Mamdani, Messaging, & Turnout

Mamdani won. I won't say the Punditocracy is getting it wrong, but they are emphasizing some stuff that is less important and have missed some really big things. Their whole deal seems to be mainly "socialist was elected", cue Munch's Scream emoji. If I read one more time that he quoted Eugene Debbs in his acceptance speech, Imma throw up in my mouth a little. The percentage of Americans who have ever heard of Eugene Debbs is zero. Mamdani put that there just for the Punditocracy and they all did a body dive for it, as he knew they would, all to illustrate that Mamdani doesn't care if the Punditocracy or anybody else calls him a socialist. He's busy and has real shit to do.

But for normal humans, this "he's a socialist who energized young people so they voted" is such a deep yawn. Although the media emphasized his socialism, he didn't. If asked, he'd say yea, I guess, whatever, but he'd always pivot to the practical, a modest tax on zillionaires, free busses, and a rent freeze. Half of New York can reel those off, I mean hell, probably half the Zoomers from DC to Boston can.

But then that thing that comes from the portrayal fifty years ago of the "Tax and Spend Democrats" would follow despite any sentient being knowing it's the Republicans who spend like crazy AND cut taxes, the famous Two Santas Strategy. Mamdani would constantly get the question, well "how will you pay for all of this?" to which he'd answer with simple clear numbers, then raise his eyebrows in an "any questions" way and move on with a big smile. He didn't talk about inequality, gini coefficients, socialism, or any isms. He'd just list the top stuff on his fix-it list. What energized people, particularly young people, was his clarity and the fact that he wasn't full of shit.

I am not saying he's anti-message, he definitely has a story, he just ignores ideology and abstractions. His whole understanding of what messaging means is different from the Status Quo Democrats. Those Democrats pay pollsters and do countless focus groups, ever since Stan Greenberg did for Bill Clinton's campaign in 1992. Since then, all the Status Quo Democrats have been clean slates waiting to be chalked on by consultants, pollsters, and pundits. The data nerds would run cross-tabs on their favorite swing groups then focus group a bunch of words and phrases past them and then have the candidate say those words...in the rare moments those candidates had amidst their main activity of making fundraising calls to the deep pockets.

These Status Quo Democrats look at votes as sales, voters as customers, and campaigns as marketing. Just as the Bay's premier accelerator Y Combinator says, "make things people want". These sad Democrats hire people, who make piles of money doing it, to tell them what the customers want so they can pretend they care about that stuff. The goal is the sale, or 51% of the vote. But if Team Messaging ends up with 49% of the vote, then here come all the OpEds about which customers should have been the focus or what customers really wanted to hear. It is very clear to the voters when they are being treated this way and it makes them think democracy is politics and politics is gross.

Mamdani's campaign focused not on messaging but on relational turnout. He got over a hundred thousand volunteers and rather than having them do pointless make-work like phone banking, batch texting, door knocking, and all the "ground game" crap, he got them to talk to their friends and relatives and get them to vote. He himself spent way more time talking to real people, and videoing it, than he did fundraising. It worked both in the primary and in the general, which both broke turnout records, despite modest deep-pocket fundraising numbers.

A very similar candidate was Beto O'Rourke in Texas. He refused to have a pollster on his campaign and would just say whatever he wanted and everybody loved him for it. Interestingly, Beto got into congress in a primary upset in 2012 the same way as Mamdani, with what he called his Friends and Family program where he got volunteers to get their contacts to vote. He beat an eight term incumbent in the primary by doing this. But then when he ran for US Senate in 2018, he abandoned the turnout strategy that had gotten him into the House. He had a huge number of volunteers and could have run a relational turnout campaign but instead focused on the usual stranger-to-stranger ground game methods favored by the Status Quo Democrats and lost to Ted "Backpfeifengesicht" Cruz who nobody in Texas or Washington DC can stand.

I think of Mamdani and AOC as the Long Game Democrats. They are focused on real solutions to real problems that they care about. They talk to real people. Some of those real people want to help them and they know the best, most respectable, and most effective way to deploy that help. These Long Game Democrats are willing to compromise but are less willing to make trade offs, meaning they will discuss what is a good idea or not with people they disagree with, but are less willing to say I will do this bad thing if you will allow this good thing I care about to sneak in. He's keeping Tisch as Police Commissioner because he's hoping she will help him deal with ICE and federal troops in NYC which is what he most cares about. Good. The Long Gamers keep things simple and are less likely to talk in abstractions. They aren't afraid to speak other languages on videos for fear of how it will appear, because some consultant told them to be scared of that. Just very practical.

It is very tough for the Status Quo Democrats to compete directly with this, so they try to remain strategically quiet, for example Chuck Schumer not endorsing Mamdani, because he was scared his funders would flee, and what would he have then? They try to portray themselves as "steady hands on the helm". Never mind that their navigators are billionaires and the engine room that pays for all that messaging is a collection of millionaires. This is to allow them to try to portray the Mamdanis and AOCs as risky or dangerous. Which is wild, considering the pace if institutional destruction the Status Quo Democrats are watching from the sidelines, all the while urging restraint, while the Long Game Democrats all seem to be so deeply practical and while relentless, don't seem at all panicked.

So hats off to Mamdani, a regular guy with a very clear plan who respects his supporters. And they reward him for it.

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