Politics

When they go low, we go viral

Published

9 months ago

January 4, 2026

NEW YORK — Zohran Mamdani rode the digital slipstream to success in New York. Now millennials and Gen Zers are banking on a similar wave to boost their political dreams.

The mayor-elect energized New York City’s youth vote, earning the support of nearly 70 percent of voters aged 18 to 44 in the general election. His publicity strategy — complete with shareable graphics, collaborations with content creators and local artists’ animations — appealed to a new trove of young voters, people who primarily get their information in short-form TikTok videos and social media posts rather than legacy media.

A wave of millennial and Gen Z Democratic hopefuls across the country are looking to follow that lead in shaking up an aging party — from a 25-year-old political influencer in Arizona, to a 35-year-old congressional candidate in Idaho, to a 24-year-old mayoral candidate in Georgia.

“The theme that we have seen this year, different from years past, is ‘I’m done waiting around. I’m sick of being told it’s not my turn,’” said Amanda Litman, CEO of Run for Something, a candidate recruitment company focused on electing progressives under 40.

The surge has rippled far beyond New York, touching races in red and purple states alike as younger Democrats test whether digital-first campaigns can compensate for limited funding, party support and name recognition.

It also has reopened a debate inside the Democratic Party over what it takes to build a viable campaign — and whether traditional gatekeepers are misreading how younger voters engage with politics. While Gen Z and millennials span different age groups, both are entering politics with similar digital fluency — and similar distance from the party’s traditional power structures.

The effects are already visible in candidate recruitment. Run for Something reported a surge of 10,000 young Democrats across the country expressing interest in launching a campaign immediately after Mamdani’s primary win. Another 1,616 potential candidates signed up within one day of the shutdown-ending deal to reopen the government, the group said.

“We’re building a party of fighters, not folders,” Litman posted on X in November along with a graph of the sign-up splurge.

The push for younger candidates comes as Democratic leadership skews older than the electorate it represents. The average age in the House and the Senate is roughly 58 and 65, respectively, and the median school board member is 59, according to Pew Research Center. The median age in the United States is 39.

More than 20 progressives under the age of 40 have announced a congressional campaign for this election cycle, nearly half of whom are looking to unseat a member of their own party. And with the Democratic Party having no clear leader, the younger generation is looking to add new faces into the mix.

For inexperienced candidates who don’t have the money or institutional support to run a competitive campaign, social media offers a cost-free solution. The ease of building an online following has lowered the perceived barrier to running for office, even as the fundamentals of winning — fundraising, turnout and organization — remain unchanged.

Take Sam Foster, a 24-year-old from Marietta, Georgia. He rode his bike to the first video shoot for his mayoral campaign against incumbent Steve Tumlin, who is 78. Social media, he said, isn’t as much a strategy for Gen Z and millennial candidates as it is a native mode of communication.

“I hate when people call it a social media campaign,” Foster said. “I went into [making content] with the intention of just showing people who I was. We built a strategy off of that, but it wasn’t essentially the intention.”

Mamdani, a democratic socialist who polled at under 1 percent in February, soft-launched his campaign in July with videos asking New Yorkers why they voted for Trump. His later videos on “halalflation,” a fully suited polar plunge to “freeze” the rent and a Valentine’s Day voter registration proposal kept him prevalent on social feeds.

And the more he posted, the more users — even those well outside of New York City — responded.

“If done well, [social media] allows you to raise lots of small dollars from lots of different places,” said Chris Coffey, a longtime political consultant and CEO of Tusk Strategies.

Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani takes a selfie with a former Marine on Veterans Day.

One Mamdani video asked supporters to donate to his transition team. The comment section was flooded with promises of donations from people as far away as Europe — with in-country support from Texas, California and Florida as well. From July to the election in November, Mamdani raised over $750,000 from over 8,500 contributors outside of New York City, according to data from the Campaign Finance Board.

Coffey drew a comparison to Andrew Yang, who also had a strong social media presence and made history by raising $750,000 in just one day for his 2020 presidential campaign, with an average donation of $41.

“Both Yang and Mamdani were able to use their social media and digital media platforms to get lots and lots and lots of small donors, which then powered their campaign, de-emphasized big dollars and allowed them to play on a level playing field with all these other candidates that were going after bigger dollars,” said Coffey, who helped manage Yang’s 2021 bid for New York City mayor.

Mamdani’s messaging inspired more than 100,000 volunteers to be visible daily on New York streets throughout the mayoral race.

His messaging also maintained an appearance of authenticity, focusing on issues that disproportionately affect young and working class New Yorkers, like housing, childcare, and affordability.

For young voters, authenticity is a major problem in the Democratic Party. And younger candidates are proving adept at conveying a message “from the heart,” according to Deja Foxx, a grassroots organizer and digital strategist who previously ran for Arizona’s 7th Congressional District.

