$27 Million Can’t Buy a Movement: The Politics of Small Money and Big Impact

How Zohran Mamdani beat a dynasty with volunteers, vibes, and a voter file in the 2025 New York Democratic Mayoral Primary.

🌇 The Empire State vs. the End of Empire

On June 25, 2025, New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary wasn’t just an election — it was a referendum on how power works in modern politics.

In a city where the Democratic primary is the general election, this race effectively decided the next mayor of one of the most powerful cities on the planet.

The showdown? Andrew Cuomo — the comeback-minded former governor with a full Rolodex and even fuller war chest — vs. Zohran Mamdani, a third-year assemblymember known more for his MetroCard than for political pedigree.

Cuomo had the endorsements.
He had the dollars.
He had the political résumé.
And… he lost.

Enter: The Mamdani Effect

Mamdani didn’t run a traditional campaign — he ran a movement.

Instead of chasing big-name backers, he flooded TikTok with clips of neighbors, small business owners, organizers, and even the local halal cart guy explaining why he got their vote. No slick slogans. Just community.

While Cuomo-aligned forces outspent Mamdani more than 3-to-1, and unleashed an avalanche of PAC money, the people-powered campaign held its ground — and then some.

Endorsements can rent attention.
But door knocks, memes, and grassroots momentum?
That stuff owns it.

💸 Show Us the Money: How Campaigns Are (Usually) Funded

For most candidates, deciding to run for office isn’t just a question of policy — it’s a test of financial viability. And in recent years, that test has gotten tougher.

Since the early 2000s, local elections have become nationalized battlefields. What used to be $50,000 school board races are now million-dollar proxy wars for ideological control. According to USA Facts, 65% of funding for local candidates in 2024 came from PACs, while just 23% came from individual donors. Another 11% flowed directly from national party committees. That leaves a shrinking slice of the pie for grassroots support.

It’s no longer just about shaking hands — it’s about shaking the right wallets.

In March 2025, Elon Musk made headlines (and not for a new EV). He poured over $20 million into a Wisconsin judicial race, hoping to sway the outcome toward a conservative candidate. The move backfired. Despite the cash avalanche, voters elected the liberal candidate — a sharp rebuke to outside influence and a case study in the limits of money.

🧾 Big Checks vs. Small Dollars
While PACs and mega-donors still dominate the cash landscape, the numbers are shifting.

Candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders have proven that small-dollar donations — under $200 — can power campaigns, build movements, and beat the odds. According to OpenSecrets, both raised over 60% of their funds from grassroots donors, and in doing so, built not just bank accounts — but trust.

Research from the Brennan Center for Justice shows that public financing systems (like New York City’s 8-to-1 matching model) dramatically level the playing field. They help elect more diverse candidates, reduce donor influence, and shift accountability closer to voters.

And while skeptics worry that grassroots donors might pull candidates to extremes, a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found the opposite: small donors tend to be more issue-driven, more representative, and less ideologically extreme than wealthy mega-donors.

🥊 Mamdani vs. Cuomo: The Money Fight
Zohran Mamdani’s average donor? They could maybe buy a burrito.
Cuomo’s backers? Try box seats at Madison Square Garden.

Mamdani’s campaign — launched in fall 2024 — wasn’t just about winning votes. It was about proving that a grassroots model could scale to one of the most watched mayoral races in the country. His strategy: trade PAC checks for people power, TikToks for TV ads, and trust for traction.

Below, we break down the spending gap between Mamdani and Cuomo, and what it reveals about the evolving economics of influence.

Spoiler: more donors ≠ more votes. But the right kind of donors? They just might.

🛠️ The Toolkit of a Grassroots Campaign

Mamdani’s victory wasn’t just a campaign—it was an operation. While Cuomo-aligned groups leaned on expensive ad buys and PAC support, Mamdani’s team built something harder to replicate: a grassroots machine with a spreadsheet and sneakers.

The engine? Door knocking. Thousands of volunteer shifts meant tens of thousands of conversations with real voters. In field organizing terms, each door knock typically costs between $3–$5 when outsourced to paid canvassers. Mamdani’s campaign did it with clipboards, community, and Google Sheets—generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in field value simply by showing up.

But the ground game didn’t stop at doorbells. Volunteers also organized voter ID, follow-up lists, and GOTV (Get Out The Vote) efforts—often using custom-built tools like live canvassing maps and dashboards. Some even made memes and TikToks that racked up views organically, helping the campaign reach younger audiences without spending a dime on digital consultants.

It wasn’t just tech-savvy volunteers, either. The win was reinforced by a coalition of local groups—tenant unions, Democratic Socialists of America, housing activists—who brought structure, bodies, and purpose to the effort.

In one now-viral example, volunteers built a real-time map of every door knocked in the district—complete with color-coded priority zones and notes. One meme overlay read: “Every dot is democracy.”

