy-filmmakers. Quirky, conversational and inviting, impromptu interchanges and stories of love and yearning were woven into the matrix of the city at eye-level.
A Valentine Message
A Valetine story (1:18) opens with Zohran in the subway surrounded by dozens of heart-shaped red balloons carrying a huge box of chocolates, where the candidate, the camera and his message are at home on the streets, and even below ground level. Mamdani walks through the subway, up the stairs, through a turn-style, then finally out of an elevator as the balloons struggle to make it past the obstacles. In the frame, a single saxophonist serenades him. Outside he walks across the street, it’s dark out and we hear him speaking softly, “I see us riding on a bus. The bus is fast and free.” Passing steal garage doors he continues, “We’re on our way back to our union-built, rent-stabilized home.” He turns a corner under a classic neon sign for a New York City steak house and continues “Maybe we’re shopping for cheaper groceries at a city owed supermarket.” The saxophone player follows him, and in the next frame he passes the sax player. It’s a magical view of the city that occupies the dreams of youthful New Yorkers, yet Mamdani makes that fanciful place seems attainable. But his vision is not without a condition. It comes as he reaches his destination, sitting at a table across from a partner we don’t see, that could be us. He says, “I know it’s not yet Valentines Day, but I can’t wait any longer,” and with a cheeky smile be presents the open box of chocolates, saying, “Will you be my Democrat?” After details of how and when to register, and another visual of the sax player, he sings “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” with words “Will you be my Democrat,” and we hear a female laugh. “I just need you to vote June 24,” he croons.” It’s as cheesy as it affective, confirmed by comments on Instagram saying it’s cheesy, but I love it anyway, and lauding the producers who should get a raise. The campaign “drew tens of thousands of new voters to the polls.”
Halalflation
From the subway to the streets, and into a food cart, another 1:32 long video begins with Zohran in front of a vender’s halal cart announcing there’s a crisis in New York called “Halalflation.” After taking a big fork-full of rice he talks while chewing, “Today, we’re going to get to the bottom of this.” It’s a speedy-paced montage set to Arabic music showing Zohran inside a bunch of different food carts, asking venders how much a plate of halal costs. They are all saying $10. They go through the costs, and the biggest expense is the outlay of up to $22,000 for a permit to sell food on the street. But here’s the rub–they don’t buy the permit from the city, they buy it from a broker, as one vender says, “a random guy.” A city permit would cost them only $400 or so, but the venders have been waiting on a list, one for 2 years and he’s still only number “3,800 something.” Next Zohran fast-steps around the cart and points to 4 bills seen on the screen, “that are sitting in the city council right now.” They would “give these venders their own permits… and make your halal more affordable, but Eric Adams hasn’t said a single word about them.” Back in the cart he asks how much they would charge for a plate if they had a permit, and they respond with 7 or 8 dollars. He then stops people on the street asking, “Would you rather pay $10 for a plate of halal or $8.” Of course, we know which price they choose, and the candidate promises, “If I were the Mayor, I’d be working with the City Council from day one to make halal 8 bucks again. On the podcast “Start Making Sense,” Jonathan Wiener called it “irresistible.”
The story is brief and direct, yet complex and fun with a doable, fair solution to an obvious injustice. Such narratives diverge from the bland vagaries of corporate-media driven campaigns so dominant, yet so lifeless. They caught the eye of social media consultant Rachel Karten who found them intriguing, “cleaver and entertaining,” recognizing their knack for engaging viewers. They are filmed in a “style that makes viewers want to stick around to the end.”
The videos sprang from a collaborative effort that included Melted Solids, a small production team that opened shop in 2019, founded by Anthony DiMieri and the supercut wizard, Debbie Saslaw. The team drew on the production skills and strategic knowledge they learned in corporate advertising. As DiMieri once told me during a chance encounter at Grand Central Station, he was “working for the man.” From there they polished their political vision by providing comms for campaigns and progressive candidates; “we built longstanding relationships with so many brilliant and talented people along the way,” Debbie Saslaw said. They helped Jamaal Bowman, worked with Bernie Sanders, and filmed Amazon Labor Union’s successful unionization efforts in Staten Island, a campaign driven by workers and immigrants. As DiMieri told Karten, “We recognize that well-produced media is a weapon in any fight.”
