It’s the people, stupid. Most commentary on Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor of New York City focuses on policy, technology, and charisma. Were rent freezes, free buses, and universal childcare the key? Or did victory depend on an unusually gifted candidate, more memorable videos, vulnerable opponents, or dissatisfaction with the status quo?

All of this mattered. But none can explain how a campaign for mayor could generate such fresh, organized, and sustained civic engagement at scale. The campaign did not only talk about people, relying on polling to turn their opinions into marketing data. It engaged with people by inviting them to join in creating the campaign itself—through which votes are secured and governing power generated. The 104,000 volunteers didn’t just recite a “message” devised by some marketing pro.

They accepted responsibility for leading neighborhood canvassing, recruiting people to canvass, coaching volunteers to lead conversations, and celebrating their communities. The campaign distinguished itself not only in what it communicated, but in who communicated, how they communicated, and what they were building: renewed grassroots muscle.

How Politics Became an Industry Thirty years ago, I warned that the interaction of new technology with an expanding electoral marketplace was destroying democratic politics. Campaigns began to target individual voters for one-way messaging, asking less of them as citizens and more as funders, replacing motivated volunteers with paid canvassers, and deferring campaign leadership to highly paid consultants.

I called it putting “voters in the crosshairs.”The transformation was already underway, but the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo held that expenditure limits would constrain political expression—i.e., money is speech. Television, polling, direct mail, and professional consulting were already changing campaigns. Buckley gave constitutional protection to an accelerating demand for money—the fuel for an industry whose revenues grow with the cost of elections. Later decisions, culminating in Citizens United, accelerated the process even more.

Federal election spending alone approached $16 billion in 2024. Add state and local races and the permanent apparatus of fundraising, data, media, and consulting, and the result is a vast industry dependent on continuously expanding political expenditure.

Candidates once depended on parties, unions, churches, civic associations, neighborhood leaders, and other organized constituencies to reach voters. These institutions were hardly innocent. Political machines could be corrupt, coercive, and exclusionary, and civic associations excluded Americans by race, gender, religion, or class. The point is not to romanticize that world.

But the dependency of candidates on organized constituencies gave them the leverage to exercise real accountability. Campaigns learned they could avoid that accountability by hiring pollsters, consultants, advertising firms, fundraising specialists, data vendors, and paid canvassing operations—all of which had to be paid for. Accountability to organized people was exchanged for accountability to organized money. Campaigns spoke at voters rather than listening to them, much less inviting them to exercise their judgment or share responsibility for political work.

Citizens were recast as consumers. Members became lists, dues became donations, local leaders became influencers, conversation became messaging, political education became targeting, and organization became digital infrastructure rented for an election and dismantled afterward. Information About People or Experience of People?

Something even more fundamental changed. Marshall McLuhan’s observation in the 1950s that “the medium is the message” was not only about television. The means of communication shapes the experience of communication. Political communication mediated by polling, advertising, e-mail, text, and social media was transformed from a lived experience of people acting together into digitized information about people acting on their own.

When we converse face to face, we encounter another person who is embodied, unpredictable, and capable of questioning, surprising, resisting, or moving us. We experience tone, humor, hesitation, discomfort, and silence. We do not merely receive a message. We experience another person responding to our presence as we respond to theirs—what sociologist Hartmut Rosa describes as an experience of “resonance.”Mediated contact cannot reproduce the embodied reciprocity of sharing space—or, more importantly, the accountability created by undertaking consequential work together.

The electoral marketing industry substitutes information about people for experience of them. Voters become profiles assembled from demographic categories, consumer preferences, followers, donors, persuadable targets, and units of engagement. The danger is not only that the information may be wrong. It is that information about people substitutes for entering into relationships with people.

Campaigns then need more money to purchase communication, data, and field capacity. Candidates become more dependent on donors and vendors and less dependent on organized constituencies. As those constituencies weaken, campaigns must purchase more of the capacity they once supplied. This not only allows wealth to speak more loudly. It transforms the machinery through which political voice itself is produced.

What Organizing Builds Social movements have historically interrupted this cycle. At their best, labor, civil rights, women’s, environmental, and other movements brought new constituencies into politics by developing leaders capable of organizing others. But in recent years many organizations with movement aspirations adopted the electoral industry’s methods: professionally managed advocacy organizations skilled at raising money, building e-mail lists, buying advertising, and mobilizing individuals to react to the latest assault. Rallies, petitions, and fundraising matter—but they are not substitutes for enduring organization. Mobilizing can produce a crowd. Organizing builds a constituency.

Organizing enables people to deliberate, decide, lead, and develop others’ capacity to act. People learn political agency by exercising it with others. Trust grows when they make commitments and take risks together. Judgment develops through succeeding, failing, reflecting, and trying again. These are not messages that can be texted. They are experiences that must be practiced.

Mamdani’s campaign renewed this older, more democratic means of producing electoral power. It did not appear overnight or spring from one charismatic candidate. New York City’s Democratic Socialists of America provided a political home in which organizers such as field director Tascha Van Auken found others with whom they shared values, built relationships through common work, experienced losses as well as victories, and learned to place organized people at the center of electoral politics.

The campaign did not dispense with money, data, professionals, or technology. Nor should it have. The question is what—and whom—the technology enables. Does a new contact receive another text message, or an invitation to join others doing the work? Does the campaign acquire an e-mail address, or develop a leader? Does technology extract attention, money, and votes—or facilitate relationships that ground shared learning and action?

Most campaigns use technology to reduce their dependency on people, especially when the absence of motivated volunteers turns door-knocking into a paid service, often contracted out. Mamdani’s campaign used technology to extend the reach of their people. A text or video might begin the process, but its destination was a canvass launch, a conversation at a door, a team debrief, or another volunteer assuming responsibility. Digital communication motivated shared experience rather than substituting for it.

Andrew Epstein, one of the campaign’s media strategists, called the videos “the first touch, the first knock at the door.”Without the organizing that followed, he explained, people would have related to Mamdani as they relate to any other online creator. One volunteer first encountered the campaign on Instagram and decided to attend a January launch once: If she hated it, she never had to return.

She went alone. But online contact opened the way to in-person experience; experience became participation; participation became responsibility; and responsibility became leadership. The important fact was not that social media offered new information, but that it could open a pathway from information to experience and from attention to agency.

None of this diminishes Mamdani’s importance. It locates his authenticity. He appeared not as a product perfected by a messaging firm but a human being sharing the evolution of a story: respectful of where he came from, grateful for who he had become, and hopeful about what people could accomplish together.