Zohran Calculator

It turned a personal budget calculation into a key communication tool for Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign reaching millions of New Yorkers. With press conferences, coverage from NBC to the New York Post, radio interviews and more. A resounding positive response and a desire for this tool available in races across the country. Again all from a simple web app that I made to answer the question “How much will I save under Zohran?”

Rent Freeze

I’ve been organizing with Zohran for the past six years and helped kick start his political career by building his assembly campaign website. I know his politics and as a rent stabilized tenant who greatly benefited from 2019 rent reforms, I wanted to know how much I would save under his rent freeze.

On June 30th, the Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) approved Adams’ 3% rent increase for stabilized apartments. Right away I dug up 20 years of RGB data, every increase or freeze under Bloomberg, de Blasio, and Adams. After charting them out, I calculated what four years of compound 3% increases under Adams would cost versus four years of Zohran’s proposed rent freeze. I saw that by the end of it I would be saving thousands each year.

By July 1st, I had turned this basic napkin math into a simple web page. Showing and color coding historical rent hikes and freezes, and allowing anyone to input their current rent to see what they’d save under four years of freeze.

It received a pretty positive response. Immediately I realized I could expand beyond just rent savings and include the campaign’s two other core planks: fast & free buses and universal childcare.

Zohran Calculator

I was partially inspired by TurboTax, using it year after year, while watching my refund amount tick up at the top of the screen as I added each deduction.

I thought instead of tax savings, why don’t I show working New Yorkers how much they could save annually under a Zohran mayoralty. It hits at the campaign’s key ethos of speaking to how people are directly and materially impacted. Typically these things would be presented as showing abstract statistics about millions saved citywide, instead I’d show each person how much more money would be in their bank account at the end of each year.

Additionally, in this election like many others, billionaires have been pouring in millions running negative ads against Zohran, hoping to maintain the status quo, buying influence for favorable regulations, government contracts, tax breaks, etc. Billionaires are political, they know what elections are worth to them. I wanted to help working people see that their bottom line was on the table too, and that it’s worth fighting for.

I built a sleek and sharp interactive React app with the UI taking notes from the campaign’s brand identity. I ensured the user experience was smooth with the goal being anyone should be able to calculate their savings in under a minute. I used the same rent calculations from before, set a conservative estimate for childcare at $16,000 annually, and used simple math to extrapolate savings based on users’ monthly bus use.

A crucial lesson was not just making a good tool, but rolling it out effectively. You have to do the marketing! Zohran’s campaign has completely mastered short-form video, a continued fixture helping propel it to victory. I decided to give a go at making my own video. Once the app was ready, I made a quick walk-and-talk video (with many many edits, admittedly, clock the background changing) showing how I personally would be saving thousands under Zohran administration and how others might be saving thousands as well.

The video went viral on X/Twitter, quickly hitting 300,000 views. Much of that viral spread came from a somewhat surprising amount of right-wing backlash. Outraged bad faith responses from them indicated to me that I’d built something effective. Sometimes the best way for a message to spread is being correctly controversial. Meanwhile, everyone else not on the right loved the app and it received overwhelmingly positive response, further spreading with others sharing their own calculations or asking for similar tools for their cities/states. Volunteers with the campaign additionally identified it as a perfect persuasion tool that they could use while walking around knocking on voters’ doors. A huge benefit with the app being oriented towards mobile use.

This led to many firsts for me, the Indypendent reached out to me for an interview, sending over a photographer to Astoria for a photoshoot, and I joined them during radio hour to talk more about the creation and intention of the app.

The Campaign Reaches Out

A few weeks later, Zohran’s comms team formally reached out and we coordinated to get the app live on their website. I worked with their policy team to verify and refine the calculation methodology, and collaborated with Forge to add campaign-specific features like email capture and volunteer signups. Their comms team then packaged everything with a press and social media strategy, finalizing the transformation of this weekend project into a core tool for communicating their campaign platform.

The rollout by the campaign was a much larger version of my personal rollout. There was a major press conference. I was personally deeply touched seeing signs held by supporters sharing how much they would personally save. It was covered by a variety of print and broadcast news outlets including Politico, Hell Gate, NBC, and Pix11, while drawing attacks from Andrew Cuomo, and both the New York Post’s and National Review’s editorial boards. Most people were reached directly through Zohran’s social media channels reaching millions and in turn receiving mass praise.

Interestingly the New York Post coverage was particularly revealing around campaign comms strategy. While they typically run contorted shoddy opposition pieces they were suddenly forced to contend with concrete numbers and policy specifics. Their writers ended up debating rent increase percentage methodologies rather than spinning typical culture war narratives. It demonstrated how creatively presenting your platform and creating interactive tools can force even hostile media to engage with substance of your campaign and set broad media narratives. A sort of “narrative hegemony”. This same “narrative hegemony” is present in Cuomo’s tweet where he shares a screen recording of the default state of the app, displaying the average savings to his audience.

