Zohran Mamdani's secret: Loving his city, expressing joy, and embracing hope

On Sunday, New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani's campaign announced a walkabout scavenger hunt open to all comers. From the speed with which the campaign ran out of scavenger hunt cards to be distributed, we can assume it had been intended to be a much smaller event than the one that actually happened on Sunday afternoon.

Yup. People showed up by the thousands.

Other politicians are competing with each other in their boasts of just how terrifying they find American life to be, what with the scary subways and scary immigrants and scary rainbow crosswalks, and here's Zohran Mamdani popping up on a Sunday afternoon with a walking tour of the city and a full damn concert xylophone on the first stop.

We've talked about how Mamdani's approach to politics differs so strongly from the modern norm. It's a throwback approach, one that brushes off hostile media environments to talk directly with voters. One that's not all-fear, all the time.

That's what's set Mamdani apart from not just other New York candidates, but from political voices nationwide: Joy. There is actual joy in Mamdani's speeches and ideas. Spontaneity; playfulness; all the things that voters say they approve of in a leader but which leaders are almost universally too cowardly to give.

Can you imagine the Adams or Cuomo mayoral campaigns hosting a spur-of-the-moment scavenger hunt, one that takes obvious joyful pride in New York's parks and people and history?

Showing New York City to the world as it really is—now that's the job of a mayor. And it's becoming rare in politics to find any would-be leader who actually seems to like the place they want to be in charge of.

The whole time I was watching livestreams of the event, my mind kept imagining Cuomo as a Hamburglar-type figure slinking through the outskirts of the crowd. "Grr, I hate fun!" he says, before calling the cops on the xylophone guy.

But it turns out Cuomo couldn't have been there anyway, because he was too busy appearing on Fox News.

There we have the two approaches to leadership. On one side we have someone who takes obvious joy in their city and who promises not crackdowns or retributions but to make the city better for you, personally: free mass transit to get cars off the streets, childcare programs to boost labor participation, temporary rent freezes to maintain at least a little semblance of affordability for the workers who work there. Parts of the city are suffering from a lack of access to groceries? Boom, we're going to build a city-owned grocery store to serve you and if the private companies who were fleecing you or ignoring you don't like it they can pound sand.

And on the other side we have ... almost everyone else in political life. The modern approach to politics is to play on fear every day, all the time, to the exclusion of all else. The man just demonstrated that getting around New York is easy and not scary, and here comes Andrew Cuomo to insist that no, it's a scary hellhole, you only think you're safe because—WATCH OUT, IT'S ANOTHER SUBWAY ALLIGATOR. OH GOD IT'S GOING TO MIDTOWN.

All it took was a walking tour to send Cuomo and, sigh, Eric Adams racing to the grump-o-phones.

No, none of us know what Eric Adams is talking about. Not even Eric Adams knows what Eric Adams is talking about.

So the mayoral race comes down to one candidate who expresses genuine support for the city, its people, and its self-improvement, and two candidates who always seem about 10 minutes away from summoning Batman to beat the crap out of a random street musician. A candidate who can walk through city parks and get on city subways just like the millions of other people who live there, and two candidates who envision their city as Mos Eisley on the Hudson.

There's no joy in the campaigns of—well, take your pick. The language is all about power. Give them power and they will defeat the bad things, whatever those are, real or imaginary. Fear is the most powerful political emotion, so it's no wonder that campaigns obsess on it above all else. And most people who get into politics do so because it comes with power, and most who succeed in gaining that power then spend the rest of their careers protecting and cultivating it.

Mamdani's approach isn't new. It is, as I said, a throwback to earlier political eras in which someone you'd like to have a beer with was a valuable quality in a candidate, and showing you could "connect" with voters was a campaign obsession. Those traits are promoted only superfluously in current campaigns, which tend instead to portray would-be leaders as shadow law enforcement officers, every last one of them on the trail of a separate Dick Tracy villain.

I expect we can blame not 9/11 or the Iraq War for this generational shift, but Fox News. It's Fox that pioneered the all fear, all the time program of brain mushification that regularly props up new supposed crises, like clockwork, whenever conservatives need election boosts. Crime rates have fallen precipitously since the 1990's, but not on Fox News or in any of the conservative campaigns that partner with them.

It's been so effective a marketing campaign—a drumbeat of partisan disinformation that never ends, never needs to contend with actual reality, and faces no real counter-campaign—that it's warped political campaigns into the authoritarian-friendly "strongman" model we see today. You can't have fun, this is America. America, the hellscape. America, the land of people who are constantly being different from you or disagreeing with you or who want rights.

Mamdani's approach deflates all that by showing what his real city, what those real streets, actually look like. He deflates the strongman bluster by poking fun at it, rather than allowing it to fester. It's not the slightest bit revolutionary, but it seems that way because political consultants in both parties have attempted to smother fun in its crib—possibly because most of their clients, like Andrew Cuomo, can't fake a sincere-looking smile and come off looking like they're contemplating what wine would go best with your cooked innards.

There are other politicians who have the same instincts. Barack Obama's speeches tended towards that all-encompassing positivity, and he remains one of the most respected political figures. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker emphasizes government as positive force rather than static or destructive one; Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz's just-folks demeanor and easy dismantling of Trump and Vance's ever-pompous weirdness proved devastatingly effective on the campaign trail, until Democratic consultants succeeded in refocusing the Harris-Walz campaign into dignified generics.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom doesn't have the same; he is eager to spit fire at fascist pomp and is one of the few political figures to recognize ridicule, not outrage, as posing the greatest threat to authoritarian personas. But he does not have that same joy, that same positivity that treats the ability of government to do good as not only possible but as its sole purpose.

And there's simply no Republican, anywhere in the country, who can accomplish the same. You can't puncture the vapidity of power-obsessed campaigning when your whole career is based on it; you can't express joy while backing Trump's programs of economic chaos, mass internments, and troops in our streets without coming off as a psychopath. (For proof of this, pick any interview with any Trump administration cabinet member about any subject. Shudder.)

While I could be wrong, I expect that Mamdami is likely on his way to crushing both Cuomo and Adams, and not just because Cuomo and Adams are nasty people who've been caught being nasty and who deserve to be crushed. There is not an hour that goes by right now without the news bringing us some new horror: Will we have vaccines, a year from now? Will the combination of tariffs, corruption, and anti-immigrant violence plant us in a new Great Depression?

Both Cuomo and Adams, along with nearly every other conservative and centrist politician in the nation, are spending their days pumping out or elevating the same horrors. Their every speech feels just another rote repetition of how we need The Batman to come take care of the subways, or the street musicians, or people who aren't being sufficiently respectful of Trump's goon squads. And it is so, so tiring. It's exhausting. It makes you want to never hear from them about anything.

I expect that any politician who can express actual joy for what America can still be will find themselves surrounded by fans, because escape from the relentlessness of the bad is what every non-asshole American needs. Politicians who can look Trump's fascist corruption in the eye and make fun of it, and him, will gain traction while mutterers about kitchen table issues will remain in the electoral no-mans-land that has Democratic Party favorability numbers looking just as bad as those of the fascists themselves.

By God, we need just a little fun around here. The public turnout for a silly, impulsive little Mamdani walkabout is evidence enough of that.