The Opposite of Slop Politics: Zohran Mamdani ran an online campaign based on real people and a real message. It worked.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/11/zohran-mamdani-campaign-slop/684842/

https://archive.ph/AYo5R



There are many fair questions following Zohran Mamdani’s decisive victory. Will his campaign be a template for others? Will he be able or allowed to follow through on his campaign promises? Will the Democratic establishment accept that its future could look something like this proud 34-year-old democratic socialist? But there is at least one very clear takeaway, and it’s best captured by one of the campaign’s final videos. It opens in the Bronx, five days after the 2024 election. Mamdani is holding a microphone in one hand and a handwritten sign in the other. It says Let’s Talk Election. Most of the passersby don’t bother to talk with him; the ones who do, at least the ones included in the video, speak about why they didn’t vote (“I lost faith”) or their decision to cast a ballot for Donald Trump. Mamdani listens with a furrowed brow.

Then the video cuts to October 29, just last week, in the same neighborhood. Mamdani is now one of the most famous politicians in the country; people dap him up, shake his hand, roll down their car windows for him. It’s a brilliant piece of campaign material: The story is simply that, by going out and talking to people—by actually hearing them—Mamdani built a movement from nothing. He’s had numerous viral videos over the past year, many of which reached me even here in western Washington, far from his constituency. Mamdani didn’t win solely because he was good at using the internet or courting fandoms. But his campaign did offer something unique and effective: Mamdani positioned himself as an inversion of our current political dysfunction. In an era of American politics that’s becoming more and more defined by trolling, shamelessness, and cheap propaganda, Mamdani proved himself to be the anti-slop candidate.

Toward the end of the race, the campaign of Mamdani’s major opponent, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, posted a racist AI-generated attack ad featuring “criminals for Zohran Mamdani.” In the ad, Mamdani runs through the streets and eats rice with his hands as a domestic abuser, a pimp, and a drug dealer offer their support for the politician. The campaign quickly deleted the ad off its X account after the backlash, though it wasn’t the only AI content from Cuomo’s people. Mamdani called out the ads—not so much for their racism, but for their laziness. “In a city of world-class artists and production crew hunting for the next gig, Andrew Cuomo made a TV ad the same way he wrote his housing policy: with AI,” he posted, referencing reports from April that Cuomo’s campaign had used ChatGPT to write his housing plan. (The campaign claimed that it used the chatbot for research purposes.)

Politicians, most notably President Donald Trump, have gravitated toward posting AI-generated imagery for four reasons: It is cheap, requires little effort, attracts attention, and is a useful tool for illustrating their (often fictional) political agendas. Cuomo tried to put imagery to the concerns that Mamdani’s detractors had based, I suppose, on his race, ethnicity, and previous comments about decriminalizing certain activities (and prostitution in particular). It didn’t work. Contrast that with Mamdani’s campaign ads, which were made for the internet but grounded in the physical space of New York City. In an interview with Defector, Andrew Epstein, the campaign’s creative director, said that Mamdani’s videos were about “embedding Zohran in the kind of street-level life of New York City, putting him all over the city, interacting with people over the city in a million different contexts.” The message of community appeared not only to resonate with younger voters who have felt estranged from politics and city life, but to draw them out and get them off their phones—to rally, to canvass, and to vote.

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