Mamdani’s social media mastery is bringing him one step closer to NYC’s top office

Despite a wave of critical headlines, the saying “bad press is good press” appears true for New York City’s Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani. 

The self-proclaimed "democratic socialist" has dominated news headlines – across the political spectrum – since he won the July 1 primary. At the same time, his social media prowess, which helped him defeat previously front-running Andrew Cuomo in the primary, might even carry him to NYC’s highest office.

“Mamdani’s top-performing recent Instagram post is worth more than 33 times as much in earned media value in dollars compared to Cuomo’s top-performing IG post,” the social media analytics company Sprout Social recently told Just the News.

Mamdani, a New York State Assembly member, defeated Cuomo – a former New York governor with much higher name recognition – by a 12-point margin in the final round of ranked-choice voting. 

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes told NYT’s Ezra Klein that Mamdani “is someone who had zero attention on him who went to monopolizing attention in the race. I think the way he did it was viral videos. It’s the first time I’ve seen a Democratic candidate be totally native to the medium of our time, which is short vertical videos in the algorithmic feed.”

Mamdani’s engagement rate was 14-times higher than Cuomo’s, according to the social media analytics company Sprout Social. And conversations online mentioned Mamdani over Cuomo at a ratio of 30-to-1.

At the same time, Cuomo has a $25 million war chest, compared to just $1.6 million for Mamdani. 

“You cannot buy attention now the way you once could," Klein also said. "You can only earn it."

Mamadani’s campaign appears similar to Trump's winning 2024 campaign, which relied on social media. 

In that race, Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris out raised Trump nearly 5-to-1, according to Forbes. However, similarly to Mamdani, Trump’s social media metrics led overall, according to Newsweek.

Mamdani is running a campaign centered on gaining viral earned media attention. One of his viral X posts leading up to the primary, in which he walked the length of Manhattan, earned nearly 16 million views.

“What he created was this kind of political gravitational pull," Jordan Uhl, a digital strategist for the progressive organization MoveOn ,told The Washington Post. "Everyone wanted to be part of this.”