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Digital organizers from the Catherine Connolly campaign give insights into the tech tools that helped drive Connolly and Zohran to victory.
By Dan Albright and Henry De Groot
In the last two weeks, two monumental electoral victories have reenergized the international left: Catherine Connolly’s landslide victory in the Irish Presidential Election, and Zohran Mamdani’s heroic triumph in the New York City mayoral election.
The two campaigns were won both on the doors and online. In addition to both campaigns being powered by massive volunteer participation from broad layers of the socialist and progressive left, the two also utilized almost identical digital infrastructure and strategies.
Here are five of the digital approaches which won it big in 2025.
1. Dynamic Video Content: Instagram, FB Reels, and TikTok
It is almost a cliche now to note that Zohran has found success through his dynamic use of video content, and most especially his “man on the street” and “walk and talk” style videos. And the same has been noted about Connolly’s campaign, with the commentariat noting her campaign’s use of relatable content (like her keepie-uppies) to drive accidental virality. There is no doubt that video played a significant role in both campaigns, both in conveying a coherent political message capable of assembling a winning coalition and in bringing joy and whimsy into the political arena.
What is also interesting to note—at least for future campaigners seeking to replicate this video-campaigning style—is the use by both campaigns of supporter-sourced content in addition to high production value videos. Mamdani’s appearances on popular podcasts as well as tags in videos by social media influencers and spontaneous volunteers became a symbol of his popular appeal. Similarly, on the Connolly campaign, we leaned into grassroots desire to help the campaign, assembling a volunteer video team to edit timely and fun, if imperfect, videos and reels. We made it a priority, time allowing, to give volunteers runway to contribute as well as a platform for their work that they could be proud of. The core team created a brand kit of template guides and graphics that we shared on easy-to-use, collaborative platforms like Canva and CapCut. With some guidance and feedback, volunteers were able to make significant progress on or almost entirely independently edit content such as other volunteers’ testimonials, event recaps, and candidate appearances on popular podcasts, TV, and radio shows. Alongside high production value content we created, this content helped provide a steady stream of IG/FB story content and even video and reel posts throughout every day of the campaign.
But the secret sauce was neither greater volume of social content nor jumping onto the trending formats of each week. The key is presenting the candidate authentically by channeling their ideosyncratic voice, style and perspective. In her trademark stubbornness to her convictions, Catherine Connolly refused to do anything staged or gimmicky for self-promotion. She’s the polar opposite of Mamdani’s social media ready style. So instead of trying to copy the now-cliched Mamdani walk-and-talk format or force a TikTok fad recreation, we let the cameras roll and let Catherine do Catherine. What we discovered and leaned into was Catherine’s vulnerable side—her comradely athleticism, musical skill, and playful way with children—the perfect counterbalance to the moral clarity and conviction that she was known for before the campaign. As Catherine spoke of building a movement, moments of Catherine engaging with the people proved to be some of our most viral clips.
2. Attention To Activation: ManyChat
It is no secret that Mamdani and Connolly used video to great effect. But how is attention on Instagram, X, or TikTok actually translated into people power? For a content creator, attention fuels brand deals or direct payments from social media platforms, and for a candidate, attention alone does lead to increased voter awareness, and therefore votes.
But attention can also lead to volunteer activation. Like the Mamdani campaign, we leveraged Manychat to direct message actionable links to engaged viewers. This led to thousands of contacts we could feed into our supporter development pipeline.
3. The Central Database: Solidarity Tech
Both campaigns relied on the same database software to collect and manage signups and volunteers: Solidarity Tech. This contact relationship software (CRM) built for organizers grew out of the rideshare organizing movement before being taken on by larger institutional unions to facilitate new organizing drives, in the auto industry and elsewhere.
Each campaign’s Solidarity Tech database was the central node of the campaign, where signups could be directed towards campaign events, WhatsApp groups, or volunteer shifts. The databases were used to source specialized volunteers or surrogates for video content, allowing for campaign HQ’s to maximize volunteer participation. They were also used to drive deeper engagement through targeted or micro-targeted content like volunteer pages in Irish or Bengali, or issue-based sign-on forms such as Artists For Connolly. And both campaigns made use of Solidarity Tech’s contact automation feature to build out layers of pre-set email and text progressions to allow campaign organizers to engage consistently at scale.
