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To be young and online in New York is to be aware of a set of social media cool kids — artists, podcasters, writers, models, folks about town — with the power to define what’s in, and what isn’t. Typically, these people anoint influencers, restaurants, bars, literary magazines and other cultural institutions, permitting them entry into a glossy universe of good taste.
Now they’ve set their sights on a mayoral candidate.
In the past three months, Zohran Mamdani, the upstart Democratic Socialist mayoral hopeful, has appeared onstage at Brooklyn Steel to speak to a sold-out concert by MJ Lenderman, the Pitchfork-approved singer-songwriter; he has tagged along with the ubiquitous TikTok host Kareem Rahma for his show “Keep the Meter Running”; he has accompanied the leftist personality Hasan Piker on his wildly popular streaming show; and he has posed at campaign events with figures of the Brooklyn cultural elite including the millennial celebrity chef supreme Alison Roman and Ella Emhoff, the fashion-darling stepdaughter of former Vice President Kamala Harris.
The event that best summed up the embrace of Mr. Mamdani’s campaign by New York City’s young microinfluencers, though, is one that took place in March at an East Village club.
It came about with the help of the publicist Kaitlin Phillips, who has a roster of clients that includes A24, Prada and the Substack phenom Emily Sundberg. Her name is synonymous with the world of Lower Manhattan hype and image making: fashionable, online, in the know.
Yet when the campaign found out in February that Ms. Phillips wanted to offer her services gratis, they had never heard of her.
Andrew Epstein, the Mamdani campaign’s communications director, started reading around about Ms. Phillips and was surprised that she wanted to help. “It’s a symbol of our ability to reach into networks far beyond the expected ones,” he said.
