Politics Is Fandom; Fascism Is Fanfic

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Zohran Mamdani never auditioned for Survivor, but one of his campaign’s final television ads placed him in the middle of the show’s infamous Tribal Council. For roughly 30 seconds, a handful of former Survivor contestants addressed the camera while explaining their decisions to vote Mamdani’s top opponent, Andrew Cuomo, off the “island” of Manhattan.

“Didn’t we already vote you out?” asks one former Survivor contestant.

The Survivor spot is just one of a handful of fandom-influenced ads that Mamdani’s campaign put out in the final weeks of the New York City mayoral race. They were designed not just to reach voters but to meet fan communities in their own worlds. The Mamdani campaign is one of the first to not just cultivate its own fandom but dip into the power of preexisting ones. Contemporary politics has recently become a multiverse of competing and intersecting fandoms, with the most successful politicians, like Mamdani, taking the political stakes of their campaigns and translating them into the emotional language those communities understand.

“We believed, because of the social nature of this show [Survivor], that we could convince more than just one person, but we could convince everybody at their watch party,” says Eric Stern, a Democratic strategist and senior vice president of the progressive messaging firm Fight Agency, which developed the ad. “It might spark a conversation, and that could lead to a group of people who might otherwise stay at home or vote for someone else to actually become part of the movement.”

Fandom is not just the act of loving a television show or having a parasocial relationship with a celebrity. It’s about belonging to a community of people with common interests who share lore and inside jokes, but also hero and villain narratives that color their worldviews. Political movements operate in a similar vein, but until recently the digital behaviors that come with stanning someone like Taylor Swift or creating fancams were reserved for pop culture figures.

President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement has proved just how contemporary politics could blend with fandom in powerful ways. For the past 10 years, Trump’s MAGA supporters have done more than simply show up to vote for him. They’ve created merch and traveled to campaign rallies like Deadheads. Online, they’ve spun elaborate lore about a deep state cabal that only Trump would be capable of dismantling. Not only did Trump’s campaign establish its own fan communities, it absorbed surrounding ones—whether that be professional wrestling or gaming aesthetics—to create access points for new supporters to flow into the movement.

The most recent example of MAGA’s fandom cross-contamination was with early-2000s-console gamers. In October, GameStop posted a policy resolution, in jest, formally declaring that the console wars, a memeified competition between video game console manufacturers, were over after news broke that a new addition to Microsoft’s Halo franchise, Halo: Campaign Evolved, would be cross-compatible with Sony’s PlayStation. Soon after the announcement went up, an official White House X account quoted the post, claiming that Trump “presided over the end of the 20-year Console Wars,” a nod to the president’s self-presentation as the “peace president.”

At the same time as this interaction between the White House and GameStop was happening, the Department of Homeland Security leveraged the moment to call on its audience to join Immigration and Customs Enforcement to “destroy The Flood.” The Flood, the main villains in the Halo franchise, were seemingly being compared to immigrants. That post has more than 100,000 likes as of publication.

This focus on cultivating the organizing power of fandom is a notable shift away from the influencer-heavy digital strategy guiding political campaigns of the last few years.

Covid-19 lockdown orders forced political campaigns in 2020 to quickly replace in-person politicking with new, online strategies. As a result, more and more candidates, like former president Joe Biden, started streaming with creators and hosting live events on platforms like Twitch. The Biden White House would regularly brief councils of political creators on policy issues, like student debt, and provide them with messaging ideas.

While working as the Biden White House’s director of digital strategy at the time, Rob Flaherty would often tout the administration’s work with influencers as a solution to an increasingly fractured media ecosystem. “It’s an incredibly fragmented, polarized media environment, and that means we have to go to a lot of different places to make sure people are hearing from the White House and hearing from the president,” Flaherty told NPR in 2022 of the administration’s work with influencers.

But in the years since, this reach hasn’t always translated into resonance. Many of the same podcasters who helped Trump win reelection last year, like the comedian Andrew Schulz, have turned on him, underscoring how precarious influencer loyalty can be.

What set the Mamdani campaign apart from the traditional influencer outreach conducted by the Biden administration was that the now mayor-elect and his team refused to treat influencers simply as rented megaphones. Instead of chasing creators with large followings or those who were already focused on politics, the Mamdani campaign sought out people who already shared the candidate’s stated values, whether they were subway riders or nurses working the night shift in neighborhoods like Elmhurst in Queens. Because of this alignment, the collaborations didn’t come off as forced political transactions, but rather as an organic extension of the communities the campaign and the creators were already part of.

“By addressing and engaging with individual communities, it allows [campaigns] to deliver their messages, and then to step away from those communities, and the communities will take the message that they just got, and then they'll do their own myth-making surrounding it,” says Kurt Braddock, an American University professor who studies political persuasion and social influence.

In contrast, the Cuomo campaign attempted to brute-force its way into the internet, courting MAGA creators and hiring meme consultants to pump out pro-Cuomo content in the waning weeks of the election. The Cuomo campaign’s trend-chasing posts, like memes about Mamdani’s résumé or its AI-generated videos mocking Mamdani’s fondness for former NYC mayor Bill de Blasio fell flat in comparison to what was coming out of its opposing campaign.

“We really were able to engage the fans and the creators and the stars themselves beyond that,” says Stern. “We were able to take the energy that was generated from these ads and really translate that into on-the-ground organizing and online narrative power in a way that massively benefited the campaign.”

Influencers aren’t disappearing from campaigns anytime soon, but fandom reframes their political power. It’s not just about a creator broadcasting a political message to millions of followers, but translating that message into the language and logic of their communities. Mamdani’s campaign recognized this, bringing creators into its fold to help shape its messaging, not just distribute it.