Ideas, pitches and discussions of the videos often originated in a group chat, during a process that included Mamdani, the Melted Solids team, comms director Andrew Epstein and videographer Donald Borenstein, who handled the Urdu video. Borenstein took the lead as video producer and was responsible for the daily feeds of short, vertical video content. Like Dimieri, he graduated from New York’s Fordham University. Mamdani’s campaign photographer Kara McCurdy, who’s worked with the candidate since 2020, was part of the team.
As a low-budget Indy-filmmaker in New York, Anthony DiMieri learned from filming on location all over the city, producing his first web-series Bros, and an award-winning short that opens in the subway, called “My New Boyfriend,” a chronicle of a young woman’s romance with a 12 foot skeleton from Home Depot. He had “great bone structure…she says, and “was patient and a great listener.” DiMieri’s upcoming independent feature film, Love New York, a series of vignettes of amorous couples, was shot on the streets, in cafes and small apartments from Bushwick to the Village. Two New York City retired cab drivers from the upcoming film Love are featured in a Mamdani campaign video.
Titled, “The Political Menu is Getting Stale. It’s Time for Something Different,” it opens with the brassy drivers eating and arguing over a choice between Mario Cuomo and Eric Admas. One even handles Cuomo’s book, while they grope for reason to choose one over the other, revealing information about both candidate’s faults. Zohran walks in and grabs their attention with “You both know that New Yorkers have more of a choice than just Adams or Cuomo this election, right?” They grill him about what he’s done for the city, allowing Zohran to highlight his significant wins as Assembly member with policies shaped with the help of community groups and political coalitions. In the end the drivers comically turn back to arguing with each other and Zohran gets up and leaves, a short, engaging take (2:11) on a typical New York political conversation that to date has racked up almost 2 million YouTube views.
Throw Away the Script: Authenticity and Documentation
Riskier formats were added to structured storytelling, in a campaign milieu willing to try different things. Anthony DiMieri recounted the time when Jamaal Bowman’s team wrote him a script he would read from cue cards, but DiMieri said, “the delivery felt stilted.” So Saslaw and DiMieri suggested, “Why don’t we just try improvising… tell us how you feel.” The result was stunning, “his monologue reads like one of the most visionary political speeches in recent memory.” Now, even if a candidate comes with a script DiMieri says, “we give them moments to just riff, and the gold that comes from someone speaking from the heart is really unmatchable.” Developing a platform dedicated to improving the well-being of most people animates authenticity and leads to a political vision that bestows upon the person the ability to speak off-script. It is no wonder that impromptu eloquent articulations of complex policies are a rare quality for most politicians, beholding as they are to the often anti-democratic agendas of superPACs and the dictates that come along with the dark money from corporate and political elites.
The campaign’s first viral video in November was a compilation of person “on-the-street-style” interviews, conducted by Zohran, in neighborhoods with large immigrant populations that moved toward voting for Trump in 2024. To help prepare for the shoots, the campaign’s communication Director Andrew Epstein, referred to Bernie Sanders interviews with mall punks in the 1980s. At the time, DiMieri admitted he thought it “was a little overkill, but looking back he now thinks “it was actually genius.” The interviews demonstrate that 2024 voters thought Trump would bring down prices, and help Bronx residents, and a good portion cited anti-genocide views the had turned them against Biden and by extension, Kamala Harris. DiMieri added that Democrats have “massively” failed at talking with people that disagree with them.
Everything about Cuomo’s campaign fits that observation, evident when the former governor declined an invitation to appear at a candidates forum organized by The Nation magazine. As the magazine’s President Bhaskar Sunkara, told Jonathan Weiner, “He was scared.” Kamala skipping Joe Rogan after pressure from staffers was a big mistake, DiMieri observed. “You should talk to everyone, not just those in our socio-political-cultural ashrams.”
