Zohran Mamdani never auditioned for Survivor, but one of his campaign’s final television ads placed him in the middle of the show’s infamous Tribal Council. For roughly 30 seconds, a handful of former Survivor contestants addressed the camera while explaining their decisions to vote Mamdani’s top opponent, Andrew Cuomo, off the “island” of Manhattan.
“Didn’t we already vote you out?” asks one former Survivor contestant.
The Survivor spot is just one of a handful of fandom-influenced ads that Mamdani’s campaign put out in the final weeks of the New York City mayoral race. They were designed not just to reach voters but to meet fan communities in their own worlds. The Mamdani campaign is one of the first to not just cultivate its own fandom but dip into the power of preexisting ones. Contemporary politics has recently become a multiverse of competing and intersecting fandoms, with the most successful politicians, like Mamdani, taking the political stakes of their campaigns and translating them into the emotional language those communities understand.
“We believed, because of the social nature of this show [Survivor], that we could convince more than just one person, but we could convince everybody at their watch party,” says Eric Stern, a Democratic strategist and senior vice president of the progressive messaging firm Fight Agency, which developed the ad. “It might spark a conversation, and that could lead to a group of people who might otherwise stay at home or vote for someone else to actually become part of the movement.”
Fandom is not just the act of loving a television show or having a parasocial relationship with a celebrity. It’s about belonging to a community of people with common interests who share lore and inside jokes, but also hero and villain narratives that color their worldviews. Political movements operate in a similar vein, but until recently the digital behaviors that come with stanning someone like Taylor Swift or creating fancams were reserved for pop culture figures.
President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement has proved just how contemporary politics could blend with fandom in powerful ways. For the past 10 years, Trump’s MAGA supporters have done more than simply show up to vote for him. They’ve created merch and traveled to campaign rallies like Deadheads. Online, they’ve spun elaborate lore about a deep state cabal that only Trump would be capable of dismantling. Not only did Trump’s campaign establish its own fan communities, it absorbed surrounding ones—whether that be professional wrestling or gaming aesthetics—to create access points for new supporters to flow into the movement.
The most recent example of MAGA’s fandom cross-contamination was with early-2000s-console gamers. In October, GameStop posted a policy resolution, in jest, formally declaring that the console wars, a memeified competition between video game console manufacturers, were over after news broke that a new addition to Microsoft’s Halo franchise, Halo: Campaign Evolved, would be cross-compatible with Sony’s PlayStation. Soon after the announcement went up, an official White House X account quoted the post, claiming that Trump “presided over the end of the 20-year Console Wars,” a nod to the president’s self-presentation as the “peace president.”
