Does A Mayor Need To Be A Good Poster?

—by Adam Bumas

There’s a week left until the New York City’s mayoral election and it does feel like the whole country is watching. It’s an off year for most federal races, the mainstream media has a home field focus on New York, and the country’s sociopolitical order is crumbling to the ground, yada yada yada. But the mayoral race has also been a referendum on, not just, as we wrote Monday, liberalism, but, also, the general question of how politicians engage with the media. Which, in 2025, mostly means how online they are. 

In an era where many elected officials in the US have fully embraced the mask off, post-truth style of posting, actual voting results are an unavoidable reality check. And looking at the state of how the candidates are using social media, there’s an obvious gap in not just messaging but understanding.

When Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary in June, he was lauded for the savviness of his social media presence, which has meant everything from shooting Subway Takes-style promos to recruiting award-winning YouTuber Jon Bois to help create campaign graphics. In contrast, his closest competitor Andrew Cuomo barely ran a social campaign at all until his surprise defeat in the primary, and has tried to close the gap with AI-generated ads, including one that was immediately taken down for somehow being too racist for X.

Early voting suggests that Cuomo is still in the race, and he’s still trying to get attention online, but it isn’t all going according to plan. Last week, pro-Trump influencer Emily Austin made a video saying she was starting “Hot Girls for Cuomo” — a rip-off of the Instagram account “Hot Girls for Zohran,” just to show how much first-mover advantage Mamdani has. Though Austin didn’t seem to be too serious about “Hot Girls for Cuomo” as any kind of organized messaging effort. As far as we can tell, it was just an offhand joke during a YouTube video, and only got taken seriously when she clipped it to X, after which someone registered the domain hotgirlsforcuomo.com to redirect to the official investigation into the sexual assault claims made against Cuomo.

This is all a fundamental issue for anyone trying to get out any message online, much less a political campaign trying to persuade people to turn off their screens and vote. The Cuomo campaign has completely lost control of how their messaging is received as it’s extruded through the grinder of the modern internet. The loss of context between platforms, the divide between filter bubbles — this is how the media landscape works now, and their attempts to work within that system keep backfiring.

On Monday, the Cuomo campaign hosted a private fundraising event in Manhattan called “Young Professionals for Andrew Cuomo,” organized by a group calling itself “Cool Girls For Capitalism.” The event required a $50 donation to attend, but was organized publicly on the app Partiful. On paper, I can totally see why this sounded like a good social media play — the event was a year to the day after the infamous Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest, which inspired dozens more real-life events that primarily exist to create content for online communities, spreading hype and conversation even among detractors. The “cool girls” angle makes sense too — the Angelicism crowd is hardly the first group of young wealthy women in Manhattan to get media attention.

The problem with hosting a buzzy exclusive event for online clout is there has to be buzz. Looking across multiple platforms and using a range of search parameters, I was only able to find three posts on the entire internet from people who actually attended the fundraiser. One was an Instagram post the Cuomo campaign collabed with on Instagram. One was a LinkedIn announcement from one of the founders of Cool Girls For Capitalism, which seems to consist of a pitiful merch store. And one was an X post from the other founder saying that over 500 people RSVPd to the event, which has about twice as many likes as the reply noting the venue lists its maximum capacity as 180.

In contrast, the Mamdani campaign also held two events in the past few days that were at least partially aimed at getting attention online: The rally in Forest Hills stadium on Sunday, and a press event on Tuesday. Garbage Day had access to both events, and both had a huge presence from influencers — or creators, as Mamdani's team officially labeled them. 

Sunday’s rally ended up being a fascinating snapshot of what the current media landscape looks like right now. Reporters for PBS, Getty, and international broadcasters like Japan's NHK were given roughly the same access as YouTube channels like The Good Liars and indie media operations like More Perfect Union and… us. In fact, the only real difference to how any of these groups were treated by the campaign was that the big media got first dibs on high-risers for filming and the creators got access to a cushy "Creator Suite" and private bathrooms. And, based on where the views of the rally came from afterwards, it seems like making the influencers comfortable was a better use of resources.

Similarly, Tuesday’s event was theoretically structured like a press briefing, but the motley crew of lav mics on the podium showed it was more for “creation” than traditional news reporting. Mamdani warmed up with a photoshoot with Mandy Patinkin, and the pre-selected questions he answered ended with several shitpost-y joke questions from contributors to a comedy Instagram account, @bocxtop. Immediately after the event ended, they went to the next empty room to film more skits.

The owner of the @bocxtop account, who goes by Prance and was credited with writing the questions, told Garbage Day that the Mamdani campaign “reached out and said [they] wanted to do more humor-based stuff,” and that the campaign planned “time at the end [of the press event] to do bits”. We’ve reached out Mamdani’s campaign for comment.

“I wasn’t being paid for this, I do all this to support Zohran”, Prance told us. Though he noted “not everyone in the group is necessarily a leftist or in Zohran’s corner.” They wanted the attention, and in less than a day since the event, I’ve seen dozens of posts covering the event from NBC News to Michael Moore’s YouTube channel.