Mamdani also appeared on podcasts not sympathetic to his candidacy, like the one hosted by two former NYPD officers who largely disagreed with his positions. After the podcast one of the hosts said, “At least he speaks from a place of honesty.”
This type of freedom is anathema to corporate politicians who hire consultants to search for talking points formulated from opinion polls or focus group probes, often seeking negative, hot-button issues used as the persuasive meat for dark, nasty political adverting. Candidates and politician are coached to repeat the text, and “stay on point,” a format now so obviously contrived we must wonder why it persists.
Countering Cuomo on @SubwayTakes
Captivating chatter and contending opinions fly along the rails of New York City subways, or sometimes roll along slowly, in the viral TikTok hit @SubwayTakes that Anthony DiMieri has directed for 10 years. The show introduced vibrant dialogue among New York riders and has amassed over 1 million followers. Comedian host Kareem Rahma and his guest hold metro cards up to their mouths like small square microphones, and he starts the conversation asking, “What’s your take?” He often disagrees with the person next to him and the fun begins. As Rahma asked Ayman on MSNBC, haven’t you ever wondered what the person next you on the subway is thinking? When Mamdani appeared on the show, after Rahma asked the question, he responded saying, “I should be the mayor.” Kareem draws out a long, “Iyyyeee don’t know,” explaining that he’s been seeing a lot of stuff saying that “you shouldn’t be the mayor.” He pulls what’s left of a folded mailing from his pocket, and after some banter, they get to the claim that Zohran will raise your taxes, a notion easily dispelled when Zohran asks, “Do you make more than a million dollars?” the income group that will be affected by the increase. Of course, the answer is no. Mamdani proceeds to deconstruct the glossy, now shredded mailing sent out by the Cuomo campaign filled with distortions about his policies. The last claim, that Zohran has a “radical plan to put homeless people in the subway system,” is too ridiculous for comment and Zohran says, “three for three,” another lie. He grabs the mailing and holds it up to the camera pointing to the “fine print” of funders, who are Michael Bloomberg, DoorDash, and Bill Ackman, who is a “Trump supporting billionaire.” He informs viewers that Bloomberg dropped $8.3 million dollars on Andrew Cuomo’s supper Pac, and says, “That’s the same amount of money we raised from more than 20,000 people,” making the distinction between ordinary people and billionaires.
DiMieri told me that the content of the video had not been planned, and it was only that morning, when over a cup coffee looking at his mail before leaving for the shoot, did he discover those “crazy anti-Zohran ads.” So, he took the mailers with him and offered a proposal to the team, “You know it might be fun to do some prop-comedy” adding, “the more we talked about it the more it just became the most obvious thing to do…to respond bullet by bullet to these allegations from the negative mailing.” To date, episode number 407 of @SubwayTakes, where Zohran Mamdani takes down Cuomo’s ‘campaign literature’ fabrications point by point, has received 872.8K likes on TikTok.
By contrast, Cuomo tried to evoke fear of the subway as a campaign theme, calling for a “50% increase in transit police” in an ugly, badly-produced graphic posted on Instagram. Since late March 2025, it’s received 5 likes.
Most of Zohran campaign videos have a clear, well stated message. This one comes at the end when he says, “These guys would rather lie to you every single day rather than admit the fact that the policies they have perused for so long have left us with the city that we actually have today.”
Another comedic theme runs through the @SubwayTakaes video, as Kareem repeatedly asks Zohran what he will do to bring down the price of a Matcha Latte. Zohran responds with, “100% not sure.”
Cuomo filled New York City with a different kind of media blitz—his ads were everywhere. In campaigns, negative ads are used not only to attack one’s opponent, they are known to turn voters off and discourage them from participating in election politics. But at every turn, Zohran’s campaign drew on conversational milieus or created new explanatory formats that were inspirational, always extending an invitation to participate in enlivening ways. As Late Night host Stephen Colbert observed Mamdani won with “relentless positivity” and cheerfulness.
While Mamdani’s appealing up-beat energy and humanity shine through the camera, the videos of working-class struggles were not without stories of hardship, and sometimes loss.
