The Lesson for Democrats From Zohran Mamdani's Campaign? Be Normal.

[Celerity]

The Democratic mayoral candidate owes some of his success to the fact he doesn’t come off as weird or off-putting as his rivals.

https://newrepublic.com/article/197943/zohran-mamdani-secret-weapon-normal

https://archive.ph/RV9xu


New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani attends the 2025 New York City Pride March on June 29, 2025 in New York City.

This week, Andrew Cuomo decided to officially mount an independent bid for mayor of New York City. He made the announcement in a video on Monday that attempted to mimic the effortless charm and easygoing charisma of his opponent, the Democratic nominee, Zohran Mamdani. It didn’t work. Mamdani immediately ratioed the video by simply replying with a link to donate to his campaign. And no wonder the gimmick failed: It was like an off-brand rip-off of a favorite cereal you’d find at the grocery store. Cuomo’s announcement was the “Great Value” version of a Mamdani video. Instead of Cheerios, he was offering Cuom-Oats.

Cuomo’s pivot to video was merely the latest in a series of failed attempts to discredit Mamdani as somehow inauthentic or insincere. Ever since he jolted the political establishment with his inspirational and—once the votes were counted—overwhelming victory in the city’s mayoral primary last month, there’s been a relentless and often bigoted attempt by Republicans and some Democrats to cast him as somehow abnormal.

These efforts have spanned the spectrum of absurdity. The president called him a “communist” and threatened to deport him; Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand falsely accused him of supporting “global jihad” (for which she later apologized); former Minnesota Congressman and alleged presidential candidate Dean Phillips—whose face you wouldn’t remember if you were standing directly in front of him—said there is no room in the Democratic Party for a socialist like Mamdani; Christopher Rufo, a leading online weirdo and the right’s preeminent peddler of racist lies about immigrants eating household pets, accused Mamdani of strategically adopting “the symbols of the exotic other.”

Mamdani’s critics would have you believe that he is somehow unusual or out of step with the values and interests of ordinary people. But as someone who has spent more than ten years cataloguing the weird, unsettling, and sometimes inscrutable behaviors of politicians in my job as a late night comedy writer, I can say with near certainty that the opposite is true. The core of Mamdani’s appeal is that he is aggressively, perhaps even radically, normal.

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