The election campaign of Zohran Mamdani, now mayor of New York, has become a small case study. Not only for its communicative effectiveness, but for the way it managed to merge the languages and codes of pop culture within a traditionally rigid context like politics. An approach that, as Livio Basoli points out in Bursting the Bubble in Domenico Loperfidio’s Substack newsletter, in case you missed it, moves between “strategic consistency” and “creative chaos,” turning politics into a space for visual and cultural experimentation.
Mamdani — already a member of the New York State Assembly — built a campaign that seems designed more for his voters’ feeds than for a rally. Every video, poster, or post functions like a pop object: ironic, clever, immediate. Instead of maintaining a fixed aesthetic, his communication constantly reinvents itself, opening the door to memes, remixes, and supporter contributions. The yellow-and-purple visual identity, a cross between Bollywood and New York bodegas, is both recognizable and freely reinterpreted. As Basoli notes, the strength of the campaign lies precisely in “letting go” of its own image, in preferring context over coherence.
It’s hard to think of another politician capable of turning their face into such a fluid visual language. Mamdani’s constant smile, his light and self-ironic tone, overturn the dramatization that has dominated political communication for years. His presence is contagious, and more than a candidate he seems like a creator who uses entertainment as a tool for participation. Basoli indeed speaks of the “Age of Creatocracy”: an era in which the language of the internet becomes the only truly credible one, even for those who aspire to govern a city.
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Behind the campaign are agencies like Fight and Melted Solids, which managed to translate progressive activism into a visual form that is both accessible and disarming. Their work, as Basoli writes again, works because “it has a real sense of urgency,” because you can feel that behind every message there is genuine political conviction.
Zohran Mamdani’s campaign will probably never win a Cannes Lions, but it has already taught something to those working in communication, art, or visual culture. Nowadays, consistency matters less than connection, and identity can be strong even when it’s mutable — and a smile, in the noise of a city like New York, can be a political act.
