Last fall, the world watched as New York City elected a young, progressive candidate — a virtual unknown at the start — as mayor.
Zohran Mamdani’s campaign put a spotlight on cost of living issues and was characterized by colourful messaging, snappy social media videos and a where-there’s-a-will-there’s-a-way approach to making changes in New York.
Since his victory, Mamdani has introduced city-run grocery stores, free public child care for two-year-olds and a mayoral office dedicated to protecting workers’ rights.
His approach to governance in New York became a sensation — and seems to be an inspiration for many candidates in Toronto’s municipal election, just a month away.
Walk-and-talk, on-the-street social media videos have become a staple for mayoral candidates Chris Alexander, Brad Bradford and incumbent Olivia Chow as a way to explain their platforms.
The style is also extremely popular among councillor candidates. Davenport incumbent Alejandra Bravo posted a video of her shooting hoops to promote more food and drink options in parks. Josh Matlow, the incumbent in Toronto–St. Paul’s, made a video on the Eglinton LRT talking about transit policy.
Some candidates have chosen to use colours close to Mamdani’s signature blue, orange and red in their marketing campaigns, while others are using a similar bubbly serif font on their campaign’s social media.
Saman Tabasinejad, executive director of third-party political organizing group Progress Toronto, which works to get progressive candidates, including Chow, elected, said Mamdani is a “generational talent” when it comes to communication.
CBC Toronto’s election podcast breaks down how candidates keep copying Mamdani:
She said he is able to explain policy ideas in a way that helps voters see a clear path forward to a better city. She’s not surprised Toronto candidates are taking inspiration from Mamdani, but cautioned some candidates may be co-opting his style to promote otherwise clashing platforms.
“If you want to be like Mamdani, that’s great,” she said. “But you’ve got to be like him in many other ways.”
Social media in place of traditional coverage
Chiara Padovani, a progressive candidate in York–South Weston, said Mamdani’s social media videos were a clever workaround given his initial lack of traditional media coverage.
Mamdani, a former state assembly member, was up against Andrew Cuomo, who was previously governor and comes from a political family.
“[Mamdani] wasn’t going to be getting mainstream media attention and he didn’t let that stop him,” Padovani said.
It’s something Padovani — who came within 94 votes of beating city council’s longest-standing incumbent, Frances Nunziata, in 2022 — says she can relate to. She says Mamdani’s strategy can be applied to city councillor races at a hyperlocal level.
“I think candidates who are challenging a mainstream candidate or a mainstream politician do need to find creative ways to get their message across,” she said.
In one of his social media videos, Uthish Ganesh, a history and English teacher and candidate in Scarborough Centre, promised to remove a bus lane along Kennedy Road, saying it creates gridlock for drivers and other commuters.
Scarborough Centre candidate calls for bus lane removal on Kennedy Road:
While the style of the video, right down to the campaign colours, is akin to Mamdani’s, the New York mayor’s policies are very pro-transit.
Ganesh told CBC that while some of his politics differ from Mamdani’s, he was inspired by the New York mayor’s ability to mobilize voters face-to-face.
“We knocked on doors for months before we posted anything worth watching,” he said. “If you make videos first, you’re guessing what people care about. If you knock first, you already know.”
Winning the ground game
Mamdani had a team of nearly 100,000 volunteers and his success in on-the-street canvassing was a major lift in the campaign. In comparison, Progress Toronto currently has a team of around 3,000 volunteers, according to Tabasinejad.
“He won because of a ground game. He was outspent by quite a bit,” said Tabasinejad.
Brian Evans, a politics and public administration professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, said that kind of mobilization is unlikely to happen in Toronto’s mayoral race, because there’s less political polarization here.
Mamdani’s campaign “drew the ire of Trump and it drew the ire of the uber, uber wealthy,” Evans said. “It’s going to be a totally different thing here.”
Zohran Mamdani is shaking up New York’s mayoral race with a socialist platform that includes rent control and public transportation. The front-runner’s message is drawing both support and backlash from the city’s financial elite, including the U.S. president.
Chloe Brown, a progressive who ran for mayor in 2022 and 2023 — finishing third and seventh, respectively — is now running for councillor in Etobicoke North. She is up against incumbent Coun. Vincent Crisanti and eight other candidates.
Brown said left-wing voters in Toronto, particularly young ones, like to jump on the bandwagon of an exciting candidate, but fall short when it comes to volunteering in campaigns and even showing up at the polls.
“So you get stuck wanting what New York [has], because you don’t put in the effort of New York,” she said.
Brown also noted that Toronto already has a progressive mayor in Chow, although some councillors have opted not to adopt her policies in their wards.
“It’s not enough to want one Mamdani. You need to want 15 of them,” said Brown.
Toronto’s progressive mayor
This city copied some of Mamdani’s ideas even before the election races kicked off.
Toronto council has greenlit a city-run grocery store pilot, approved a pitch to hire citizen snow shovellers and moved forward on banning surveillance pricing on groceries.
All three were introduced in New York by Mamdani’s administration. Here in Toronto, it was Chow who pitched the snow shovellers and the surveillance pricing ban, while Anthony Perruzza, incumbent in Humber River–Black Creek, put forward the motion on grocery stores.
Chow also raised taxes for homes over $3 million last year, in a move similar to Mamdani’s tax on luxury second homes. The Toronto and New York mayors also have similar politics on tenant protections and supporting city libraries.
Chow and Mamdani’s office have in fact had meetings since he took office, a source in Chow’s office told CBC Toronto. Chow was also in New York this week for a cities summit, co-chaired by Mamdani, and met with him one-on-one.
One key distinction between the Toronto mayoral race and the last New York City vote is that the progressive has the incumbent advantage here, says Tabasinejad, which means Chow’s campaign will have different challenges than Mamdani’s did.
In any case, the issues that defined the New York mayoral race — housing and affordability — are certainly at play in Toronto’s election, Evans says.
“But it will have nowhere near the drama.”
