Zohran Mamdani’s Video Team Is Just Getting Started

Zohran with team members Anthony DiMieri, Donald Borenstein, Olivia Becker, Debbie Saslaw and Andrew Epstein at a shoot, September 2025.

anthony dimieri

It is the crisp afternoon of November 5th, 2025. I am joined on call by Anthony DiMieri, a Brooklyn-based film producer, and Debbie Saslaw, who’s previously produced videos for Showtime and HBO. DiMieri is running across town for a film shoot and Saslaw has another call in about 20 minutes, but both bear the unmistakeable signs of a long night. Partying hard, were they? I ask. The question is of course, rhetorical; I know the answer is yes. I also know the celebration was more than well deserved, for as of the previous night, DiMieri, Saslaw, and their scrappy video team had just helped pull off one of the biggest upsets in New York’s electoral history. Their client? Zohran Mamdani.

It has now been three weeks since it happened. From polling at one percent at the beginning, Democratic Socialist candidate Mamdani beat impossible odds to pull off a joyful grassroots campaign that made him Mayor of New York City. He, his family, and his collaborators have been subject to every criticism under the sun. Too brown. Not brown enough. Too Socialist. Not Democratic enough. Too young.

And yet, most everyone seems to be in agreement about one thing: in what has been called a David vs. Goliath race, one of the biggest rocks in Mamdani’s arsenal was his video team.

The Dream Team

When Donald Borenstein joins the conversation a few weeks after victory, they’re walking through downtown Brooklyn, powering through zero-degree weather, dying earphones and patchy internet. The scene is perfectly on-brand for a team that became famous for walk-and-talk videos shot guerrilla-style across all five boroughs. “We are, in some ways, the world’s most successful student film production,” Borenstein laughs.

It’s a humble assessment for a Director of Video who, along with documentary filmmaker Olivia Becker and the Melted Solids duo of DiMieri and Saslaw, arguably fundamentally changed how political campaigns communicate. Their weapon of choice: relentless authenticity, stripped of the polish that usually characterizes political media.

None of them came from traditional political backgrounds. DiMieri describes himself as “basically a filmmaker”, someone who helps friends with film auditions and produces independent films.

Saslaw had worked on Mamdani’s first campaign in 2020, but her background was in entertainment production. Producer Olivia Becker had spent years making documentaries, including work at VICE News covering politics from the outside. Borenstein’s background was “largely in journalism and documentary work,” including reporting on taxi strikes in 2021.

The team’s role was to translate Mamdani’s vision into a visual language that could reach beyond traditional political audiences. They shot in Bath Beach Brooklyn, the top of the Bronx, the middle of Staten Island. They interviewed Bangladeshi labor leaders, taxi drivers working overnight shifts, and everyday New Yorkers whose concerns rarely make it into political discourse.

“None of us came from the D.C. consultant world,” Becker explains when I reach her. “We didn’t have a playbook. Our playbook was: let’s make stuff that people will watch and that will captivate them.”

That playbook delivered results that bordered on the miraculous.

Even before his own videos took flight, Mamdani featured on viral social media series Subway Takes, which incidentally is produced by DiMieri. In his first appearance in June 2024, host Kareem Rahma asked Mamdani, “What’s your take?”, to which he replied, “Eric Adams is a terrible mayor.” About a year later, two days before the mayoral primaries, Mamdani appeared on Subway Takes again, this time with “I should be the mayor.”

In the months leading up to the primary, videos like “Halalflation” — where Mamdani investigated rising street food prices with halal cart vendors — racked up millions of views on social media. “That was always Zohran’s idea,” Saslaw and DiMieri stress. The video exploded online. “Nobody else would even think of that,” DiMieri reflects. “Zohran’s intuition to be like, this is a place the government is failing New Yorkers, so specific.”

The “walk video,” where Mamdani trekked from the top of Manhattan to the bottom, greeting New Yorkers along the way, became the defining visual statement of the primary. Each piece was shot with minimal equipment, edited quickly, and released with a frequency that would exhaust most production teams.

“Between the previous four days before the election, I was just like, I have no idea what time it is, what day it is,” Becker recalls. “It’s just running through the tape.”

From Obscurity to Phenomenon

The evolution of the campaign’s video strategy tells the story of Mamdani’s rise in miniature. In the early days, they could film anywhere. Mamdani would show up on a Citi bike, they’d shoot on the sidewalk, and no one would stop them.

“In April of last year, not that many people knew who he was,” Becker says. “Andrew and Donald have stories of just driving around in their car and begging people to talk to them.”