“People have a different expectation of how they should be engaging with public figures [than they did 10 years ago],” Foxx said. “We are consuming so much on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, where videos from our Congress person are mixed in with life updates from our best friend from middle school. It demands a different level of vulnerability that frankly a lot of our older electives aren’t comfortable with.”

The embrace of online-first campaigning has also blurred the line between political organizing and performance. Jack Schlossberg, the 32-year-old grandson of John F. Kennedy who’s running for Rep. Jerry Nadler’s congressional seat, is a provocative social media personality, sometimes offering raunchy and offensive political commentary to his 860,000 followers.

Schlossberg shares random, quotidian tidbits, like being called an “incel Frankenstein looking mother—” by a random passerby. He impersonated Melania Trump — wig and all — as he read a letter of support to Vladimir Putin, trolled his uncle Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ‘s health policies — insinuating his uncle’s claims of autism being linked to circumcision came from personal experience — and gave crass explanations of political news like the release of the Epstein files, New York Attorney General Letitia James’ indictment (since tossed) and the government shutdown.

While his videos drive an audience, and have certainly got voters talking, they lack what other candidates are hinging on — promises and policies.

For those who aren’t Kennedys — like Kaylee Peterson, a 35-year-old Idaho candidate in the historically Republican 1st District — social media is their pathway into the otherwise pay-to-play world of campaigning.

“Social media is the only real affordable tool we have to reach disenfranchised Gen Z and millennial voters,” said Peterson. “Seeing [Mamdani] be successful and the massive national support he received gave us hope.”

Like many other progressive candidates in rural republican areas, Peterson said, she did not receive support — or even a call back — from the Democratic National Committee. Instead, she found her support, strategists and community on social media groups where other young candidates virtually congregated — like TikTok Live, Instagram and messaging apps.

Peterson ran a losing campaign against Republican incumbent Rep. Russell Mark Fulcher in 2022 with only $70,000. She focused on getting her message out and mobilizing progressives in her district. In her third campaign cycle, though still unsuccessful at claiming the seat, she raised just under $250,000.

Mamdani may ultimately prove to be the exception rather than the rule. His online success amplified preexisting strengths and allowed his reach to go beyond the five boroughs.

“Social media is an important part of [the campaign],” Coffey said. “But so is the messaging, and so is the staff, and so was their press apparatus, and so was their candidate’s ability to do really hard and tedious work.”

Politics

NRSC Chair Tim Scott leaves Georgia, North Carolina off his list of top Senate targets

Published

3 hours ago

September 23, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The National Republican Senatorial Committee is shifting its focus away from the North Carolina and Georgia Senate races as it works to shore up red states like Texas and flip other Democratic-held seats.

In a closed-door meeting Wednesday, Sen. Tim Scott, the chair of the NRSC, told Senate Republicans that the campaign arm will focus its spending going forward on defending GOP seats in Maine, Alaska, Ohio, Iowa and Texas and trying to flip the Democratic-held seats of Michigan and New Hampshire, according to four people in the room who were granted anonymity to share private details.

That list notably leaves out North Carolina GOP nominee Michael Whatley’s battle against Democrat Roy Cooper and Georgia GOP nominee Mike Collins’ effort to unseat Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff.

Scott’s briefing is the clearest sign yet that Republicans have deprioritized the two states, as POLITICO has reported, while senior Republicans grow increasingly resigned to the possibility of losing those races. It’s a remarkable shift: President Donald Trump carried Georgia twice in 2016 and 2024 and North Carolina over the last three presidential elections.

In deprioritizing North Carolina, the NRSC is effectively ceding a state that Democrats haven’t won in the Senate since 2008.

Still, other GOP groups with massive war chests, including Trump’s MAGA Inc., could pick up the slack.

Scott also shared with the senators polling showing Republicans are locked in tight battles in several other key races, which tracks with much of the public polling, according to the four people.

For example, one poll found that GOP Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio is still trailing former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. Scott also showed polling indicating Republican John Sununu is essentially neck-and-neck with Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas in New Hampshire, a seat Republicans are laser-focused on trying to flip.

NRSC did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Collins’ campaign.

“As Roy Cooper said earlier this year about U.S. Senate races in North Carolina, ‘Democrats are often ahead until they are not.’ And then just last week Cooper, correctly, observed, ‘We know a lot of undecided voters lean Republican.’ We’re confident we will have the resources to get our message out to North Carolina voters and win,” said Whatley Spokesman DJ Griffin in a statement.

Georgia GOP party chair Josh McKoon dismissed the notion that his state was being deprioritized by Republicans in Washington, even as he acknowledged beating Ossoff will be a challenge.

