Mamdani, Trump and the End of the Old Politics

This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Democratic primary that just wrapped up in New York was a collision between two very different candidates on almost every level: ideologically, outsider versus insider and name recognition. But it was also a collision that I think matters, for much beyond New York City politics, of two very different theories of attention.

Andrew Cuomo ran a campaign that was based on a tried-and-true strategy of buying attention. He had this gigantic super PAC with tens of millions of dollars purchasing all the advertising money can buy, absolutely dominating airwaves with negative ads about Zohran Mamdani.

Archived clip: In his own words, Zohran Mamdani wants to defund the police.

Archived clip: Zohran Mamdani is a 33-year-old dangerously inexperienced legislator who has passed just three bills.

Archived clip: Zohran Mamdani, a risk New York can’t afford.

And then you had Mamdani, who was running a campaign on a very different theory of attention, a theory of viral attention, a campaign built on these vertical videos that, if you opened Instagram, if you opened TikTok, and you were in any way connected to his ideas or to New York City, this was all you saw.

Archived clip of Kareem Rahma: So what’s your take?

Zohran Mamdani: That I should be the mayor.

Archived clip of Mamdani: New York is suffering from a crisis, and it’s called halalflation.

Archived clip of Mamdani: Did you know that Andrew Cuomo gutted the pensions for hundreds and thousands of New Yorkers?

Archived clip of Mamdani: Mr. Cuomo, and furthermore, the name is Mamdani. M-A-M-D-A-N-I. You should learn how to say it.”

Attention works differently now. This is one of the core political theses of this entire podcast. It is laced through so many of these episodes.

You just watched these two incredibly different attentional strategies collide. Cuomo got flattened. He got flattened. It was not close.

There are things you cannot learn about how to win elections in other places from an off-year June Democratic primary in New York City using rank-choice voting.

But there are things you can learn about how attention works right now — and that’s in a large part the subject of this conversation.