You might think the successful primary campaigns of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Texas Senate candidate James Talarico are as different as, well, New York City and Texas. Mamdani is a Muslim democratic socialist, Talarico a Christian populist. But Michael Lange contends they both triumphed with similar strategies.
The Texas Senate Primary, pitting charismatic State Representative James Talarico against firebrand Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, featured almost none of the sharp ideological contrasts that defined the New York City Mayor’s race. … Still, there are remarkable similarities in how Talarico and Mamdani ran their underdog campaigns, compared with how Crockett and Cuomo – frontrunners flush with name recognition – failed to capitalize on their pronounced early advantages.
These nuances, not explicitly ideological, translated into how their coalitions manifested: Crockett’s base (older, Black) mirrored Cuomo’s, whereas Talarico’s coalition (younger, college-educated, White, Hispanic, lower-propensity) is reminiscent of Mamdani’s.
Mamdani and Talarico combined style and substance. They consistently released algorithm-oriented vertical videos, becoming omnipresent in the feeds of younger voters. (Talarico has credited Mamdani’s “Halalflation” video for inspiring a similar spot on high prices at the Texas State Fair.)
Each made a point to campaign seemingly everywhere, while making deliberate and nuanced outreach to lower-propensity voters. Both modeled a positive campaign ethos, rarely going negative on their opponents, while eschewing barn-burning rhetoric for inclusive and direct public addresses – neither ever raises his voice in speeches.
Told to downplay their religion, neither Mamdani, a practicing Muslim, nor Talarico, a devout Presbyterian (and seminarian), obeyed such tired orthodoxy. Ahead of the Democratic Primary in June, Mamdani walked the length of Manhattan, a seventeen-mile sojourn, alongside his supporters; when first running to flip a state legislative seat from red to blue, Talarico crisscrossed the entirety of his suburban district on foot.
But most importantly, these common aesthetics and values were paired with a unifying, class-based message: Mamdani’s articulation of the affordability crisis has been widely adopted (to varying degrees of success), but Talarico’s “it’s not left versus right, it’s top versus bottom” has emerged as a well-calibrated, swing-state adaptation.
Many political pundits have focused on the individual brilliance of Mamdani and Talarico, routinely at the expense of the voters who came together to support them both. In doing so, they have sorely underestimated the replicability of their respective coalitions elsewhere in the United States.