Apps, AI, & Acceleration

There’s something interesting and exciting here. While not fundamentally new, it’s part of a continued shift within politics and development. A shift toward more personalized communication and shorter-form content, catalyzed everything moving faster and increased competition for attention.

In particular, simple web apps/tools allow fast-moving grassroots campaigns to circumnavigate barriers to entry with more traditional iPhone and Android apps. They also provide a more unique conversation with voters rather than just listing out endless policies. While it’s still critical to use tools like VAN, Action Network, and Mobilize, there’s a place for creative experimentation with software as well. Overall, it previews how the responsiveness of a candidate and how they relate to constituents once in office.

While working on this app and others that haven’t yet been released, I recognized parallels between what I’m doing and others like Danger Testing. Danger Testing’s premise is to release apps more like songs and art, rapidly engaging with meme/hype cycles, minimal and responsive to the present moment rather than longterm monolithic. Their latest app spoofs off the real world moment of mass vandalization of Friend.com ads in our subway. A great writeup here goes more in-depth.

I took this app art idea and extended it again in this race. After launching the Zohran Calculator, someone reached out to me offering the votecuomo.com domain. In less than a day, I turned it into a website lampooning Cuomo’s billionaire donors by placing pictures of them on his suit jacket, a line that Zohran has used during interviews and debates. Again, I broke out the acting chops by making a short-form video promoting it, which accrued over 300k+ views across platforms in less than a few days. Also receiving broad praise and desires for it to be available across the country.

This turn toward apps, attention, and interface is happening in many places. Interesting people are able to recognize and appreciate good work even if it’s far from or runs afoul of their social space. When I searched ‘Zohran crypto,’ I found David Phelps, who has written about a shift within the crypto space where apps are newly taking on greater importance over simply just blockchians. He wrote a three part series of articles around apps, social capital, and blockchains that I thought were interesting and worthwhile reads for political folks and people in the technology space.

This all connects and intertwines with the advent of AI, vibe coding, and a proliferation of software both great and poor in quality. Naturally, campaigns and companies in competition will push all this further. We’ve seen Cuomo use AI to portray himself as an everyday New Yorker and use ChatGPT to draft his housing policy, while the Republican Party recently generated a deepfake of Chuck Schumer for an attack ad. I’m still collecting some of my thoughts, but there seems to be a divergence of AI use. With bad actors creating and presenting wholesale artificial reality rather than using AI as one of many support tools to help speed up or refine genuine human creative endeavors.

UPDATE: This has rapidly expanded with Cuomo releasing a series of controversial and racist AI generated videos featuring Zohran and other New Yorkers committing crimes. Along with Trump admin releasing AI generated videos showing him bombing protestors with feces.

We’re edging toward, or maybe we are already in, a Minority Report era where your face and likeness can be blasted back to you in the form of ads. With OpenAI’s Sora AI video generator, we’re seeing a trend toward infinite hyperpersonalized content where a person or customized AI can generate endless seasons of South Park specifically targeted at the individual.

It’s a lot! It will definitely resonate with millions and be a significant chunk of our new reality. It comes down to ultimately optimizing for human dopamine receptors, delivering effective hits. Endless entities triangulating on our pleasure centers.

Though maybe it isn’t that simple, at least when you move from entertainment and into political campaigns. A comparison would be the very familiar spam texts from a Democrat far away heralding some new doom and asking for money, an obscure foreboding email compelling you to donate right now and it will be matched 8 times. While Zohran definitely sends some similar texts and emails, he matches those sugar hits with a large share of (organic) vegetables in a holistic campaign deeply anchored and lovingly rooted to the best city in the world.

Ground Kit

Bringing us back down to the present. I’ll be launching a service, GroundKit, in the coming weeks that will allow other campaigns to subscribe to and create their own version of the Savings Calculator and over time rollout other web tools/apps that allow grassroots campaigns to quickly, more broadly and deeply have conversations with voters and constituencies.

A smart and effective campaign moves quickly through media cycles using the mediums of the day. Today that is phones and in particular short-form videos. It works for Zohran especially because those videos are connected to real struggles, joys, and ways forward in the city he looks to lead.

This is also extended to low friction topical apps. A tool that can be used in addition to social-media further along the funnel. To build deeper relationships with voters and engage with them more holistically converting them to someone who will just show up on election day into an active advocate throughout the campaign and after the election.

The hope is to help with electoral success, but more deeply align campaigns where possible to be concrete and personable about their policies and how they can improve people’s material conditions.