Campaigning has never stood still; the way political campaigns have always evolved, even though the purpose of campaigning has remained the same, to persuade people that you deserve their trust. From ink-stained pamphlets to booming television ads, every new medium has rewritten the rules.
Now, social media has slammed the old political handbook shut and cracked open a new one. Campaigns are no longer just campaigns; they’re content streams, aesthetic choices, and carefully curated vibes. This is how Gen Z does politics.
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Gen Z politics rewrite traditional playbooks
The clearest example of this new era is Zohran Mamdani, the newly elected mayor of New York City, a young, multilingual, multiracial, multicultural immigrant who didn’t just campaign differently; he reconstructed what campaigning means.
Yes, his victory is historic. Yes, his identity matters. But the real plot twist is how he got there. His campaign didn’t feel like a campaign; it felt like a cultural phenomenon, stitched together through colour palettes, music, late-night pub visits, Collaborations and reels sharp enough to beat billboards.
Social media election strategy
Mamdani’s campaign matters because it signals a shift that the political world can no longer ignore. For political communicators, it is a wake-up call: what worked a decade ago won’t work now. Aesthetic fluency, humour, collaboration, and platform-native messaging are not add-ons; they are strategic essentials.
For political scientists, this moment offers a blueprint for studying how to reach disengaged youth. His campaign shows that young people are not apolitical; they are simply alienated from traditional forms of politics. When approached on their own cultural terms, they show up. The question now is how institutions and campaigns will respond.
To understand how Mamdani rewrote the rules, we first need to look at where his campaign truly lived: online.
Mamdani’s communications team mastered the art of what I call content politics. While his opponents treated social media as an optional add-on to their traditional campaigns, Mamdani built his campaign through it. A significant part of his team was dedicated solely to social media strategy, not as publicity, but as political infrastructure.
Start with his Instagram: unlike his opponents, his page feels intentionally built. The visuals have a soft, dreamy, chic tone, the colour palette, fonts, and music land squarely within youth design memory. There is uniformity, yes, but not the stiff, branded uniformity of corporate
campaigns. Instead, his feed feels curated the way a friend’s creative account would: warm, intentional, and trending in just the right ways. It connects because it looks like what young people are already consuming.
Then there are the collaborations. Most contemporary politicians do influencer marketing by letting influencers talk about them testimonials filmed separately and stitched together. Mamdani flipped that. He appears in the reels with the influencers themselves. He stands beside them, jokes with them, and speaks directly to their audience. The message isn’t “they support me”; it’s “I am here with you.” That kind of proximity breaks the layer of distance most political endorsements have. It signals care, not performance.
For Mamdani, social media was never a decorative layer. It was the central tool to speak directly to his target demographics. He made dedicated videos for Instagram in which he endorsed his own policies, updated his followers, or simply spoke to the camera with clarity. This direct interaction was a frequent routine, even creating a sense of ongoing conversation rather than a campaign broadcast.
Meanwhile, his opponents felt like they were posting from another era. Their pages are mostly clips of rallies, speeches, or formal addresses, fragments of offline events thrown online. It feels like old-school campaigning wearing a digital coat. Nothing about it is native to the platform.
When placed beside Mamdani, his opponents’ campaigns revealed just how deeply traditional strategies are still embedded in contemporary politics and why they no longer work for younger voters. Andrew Cuomo’s digital presence, for instance, felt like an archive rather than a conversation: a static grid of staged photos, long captions, and generic political messaging. It echoed an older era in which credibility came from distance, not closeness.
Curtis Sliwa’s feed did little better; it was mostly rally clips and street speeches recycled into short videos, offering no real narrative or personality. Meanwhile, Eric Adams seemed to forget that he was running his own campaign; his digital strategy appeared fixated on attacking Mamdani rather than articulating any coherent vision of his own.
To be fair, Cuomo like Curtis Sliwa and even Eric Adams, did occasionally speak directly to the camera. But these instances were rare, brief, and largely perfunctory, more like obligatory content drops than meaningful attempts to engage. To them, social media was a display shelf, a place to post proof of activity. To Mamdani, it was the activity. And then, there is the humour.
Mamdani understands that tools only matter when you know how to hold them. He used humour lightly, never forced, weaving references into reels, acknowledging jokes made about him, and even reposting the memes he was tagged in. He spoke the visual and ironic language of young people without pretending. That playfulness made his presence not only visible but inviting.
But the power of Mamdani’s social media presence didn’t stop at visuals and humour. It fed directly into something deeper; the construction of a brand rooted in familiarity and accessibility. His videos rarely carried the stiffness of political scripting; instead, they held the gentle ease of everyday conversation. He spoke straight to the camera in short, honest bursts, without the overly polished cadence most politicians adopt.
This communication style aims to portray him as “your guy”—the recognisable face who, almost incidentally, happens to be running for mayor. His appearances in influencer reels reinforced this energy. He didn’t arrive as a VIP guest; he blended into the scene, laughing, listening, and speaking without pretence. These moments felt organic rather than orchestrated.
His redefinition of campaign strategy was not confined to digital spaces; his ground game was equally transformative.
Mamdani’s offline campaigning broke sharply from tradition, trading staged rallies and predictable photo-ops for something more intuitive and embedded in everyday life. Instead of treating the city as a grid of doorbells to knock, he treated it as a living map of subcultures, routines, and late-night rhythms. His team handed out merch that wasn’t meant to be stored away, but actually used bandanas, tote bags, enamel pins objects that folded his campaign into daily fashion rather than plain leaflets.
Showing up at a queer nightclub around midnight is my favourite — a moment that would be a right-wing politician’s worst nightmare. But Mamdani understood where his target audiences were and knew exactly how to meet them. He didn’t wait for voters to enter civic spaces; he entered theirs.
All of this was not random creativity. It was demographic-centric campaigning at its sharpest. Mamdani’s team knew exactly who their core voters were and built an entire strategy around them: young New Yorkers, renters, immigrants, queer communities, and politically curious first-timers.
Impact of digital political communication
The results speak for themselves. According to the AP Voter Poll, only 11% of NYC voters were between 18–29 — yet a staggering 78% of them cast their ballots for Mamdani, compared with just 18% for Cuomo. The trend continued among 30–44-year-olds, where 66% supported Mamdani versus 28% for Cuomo. Older groups leaned the other way: among voters aged 45–64, only 43% backed Mamdani, compared to 47% for Cuomo; and among those 65+, just 36% chose Mamdani while 55% supported Cuomo.
These numbers confirm what his campaign tactics already hinted: Mamdani did not chase everyone; he committed to speaking to the people most ready to listen. His campaign showed what happens when a politician stops trying to be universally appealing and instead builds intentionally around the communities that already share their urgency.
Mamdani’s victory is more than an achievement; it is a signal that the language of politics is changing, and that the tools of persuasion now belong as much to the feed and the street as to the podium. His campaign has already left its mark, carving out a new chapter in the book of contemporary political communication. But here’s the real test: campaigning is not governing. Being brilliant on the feed doesn’t automatically make you brilliant behind a desk.
The strategy won the election; the policies will decide the legacy. Mamdani knows how to reach people now; we’ll see whether he knows how to run a city. While we cannot yet know what the future holds for Mamdani or how he will ultimately govern, the coming years will reveal whether his digital fluency can translate into durable political leadership.
Likitha Sudhir Pallikonda is a postgraduate student at the London School of Economics, specialising in Politics and Communication.