“Every cycle, someone in Washington leaks that they’re thinking about moving money,” he said in a text message. “What matters is who shows up — and what the actual numbers say.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune is set to headline a fundraiser for Collins in Atlanta on Thursday, alongside the state’s popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp. The Collins campaign is also making the case that one in 10 Georgia voters — who backed Trump in 2024 and plan to vote for Jackson — are still “up for grabs,” according to a memo obtained by POLITICO.

“The goal in Georgia is to strike a balance where you are spending as little for Senate as possible while not derailing Rick Jackson’s, so far, very strong bid for Governor in a difficult environment,” said a GOP pollster granted anonymity to speak candidly about the landscape. Public polling shows the governor’s race has much tighter margins, with Jackson leading Democratic nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms in some recent surveys.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who lost his Senate primary to Trump-backed Ken Paxton, was also in the room. He later told Blue Light News that the party has to make tough decisions.

“At some point I think the people spending that money are going to have to make hard choices and figure out where the money can have the biggest impact, and certainly Texas is the most expensive,” Cornyn said.

Politics

The NY governor race pollster scrum

Published

3 hours ago

September 23, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

A new Quinnipiac University poll has Gov. Kathy Hochul leading her Republican challenger Bruce Blakeman by a sizable margin.

Q THE LANDSLIDE: Quinnipiac University released a poll today that found Gov. Kathy Hochul leading Republican Bruce Blakeman 58-39 — putting her on track for the fourth-largest landslide by a New York gubernatorial candidate in the past 200 years.

It’s by far the best poll for Hochul this year and certainly better than a Siena University survey out this morning that found her with a modest 9 point lead over the Nassau County executive.

So which one’s closer to reality?

The last time both pollsters released New York numbers on the same day was a few weeks before Hochul’s last election in 2022. Siena found at the time that her lead over then-Rep. Lee Zeldin was quickly shrinking, having dropped from 17 to 11 points.

The Q Poll painted a more dire picture for the governor.

“We released a poll in mid-October showing that Hochul had a 4 point lead over Lee Zeldin,” Quinnipiac spokesperson Mary Snow said. “And it went against the grain of other polls out there at the time.”

Hochul wound up winning that race by about 6 points.

Pollster vs. pollster results in prior elections have been mixed. Both Q and Siena nailed Andrew Cuomo’s eventual 23 point margin of victory in October 2018 polls, though Siena’s early November numbers that year found Cuomo’s lead had shrunk to 13. An infamous Q Poll from September 2010 found Cuomo with a stunningly small 6 point lead over Buffalo firebrand Carl Paladino, while a Siena poll the next day found a much more predictive 57-24 Cuomo advantage.

The biggest difference this time around is that Quinnipiac assumed a higher share of November’s turnout will be in deep blue New York City.

The five boroughs accounted for 31 percent of the statewide turnout in 2022 and 34 percent in 2018. Siena’s sample assumed 30 percent of this year’s voters will come from there, while 38 percent of Quinnipiac’s sample was from the city.

Quinnipiac also does more to avoid undecided voters. “One tweak that we made after 2020 was an adjustment to the questions that we ask, so that we try to cut down on the number of people who say they don’t know,” Snow said.

Only 3 percent of the Q Poll’s sample declined to weigh in on the Hochul-Blakeman race, while the comparable number was 9 percent in Siena’s poll. And it appears as if a lot of the Quinnipiac respondents who might not have answered Siena’s questions broke toward the incumbent: Siena has Hochul winning New York City 61-27 while Quinnipiac has her up 70-27; Siena had her up 57-34 among women while Quinnipiac found her lead at 63-34.

Another notable difference between the methodologies that may account for the divergent results is that Quinnipiac’s sample was based on asking respondents what party they affiliate with. Siena uses voter registration files.

“For a couple of years running, the New York Times/Siena Poll was ranked as the most accurate poll in America,” Siena spokesperson Steve Greenberg said. “Siena has been polling New York state for nearly a quarter of a century, and we have shown that we get it right almost all of the time.”

Republicans, for their part, believe both sets of numbers are far overstating Hochul’s advantage.

“Blakeman is closer in the polls I’ve seen than Lee Zeldin was at this moment in time four years ago,” state Senate Republican Campaign Committee Chair George Borrello said. “As I travel around New York state, I have seen literally thousands of Bruce Blakeman signs. Yet I can count on one hand the number of Kathy Hochul signs I’ve seen, unless you count the ones that say ‘Fire Hochul.’” — Bill Mahoney

From the Capitol

A new program has made progress in awarding large-scale batteries and contracting new renewables.

MEGAWATT DEAL: New York has made its first awards for large-scale batteries under a new program and secured contracts for new renewables that are close to getting built.

The state’s energy authority contracted for 719 megawatts from 13 solar, wind and hydroelectric projects and 950 megawatts of battery storage from eight projects.