4. Online-To-Offline: Volunteer Event Maps
The Zohran campaign built its own custom volunteer map page to geographically display its array of Solidarity Tech RSVP pages, taking innovation from a tactic used effectively in the Bernie 2020 campaign.
Volunteer event maps helped facilitate engagement at the hyper-local level, helping supporters clearly visualize volunteer opportunities, and therefore driving the high levels of doorknocking which was needed to win the campaign in the field.
Within weeks, the feature was replicated by the Solidarity Tech team so it could be used by the Connolly campaign. The Connolly campaign replicated the basic function of mapping canvassing shifts. But it also used the campaign map to facilitate locally organized cultural events, including trad music nights, nature walks, pub quizzes, and opportunities to meet up with Catherine as she traveled the country twice over.
In this way, the campaign leaned into a vibes-based, personable approach to campaigning. This was not only run in parallel with a more target-focused, traditional canvassing turnout approach, but also served as an accessible entry point to active supporters beyond the “usual suspects” to engage a new layer of progressives in political activism.
5. Digital, But Local: WhatsApp Communities
There is a long-standing dispute within DSA about which is a better messaging tool: Signal, WhatsApp, or Discord.
And I hate to say it, but this election season has proved the WhatsAppers right.
With the introduction of WhatsApp Communities in 2022, multiple group chats can be integrated into one ecosystem, or “Community.” This replicates the depth of engagement made possible by apps like Discord, without the same obstacle of accessibility.
The Zohran campaign made use of local WhatsApp communities to powerful effect, to bring together … This also allowed the campaign to more easily access the countless immigrant communities in New York City, many of which already use WhatsApp to communicate among themselves and with family back home.
The role of WhatsApp was perhaps even more prominent on the Connolly campaign, where, in Ireland as in many countries, it is already both the primary way to message and the existing predominant choice for coordinating progressive groups.
The campaign even built an in-house “WhatsApper,” which facilitated the text-banking of contacts stored in Solidarity Tech through WhatsApp, a workaround necessary to replace the CRM’s SMS feature, which is not yet operational in Ireland.
International Solidarity, Parallel Victories
And it’s no accident that the two campaigns share a number of similarities in both political messaging and organizing methods.
The multi-party alliance which assembled during the Connolly campaign from its early days—including People Before Profit, the Social Democrats, the Green Party, and independent leftist trade union and housing activists—was in some ways the exact Irish parallel to the early Zohran coalition of the Democratic Socialist of America’s New York City chapter and its close allies like the New York Communities For Change.
In both cases, an early consolidation by the political left allowed the two campaigns to pick up less radical endorsements, such as the Working Families Party and the Irish Labour Party. Then, this momentum paved the way for support from the institutional center-left, with Brad Lander and many Democrats joining the Mamdani wagon between the primary win and the general election, while Sinn Féin endorsed Connolly around one month before the Irish election, consolidating her place as the official candidate of the opposition.
And the two campaigns were not only built of virtually identical political coalitions, but also almost identical campaign technological infrastructure, with the Zohran campaign providing the Connolly campaign with tactical insights in its early days.
Despite the tremendous, almost comical stylistic differences between Zohran’s triumph in metropolitan NYC and the Gal From Galway’s successful run for the Irish Presidency, the actual election results in both cases are quite similar.
New York City has a population of some 8.5 million, with around 5 million registered voters. Turnout in New York was around 40 percent, and Mamdani won 1,036,051 out of 2,055,921, or 50.4 percent to Cuomo’s 41.6 percent and Sliwa’s 7.1 percent.
The Republic of Ireland has a population of around 5.5 million, with some 3.6 million registered voters. Irish turnout was around 45 percent, with Connolly receiving 914,143 out of 1,656,436 total votes, or (when including spoiled votes) 55.1 percent, to Humphrey’s 25.6 percent, Gavin’s 6.2 percent, and 12.9 percent of ballots spoilt, mostly by right-wing voters.
Dan Albright is a founder and the Board Chair of Working Mass. Henry De Groot is an editor and a founder of Working Mass.
The post The Digital Playbook: 5 Tactics That Helped Connolly and Zohran Win appeared first on Working Mass.
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