Zohran Mamdani owes his win as New York City mayor substantially to his internet presence. Mamdani — as numerous writers have outlined — is good on social video. He picked a message, stuck to it, and adapted that platform to snappy soundbites across multiple mediums. But Mamdani’s best trait as an online communicator wasn’t knowing how to use the internet. It was understanding when not to use it. In an era of terminally synthetic politics, New York picked the candidate who still seems capable of looking away from his screen.

“Extremely online” might be the two words most frequently attached to politicians in 2025. Since taking office in January, the already 4chan-steeped Trump administration has slipped further and further into the purely digital realm. It communicates in photoshops, ASMR videos, podcast clips, and meme-ready branding for concentration camps, periodically screwing up its own operations by posturing online. Generative AI has massively accelerated this process: the government officially entered its longest shutdown in history last night, and the president’s most memorable public statements during it include AI-animated videos of himself playing Blue Öyster Cult cowbell and dropping diarrhea on protesters from a jet.

This aesthetic was on display with Mamdani’s independent rival, Andrew Cuomo, who closed out his campaign with a series of AI-generated attacks on Mamdani posted to X. One video, “Criminals for Mamdani,” featured the shiny hyperreality that’s become synonymous with AI. It depicted fake Mamdani endorsements from a series of cringeworthy stereotypes, including a Black shoplifter and a 1970s-style pimp with a van full of trafficked white women. A generative Mamdani appears, chomping handfuls of rice, a reference to some Republican commentary over Mamdani’s perceived foreignness that spread on X.

The video, while quickly deleted, was a perfect example of synthetic politics. Start with a fairly normal, if well-worn accusation: my opponent is soft on crime. Then, render it through a machine designed to reproduce perfectly distilled stereotypes, making the whole thing not only a fictional scenario from the get-go, but one lacking even the nominal humanity you’d have gotten with live actors or an animator. Sprinkle in a digital puppet version of your rival with a reference to a niche social media micro-controversy. Finally, post it on said social media site. The result is something stripped of nearly any connection to physical reality — whether you agree with the central premise or not.

The contrast with Mamdani’s campaign is striking. His videos make a point of showing him not only in the flesh, but in physical settings beyond the booth of a podcast and frequently outside on the streets of New York. Earlier this year, he won the primary against Cuomo by teaming up with other candidates like Brad Lander, who became a minor real-world character in his videos. Unlike, say, Democratic California governor and itinerant podcaster Gavin Newsom, Mamdani hasn’t adopted the tone and strategy of Republican internet culture or chased online archetypes like a “Joe Rogan of the left.” (Cuomo, incidentally, also tried and failed at podcasting.) His best videos spread online, but weren’t clearly born online — and as a result, even when they’re short and mundane, they don’t have the endlessly recirculated hollowness that fills much of the modern web.

Mamdani, obviously, benefits from his timing and his location. The last mayoral election cycle took place in the throes of the covid pandemic, when chilling with cats in bodegas would have been fraught. Also, New York is a dense city filled with instantly recognizable iconography. But Cuomo had the same advantages — and we got a video of his digital replica in an AI-generated subway instead.

Other politicians have rediscovered the benefits of just going outside and doing a thing. Congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh is another person who’s widely described as an online influencer, but has become known for on-the-ground protests of ICE — similar to Lander, who was arrested for protesting during the primary campaign. Rather than relying on remixed references or AI simulations, they put skin in the game.

Obviously, there’s no purely “authentic” campaign strategy; all these things are meant to spread online. Real footage and events are no guarantee of truth; they’re easy to misrepresent or distort. Mamdani, an erstwhile SoundCloud rapper, is hardly a digital recluse. But over the past few years, it’s become painfully clear that even mediated connections to the ground truth of the offline world still matter — because the spheres where they’re disappearing are some of the ugliest places online.

The Trump administration is arguably the clearest example of this. Trump’s first term saw his rise as a popular internet meme and prolific tweeter, but he and his cabinet weren’t known to spend that much time consuming the internet — Trump relentlessly watched Fox News, which, while not a bastion of truth, held at least some factual connection with the offline world. Now he exists in an ecosystem full of social media personalities and appears to substantially fill his media diet with AI slop.

The problems with severing internet culture — which at this point *is *culture — from reality go much deeper than bad campaign ads. At a strategic level, Trump administration figures regularly undercut their own agendas because they can’t keep anything offline, from Kash Patel’s constant bragging about FBI investigations to Brendan Carr’s mafioso threats on podcasts to Pete Hegseth’s Signal leaks to Trump’s own publicly posted Truth Social DMs.

And more importantly, a government of sloppers and influencers has little regard for un-feed-worthy real work. Carr’s FCC, for instance, has abdicated nearly every agency duty that’s not tied to flashy culture wars — approving media mergers conditioned on pro-Republican coverage instead of mitigating the harms of consolidation, ignoring a legal mandate to lower prison phone call costs.

We won’t know how Cuomo would have done in office. We do know his campaign found topics like New York’s dire housing shortage too boring to tackle without ChatGPT.

By the same token, we don’t know how Mamdani will do in office — idealistic mayors have been broken on the wheel of New York politics before. But his campaign promises were, often literally, tangible: rent-frozen apartments, free child care service and buses, city-run grocery stores. However difficult they might be to realize, they’re not vibes or memes, they’re actual things. And at least for this moment, things have won.

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• Adi Robertson