Sarah Miller-Davenport in The Ideas Letter:
The most facile assessments of Zohran Mamdani’s extraordinary campaign to lead New York City attribute its success to his innovative use of social media and a communication style that appealed to voters with TikTok accounts. But often lost in the narrative of his historic win—inevitably reduced to his age and the novelty of a democratic socialist mayor—is the long tradition of progressive urban policy that his platform evoked. Mamdani’s agenda seeks to disinter, if not fully revive, New Deal–era New York. In doing so, it promises to finally shake the albatross of the city’s 1975 fiscal crisis.
As the general campaign intensified, Mamdani’s team launched a series of videos under the banner “Until It’s Done,” a phrase borrowed from Nelson Mandela. Each began with the solemn-faced candidate striding into frame and sitting behind an antique wooden desk placed in the middle of a sidewalk or public park. For those closely attuned to the semiotics of the Mamdani campaign’s near-constant video drops, you knew you were in for a history lesson. In the final entry in the series, Mamdani celebrated the political career of Vito Marcantonio, the seven-term socialist congressman from East Harlem and a mentee of Fiorello La Guardia, a mayor who had championed labor and civil rights. Posted on the eve of Election Day, the video urged voters, “we need look only to our past for proof of how socialism can shape our future.”
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