“My goal was to make Zohran a public figure,” Saslaw explains of their strategy for the primaries. “The thing the left has gotten wrong for so long is communication. Zohran can speak to a more broad coalition of people, and I knew he was capable of doing that at a time where our politics was so bleak and depressing.”

Most endearing was the cultural references liberally sprinkled through his videos that appealed to a vast majority of ethnicities across the diverse city. “The strong cultural method comes direct from Zohran,” DiMieri tells me. “All we can really do, including Olivia and Donald and Andrew — none of whom are South Asian or Ugandan — is translate it.”

By the primary’s end, everything changed. When they tried to recreate the first Fordham Road video, crowds swarmed him within minutes. “He couldn’t walk that far because he was getting mobbed,” Saslaw remembers. “A woman was kissing the flyer of him, saying ‘we’re praying and fasting for you.'”

The logistical challenges forced creative evolution. With Mamdani now a known quantity, the team had to adapt.

“In the primary, it was more: how do we get people to know who he is?” Becker explains. “After he won the primary, he didn’t need to be introduced to the world. It was more like, ‘Okay, now let’s show how he’s gonna be mayor.'”

The team shifted toward more controlled environments, launched the “Until It’s Done” series of desk-based speeches, the brainchild of Borenstein and Mamdani’s speechwriter Julian Gerson, and leaned into events with labor groups and community organizations. But the core philosophy remained: meet people where they are, speak to their real concerns, and never condescend.

They also built what Saslaw calls the “Zohran-iverse”—a rotating cast of real New Yorkers who appeared across multiple videos. Bangladeshi labor leaders, taxi drivers, everyday voters became recurring characters, creating “this big tent community that’s now citywide,” as DiMieri puts it.

The influencer strategy became crucial. The campaign brought on “influencer wrangler” Emilia Rowland to coordinate with niche content creators across the city. “I would be like, why does Zohran have to talk to that person?” Saslaw admits. “Random. But then I’d see bodega cats and go, oh, that’s the influencer I like.”

The team also secured major endorsements that doubled as content opportunities. Bernie Sanders sat down for an interview, and afterward, as DiMieri recalls, “pulled all of us aside and gave us basically a five-minute pep talk about what we were doing and how this social media approach was a revolutionary thing.”

Against the Money Machine

The opposition was staggering. More than 20 billionaires — whom Mamdani has said should not exist as a concept — poured millions like water into super PACs working to prevent his victory. Fix the City, the largest pro-Cuomo PAC, alone spent $32 million around four times what Mamdani’s entire campaign was legally allowed to accept in funds. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg contributed over $13 million to pro-Cuomo efforts between the primary and general election. Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman donated $1.75 million across multiple anti-Mamdani PACs. Members of the Lauder family contributed nearly $2.6 million combined.

“They’re spending more money than I would even tax them,” laughed Mamdani in an interview with MSNBC.

Against this onslaught, the video team had something money couldn’t buy: authenticity and a candidate who genuinely connected with voters.

“We knew it was a good strategy,” Saslaw says of their plan to have Mamdani simply talk to everyday New Yorkers. “But we didn’t know how quickly it would catch on.”

The Human Cost

The final stretch of the campaign would test just how much their team could withstand. “[Election] night was the first time I slept in months,” DiMieri tells me. Borenstein scheduled a double root canal three days after the election just to force rest.

The final days were brutal. Becker describes one 72-hour blur: filming nightclubs Saturday, filming all day Sunday, Knicks game Sunday night, walking across a bridge at dawn Monday.

DiMieri describes Mamdani’s stamina with awe: “Saturday night [weekend before voting day] after we shot in six nightclubs, the last stop was on this corner for three different creators to do TikToks with him at two in the morning. He’d been out since 7 a.m.”

The team protected each other through the brutal aspects of the campaign too. As Mamdani faced increasingly vitriolic attacks—racism, Islamophobia, and coordinated smear campaigns funded by billionaire-backed super PACs—the video team absorbed some of the overflow.

“This close-knit team of people have become my dearest friends,” Borenstein says. “You don’t get that on any old campaign.”

“It hits him and it hits the other members of our team who are Muslim and not white in a much bigger way,” Becker reflects. “But Zohran approaches it with utter fearlessness. There’s no bitterness, and I can see how for a lesser politician, there would be more kind of resentment.”

A Replicable Strategy?

In the weeks since Mamdani’s victory, the team has been inundated with requests.

Emails from France, Italy, the UK, a cross-European parliament party. Progressive candidates across the United States studying the campaign’s social media strategy. A politician from Naples who told DiMieri, “I want to be the Zohran of Italy.”