Mamdani’s campaign proved something quietly revolutionary: when you replace PAC dollars with people power, you don’t lose efficiency—you gain legitimacy.

We broke down what $1 million typically buys in a traditional campaign: a heavy tilt toward ads and logistics, with only a fraction spent on face-to-face organizing. Then we compared it to the estimated value delivered by 10,000 energized volunteers. The result? Ground game wins — by a landslide.

From door knocking and phone banking to grassroots visibility and trust-building, volunteers stretch campaign impact far beyond what money alone can buy. While PAC-funded campaigns flood inboxes, people-powered movements flood neighborhoods — and that difference shows up at the polls.

📊 What the Numbers Tell Us (and What They Don’t)

While pundits were watching TV ads and polling averages, Mamdani’s team was watching precinct-level margins—and building a movement one block at a time.

A post-election breakdown of the vote reveals a striking pattern: the biggest swings toward Mamdani came from precincts that had been heavily canvassed, not heavily advertised to. In some areas, the margins flipped by double digits compared to previous cycles. In others, turnout surged among the youngest eligible voters—Gen Z, who are both the hardest to reach via traditional media and the most likely to be mobilized by a cause-driven, in-person message.

Why didn’t polls catch this? Because most polls aren’t built to measure organizing energy—they measure name recognition and historical behavior. Mamdani’s win wasn’t predicted because it didn’t behave like a conventional media strategy. It behaved like a movement.

Campaigns today aren’t just ad-buying competitions; they’re movement engineering projects. The real infrastructure is built in WhatsApp groups, on porches, in tenant meetings and TikTok DMs—not just in ad agencies or PAC war rooms.

Voters didn’t just choose a candidate—they chose a campaign that chose them first.

🎭 So What Happens When the Money Loses?

When a grassroots campaign beats a PAC-backed powerhouse, it grabs headlines. But one viral upset does not a revolution make.

Mamdani’s victory is a powerful signal — that organizing can still beat outsize spending, that people can outperform PACs. But zoom out, and the broader reality is sobering: this is a blip, not a sea change. For every Mamdani, there are dozens of races where the candidate with the deepest war chest wins, often by overwhelming margins.

The data backs this up. According to OpenSecrets, over 90% of federal races are won by the top-spending candidate. Super PACs and dark money groups are pouring billions into campaigns — and they’re getting results. In 2024 alone, outside spending topped $2 billion, with major corporate and ideological funders targeting everything from school board races to Senate contests. And unlike Mamdani’s donor list, the average check isn’t coming from someone in the district — it’s coming from a hedge fund manager in Connecticut or a political nonprofit with no public donor list at all.

What makes Mamdani’s campaign different — and effective — is also what makes it rare. New York City’s dense geography, robust public financing system, and politically engaged electorate are unusually fertile ground for organizing-driven wins. A high-rise building can yield hundreds of voter contacts in an afternoon. That’s not the case in sprawling districts across the Midwest or Sunbelt suburbs, where TV ads and mailers still dominate because door-knocking doesn’t scale the same way.

Even in NYC, this kind of upset is tough to replicate. It requires relentless volunteer infrastructure, disciplined message control, coalition management, and often a unique moment of vulnerability in the incumbent or opposition. In other words: it takes a perfect storm.

Yes, this campaign beat money.
But money is still winning most of the time.

So, when money loses — does governance change? Or just the optics?

That’s the open question. The challenge for Mamdani and others like him will be to translate people-powered campaigns into people-powered policy. Otherwise, the PACs may not just win the next round — they’ll write the rules for how it’s played.

🧾 Summary: The Future of Political Spending Is Weird

The 2024–2025 cycle has confirmed what we already suspected: political spending is skyrocketing, but effectiveness isn’t scaling at the same pace.

In 2024, Senate races regularly topped $100 million — with outside groups accounting for up to 60% of total spend in some states. Digital ad rates are inflating faster than campaign reach. Voter acquisition costs in high-profile races are now $60–$100 per vote, depending on the state. And yet, candidates like Zohran Mamdani are winning with donation averages under $35, powered by volunteers and velocity, not consultants and cash.

This isn’t a signal that big money is dead. Far from it. The vast majority of victories — from Congress to county clerk — still go to the highest bidder. But it is a signal that we’re entering a more fragmented, less predictable phase of American political spending. One where:

• Local density, identity, and organizing infrastructure can outperform national money.
• Campaign tech is becoming decentralized and volunteer-led.
• The marginal return on each additional ad dollar is shrinking.

If 2016–2020 was the era of the media personality candidate, and 2022–2024 marked the hyper-targeted ad race, then 2026–2028 may bring the rise of the micro-movement campaign — local, viral, scrappy, and hard to poll.

That should worry consultants, excite organizers, and intrigue political scientists.

Because in a world of $100 million Senate races, Zohran Mamdani won with under $10 and a MetroCard.

That’s not just a political upset —
that’s an accounting anomaly.