Pages

Showing posts with label Zohran Mamdani. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Zohran Mamdani. Show all posts

Thursday, July 03, 2025

3: Zohran Mamdani

How Extremely Online Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani Learned to Embrace the Cringe The young democratic socialist has been building buzz and raising money from New Yorkers online, but it remains to be seen how that will translate into votes IRL. ........ and Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, who donned a $30 business suit he had bought the day before from one of his constituents’s thrift stores on Steinway Street in Astoria, Queens. .......... “I’m freezing … your rent as the next mayor of New York City,” Mamdani said to the camera. “Let’s plunge into the details,” he continued, before jumping into the 40-degree water and emerging soaking wet to talk about his affordable housing proposal......... The video went on to garner more than 800,000 views across social media platforms. ......... “I think that you’ll find more people heard about my policy on freezing the rent by me jumping into the water than me being at any number of political forums where I’ve said the same thing,” Mamdani told THE CITY in a phone conversation about his social media strategy on Wednesday. .......... Two days later, his campaign released a sincere video of him talking with some of the New Yorkers who gave to his campaign. That clip quickly racked up more than half a million views on Twitter. ........ Part of the reason Mamdani’s been able to appear so comfortable in front of the camera, he said, came from his experience of being a self-described C-list rapper — including attempts to sell CDs on public buses in visits to Kampala, Uganda. ........ (He was born in the African nation to award-winning indie filmmaker Mira Nair and noted scholar of postcolonialism Mahmood Mamdani before they moved to New York City when he was a child. Despite her filmmaking expertise, Nair hasn’t offered her son tips for his campaign videos, he said.) ........ Those moments of “humiliation,” he added, were part of what prepared him for the harsh truths of the campaign trial, especially the early morning attempts on subway platforms to stop people for petition signatures when they’d rather not speak to anyone. ........... “You have to throw yourself out there, you have to put yourself out there, you have to also just crave rejection like water on your back.” ........

Mamdani, for his part, likened campaign content creation to door-knocking.

........ “With low turnout events, any bit of turnout matters a lot,” Sanderson said — especially when New York City’s last two mayoral contests were effectively decided in Democratic primaries where the winner was the first choice of not even 300,000 voters. ........... “I began this race with most New Yorkers not knowing who I am, but if I want to change that reality I have to be everywhere all at once,” he said. “I have sought to fulfill that commitment by physically going to three to four boroughs in a single day and also by ensuring that when New Yorkers open their phone and they’re scrolling through Instagram or Twitter or TikTok, they may also see a video from this campaign.” ....... Mamdani’s isn’t just working with content creators. He’s also becoming one of them. ......... organizing and hunger-striking with taxi workers drowning in debt back in 2021.

at No comments:
Labels: , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)