The interest is flattering but also somewhat misguided, the team suggests. The temptation to copy their format — daily TikToks, walk-and-talk videos, direct-to-camera messaging — misses the point.

“If you don’t have the real political organizing and the politics, you can’t make a funny video and have that be the thing,” Becker tells me. “Andrew Cuomo copied us with his launch video where he tried to make a walking and talking video and it was like, you can’t just make a video and hope that it goes well.”

“You have to adapt to the specifics of that given environment,” DiMieri adds. “If you do it in France, you have to leave Paris and go to the countryside. You have to speak with people on the margins who are suffering the most.”

The AI Question

And what about the AI of it all? Cuomo infamously deployed several AI-generated attack ads against Mamdani, and the technology is improving rapidly.

The team is unanimously skeptical. “It becomes this perfect messaging medium for people who really have contempt for their audience,” Borenstein argues. “A platform built entirely on theft and manipulation.”

“Some of Cuomo’s AI ads were very slickly done, but even amongst his base, who was moved by the AI videos?”

“AI is good at technical things but what we do is not primarily technical. It’s creative,” Becker says. “The walk video, that just happened in real life. I don’t see a world in which AI could replicate that without humans.”

So will AI play a large role in future political video campaigns? I ask DiMieri. “Maybe in losing campaigns,” he says, right before his phone dies.

I am left to stare at my reflection, thankful that AI couldn’t have engineered that perfect mic-drop moment.

The Zohran Formula

So what exactly made these videos work where countless other political social media attempts have failed?

The answer, according to the team, isn’t about production tricks or clever editing, though their style, influenced by everything from noir films to sketch comedy like Nathan For You and 30 Rock, certainly helped.

“The difference for what is noise and what breaks through isn’t actually going to be the video format,” Borenstein explains. “The reason we got here is because we had a candidate who was relentlessly focused on running on a clear message of affordability. A candidate who spoke to people’s needs explicitly and clearly with real answers at people’s level.”

Another crucial element? The actual organizing.

“Any progressive campaign trying to think ‘how can we do this?’ should also look deeply at our field operation, which were the real heroes of this campaign,” Borenstein points out. The mobilization of 100,000 volunteers, the canvassing operation, the coalition-building — these were the engines of victory.

This is where the “vibes-based operation,” as DiMieri calls it, reveals its deeper logic. The joyful, optimistic tone of Mamdani’s campaign wasn’t simply good branding. It was a deliberate strategy to build community, to make politics feel participatory rather than extractive.

“Our video was always trying to get them to actually engage with this movement in a way where it was more active,” Borenstein explains. “You have to have people who feel a stake in it.”

“It was extremely bleak. It was very dark,” DiMieri recalls of the pre-campaign atmosphere. “And then to be this joyous, fun, positive, optimistic campaign that builds community, that was the whole point.”

What’s Next for the Team

So what does the future hold for the team that helped elect a democratic socialist mayor in America’s largest city?

DiMieri, true to his filmmaker roots, is keeping his options open. “I have two films that are cycling,” he explains. “The path is there if I want to go deeper into politics, but I think anything will be part-time, short of maybe the next presidential race in the United States.”

Then he catches himself: “I say that as we’re about to help three or four different congressional races.”

Becker and Borenstein remain on Mamdani’s transition team, and confirms that video will continue to be a huge part of his mayoral communication strategy. “I feel like the video project and how we communicate to the world is going to be even more important once we’re in office,” Becker says. “We built something that I really want to continue.”

Borenstein hints at plans, ones that include ideas they couldn’t film during the campaign, but won’t spoil them: “We have some very exciting things planned.”

Those plans may need to include documenting one of the more unlikely political détentes of 2025, for in the weeks since our interviews, Borenstein has been supplanted as the most newsworthy Donald in Mamdani’s corner.

In a bizarre turn of events, President Donald Trump lavished the new mayor-elect with praise at the White House on November 21st, despite Mamdani sticking to his campaign points about affordability in New York and the US funding a genocide in Gaza.

In a reception more warm than some Democrats towards Mamdani, Trump even deflected aggressive questions against him and called their meeting “really productive” — this from a man who spent months calling him a “communist lunatic” during the campaign. He even said he’d be comfortable moving back to New York City with Mamdani as mayor, noting “we agree on a lot more than I would have thought.”

As analysts around the world spend the week puzzling over this working relationship, the Trump-Mamdani meeting only underscores what his team members told me: the videos are nothing without a candidate with real conviction who can engage authentically without compromising core values.

Even with the strangest of bedfellows.