The Fun Factor in American Politics

On Zohran Mamdani.

The full results of the New York City mayoral primary haven’t yet been finalized, but the outcome is clear: Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist, will be the Democratic nominee to lead the nation’s largest city.

NYC uses ranked-choice voting in its municipal elections, which requires candidates (over multiple rounds of tabulation, if necessary) to receive majority support to win. With 93% of first-round choices counted, Mamdani — a New York state assemblyman who would be the city’s first Muslim mayor — has 43.5% of the vote. Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor who resigned in 2021 amid allegations of sexual misconduct, has 36.4% of the vote.

We won’t know for sure until July 1, when the rest of the ranked-choice tabulation will be released, but Mamdani’s lead is likely too large for Cuomo to make up the difference from second-choice votes, something even Cuomo himself acknowledged.

“Tonight was not our night,” Cuomo told his supporters Tuesday evening, announcing that he had conceded the campaign. “Tonight was Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s night.”

Mamdani’s victory is a striking rejection of the Democratic Party establishment, after centrist figures like former President Bill Clinton, former House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg lined up behind Cuomo in a bid to stop Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chosen candidate.

It is also just a remarkable political story. Before Election Night, nearly every available poll showed Cuomo, the presumed frontrunner, trouncing Mamdani, often quite comfortably. In fact, only a few months ago, Mamdani was polling at 1%, commanding a tiny fraction of the name recognition of a rival whose family has dominated New York politics for two generations.

“In the words of Nelson Mandela, it always seems impossible until it is done,” Mamdani said in a speech last night celebrating his upset victory. “My friends, we have done it.”

Four Emerson College polls from throughout the primary race show Mamdani’s striking trajectory: up and to the right. (Graphic by Emerson College)

Here at Wake Up To Politics, we always hesitate to draw over-broad conclusions from limited results, which is definitely a good policy to keep to when talking about an off-year, summertime primary conducted in an already liberal-leaning city.

I’m already seeing a lot of commentators making sweeping predictions about what last night’s results portend for the 2028 presidential contest or a future primary challenge against Chuck Schumer, and I’m just not convinced that this race is transferable to those. Ocasio-Cortez (who was the presumed beneficiary in both the predictions linked above) is herself a great example of a unique phenomenon of a candidate who triumphed against a uniquely weak opponent but largely failed to turn the momentum of her victory into wins for other like-minded candidates in successive election cycles.

In this race, what comes next is also quite unique: Mamdani is headed for a three-way general election, against Republican Curtis Sliwa and incumbent Mayor Eric Adams (who is running as an Independent), which could become a four-way contest if Cuomo decides to launch an Independent bid well (something that he teased before last night, but seems less likely now that the primary wasn’t particularly close).

All that said, I do have two quick thoughts on Mamdani’s stunning victory I’d like to share: one pertaining to the politics of it and one to the governing implications.

The Fun Factor

There’s a poll result I often think back to from the 2024 Republican primary. That contest ended up being a non-event, of course; this New York Times/Siena survey from July 2023 helps explain why. The pollsters threw out several characteristics, and asked respondents whether each one better described Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis, his chief rival.

Trump won on most scores, but somewhat surprisingly (considering the primary’s end result), DeSantis actually pulled out a few wins too, including on qualities like “likable” (DeSantis 45%-Trump 43%) and “moral” (DeSantis 45%-Trump 37%). But there was another characteristic where Trump just creamed DeSantis: 54% of GOP primary voters said the former president was the more “fun” candidate. Only 16% said the same about DeSantis. Even with apparent concerns about Trump’s morality, that gap was enough to help vault Trump’s path to re-nomination.

We like to think of political campaigns as serious contests of ideas, but voters are also humans, which means other factors inevitably slip into the mix. And one of them is whether a candidate is fun.

Mamdani fueled his campaign with videos on X and TikTok where he was reliably grinning and having fun — whether he was walking across Manhattan, making light of his proclivity for talking with his hands, or bantering with a rival he was cross-endorsing. A good number of these videos end with a scene of Mamdani laughing.

@zohran_k_mamdaniThis election is in your hands. But only if you’re registered to vote in New York City. Deadline is Saturday. Go to zohranfornyc.com/vote now

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Cuomo, meanwhile, barely cracked a smile at many of his events. In fact, he barely held many events. “A grim and joyless campaign, as befits a battle for a prize never wanted, one long viewed with disdain and contempt as a trifle that only lesser men would debase themselves to seek,” Howard Glaser, a Cuomo aide turned critic, described it.

