Photo by Mother Jones
Written by Josh Ishimatsu
Last week, Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for Mayor of New York City, met with Democratic lawmakers in Washington DC who wanted to learn more about his messaging/communications strategies in how he went from a virtual unknown to the clear winner against much-better funded and more widely-known and endorsed rivals. Since his surprise victory in the primary, lots of ink and electrons have been spilled about Mamdani’s savvy use of social media, his message discipline, his focus on everyday, “normal” cost-of-living issues, his coalition building across multiple communities, etcetera. All of these lessons are, I believe, deeply applicable to us here in Silicon Valley, another high-cost and highly-fractured, multicultural metropolis. In this month’s column, I want to tease out and emphasize a few of these lessons that are top of my mind right now, using Mamdani’s proposal for publicly-owned grocery stores in NYC as the main vehicle to make my points.
When I first heard Mamdani was proposing publicly-owned grocery stores…
I was skeptical. I am old enough that, as a kid, I was subject to Reagan-era anti-Soviet propaganda about breadlines and the perils of government-controlled distribution of food. I also have some vague notion about produce being a loss leader for grocery stores. So, as an innately wonky person, my first reaction was a question about how a publicly run grocery store with a focus on fresh produce (as Mamdani proposes) would actually be able to lower prices. But, as I think about the proposal more in the big picture and less in the weeds, I think it’s brilliant. It’s a case study that is instructive about Mamdani’s use of policy as a communication/relationship building tool.
So, just to be clear, I don’t have a strong opinion about the proposal on its merits and this column is not about that. I’ve done a little more reading to convince me that the proposal is not from nowhere (see here, for e.g.). But I still don’t feel comfortable enough about the economics and logistics of corporate grocery store alternatives to have a well-formed opinion of the feasibility of the proposal. But the feasibility of the idea is besides the points that I want to make.
In this interview (link to youtube video) around the 32 minute mark, one of the interviewers is pushing Mamdani on the feasibility of the public groceries proposal. I will talk a little more about this clip below, but Mamdani’s exchange/response encapsulates what I want us to learn from Mamdani’s groceries proposal: speak from the heart (and to the heart), be bold, and don’t fear failure (or deny the possibility of failure).
Speak from the heart
When we talk about policy, we typically assume that we are trying to convince somebody about the validity of a specific policy. And we assume that this is something that happens in the head. But when Mamdani talks policy, he flips it around. Mamdani uses policy to connect with people at the deeper level of values. And this is something that happens in the heart.
Sure, as many people will tell you, Mamdani talked about cost of living issues during a moment when people are especially focused on the cost of living. And this could be read as an opportunistic tactic to exploit the current mood (like Trump talking about “the grocery”). But, beneath the focus on cost of living, Mamdani was relentless in tying cost of living issues back to quality of life and then to his explicit belief that all New Yorkers deserved a high quality of life. This core value – that everybody deserves a high quality of life – is something that Mamdani always found a way to pivot back to. For example, when pressed about his relatively privileged childhood (as can be seen in this NPR interview around the 22 minute mark), Mamdani artfully uses the question to talk (passionately) about his conviction that all people deserve the same level of comfort, security, and sense of home that he had growing up. Policy proposals like publicly-owned grocery stores are the ways in which Mamdani gives form and substance to what might otherwise seem a disconnected/theoretical/pie in the sky statement of values.
And, of course, people’s policy recommendations always express their values at some level. So maybe it doesn’t seem like Mamdani is doing anything qualitatively much different than any other politician. But I think the difference, while subtle, is significant. It’s the difference that explains, in part, why Kamala Harris, who had more detailed and feasible policy proposals to address inflation and cost of living than Donald Trump, was less trusted to do anything about cost of living in the last election. Donald Trump spoke lots about inflation and the economy without saying much about specific policy besides asserting that he’d fix egg prices on Day One. But he spoke from the heart. Donald Trump’s heart happens to be a bubbling cauldron of narcissism and grievance. But his anger and frustration are real and legible (even though he barely cares about the price of groceries). Enough people identified with it and believed that he understood their hardship and that he would fight for them.
