Rethinking Democracy In The Age Of Branding

Zohran Mamdani’s recent victory in the New York mayoral race has drawn significant attention from commentators across the political spectrum. The result overturned not merely electoral expectations but a set of entrenched assumptions about what is politically viable in the United States today. The campaign was waged in a context shaped by sustained racialised rhetoric in the post-Trump political environment, by the consolidation of corporate influence over urban political machines, and by deep internal tensions within the Democratic Party itself.

In this sense, Mamdani’s win warrants analysis not as an isolated event but as a case study in rebuilding democratic agency from below.

The opposition Mamdani faced was multidimensional. Organised interest groups and billionaire-funded political action committees invested heavily in portraying him as dangerously radical. His background as the child of immigrants from East Africa and South Asia was mobilised to frame him as an outsider whose political commitments could not be trusted. Islamophobic tropes—subtle and explicit—were deployed to question his loyalty to the “American mainstream.” Even within his own party, senior figures openly questioned his electability and urged ideological moderation in response to such attacks.

That Mamdani prevailed despite these pressures is not merely a testament to his articulation of progressive politics, but to the different mode of politics his campaign pursued. The campaign prioritised relational organising over message management. Rather than relying on top-down mobilisation or digital outreach alone, it returned to a historically grounded method of democratic practice: systematic door-to-door engagement, neighbourhood-level committees, multilingual outreach, participatory meetings, and durable alliances with community organisations, labour unions, and tenant associations.

In a political culture where elections are increasingly treated as matters of brand strategy and media positioning, Mamdani’s campaign reasserted the significance of physical presence and sustained dialogue. The campaign was not built on the presumption that voters must be persuaded of a candidate’s personality or competence, but rather that they can be engaged as politically reasoning subjects. This approach sought not to speak to constituents, but to invite them into a shared project of diagnosing local problems and identifying collective solutions.

Two analytical features of the campaign stand out.

First, the campaign grounded itself in material politics. Its platform emphasised issues such as rent control, public housing, transit affordability, labour protections, access to community health services, and school funding. These concerns were framed neither in technocratic nor moralistic terms, but rather as everyday conditions that shape life in the city. In doing so, the campaign circumvented much of the cultural-polarisation terrain on which contemporary American electoral politics often stagnates. Instead, it built solidarity across ethnic, racial, and linguistic differences through the shared experience of navigating an increasingly unaffordable and unequal city.

Second, the campaign refused to accommodate the logics of racialised suspicion directed against Mamdani. Historically, candidates from marginalised backgrounds have been compelled to demonstrate political respectability by distancing themselves from their own communities or by signalling alignment with dominant nationalist narratives. Mamdani declined this route. He did not mute his positions on policing, international solidarity, or structural inequality. Instead, he refused to cede epistemic authority over his own identity and political commitments. This refusal itself became a form of political pedagogy, modelling for supporters a politics grounded in dignity rather than strategic apology.

For observers in India, the question arises: Can this model be replicated in contexts marked by majoritarian nationalism, uneven institutional capacity, and deeply stratified social formations? The answer requires nuance.

The organisational ecology that enabled Mamdani’s campaign—dense civic networks, long-standing immigrant solidarities, urban labour infrastructures—cannot be assumed to exist uniformly elsewhere. In India, electoral politics is often embedded in patronage structures mediated by caste, kinship, and local brokerage networks. Moreover, the ideological dominance of majoritarian nationalism in India today operates at a deeper affective register than contemporary American nativism, shaping everyday forms of belonging and exclusion.

However, the conceptual orientation of Mamdani’s campaign does hold relevance. The central lesson is not tactical but theoretical: democracy is not sustained by appeals to the electorate as a passive public, but by cultivating voters as active political subjects. Politics that depends on media-led persuasion campaigns, personality charisma, or last-minute electoral coalitions is inherently fragile. By contrast, politics grounded in everyday organisations—such as workplaces, neighbourhoods, union branches, student collectives, and tenants’ forums—has the capacity to endure and expand.

In India, rebuilding such organisational terrains would require patient investment in local leadership, decentralised structures of decision-making, and political education that does not treat citizens as targets of messaging but as participants in deliberation. This is slow work. It does not guarantee rapid electoral results. Yet, Mamdani’s campaign demonstrates that the apparent inevitability of elite dominance is contingent, not structural. When political agency is reclaimed, the seemingly impossible becomes electorally viable. Mamdani’s victory, therefore, should not be misread as a formula for opposition success. It is better understood as evidence that democratic capacity can be rebuilt from below when politics is reoriented from representation to participation. In a global moment defined by the shrinking of public imagination, that insight is of lasting consequence.