“Fun” won’t always beat “grim and joyless,” but it’s often a better bet. That’s especially true in today’s media environment, which asks more of political hopeful than previous eras, when mastery of a single medium (like radio or TV) was often sufficient to succeed.

Today, a successful politician must excel at delivering scripted rally speeches. And engaging in unscripted moments. And making funny, short-form videos. And sitting for thoughtful, long-form podcast interviews. And, of course, it always helps to know a thing or two about matters of public policy.

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are candidates who performed well in scripted and unscripted settings. Donald Trump does well off script, including in video and podcast, but often sounds stilted on script. Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton could give scripted rally speeches, but faltered off the cuff. Joe Biden was often shaky at both, struggling with a Teleprompter and in the sort of TikTok videos and podcast interviews that are a modern expectation.

Mamdani scored well with all of the above, running a thoroughly modern campaign.

These sorts of skills don’t code for any particular ideology — Clinton endorsed against Mamdani, proof enough that they come from different factions of the Democratic Party — but they do tend to reward candidates with a consistent and authentic message, whatever that might be. Some politicians might be good actors, but if they are promoting a message they don’t believe in or can’t explain, it will inevitably start to show in the 40th minute of a podcast video or in the 100th TikTok.

It’ll seem like they’re acting. And it’ll be clear they aren’t having any fun.

In Mamdani’s case, his ideology was firmly rooted in the American left and his message was squarely focused on affordability. I don’t think his success guarantees that the 2028 Democratic presidential nominee will share either. But, looking back, it’s a bit strange that Democrats have run three consecutive candidates who struggled in unscripted interviews and social media posts, even as those skills became more important and even as Republicans were running a candidate who was a master of both.

“Fun” doesn’t win elections by itself: candidates who try to claim that mantle can be bogged down (Harris running while serving in a deeply unpopular administration) or boosted (Mamdani running against a scandal-plagued opponent) by other factors. But without it, it’s increasingly hard to compete in the media where elections are now run.

Filtration Theory

In his book “Indispensable,” the leadership expert Gautam Mukunda proposes something he calls Leader Filtration Theory: the idea that any leader — in business, politics, etc. — can be measured by how “filtered” they were, i.e. how much of a role elites had in shaping and selecting them.

Mukunda’s theory is that highly filtered leaders end up being the most mediocre. Having come up through the organization they now lead, they tend to be more functionaries than visionaries. The highest-impact leaders, he argues, are the ones who haven’t been filtered — although this impact can be positive or negative.

He extends this argument to presidential politics in his book “Picking Presidents,” taking rankings of the presidents and showing that highly filtered leaders (John Quincy Adams, George H.W. Bush) fall in the middle while low-filtered leaders take up the high (Abraham Lincoln) and low (Franklin Pierce) ends. Politicians who aren’t filtered are the ones who cause a jolt, but it’s a coin-toss whether the jolt will be for good or not.

Zohran Mamdani, who was born in Uganda, has spent only four years in political office, and was opposed by most of the political establishment, is as unfiltered as it gets. If he wins the mayoralty, Mukunda’s theory would predict that it will be an extremely high-impact term. We just don’t know in which direction that impact will go.

There are plenty of examples of unfiltered, progressive political leaders who sweep into office and quickly become unpopular: just take a look at Brandon Johnson in Chicago. In his Substack, progressive strategist Waleed Shahid draws a comparison between Mamdani and Fiorella La Guardia, another unfiltered socialist (and a Republican socialist, at that) who is now remembered as one of the more transformative mayors in New York City history. (“First they call you radical. Then they name an airport after you,” Shahid writes.)

One of La Guardia’s strengths was building a broad coalition of voters, cutting across ethnic and party lines (being a Republican socialist will do that to you). If Mamdani is elected, his governing success will likely rely on building bridges outside of his natural ideological home, something Shahid’s former boss Ocasio-Cortez has done, for example, but other members of “The Squad” have not.

Already, during his campaign, Mamdani made efforts to reach into other Democratic Party factions, something the ranked-choice voting system also incentivizes. As an unfiltered leader, those sorts of alliances will be instrumental if he is to navigate the complex world of city politics without a deep web of pre-existing relationships. If the Filtration Theory is correct, his tenure would likely be memorable — but that can skew in two very different ways.