Zak Khan wasn’t always the Gyro King of Brooklyn. He started out with a little halal cart down on Wall Street, in the Financial District, just after the September 11 attacks. But running a halal cart is a rough business: Permits cost an arm and a leg, the city fines you without mercy, and in the end it was actually cheaper for him to open a brick-and-mortar restaurant. He expanded steadily, and today his gyro kingdom spans the steppes of Central Brooklyn, from Midwood and Bay Ridge to Coney Island Avenue’s Little Pakistan.

During the coronavirus pandemic, Khan started giving out hot halal meals. One of the people who showed up to help was a young state assembly member who wasn’t even from the district: Zohran Mamdani. So when Mamdani announced his campaign for mayor last October, Khan made the pilgrimage to Long Island City in Queens for the launch. He still remembers Mamdani’s exact words: “This is not a time for lecturing. It’s a time for listening.”

The moment Mamdani won the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, the political consultant and pundit classes started trying to distill the precise chemical formula of his appeal. How did Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, demolish former Governor Andrew Cuomo, electrify the normally sleepy off-year electorate, and upend the traditional calculus of money = votes? Was it the short-form videos? The visual branding? The rizz? The clothes? The “attentional strategy”?

Full disclosure: I door-knocked for Mamdani’s campaign on two occasions, plus a short, sweltering stint outside the polls on Election Day. I’d never volunteered on a political campaign in my life—I’m a journalist, not a joiner of political parties—but I could see that Mamdani was a different kind of politician, and I wanted to see it from the inside. And here’s what I concluded: Mamdani understood something that all the professional moonbeam extractors missed. You don’t appeal to working- and middle-class voters by going on all the right podcasts, hiring influencers like Olivia Julianna, posting on social media a certain number of times per day, or hammering at them with meticulously focus-grouped talking points. Mamdani’s secret sauce is much simpler.

The trick to messaging working- and middle-class voters is that you don’t. You stop fretting about what you’re telling them, and how, and on what precise algorithmic formula of platforms and formats. You shut up and start listening to what they’re telling you. You listen to what they care about. And then you talk about that. Nowhere is that strategy clearer than in the way Mamdani used the most powerful form of political propaganda: food.

Food has been the key to electoral politics since the days of bread and circus. But for modern-day Dems—and their consultants, surrogates, and attendant media—this is apparently news. Think of the Democrats lecturing us that food prices didn’t matter because of the offsetting benefits of Bidenomics. When they do try to use food, it’s even worse. Remember Biden holding an ice cream cone as though it was a live grenade and musing awkwardly about Gaza? Or Nancy Pelosi showing us her two enormous brushed-steel refrigerators, stuffed with $12-a-pint boutique ice cream, at a moment when a lot of Americans were wondering how to get their next meal?

Mamdani used food as a touchstone in a way that felt organic and joyful instead of pandering and forced. His campaign logo’s hand-drawn letters, with their contrasting drop shadows, echoed the hand-painted

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