Turn The Volume Up: Mamdani's Speech
Lessons from Zohran Mamdani's remarkable victory speech!
Zohran Mamdani’s campaign will be studied as a masterpiece in motivating the power of people to defeat the power of money. His superb rhetorical skills are just one piece of that puzzle, but a very important piece. His victory speech is chock full of great examples of powerful communication that we can learn from.
I am a strategist. I can tell you what we are trying to convey with our writing, from what perspective we want people to see the world, but others are far better at the creative part of writing. Zohran Mamdani’s speech conveys many important themes and even significant shifts in framing and perspective, and it does so “in poetry,” evoking the imagery that compels emotion.
If you haven’t watched Mamdani’s speech already, I recommend that you do! You can watch it in its entirety at CNN.com. You can also read the full transcript at The Guardian US. Here are my thoughts on what makes this language so effective.
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Poetic Imagery
Zohran Mamdani’s campaign represents a victory of hope over fearmongering, the embrace of change over the immense power of the status quo. His speech addresses it all. It is about his campaign and election marking a significant transition from the old and unfair ways to the new and better, and the transfer of power from the rich few to the struggling many. It also reframes politics and government as things that belong to us and over which we have agency. These themes are repeated and intertwined throughout.
TRANSFORMATION and RENEWAL
(Opening sentence) “The sun may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said: ‘I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.’”
“turn the page on a politics that abandons the many and answers only to the few… A mandate for change. A mandate for a new kind of politics.”
Metaphors about change, newness and rebirth abound in this speech. He opens with “the dawn of a better day” and “turn the page,” and later he refers to a “a city that has been reborn.”
POWER CHANGING HANDS
“For as long as we can remember, the working people of New York have been told by the wealthy and the well-connected that power does not belong in their hands. Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery bike handlebars, knuckles scarred with kitchen burns: these are not hands that have been allowed to hold power. And yet, over the last 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater. Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it. The future is in our hands.”
Brilliant! He took the common metaphor of “power being in people’s hands” and made it real. You can see the hands of these working people. Throughout this speech, Mamdani uses descriptive concrete examples to make what he is saying feel tangible and to get people to believe that they will feel the impact his administration will have on their daily lives.
“SOMETHING THAT WE DO”
“we won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us. Now, it is something that we do.”
This is awesome reframing. We all know that sense of powerlessness, of being bombarded with ads from distant campaigns for candidates who do not answer to us. I have long said that political campaigns should be a dialogue between people about what we need from each other and who among us should represent us. This language expresses it in just a few words. “Something that we do” gives us back our ownership, our agency over the political process.
Here, he makes hope sound like “something we do,” something concrete, active, intentional:
“Hope is alive. Hope is a decision that tens of thousands of New Yorkers made day after day, volunteer shift after volunteer shift”
“With every door knocked, every petition signature earned, and every hard-earned conversation, you eroded the cynicism that has come to define our politics.”
“Thank you to the next generation of New Yorkers who refuse to accept that the promise of a better future was a relic of the past. You showed that when politics speaks to you without condescension, we can usher in a new era of leadership.”
Mamdani repeatedly thanks and recognizes the important role of the younger generations in being able to envision and work toward something better.
“WE ARE IN CITY HALL NOW”
“Thank you to those so often forgotten by the politics of our city, who made this movement their own. I speak of Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties. Yes, aunties.”
“it’s about people like Richard, the taxi driver I went on a 15-day hunger strike with outside of City Hall, who still has to drive his cab seven days a week. My brother, we are in City Hall now.”
At many points in this speech, Mamdani talks to different groups and assures them that he will represent them all. To the younger generations, he says, “We will fight for you, because we are you.” To the persecuted, he says, “Your struggle is ours, too.” To the neighborhoods, he says, “this city is your city, and this democracy is yours too.”
Many of the people he refers to in this speech are not just New York archetypes. They are specific people that he knows, people familiar to those who have seen Mamdani’s videos. If you don’t know about Richard and the cab drivers’ strike, watch this short video. When Mamdani says that “we” are in City Hall now, you know that he really means all of these people.
BREATHE
“breathe this moment in. We have held our breath for longer than we know. We have held it in anticipation of defeat, held it because the air has been knocked out of our lungs too many times to count, held it because we cannot afford to exhale. Thanks to all of those who sacrificed so much. We are breathing in the air of a city that has been reborn.”
