Mamdani the Party Builder

They say never to treat social media like an assignment desk, but this prompt from Zak Yudhisthu (whose own newsletter is well worth a follow) was too good the pass up:

If you’ve read any of dispatches over the past year, you might be able to guess at why Zak is asking for my take. I’ve been a strident proponent of what Henry Farrell calls “partyism”: the proposition that, in Henry’s words, “the road to renewing the Democrats (and remaking the Republicans into an organization that is not actively malevolent) begins with changing party organization from the blob-like congelation of chaos and self-interest … into organizational forms that actively connect political leaders and ordinary people.”

You can read my initial argument in favor of partyism, written almost exactly a year ago, here. More recently, I’ve proposed that the YIMBY movement offers a decent model of how to translate face-to-face socializing into real political power. Zohran Mamdani’s successful campaign to become New York City’s next mayor offers another model. As The New York Times noted on election day: “Mr. Mamdani’s campaign wasn’t just about mobilizing, but socializing. And the social buoyancy of his campaign wasn’t just for show. Young people turned up and voted.”

Campaign events, including the now famous scavenger hunt, provided an opportunity for young supporters to connect with other people who shared their politics and interests; that ended up being the hook that drew a lot of people into volunteering for the campaign. As I’ve written many time in the past, this sort of emphasis on conviviality and neighborliness is a great tool for turning undecideds into supporters and turning supporters into committed ground troops.

But Mamdani’s success illustrates another advantage to the partyist approach that I haven’t covered as much: it’s great for intelligence gathering. The people who show up to campaign-sponsored social gatherings may be there to learn about the candidate or just hang out, but they also have a lot to tell campaign workers about the concerns and political currents rippling through key constituencies.

Campaigns have other ways of information-gathering, of course. Over the course of several traditional campaign events (i.e., stump speeches), a good candidate can learn something about which talking points are landing with voters and which aren’t. Then there’s the consultant-forward approach to campaign intelligence-gathering, which relies heavily on polls and focus groups. All of these tactics have their place, but none of them provide a complete picture of the electorate.

A good poll is far more representative than a series of incidental conversations with happy hour attendees. But you get far richer information from an actual conversation with someone than you get from asking them a single question and then recording which answer they chose from a limited set of options. Neither is really a good substitute for the other, which is why Democrats should avail themselves of both instead of treating issue polls like a definitive account of what voters think and believe.

Mamdani, of course, did not only interact with the voters who were sufficiently motivated to attend a campaign event. He also spent a good deal of time on the street and public transit talking with anyone who was willing to give him the time of day (including another YIMBY Substacker, Sam Deutsch). I have no doubt that he used these conversations as a sort of temperature check on the state of the race and the general mood of the city. Again, doing that sort of thing is not really a substitute for methodologically sound polling. But it gives someone with good instincts a much deeper, more nuanced, intuitive sense of how things stand than a poll alone can provide.

Contrast Mamdani’s approach to Cuomo’s. When he wasn’t staging awkward man-on-the-street interactions for a campaign ad — a campaign ad which, I should add, was clearly a fumbled imitation of Mamdani’s style — Cuomo barely interacted with regular voters at all. Instead, he seems to have spent a lot of time huddled with billionaire donors and internalizing their deeply warped mindset. That may help to explain why, as the race wore on, he leaned more and more into the kind of AI slop that guys like Bill Ackman seem to love, but which looked especially bad when viewed alongside Mamdani’s more amiable, cinema verité stylings. It probably also helps to explain why Cuomo resorted to outright gutter racism in the campaign’s closing weeks.

New York is a sui generis place, and 2024 was an especially weird mayoral election year. But there are still lessons that Democrats outside the city can draw from Mamdani’s campaign. Josh Marshall identified one of them: “find candidates suited to their constituencies and focus on cost of living issues and opposition to Donald Trump’s autocracy.” Another one is that the party needs to offer people something they can be a part of. It’s not enough to sell the candidate or the party brand as a product. That’s the best you can do for reaching some voters, but it isn’t how you build political power over multiple campaign cycles.

What Democrats need even more than better branding or better messaging is better party building. Mamdani can teach others how to do that. What’s remarkable is that he’s been able to do it without access to parts of the Democratic Party apparatus — Chuck Schumer never endorsed him, Hakeem Jeffries waited until the last minute, and the state party chair basically threw a tantrum over his candidacy. He prevailed anyway. And, in doing so, he helped demonstrate how to actually make the party stronger.