NYSERDA President and CEO Doreen Harris announced the awards Wednesday during a Climate Week event hosted by the state’s renewable developers association.

“Everything that we do with respect to our energy system costs money,” Harris said. “When we invest in clean energy, not only are we talking about low single-digit percentage increases in cost, we are talking about benefits that far exceed those costs.”

Hochul warned that federal headwinds and rising expenses made a more ambitious pace of transitioning to clean energy too costly as she successfully fought to weaken New York’s ambitious climate law earlier this year. But she has highlighted her continued support for progress on offshore wind, renewables, storage and nuclear this week.

New York and developers are racing the expiration of federal tax credits. Renewables that didn’t start construction by July 4 — or don’t finish work by the end of the year if they start after that deadline — won’t be eligible for those key incentives that lower the cost of contracts for the state.

FROM CITY HALL

Bellevue Hospital CEO Eric Wei speaks during a press conference announcing $26.5 million in funding from the City Council.

MAKING ROOM: Bellevue Hospital announced a major renovation and expansion of its inpatient psychiatric wing, fueled by an infusion of $26.5 million from the City Council.

Bellevue, which is part of the NYC Health + Hospitals system, will use the new capital funding to add 40 beds for adult psychiatric patients over the next few years — bringing the division’s total capacity to 204 beds.

Hospital officials said the expansion will ease the bottleneck of patients with severe mental illnesses who need to be admitted for continued observation and treatment; those inpatient psychiatric units have been operating consistently at 98% capacity.

“The need here demanded an investment of this scale,” Council member Virginia Maloney, who spearheaded the funding, said during a news conference in the hospital’s atrium.

Bellevue Hospital CEO Eric Wei said the facility has seen a bump in psychiatric patients since the April 2025 closure of Mount Sinai Beth Israel several blocks away. Bellevue’s dedicated ER for psychiatric patients, which Wei said sees about 30 patients daily, is undergoing its own $40 million expansion.

“We are unfortunately needing to transfer out about 90 patients a month to other inpatient units because there’s no room in our inpatient psychiatric units,” Wei said in an interview. “We’re always feeling like I’m toeing the line. We’re very busy.”

Bellevue was so overwhelmed as of late that hospital officials asked FDNY to stop bringing them patients with psychiatric emergencies, according to EMS union Local 2507. Those diversion requests continued for at least a couple weeks in late August and early September, a union spokesperson said. — Maya Kaufman

IN OTHER NEWS

— INSTITUTIONAL FAILURE: A NYC high school which once enrolled 3,000 students now has only 90. (The City Reporter)

— FIRST IN THE NATION: In a new TV ad, Hochul is touting her first-in-the-nation data center moratorium. (City & State)

— HITTING THE BRAKES: The rollout of electric school buses in New York state has been rocky. (The New York Times)

Missed this morning’s New York Playbook? We forgive you. Read it here.

Politics

Trump officials weigh rolling back beef import plan as GOP midterm panic spreads

Published

5 hours ago

September 23, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

A small group of White House officials are exploring whether to cut back President Donald Trump’s decision to increase foreign beef imports, as GOP panic rises ahead of the midterms.

The proposal to reduce the amount of imports is being discussed within the Domestic Policy Council headed by Vince Haley, a longtime Trump speechwriter and former campaign official, and a few other officials at the White House, according to two people with direct knowledge of the conversations, who were granted anonymity to share private details.

Trump officials are unsure if anything will come of the talks. The two people said the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative disagrees with cutting back the imports, since it aims to lower high consumer beef prices in the short term and since USTR helped implement the move.

But their conversations about partly rolling back the beef policy — which Trump instituted in August — is a clear sign the White House is trying to stem the alarm from battleground and farm-state Republicans as high prices and Trump’s tariffs roil their election campaigns. The White House is also preparing a plan on diesel exports, likely with exemptions, amid sky-high prices from the Iran war.

The White House, USTR and Department of Agriculture did not respond to requests for comment.

Iowa Rep. Ashley Hinson, the GOP Senate nominee, took the extraordinary step this week of publicly breaking with Trump, saying gas prices were too high because of the Iran war and that farmers in her state are suffering. Michigan Senate GOP nominee Mike Rogers and other vulnerable House and Senate Republicans have made similar breaks.

Farm-state lawmakers in Iowa and beyond have publicly called for the White House to provide some relief from the beef import executive action in particular, because of its impact on farmers and ranchers.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, the rest of the Iowa delegation and other senior farm-state lawmakers have all pressed the administration to change course — to no avail.

Trump did sign an executive order of rancher-friendly policies as a way to address the initial backlash. But U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer made clear to a group of House Republicans in a closed-door briefing earlier this month that Trump’s executive action to import 300,000 metric tons of beef without certain tariffs and at discounted prices would go forward as planned, as Blue Light News first reported.