Greg Sargent writes:

Despite being mired in a cutthroat New York mayoral campaign, Zohran Mamdani recently released a video announcing that he was taking a vacation. A vacation, that is, in his childhood home of Uganda. In the video, he mocked right-wing trolls for telling him to go back to Africa and joked that his return there showed that he’s “listening” to those “critics.” He offered New York tabloids suggestions for headlines mocking his African heritage—one read “MIA? MAMDANI IN AFRICA”—and invited the tabs to feature them on their front pages.

As campaign messaging goes, this was unusual stuff. Yet the video has now racked up 4.5 million views on Instagram, according to internal campaign data supplied to me—and 56 percent of those were among people who weren’t following Mamdani on the messaging site.

Whatever happens in the mayoral race, Mamdani is already making a major contribution to a huge debate among national Democrats: over how to compete digitally in the age of Donald Trump. Much of this debate has turned on how to use paid digital spots in nontraditional ways and how to empower influential “Joe Rogan of the left” podcasters—or some other similar network—to achieve the penetration into the culture that matches whatever it is Trump achieved, which is elusive and hard to define.

But the Mamdani campaign seems to be achieving a version of this penetration with unpaid social media videos that communicate directly with voters. The goal is to achieve a kind of Trumpian ubiquity: Andrew Epstein, the campaign’s creative director, says it’s designed to ensure that if you are “on your phone,” you are “going to see Zohran.” [Continue reading…]