Storytelling in a Cab
In Keep the Meter Running: Ramadan Edition! Zohran gets into a yellow cab where Kareem Rahma is also a passenger. The driver’s name is Mouhamadou and he’s on his way to an Iftar dinner. Over the course of the ride Mouhamadue tells the story of the successful action by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance in 2021, when both he and Zohran joined the hunger strike for 15 days that ended in a historic victory for debt relief. Zohran explains the crisis to Kareem that began when Mayor Bloomberg “inflated the cost of a medallion from $200,000 to $1million to bridge a budget deficit.” Zohran was arrested at city hall, and Mouhamadue says he was $750,000 in debt.” And “don’t forget,” he adds, “9 of my fellow brothers committed suic*de.” The remembrance offered by the African cab driver from the Côte d’Ivoire is not done gratuitously, or for shock value. It’s sometimes just the price of struggle.
The dialogue is followed by a fast-paced comedic sequence in the last third of the tape that takes place at a Chinese Halal restaurant that serves Bengali food, where the Iftar takes place. Zohran speaks at the dinner and Kareem plays the role of scruffy-looking outsider trying to insert himself into numerous photos ops, but few take him up on it.
My favorite video might be the one where the candidate explains why “we walked the length of Manhattan,” and tells viewers, “because New Yorkers deserve a Mayor they can hear, see and even yell at if they need to.” It’s classic Zohran walking with people in the streets talking directly to the camera and featuring footage of endearing interactions with New Yorkers in a video that definitely shared the love of diversity and gleeful enthusiasm.
Many have written about the strengths of his social media campaign, sometimes referring to it as a model to emulate for progressives. The Washington Post wrote that Mamdani’s Instagram engagement rate was 14 times more than that of Cuomo’s during June, and across social media conversations about him outnumbered mentions of Cuomo more than 30-to-1. “His digital presence felt savvy and authentic,” they said. And of course it will be copied by what the Post calls, “National Democrats” who are “eager for an edge in the internet era.” But Mamdani’s campaign won’t be easily copied by corporate Democrats trying to make their presence feel authentic. The campaign was a tectonic shift in visual and narrative structures, with esthetic sensibilities eagerly embraced by youthful New Yorkers as they expressed dedication to change with doable justice actions and inventing a new political art form. It was experimental and innovative, as it abandoned political hackery, “staying on message,” repeating dreary talking points and campaigns designed to silence conversation and discourage participation. Its intricacies will require inclusion and engagement with political and community actors working with city-wide, and even national organizations. For Mamdani that involved collaborating with talented members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and “coordinated efforts with tenant organizations across the city,” who went on an offensive against Real Estate, among many others.
In a cringeworthy production, Cuomo has already mimicked Mamdani in a new post-primary ad that has him dressed as “everyman casual,” in unbearably drab clothes, though Zohran is mostly attired in a suit and tie, in colors crafted and inspired by NYC taxis and Bollywood posters, cobalt blue and marigold yellow. Washed out and looking tired Cuomo tries to say with conviction, “I am in it to win it,” but the campaign seems to have lost any sense of irony when in the next breath Cuomo accuses Mamdani of using “slick slogans, but no real solutions.” He then walks down city streets meeting and greeting residents, but they are silent props, we never hear their voices, they never speak on camera. It’s Cuomo who speaks, scripted, about lower rents… and childcare that “won’t bankrupt you,” without offering a single policy proposal. He promises to earn your votes, and he’ll be talking to you…maybe soon, eventually. But my bet is those interviews won’t be televised.
Yet Debbie Saslaw hasn’t given up on more traditional adverting that she believes can still play a role. When asked to think about ideas for working on upcoming elections, after noting that there is a ceiling for audience reach on social media, she said a life goal is to create something as “universally poignant” as Sanders’ America ad. And I’m absolutely sure she’ll do it, while working with partners on this new filmic political art form that will continue to evolve.
Note: Anthony DiMieri was a student of the author’s at Fordham Unversity.