For those of us who live in the world of public policy, we are trained to think, speak, write, and argue in ways that are technocratic and anodyne. Policy is purposefully NOT about the feelings or relationships. But, in our current era of constant access and para-social relationships, these ways of being are no longer read as authentic. Policy platforms – that have no heart, that sound like they’ve been focus-group-tested, targeting an imaginary middle-America, that rely heavily on facts and figures – no longer connect with people. They are dull checklists, with enough giveaways to specific, siloed constituents such that they feel like they are getting something out of the political transaction. They vibe sanitized and business-as-usual. In contrast, Mamdani’s explicit, intentional focus on policies is a bridge to talk about values, to speak from the heart about his vision of New York. It is what Donald Trump does but not how Donald Trump does it.
The public groceries proposal is a vehicle for connecting to people directly (this candidate wants to do something about grocery prices), for building relationships that feel less transactional (he’s doing it because he is trying to address quality of life/cost of living in a comprehensive way).
The lesson for us, therefore, isn’t that we should become crackpot, rage-tweeters like the current president. Instead, we should minimize the wonky details of a policy (this will be hard for me and for organizations like SV@Home, who are proud of our policy nerdiness) and more about how our policies represent our vision, values, and passions. And how our vision, values, and passions are something that are shared and important.
Be bold
In our current attention economy, if you sound and look and act like everybody else (or what people perceive as mainstream/business-as-usual), you get no traction. One lesson from Mamdani’s victory is that going big and being bold helps you stand out from the crowd.
And it’s more than simply standing out from the crowd. I intend this learning from Mamdani not as a cynical exercise in being big and shiny and new only in order to attract attention. It is also an exhortation for progressives to stop shrinking ourselves.
As progressives in policy space, we are often watering down our proposals – self-compromising even before external forces make us do it. We pre-compromise because we think it helps with the feasibility of our ideas. We make ourselves smaller than we need to be in order to have more perceived real world impact. But, Mamdani’s lesson is that we don’t need to make this trade-off anymore (if we ever even had to).
Mamdani shows us that taking a big swing is how you tell people you care about them without telling them you care about them. You’re saying that you care enough to try something new. Publicly-owned grocery stores is just that type of big swing. It attracts attention AND it tells people who are struggling to put food on the table that they matter.
Don’t fear failure
Building on the metaphor from the paragraph above, if we are going to take big swings, we are going to have some big whiffs. We have to understand that there are going to be some swings and misses. We can’t fear failure.
In this current era, public policies are more about expressions of identity and ways to form para-social community than they are about actually getting things done. This is something that Donald Trump exploits better than anybody else. When Trump talks about building the wall, the people who like it when he talks about building the wall don’t actually care about whether or not he’s made any real progress on building the wall or whether or not Mexico paid for any of it. Just like they don’t care if he actually revives Alcatraz or forces sports teams to re-adopt their racist team names or whatever random brain spasm he posts to social media.
Not that I am advocating that we follow Trump’s example and propose half-baked, infeasible things that we never intend to deliver. Lying is not a sustainable organizing or relationship building mode. Public accountability still matters. Getting things done still matters. We should be proposing things that, in good faith, we think will work. But, we need to liberate ourselves from fear of failure, from the need to be perfect every time.
This is where I think Mamdani excels – this balance of sincerity, audacity, and willingness to experiment. And here, I’d cite back to the interview (link to youtube video) I linked to at the beginning of this piece, where, a little after the 22 minute mark, Mamdani says something to the effect of, “Look, I get what you’re saying. Here are all the reasons why I think my proposal will work. But you could be right. It might not work. But neither is what we’re doing right now. If we want to fix things that aren’t working, we’re going to have to try some new things. Not all of them are going to work. But, for things that matter and that are big and important, we can’t be afraid to experiment.” And this statement, right here, is what I find so exciting and inspiring about Mamdani. This is how I want us (myself included) to be better in terms of policy.
If we want transformative change, we need to be more generative, more creative, and more willing to fail. If we look at tech – the industry that is most transforming our world right now – and venture capital, 75% of venture capital investments are a total loss but the surviving enterprises are transformative (for better and for worse). Not that we want tech’s failure rate, but that we need to normalize the possibility of failure, like Mamdani does. And then learn from it and grow from it.