Green chief Zack Polanski needs to ‘do a Mamdani’ as he meets hard-Left New York mayor’s group for tips about ‘taxing the wealthy’
Green Party leader Zack Polanski has met with the campaign team of New York’s Left-wing mayor Zohran Mamdani in the hope of copying his success.
Mr Polanski, an ‘eco-populist’, is revealed to have held talks with Mr Mamdani’s aides in recent weeks as he attempts to boost his social media strategy.
The discussions are said to have focused on how Mr Mamdani used ‘high-quality video content’ to drive his campaigning.
At the age of 34, Mr Mamdani is the youngest mayor of New York in more than a century and also the first Muslim to hold the role.
The self-described socialist defeated independent rival Andrew Cuomo and Republican hopeful Curtis Sliwa in November’s election.
He centred his campaign on bringing down costs for New Yorkers through rent freezes, the creation of city-owned grocery stores, the introduction of free buses, and universal free childcare.
Mr Mamdani also vowed to ‘tax the rich’ with levy increases for businesses and the wealthiest 1 per cent of the city’s population.
In one social media video this month, which garnered millions of views, Mr Mamdani announced the introduction of a ‘pied-a-tierre tax’. He said: ‘When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich; Well, today we’re taxing the rich.’
Green Party leader Zack Polanski has met with the campaign team of New York’s Left-wing mayor Zohran Mamdani in the hope of copying his success
Mr Polanski, an ‘eco-populist’, is revealed to have held talks with Mr Mamdani’s aides in recent weeks as he attempts to boost his social media strategy.
In one social media video this month, which garnered millions of views, Mr Mamdani announced the introduction of a ‘pied-a-tierre tax’ in New York
Mr Polanski is reported to have considered changing his branding and hiring a videographer in an effort to emulate Mr Mamdani’s social media success.
The Green leader currently has 670,000 followers on Instagram and 157,000 followers on TikTok.
This compares to the 11.5million followers that Mr Mamdani has on Instagram, while the New York mayor has 3.5million followers on TikTok.
Mr Mamdani’s videos on TikTok have racked up 42million ‘likes’, while Mr Polanski’s videos have only attracted 873,000 ‘likes’.
A Green Party source told The Times that Mr Polanski wanted to learn how prioritising social media and video content had shaped Mr Mamdani’s campaign, as he sought to do the same.
They added: ‘Zack’s social media is absolutely flying. It helps that he’s a natural at it.
‘But we want to make sure we’re being as strategic as possible in how we’re using all forms of social media, particularly video, to really own the narrative.
‘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 meeting with Mr Mamdani’s team is said to have been hosted online a few weeks ago between Mr Polanski and Morris Katz, one of the New York mayor’s top strategists.
Mr Polanski was unable to visit New York to meet Mr Mamdani in person because he does not fly for environmental reasons.