The metaphor of holding our breath is powerful, here representing both political and economic anxiety. The “air knocked out of our lungs” evokes that punched in the gut feeling we get every time you-know-who reaches for a new level of cruelty or every time we get a bill we cannot pay. Being able to breathe again represents a visceral sense of relief. President Biden often used this same imagery, talking about “Being paid enough to support your family, with a little breathing room.”
FINDING OUR VOICE
“I think of the words of Jawaharlal Nehru: ‘A moment comes, but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.’ Tonight we have stepped out from the old into the new.”
I love this quote. The idea of a nation finding its voice also expresses a visceral sense of liberation.
HAND IN HAND
“Safety and justice will go hand in hand as we work with police officers to reduce crime and create a department of community safety that tackles the mental health crisis and homelessness crises head on.
This “hand in hand” image transcends the false dichotomy of safety versus civil rights.
THE RICH AND POWERFUL
“For years, those in City Hall have only helped those who can help them. But on 1 January, we will usher in a city government that helps everyone.”
“the billionaire class…want the people to fight amongst ourselves so that we remain distracted from the work of remaking a long-broken system. We refuse to let them dictate the rules of the game any more. They can play by the same rules as the rest of us.”
This last line is important. He is not talking about retribution; he’s talking about fairness and equality. At several points he even refers to those who “traffic in” division, antisemitism and Islamophobia, equating them with drug or human traffickers.
STANDING UP TO TRUMP
“if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him. And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power. This is not only how we stop Trump; it’s how we stop the next one. So, Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up.”
Rather than treat Trump like some uniquely powerful creature, he portrays him as the result of a corrupt system, and uses him to make that case for changing that system. He talks about landlords, billionaires evading taxes and workers standing up to the bosses who exploit them. One of our best themes moving forward will be addressing the culture of corruption and the concept of “elite impunity,” the long festering problem of the rich being able to buy their way out of legal accountability.
OUR STRUGGLE
“In this moment of political darkness, New York will be the light. Here, we believe in standing up for those we love, whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many Black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone else with their back against the wall. Your struggle is ours, too.”
The idea that New York can be a light in the darkness is powerful indeed. Evoking love, toughness, empathy and my personal favorite, solidarity, he demonstrates once again that our politics doesn’t have to choose between addressing persecution and economic distress. We’re all struggling.
PROJECTING STRENGTH
“New York will remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant.
So hear me, President Trump, when I say this: to get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.”
Now THAT’s how you talk to Trump.
“I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older. I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.”
“Together, we will usher in a generation of change. And if we embrace this brave new course, rather than fleeing from it, we can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves.”
Mamdani never took the bait of those who attacked him. He never went on defense. That refusal to apologize is how you project strength to the listener. You convert every attack into an opportunity to make your case and demonstrate the strength of your conviction.
OVERCOMING FEAR OF CHANGE
“There are many who thought this day would never come, who feared that we would be condemned only to a future of less, with every election consigning us simply to more of the same.”
“If tonight teaches us anything, it is that convention has held us back. We have bowed at the altar of caution, and we have paid a mighty price. Too many working people cannot recognize themselves in our party, and too many among us have turned to the right for answers to why they’ve been left behind.”
“We will leave mediocrity in our past. No longer will we have to open a history book for proof that Democrats can dare to be great.”
“This will be an age where New Yorkers expect from their leaders a bold vision of what we will achieve, rather than a list of excuses for what we are too timid to attempt.”
If there ever was a campaign that challenged the wealthy status quo, this was it. Mamdani tapped into enormous discontent and created a wave of hope to overcome fear of change, successfully portraying the status quo as both untenable and genuinely pathetic.
TOGETHER
(Closing line) “Let the words we’ve spoken together, the dreams we’ve dreamt together, become the agenda we deliver together. New York, this power, it’s yours. This city belongs to you.”
A great speech and a remarkable campaign. Zohran Mamdani’s election and administration may prove to be the catalyst for a paradigm shift in American politics. I have high hopes!
Thank you so much for reading this. I hope it is of use to you in your work and activism!
In solidarity, always,
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Contact me at antonia@antoniascatton.com or (202) 922-6647
Thanks for this great column, Antonia. I listened to Mamdani's speech Wednesday morning and I was struck — both in the speech and in his campaign — by his immersion with real people of New York. You make some reference to this too. Cuomo's case was, vote for me because *I'm* important. Mamdani's case was, vote for me because *you're* important. The contrast was plain as day. Other candidates should take clear note of that.
Bravo.