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By all appearances, the New York City mayoral race has narrowed to two viable contenders: Zohran Mamdani, a thirty-three-year-old democratic socialist, and the disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo, who is trailing Mamdani by around thirteen points in the polls. Cuomo, who, with his scandals, has managed to alienate half the city’s population (women) as well as one of the most reliable voting groups (the elderly), is running as an Independent after losing decisively to Mamdani in the Democratic primary. At this point, his mayoral ambitions hinge on his ability to get ahold of one of those memory-wipe devices from “Men in Black.” And yet, somehow, he has set his sights on an even more unrealistic goal: getting good at social media. Namely, better than Mamdani, whose videos have been described as “groundbreaking” and as “a blueprint for Democrats.”
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Cuomo’s efforts to parrot Mamdani—and the effort is evident, in every single video—have resulted in some of the most excruciating political content that I’ve ever seen. Cuomo, helping a young man with an Afro jump-start his car (using a technique that, as some viewers have pointed out online, could start a fire); Cuomo, grimacing as he confronts the reality of his situation (“Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that the Democratic primary did not go the way I had hoped”); Cuomo, trepidatiously stepping into a butcher shop that’s flanked by a statue of a cow. (“Do you like my cow?” the owner asks. “I love the cow,” Cuomo says. No, he doesn’t!)
Cuomo, with his awkwardness and his barely stifled aggression, is beginning to resemble J. D. Vance in the summer of 2024, back when the Vice-Presidential nominee’s attempts to seem relatable were swiftly supplanted by internet jokes about his past experiences with couches. Like Vance, Cuomo has even become a reply guy on X, striking up conversations with total randos who make the mistake of invoking his name. (“Give it up grandpa,” one person wrote, to which Cuomo replied, rather ominously, “No grandkids yet- but I’ve got the experience and the ability to get things done.”) The replies could be a way to differentiate his approach from that of Mamdani, who has mostly avoided making text-based quips on a platform whose user base, according to one estimate, is sixty-four per cent bots. But the main appeal for Cuomo is probably that, unlike the videos—which have forced him to venture into such unfamiliar lands as the Upper West Side—the replies can be done from home, ideally by an intern, without the former governor having to interact with another person in real life.
Cuomo’s attitude toward social media is similar to his attitude toward the mayorship—he clearly thinks that both are beneath him, and yet he’s reached a point in his life where he must doggedly pursue them. This seems to be the main lesson that he took from the primary: “We had a social media component, but his was better,” Cuomo said, of Mamdani, to The Free Press. “They used it very well. It was very professional, and they were talking to that under-30 group.” Indeed, according to a recent poll, more than thirty per cent of respondents who voted for Mamdani cited his social-media presence and videos as a deciding factor. But these videos weren’t just A.S.M.R. Most people who voted for Mamdani did so because of his policies—which, yes, were articulated and circulated through the videos. Or maybe they picked him because he seems genuine, which is something that immediately distinguishes him from basically every other member of his party. According to an analysis conducted by Edelman, the public-relations firm, the videos played an important role here, too, in bolstering the candidate’s sense of authenticity.
But what’s ironic is that Mamdani’s videos are arguably the least genuine thing about him. They are engineered for virality. Take the famous video of Mamdani doing a polar plunge on Coney Island. He opens with an attention-grabbing thesis: “I’m freezing your rent as the next mayor of New York City.” He goes on, “Let’s plunge into the details!” Then he jumps into the icy-cold ocean while wearing a suit and tie. He explains the intricacies of his plan, with the video cutting away every few seconds to show Mamdani in a new position: first he’s soaking wet, next he’s towelling himself dry, then he’s walking across the sand, posing with a polar bear, and standing in front of a roller coaster. These rapid-fire visuals are designed to prevent even the most brain-rotted among us from scrolling away. When people say that Mamdani’s videos speak to Gen Z, it is likely this aspect that they are referring to—the brevity, the hard transitions. But the content of the videos, and Mamdani himself, have a slick, curated quality that is predominantly associated with millennials.
I’m not using “millennial” as a slur—the videos are undoubtedly effective in their political messaging, and that’s what matters most. But the fact that the messaging is coherent, in the first place, is what makes them so millennial-coded: this is the generation that pioneered the explainer video, which has made its way from the early days of YouTube to platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. Explainer videos are earnest; the vibe is cool substitute teacher, or McKinsey dropout, which is exactly what Mamdani is channelling when he describes Fourteenth Street as “an oasis of quick commutes” in an educational video about busing, or when he outlines his plan to create a Department of Community Safety, which will “coördinate a whole-of-government approach to protect New Yorkers like never before.” Although Mamdani will occasionally engage in true Gen Z campiness—such as his video celebrating Eid, which gives off “WhatsApp auntie group chat aesthetics,” according to one commenter—we tend to conflate appealing to Gen Z (which Mamdani certainly does) with posting like Gen Z, which is an entirely different game. It is almost impossible to find a politician who is posting like a Zoomer, and this is true even of the latest crop of young candidates. Gen Z content is ironic and nihilistic, and running for office is a fundamentally earnest act.
