ON THE HUSTINGS ZOHRAN IRL

If, as Mario Cuomo once said, you campaign in poetry and you govern in prose, then New York's mayoral race has birthed some new kind of TikTokian free verse.

- Zach Helfand

Zohran Mamdani

Andrew Cuomo, the candidate for the Fight and Deliver Party, which was recently invented by Andrew Cuomo, said that Zohran Mamdani defeated him in the Democratic primary because of social media.

Now Cuomo posts candid videos and replies to random users on X. Eric Adams, the candidate for the Safe & Affordable Party, which was recently invented by Eric Adams, has always campaigned, governed, and generally lived life in poetry, of a sort. (He once described New York as "a place where every day you wake up you could experience everything from a plane crashing into our Trade Center to a person who's celebrating a new business.") Yet even he has tried to copy Mamdani's virality. "He was never a candidate," Adams observed, of Mamdani.

"He was a social-media influencer." Is the influencer candidate feeling threatened? Last week, he experimented with a new form-the fan meetup. "I talk a lot about how expensive New York City is," he said on Instagram.

"But, right now, there are actually a few fun and free things happening across these five boroughs." He would visit one later that day. The first twenty-five people to message him received an invite, with a time and a location: the U.S. Open, for the first day of qualifying.

Mamdani showed up in a white shirt, a brown tie, and a clip-on mike.