Mamdani's club campaign was about mobilising volunteer grassroots activists rather than just voters. The club is then not just a cynical space to hoover up votes at the last minute, but an invitation to be part of something bigger: collective political action.
Banseka Kayembe
After Zohran Mamdani’s recent win in New York, everybody has been busy drawing lessons. Some point to his sharp messaging and powerful communication skills, others praise his social media game: smooth, punchy, likeable, and instantly recognisable by that nostalgic cinematography tinge. There are those who see his victory as proof that left politics still cuts through when you organise properly, but there’s another sub-element that has slipped under the analysis radar: the campaign trail in the club. Remarkably, Mamdani spent the proceeding evening of election day in reportedly six different New York night clubs, delivering his message of rent controls and free buses to the partying masses.
I’m maybe not the best person to write this piece. I do like a little party and dance, but I’m firmly in my thirties now, not rich, and living (almost) in London so I often fall victim to the hollowing out of contemporary nightlife. This combination of things has relegated most of my partying to the odd night out at some random warehouse venue in the sticks of south east london once every 20-30 business days, as opposed to it being a regular lifestyle occurrence. I also don’t want to do one of those reductive “How Mamdani Won!” pieces that tries to whittle down Mamdani’s victory to one particular thing. There were loads of posts of him dancing behind the decks to Charly Black’s dancehall anthem “Gyal You a Party Animal” but what is the utility behind campaigning in the club? And could that work here in the UK?
We want to keep our journalism independent, people powered, with no paywalls and away from big corporate and billionaire funders- but we need your help!
Please consider becoming a subscriber or making a one off donation, for as little as 99p
The club has a long history of melding the personal with the political. It's a communal experience even if you’ve rocked up on your own (“in the clerb, we all fam” as the tiktok saying goes), there’s a freedom gained from pleasure for pleasure’s sake, and like so many songs have reminded us it’s a place to forget our day to day worries: eg. 1970s band Chic’s classic lyrics “Good Times/Leave Your Cares Behind” or Beyonce’s “release ya job!” on Break My Soul. The dancefloor in particular is somewhat a social equaliser. Money or a conventionally handsome face simply can’t make up for being rhythmless.
José Esteban Muñoz described ballroom culture specifically as a “rehearsal for freedom”: a space that hints at the world we want to build. If we extrapolate this further, the club is where you can imagine your best life. Things that probably wouldn’t normally happen, occur in the haze of club smoke: romantic trysts blossom, new gender expressions get explored, you can twirl with strangers, long held confessions get spilled after a few swigs of alcohol (or something else), friendships can spring up in an instant via the holy site of the girls bathroom that IRL would have taken months to take root if ever. It’s a temporary utopia, erected just for the night.
With all that in mind, Mamdani’s broad politics of hope, promising to make elements of that temporary utopia into a reality probably plays well in the club, as well as having the added bonus of making him seem like a normal person who actually likes to go out. Mamdani actually has a background in music (he was in his words a “B List rapper” prior to entering local politics) so he probably feels genuinely at home in these environments. His now viral club crawl means I associate songs I already like (e.g.: Kenrick Lamar’s “They Not Like Us” or Jay Z and Alicia Key’s “Empire York State of Mind”) with his campaign. Pivotally, he wasn’t just asking party-goers to vote for him, but to campaign by continuing to “knock on doors,” suggesting his club campaign was about mobilising volunteer grassroots activists rather than just voters. The club is then not just a cynical space to hoover up votes at the last minute, but an invitation to be part of something bigger: collective political action.
I’ve thought a lot recently about how UK politicians have failed to harness the power of popular culture (I’ll share more on this soon). An exception to this is Reform UK who are embedding themselves in football with the rollout of their own football shirts, and there’s officially a Reform pub in Blackpool. The left of course has lots of organic cultural spaces (eg Glastonbury) but they tend to be grassroots. We haven’t as of yet seen a left wing political party indulge as much in popular culture as a means to electoral success. Perhaps the closest we’ve seen was Angela Rayner partying behind the decks in Ibiza but she wasn’t really campaigning, just having a good time. Given the state of this Labour government, what hopeful message could she possibly have shouted from behind the DJ booth? "Tuition fees are now 10k instead of 9!"?
Our nightlife is in some ways on life support, and arguably has been fragmented into smaller more disparate venues, so it probably is harder to use clubs to reach the masses. Is a club crawl even possible now in London for example without having to hop in an uber for half an hour between venues? I’m saying this with some affection, but there is also something distinctly low-key miserable about the way we do politics. It’s not glamorous and big, but done in drafty church halls and small crumbling school buildings. Still, nightlife here persists, a political story of survival; it’s worth mentioning the club isn’t just full of partygoers having a good time, it can only function with workers: bar staff, shot girls, bouncers sweating blood and probably tears.
Mamdani’s club crawl offers a provocation to us rather than a copy-and-paste template. It asks what it would look like if politicians treated cultural spaces as valid political spaces, not just with potential voters but as people who can mobilise at a grassroots level and be part of a movement. I think the Labour party has shown itself to be profoundly scared of grassroots politics of any kind, favoring dogmatic centralised control at the top. Perhaps though, with the more democratic Green Party we may not be far from Zack Polanski mobilising from behind the decks. In the meantime, the club utopia persists.
Thanks for reading our article! We know there's power in people and really appreciate everyone who reads our work.
Give us a follow on Instagram and TikTok to see more of our independent journalism.