With only 13 days left before the New York City mayoral election, former governor Andrew Cuomo is partnering with some of the same influencers who helped President Donald Trump win the White House last year.
Over the last week, right-wing creators like Logan Paul, the former vlogger turned podcaster and WWE wrestler, and Emily Austin, an influencer and sports commentator, have published content featuring Cuomo as a guest on their shows. The appearances have marked a new investment by Cuomo’s team into cultivating attention online as a means of competing against the social media-savvy Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani. But instead of trying to cleave off Mamdani’s online support, Cuomo appears to be trying to siphon off support from Sliwa.
“It’s a desperate swing,” one Democratic strategist who spoke to WIRED under the condition of anonymity to speak candidly without involving the firm where they work. “The clear desire to align himself with power at all costs, wherever that power might be, is one of the reasons he’s getting rejected so hard online. It’s a misunderstanding of the moment.”
The Cuomo campaign’s decision to attach itself to the online right comes after new polling has shown that if GOP nominee Curtis Sliwa were to drop out, the race between Cuomo and Mamdani would be tighter. Cuomo, a registered Democrat, is running in the Independent lane after failing to beat Mamdani in the Democratic primary.
The Cuomo campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
“I’m sure his consultants are giving him advice that’s like ‘you need traction online,’ and they want to get it at all cost,” the strategist tells WIRED. “It’s that same kind of consultancy brain where they think they need to go big and get attention without understanding that the attention Zohran is getting is not paid for. It’s coming from creators who believe in him and see his vision as their vision.”
Cuomo’s collabs with conservative influencers comes days after the former governor’s campaign brought on pro-Israel creator Zach Sage Fox to run his “social media campaign,” according to a recent post from Fox on X. According to Fox’s LinkedIn account, he’s the chief executive officer of a company called Fat Camp Films which describes itself as “the production arm for viral internet hubs,” including @fuckjerry and LADBible, two massive social media brands and Instagram accounts that aggregate viral content from across the internet.
On the Fat Camp Films website, the company touts Fox’s work with Mike Bloomberg’s 2020 presidential campaign which flooded social media with pro-Bloomberg memes at the time, becoming one of the first political campaigns to officially partner with the parent company of meme pages like fuckjerry.
“Although the candidate was weak, the content wasn’t,” the site reads. “We were lauded for building a daring digital operation.”
Fat Camp Films also claims to have worked with the Lincoln Project and Rock the Vote. On Instagram, Fox has been tagged in at least one post with organizations like Canary Mission, a group that created a website to track and dox protesters during the peak of pro-Palestinian student protests last year.
Cuomo’s “media director came from running meme pages, which tells you everything,” Stefan Smith, a digital strategist and the former digital director for Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign, tells WIRED. “They know modern political strategy isn’t about message quality—it’s about content volume feeding the algorithm.”
This week, Mamdani went on Flagrant, a podcast that Trump appeared on last year that is hosted by comedian Andrew Schulz. Over the last few months, Schulz’s support for Trump has softened and he has repeatedly criticized the president for not fulfilling campaign promises like releasing the Jeffrey Epstein Files.
Despite framing himself as the best-positioned candidate to take on Trump, Cuomo has received a multitude of compliments from the president over the last few weeks. Trump has called Cuomo the better option for New York compared to Mamdani, whom the president has referred to as a radical and “little communist.”
“It’s really a question of would I rather have a Democrat or a communist?,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “And I would rather have a Democrat than a communist.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: wired.com
