The Visual Lessons from Zohran Mamdani's Campaign

The Wire

16 hours ago

Culture
Kavita Kabeer
2 minutes ago
In the US, where politics is increasingly reduced to sanitised marketing, Zohran Mamdani's campaign visuals hit like a burst of fresh air: bold, disruptive, and impossible to ignore.
If you were to recall Zohran Mamdani's image, you'd possibly see him in a sea of yellow and a distinct persian blue, inching towards violet. After running a remarkable campaign, equally rooted in grassroots activities and online mediums, the visual design of Mamdani's campaign becomes a curious study of radical purpose meeting rebellious joy.
To begin with, the fonts! I mean we don't really pay attention to fonts, yet they play with our perceptions all the time. Think of the elegant, clean, italic fonts on luxury items, and the bold reds, yellows, blacks on most shopfronts, each serving their own purpose.
From the start, Mamdani's branding rejected the stale, overly polished aesthetic of establishment politics. Most placards, posters and videos spelled Zohran's name in capital letters using a bright yellow colour with a shadow of orange on a blue background. If he were a John or Jonathan, his campaign could have focussed on only his face, but his name needed to be spelled so that people actually learn to pronounce it.
These small things, planned or not, tell us a lot about the way association and inclusion work. This is also where the warmth of the colours come into picture. The fonts and the logo weave into Zohran's own quirky personality. The typeface is drawn from Boheld, but several placards play with the font, and nearly look hand-drawn. The designer behind the campaign, Aneesh Bhoopathy, told Curbed that New York iconography, such as taxicab yellow, MetroCard primary colors, bodega awnings, stuff people are familiar with in the New York street, were on their mood board.
And then, of course, there was Bollywood! The video that you have now seen circulated on every social media platform, where Zohran's Hindi, and Bollywood's dialogues give mini-cinema vibes, inviting you to dig who this fellow is, set the tone for most South Asians. When the dialogue goes, ' Mere paas paisa hai, bangla hai, gaadi hai, naukar hai, bank balance hai, tumhare paas kya hai?', Zohran strikes an SRK pose and says, 'Aap.'
'You had me at 'aap', ' commented a user on Instagram. And that summarises what makes content relatable on social media.
It's quirky writing, placement, yet never deviating from the core message. Zohran's team does everything right. Interestingly, some folks wondered if his award-winning filmmaker mother had a role to play behind his videos. But that is solely his creative team's work, Zohran confirmed in one of his interviews.
The tone of his videos is not just warm, it is people centric; he is always in places that belong to people. He is among them, even when he is alone. He listens and talks, answers questions right away. His go-to-core messages, rent freeze, free buses, universal childcare, appear in almost all of the campaign videos.
His grassroot campaign and digital campaign ran parallel to each other. For instance, his team organised a Zohram Mamdani look-alike contest, which became a space to engage people at the grassroots, while drawing crowds of young internet-savvy people, and that's how we became incidental yet essential viewers and observers of this campaign from far off lands.
The hype on Instagram has been real, Mamdani clocked in about 800k followers just a week before the primary election, just as he emerged as the winner, he hit 1 million, and by the time this article was written his follower count stood at 2.2 million.
Lessons for India
In India, we have caught on to the social media hype, but just like the crushing inequality on the ground, our online spaces remain unequal. The collaborations of our politicians reflect a power-imbalance, and so do their videos/reels.
Our favourite genre of political reels is cars zooming on roads one after the other, then the slow-mo garlanding of the leader getting down. Or we have Modi ji taking a lone walk on a newly-inaugurated bridge, with random motivational music. It is worth mentioning that Rahul Gandhi's team has tried to do something different for quite some time now.
Starting with his Bharat Jodo Yatra, reels of Rahul Gandhi talking to people began appearing in our feeds. Many were a departure from the norm, they were planned, shot, and composed differently. Since then we have seen Rahul Gandhi meeting a variety of people from farmers, cobblers, trailers, factory workers to students and unemployed youth. His videos of taking a bus ride, or ziplining in Kerala are refreshing in Indian politics.
One lesson for us is how we see culture, is it something that is happening in the background, or something we are actively creating? Be it on the ground or online.
The proliferation of smartphones in the country has certainly added a layer to the culture we are creating. Yet, our political campaigns are not at par with engaging with that culture. We like to 'record' our activities and 'inform' our audience, not 'engage' with them as equal participants on the internet. We want creators to make reels for the political parties covertly, but deny, or discourage active engagement.
Right now, we pull some of the highest numbers in the world on Facebook, Youtube and Instagram. In fact, BJP understands this better and hence, we have seen every BJP-ruled state come up with its own version of 'influencer reach programs.'
Yet, we are far from Zohran Mamdani's style of campaign, simply because we don't let people be the star of the show.
Kavita Kabeer is a writer and satirist, currently helming the show #Cracknomics for the Wire.
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