A Few Thoughts on Zohran
Elder dems need to learn from the younger, more digitally savvy wing of the party
I am somehow both perplexed and woefully unsurprised that the Democratic party establishment is “melt[ing] down” over Zohran Mamdani’s victory over Andrew Cuomo in New York city’s democratic mayoral primary.
The puzzlement stems from feeling that figures like Mamdani, at least ones with similar personability and acumen for populist, digitally savvy rhetoric are the best hope for the democratic party going forward.
This is a party, recall, whose rank-and-file members—roughly 60% of them—believe “the leadership of the Democratic Party should be replaced with new people.” The party’s overall approval rating sits at a record low of 29%. That big name democrats like Bill Clinton, Mike Bloomberg, and Jim Clyburn endorsed Cuomo did nothing to prevent his “thrashing” by a 33-year old Muslim socialist with zero mainstream party credentials to speak of.
Mamdani’s win also comes on the heels of Trump making historic inroads in normally solid-blue New York, suggesting that the president’s relative success not just there, but in other progressive strongholds, may have more to do with broad anti-establishment sentiment, rather than expressly conservative sentiment among voters.
This should all excite leading Democrats: Mamdani has shown that they can notch convention-defying wins by melding disciplined emphasis on cost-of-living with an interlinked, state-of-the-art social media and ground game.
Any proven contribution to revamping the Democratic playbook in advance of 2026 and 2028 ought to be welcomed with open arms. Senior party members have so far failed to internalize the fact that the political mood of the time is anti-establishment to its core. They have also failed to see the sinews connecting this fact to the new digital media environment, and to infer from there that it is a grave error to rebuff opportunities—as Harris did in 2024—to appear on shows like Joe Rogan’s, or otherwise commit to a high-visibility social media presence. Doing so would mean embracing both unscripted, longer-form interviews as well as punchier, short-form video content, as Mamdani did to great effect.
I recently argued that our new digital media ecosystem is akin to a grand new social institution, one set to delineate the shape of public discourse in this country for the foreseeable future. The sooner the Democratic party wakes up to the newfound influence of social media, as Republicans did years ago, the sooner they can reestablish themselves as a potent political force in the eyes of the large number of Americans fed up with mainstream politics.
For all the Republican party has to thank Trump for, his most underrated gift might be obviating their need to grapple, in their own antiquated terms, with adapting to the new cultural climate of the 2010s. In reshaping the party more or less by force, Trump headed off a counterfactual scenario in which senior Republicans might’ve been as hopelessly lost as senior Democrats are now.
Mamdani’s win in New York is an invitation for Democrats to find their way again by learning from the younger, more progressive, more digitally savvy wing of the party. Doing so doesn’t require embracing every, or even any of Mamdani’s policy platform, much of which is likely to prove difficult to implement, should the 33-year old become mayor. But it does mean taking seriously the potential of backing, or at least emulating younger, fresher digital natives with a populist message—even if that means passing over more senior party figures that see themselves as ‘next in line.’