Green Party leader Zack Polanski has been holding talks with the campaign strategists behind New York’s newly elected left-wing mayor Zohran Mamdani, in an effort to replicate the social media approach that propelled the self-described socialist to one of the most high-profile political victories of recent years.
Polanski, who has positioned himself as an “eco-populist” within British politics, met online with Morris Katz, one of Mamdani’s senior strategists, in recent weeks. The Green leader was unable to travel to New York for an in-person meeting on environmental grounds, as he does not fly. Discussions are said to have centred on how Mamdani’s team used high-quality video content at scale to drive his campaign and dominate the political conversation on social media platforms.
The contrast in online reach between the two politicians is stark. Polanski currently has 670,000 followers on Instagram and 157,000 on TikTok, with his videos accumulating around 873,000 likes on the latter platform. Mamdani, by comparison, commands 11.5 million Instagram followers and 3.5 million on TikTok, where his videos have racked up 42 million likes. A recent clip in which the New York mayor announced a new tax on wealthy property owners — declaring “When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich; well, today we’re taxing the rich” — attracted millions of views within days of being posted.
A Green Party source told The Times that Polanski was keen to understand how strategic use of video had shaped Mamdani’s rise, and was considering hiring a dedicated videographer and refreshing his branding as part of a more deliberate social media push. “Mamdani has set the bar really high for producing a huge volume of high-quality video content to drive his campaign and there is lots we can learn from that,” the source said, adding that Polanski was “a natural” at social media but the party wanted to be “as strategic as possible” in how it deployed video to “own the narrative.”
Mamdani, 34, was elected mayor of New York in November, becoming both the youngest person to hold the role in over a century and the first Muslim mayor in the city’s history. He defeated independent candidate Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa on a platform built around rent freezes, city-owned grocery stores, free bus travel, universal childcare and tax increases on businesses and the wealthiest one per cent of New Yorkers.