There is one mayoral candidate who is posting like a Zoomer, with a complete disregard for any kind of narrative structure or message, and an embrace of lo-fi absurdism. It’s Eric Adams, who also happens to be the current mayor, as easy as it is to forget. (A recent devastating headline from Politico: “Mass Shooting Becomes Mamdani’s First Test as Mayoral Nominee.”) Adams, who, like Cuomo, is running as an Independent, also seems interested in upping his social-media game, as suggested by a recent job posting for a “Digital Content Creator,” on the website for the Mayor’s office. But we should all pray that this role is never filled, because whoever takes the job might try to change Adams’s social-media strategy, which is already perfect. His feed is a fever dream of NutriBullets and vomit-green smoothies, clip-art rats and live-action garbage cans, pure bombast and ego death. He piggybacks on preëxisting trends, but he consistently butchers them beyond recognition, resulting in, say, an unsettling slo-mo edit that makes it look as if Adams is going into cardiac arrest, followed by the tagline “Directed by Michael Bay.” There’s “Make an important call with me,” where Adams announces that he’s bringing back the city’s summer concert series, which he explains in a fake FaceTime call with Usher, using clips of the artist talking on the phone in one of his old music videos. All seems fine, until one realizes that the clips are from “Confessions Part II,” and that, in the original music video, Usher is speaking to his side chick, who is delivering the unfortunate news that she is pregnant. Or my personal favorite: “Come with me to Get Stuff Done,” which is a montage of Adams, in a pin-striped suit, entering and exiting vehicles, walking in and out of buildings, and getting absolutely nothing done. The video is a kind of inversion of the TikTok masterpiece “My Weekend as a 28-Year-Old in Chicago,” which begins as an ordinary vlog, with the narrator making his bed and going to brunch, and then spirals out of control, as he visits countless restaurants, bars, and museums—introducing us to his girlfriend, his wife, and his husband in the process—all in just over two minutes.
Cuomo likes to remind the electorate that he’s been in politics for decades—in other words, for about as long as Mamdani has been alive. But Adams has been making cutting-edge content since before most people knew what Instagram was. Back in 2011, when Adams was a state senator, he filmed a P.S.A. in which he taught parents how to search their kids’ rooms for contraband. The video is a surrealist work of art, with Adams discovering bullets behind a picture frame, a crack pipe hidden in a knapsack, and a full-on gun inside of a throw pillow. (“Something simple as a baby doll,” he says, completely deadpan, as he holds up the plaything. “It could be a place where you can secrete or hide drugs.” Then he proceeds to shove a bag of marijuana into the doll’s shorts.) Some might also remember Adams’s first TikTok, posted in March of 2022. Beyoncé’s “Crazy In Love” is playing in the background, but the song is drowned out by violent blender noises, as Adams makes one of his signature smoothies. The video cuts to the politician, standing next to some computer monitors and an exercise machine, in a room with horror-movie lighting. “Bing bong, New York City,” he declares. “Your mayor is on TikTok.”
A lot has happened since then, forcing Adams’s social-media content to evolve. There’s the Mamdani effect, yes. But there’s also Adams’s laundry list of scandals, which is arguably the main reason why he has to contend with the Mamdani effect in the first place. Adams, who simultaneously has everything and nothing to lose, has leaned into his reputation as a corrupt jester, posting a video where he is packing a suitcase and mulling over his next travel destination: “Ankara? Istanbul? Or Zero Bond?”
Adams’s videos typically don’t go viral, or at least not in the way that he wants them to. While Mamdani’s pre-planned videos with celebrities such as Emily Ratajkowski garner millions of views, Adams’s version of a viral celebrity cameo is resurrected footage, from 2023, of the Mayor standing beside Sean Combs and declaring, “The bad boy of entertainment is getting the key to the city from the bad boy of politics.” Combs: “Diddy finally has the key to the city!” Adams has also become popular on TikTok, recently, though it’s not because of any official content he’s been posting; rather, people have begun creating deepfakes of the Mayor narrating Chinese videos.
The comments on Adams’s actual videos, meanwhile, are brutal: “I moved back to NYC just to be able to vote you out,” one user wrote on the Mayor’s “morning routine” video, which is also full of commenters pointing out that Adams is claiming to make a smoothie at 9 A.M. while a clock behind him reads 11 A.M. (The fact that Adams and his team took such little care to avoid the flub reminds me of a phrase that Dave Chappelle once ascribed to Donald Trump: he is an “honest liar.”) One wonders if the Mayor is even posting these videos to court voters, or if he’s simply posting for history: a documentation of his final days in office, in lieu of the Robert Caro biography that he will never receive and does not deserve.
If Adams has any kind of case to make for himself, beyond the fact that he’s one of the funniest human beings to ever live, it’s the simple fact that he’s been mayor before, and the city did not explode (depending on whom you ask). Both he and Cuomo are fixated on the idea that Mamdani is too young and too progressive, and lacks the requisite experience to run the largest city in the country. Mamdani, to his credit, does not skirt around this in his videos: as excited as he is to present himself as a man who has a plan for everything, he is also clear-eyed about the challenges ahead. His videos make running the city look hard. They make living in the city look hard: trying to get a permit for a halal cart, apparently, is like trying to get access to the nuclear codes.
Adams’s videos, meanwhile, make the job of New York City mayor look comically easy. Making smoothies, throwing concerts, alerting people to heat waves, and killing the occasional rat—these are your tasks, should you choose to accept them. It’s not that no one else can do it but him. This idea is undermined by every video he posts. There’s just no one else who can do it like him. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
