Me and Lily (my assistant) are trying to figure out why Substack sent the email with a misspelling of Zohran’s name in the subject line. We’re sorry about that mistake.
Back to the material…
Wild week. Here is the generational and gender breakdown of the race:
The affordability promises of Democratic socialism felt urgent and meaningful to young New Yorkers.
Free buses and childcare, rent freezes, and government-subsidized groceries spoke directly to immediate concerns.
This chart helps explain why socialism’s message landed:
There’s an interesting contrast with Minneapolis, where Democratic Socialist Omar Fateh lost to two-term incumbent Jacob Frey.
Frey has already made progress on affordability, so the pull of Democratic socialism wasn’t as strong, even among young voters.
The Mamdani campaign branding was unbeatable.
Campaign volunteer opportunities weren’t just about mobilizing, they were about socializing.
A few anecdotes from the NYT:
“Graciela Blandon, 24, went to a board game night for supporters of Mr. Mamdani, an arts and crafts event and even a Valentine’s Day singles gathering for his supporters. “The people I go to dinner with, the folks I go to concerts with—my day to day is organized around Mamdani,” said Ms. Blandon, who moved to New York in 2019 for college and quickly found herself holed up because of the pandemic.”
“After a breakup, organizing for Mr. Mamdani brought back Ms. Roundtree’s confidence. Her friends sent one another memes joking about being at the club at 2 a.m. and getting a text from a canvas captain. “It feels like we’re the cool kids,” she said.”
The ability to build community is so powerful. I’ve observed this trend across youth protest movements in the past few years. The loneliness epidemic will continue to impact the youth vote. In the absence of community, religion, and third spaces, politics has become the stand-in for all of it.
The Mamdani campaign figured out how to channel fandom.
As Makena Kelly wrote for Wired:
“For the past few months, feeds have been filled with fancams, fan art, and videos created not just with Mamdani but for him. This form of participatory online fandom has traditionally been reserved for celebrities and musicians like Taylor Swift and K-pop idols.”
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I am not sure who advised Cuomo’s team to fill feeds with AI slop, but I think we can all agree at this point that it was a mistake.
Final thought:
Below is an email that Peter Thiel wrote to Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Andreseen, and a few others five years ago. This goes viral every few months but it’s worth revisiting right now.
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