Deli Socialism: The Secret Ingredient to Zohran Mamdani's Success [View all]

[Celerity]

The way to New York voters’ hearts is through their stomachs.

https://newrepublic.com/article/197359/zohran-mamdani-food-campaign-success

https://archive.ph/wQiQi


Zohran Mamdani outside a deli in Queens on June 19 - Adam Gray/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Zak Khan wasn’t always the Gyro King of Brooklyn. He started out with a little halal cart down on Wall Street, in the Financial District, just after the September 11 attacks. But running a halal cart is a rough business: Permits cost an arm and a leg, the city fines you without mercy, and in the end it was actually cheaper for him to open a brick-and-mortar restaurant. He expanded steadily, and today his gyro kingdom spans the steppes of Central Brooklyn, from Midwood and Bay Ridge to Coney Island Avenue’s Little Pakistan.

During the coronavirus pandemic, Khan started giving out hot halal meals. One of the people who showed up to help was a young state assembly member who wasn’t even from the district: Zohran Mamdani. So when Mamdani announced his campaign for mayor last October, Khan made the pilgrimage to Long Island City in Queens for the launch. He still remembers Mamdani’s exact words: “This is not a time for lecturing. It’s a time for listening.”

The moment Mamdani won the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, the political consultant and pundit classes started trying to distill the precise chemical formula of his appeal. How did Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, demolish former Governor Andrew Cuomo, electrify the normally sleepy off-year electorate, and upend the traditional calculus of money = votes? Was it the short-form videos? The visual branding? The rizz? The clothes? The “attentional strategy”?

Full disclosure: I door-knocked for Mamdani’s campaign on two occasions, plus a short, sweltering stint outside the polls on Election Day. I’d never volunteered on a political campaign in my life—I’m a journalist, not a joiner of political parties—but I could see that Mamdani was a different kind of politician, and I wanted to see it from the inside. And here’s what I concluded: Mamdani understood something that all the professional moonbeam extractors missed. You don’t appeal to working- and middle-class voters by going on all the right podcasts, hiring influencers like Olivia Julianna, posting on social media a certain number of times per day, or hammering at them with meticulously focus-grouped talking points. Mamdani’s secret sauce is much simpler.

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