Politics Is Fandom; Fascism Is Fanfic

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 ...