Nenshi's former aides see an eerily similar story in New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani

National Post

01-07-2025

OTTAWA — Two architects of Alberta NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi's surprise victory in the 2010 Calgary mayor's race say they're feeling déjà vu after seeing another thirty-something Shia Muslim — with family ties to East Africa and Gujarat, India — upend the politics of a major North American city.
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Stephen Carter, now president of Decide Campaigns, says he sees shades of his old boss in 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani, who rode an outsider campaign to victory in last week's New York City Democratic mayoral primary.
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'The similarities are hard to miss,' said Carter.
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Carter said that, on top of the biographical similarities, Mamdani followed Nenshi's playbook of using digital tools to build a strong personal brand that transcends party labels.
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'I won't pretend to be an expert on the inner workings of the Mamdani campaign but one thing I can say … is that the brand construction … was spectacularly implemented,' said Carter.
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Fifteen years ago, Carter helped then 38-year-old Nenshi leverage newfangled social media platforms Facebook, YouTube and Twitter (now X) to launch a similarly powerful digital brand.
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Nenshi's then novel grassroots digital campaign helped him become the first Muslim mayor of a major North American city.
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Carter says that the digital landscape has changed in the past 15 years but the fundamentals of building a political brand haven't.
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'Of all the things we talked about back in 2010, I think the strongest thing was actually the development of brand politics,' said Carter.
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With Carter at the helm, the Nenshi campaign poured significant resources into brand building. For instance, candidate Nenshi frequently donned the colour purple — a mixture of Liberal red and Conservative blue — to put himself above partisan politics.
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Nenshi has held onto his purple personal branding since making the jump to provincial politics last year, despite admitting on a recent podcast appearance that purple doesn't coordinate especially well with the Alberta NDP's traditional orange.
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Carter said Mamdani first crossed his radar a few weeks ago, when his social media algorithms started to feed him short videos, known online as 'reels,' promoting the upstart mayoral candidate.