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Zohran Mamdani’s Campaign May Have Accomplished Something More Fundamental Than Moving Policy Debate to the Left

It’s the people, stupid.

Most commentary on Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor of New York City focuses on policy, technology, and charisma. Were rent freezes, free buses, and universal childcare the key? Or did victory depend on an unusually gifted candidate, more memorable videos, vulnerable opponents, or dissatisfaction with the status quo?

All of this mattered. But none can explain how a campaign for mayor could generate such fresh, organized, and sustained civic engagement at scale. The campaign did not only talk about people, relying on polling to turn their opinions into marketing data. It engaged with people by inviting them to join in creating the campaign itself—through which votes are secured and governing power generated. The 104,000 volunteers didn’t just recite a “message” devised by some marketing pro. They accepted responsibility for leading neighborhood canvassing, recruiting people to canvass, coaching volunteers to lead conversations, and celebrating their communities. The campaign distinguished itself not only in what it communicated, but in who communicated, how they communicated, and what they were building: renewed grassroots muscle.

How Politics Became an Industry

Thirty years ago, I warned that the interaction of new technology with an expanding electoral marketplace was destroying democratic politics. Campaigns began to target individual voters for one-way messaging, asking less of them as citizens and more as funders, replacing motivated volunteers with paid canvassers, and deferring campaign leadership to highly paid consultants. I called it putting “voters in the crosshairs.”

The transformation was already underway, but the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo held that expenditure limits would constrain political expression—i.e., money is speech. Television, polling, direct mail, and professional consulting were already changing campaigns. Buckley gave constitutional protection to an accelerating demand for money—the fuel for an industry whose revenues grow with the cost of elections. Later decisions, culminating in Citizens United, accelerated the process even more. Federal election spending alone approached $16 billion in 2024. Add state and local races and the permanent apparatus of fundraising, data, media, and consulting, and the result is a vast industry dependent on continuously expanding political expenditure.

Candidates once depended on parties, unions, churches, civic associations, neighborhood leaders, and other organized constituencies to reach voters. These institutions were hardly innocent. Political machines could be corrupt, coercive, and exclusionary, and civic associations excluded Americans by race, gender, religion, or class. The point is not to romanticize that world.

But the dependency of candidates on organized constituencies gave them the leverage to exercise real accountability. Campaigns learned they could avoid that accountability by hiring pollsters, consultants, advertising firms, fundraising specialists, data vendors, and paid canvassing operations—all of which had to be paid for. Accountability to organized people was exchanged for accountability to organized money. Campaigns spoke at voters rather than listening to them, much less inviting them to exercise their judgment or share responsibility for political work.

Citizens were recast as consumers. Members became lists, dues became donations, local leaders became influencers, conversation became messaging, political education became targeting, and organization became digital infrastructure rented for an election and dismantled afterward.

Information About People or Experience of People?

Something even more fundamental changed. Marshall McLuhan’s observation in the 1950s that “the medium is the message” was not only about television. The means of communication shapes........

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