It’s tempting to draw a line between all of Cuomo’s billionaire supporters and the fact that his cool influencer party charged $50 for entry, but our roundup of the Trump social media team shows you don’t have to be progressive to understand how to post. And the Mamdani campaign is clearly much better at it than Cuomo’s because it knows that influencers, creators, and journalists are effectively the same thing now: Outputs for content. Mamdani responded to most of the questions at Tuesday’s event seriously, and began by entreating the creators he invited to “ask hard questions.” Even so, he wasn’t working very hard to pretend it was anything rigorous, responding to one of Prance’s questions with, “Ha! Totally not a plant question!” Funny, sure, but a little worrisome, at least for the journalists that still have jobs.

Straight Garfunkel

TikTok’s SNAP Shutdown Meltdown

—by Ellie Hall

We’re currently on Day 29 of the government shutdown with no end in sight, and for millions of Americans — 41.7 million, to be precise — the political standoff is about to have some drastic repercussions. The USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), aka food stamps, will not be distributing funds to the 12.3% of US citizens who rely on it. And, of course, there’s a big stupid red banner on the USDA homepage blaming all of this on the Democrats.

Naturally, people who most affected by these cuts (overwhelmingly women, mostly mothers) are talking about it on TikTok. These videos run the gamut from women crying while asking how they’re going to feed themselves and their children next month to people angry at the system’s failure, venting about how they specifically, or benefit recipients in general, will be forced to steal from stores if they don’t have food stamp money in November. And all hell broke loose when these videos found their way to MAGA TikTok.

In reaction videos that demonstrate a profound lack of knowledge about how the SNAP system works and a whole lot of pent-up rage, users are unloading on “Welfare Queens” and people “taking advantage of the system” and their tax dollars. Although race is never mentioned, the majority of anti-benefits content creators are white, reacting to TikToks posted by Black people. (Fun fact! According to USDA data, the race/ethnicity that receives the largest percentage of SNAP benefits are white people, at 35.4%, while Black people account for 25.7% of funds.)

That information has clearly not made it to TikTok, because a lot of white people are saying some pretty racist things (in fact, it looks like one white woman has actually been fired for her remarks). But you’re not just dealing with racist human-made content. There are countless viral AI-generated videos of gorillas robbing stores and Black women (“hood moms”) freaking out about EBT cards not working. Which adds to the very real hysteria on the app. A swipe through the feed right now will show you people genuinely predicting “Purge”-like riots, actual videos of looting, announcements of (fake) store closures, food robbery threats, and, in response, TikToks of people warning that they’ll protect groceries with guns.

As always, TikTok discourse is largely confined to TikTok until it isn’t. As these videos migrate to other platforms, specifically X, they rack up millions of views and get absorbed by the broader MAGA outrage machine. The rapidly-growing @EBTofTikTok, created Monday, has been posting TikToks — 90% of which feature Black men and women — on an hourly basis. 

Unlike last month’s “let’s eat Tylenol because Trump says it causes autism” trend, this isn’t just ragebait and performative social media kayfabe. These are real people who are scared about how families are going to eat and real people who don’t give a fuck or are even happy that government assistance is being cut off. All of these videos about the impending SNAP shutdown provide a rare glimpse into the collective consciousness of the United States right now, and the view is pretty bleak. It’s one thing to know that there’s a yawning ideological, political, cultural, and racial abyss between American citizens, but another to actually see the divide up close. Sure, there are other issues involved here, but ultimately if people can’t — and they don’t — agree that children should have food (39% of SNAP participants are children, so approximately 16 million kids) what hope is there for the country?

Substack’s Dark Patterns

People are finally beginning to notice that the size of a Substack doesn’t necessarily translate to success anywhere else. If only someone could have told Paramount before they installed Bari Weiss and started laying people off.

Mike Nellis, a Substack writer with over “a million” “readers” on the platform, was barely able to get 600 people to watch a recent livestream of his concurrently. Though it’s possible it did more views after Nellis emailed it out. But X users are also beginning to wonder how they ended up on his email list to begin with.

Meanwhile, Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie posted recently that he was upset that Patreon was poaching writers for their own newsletter product. He blamed writers who wanted to get away from Substack’s social features. It’s almost like all of this is connected!

The New Personal Robot Thing Still Needs A Human To Operate It

A company 1X has debuted a personal robot called Neo that, according to the demo video, can do household chores for you. It costs $500 a month and it looks like a smart speaker that walks around like it shit itself. It’s a nifty video except it leaves a few things out. The most important being that, at least right now, Neo needs a human to operate it.

The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern has a good video showing what this cursed little homunculus can and can’t do.

A Redditor Takes The Chives Challenge

Part 1:

Part 2:

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s a beautiful Barnes and Noble experience (they meant Neil Armstrong btw).

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***