The Limits of "Verticality"

Originally published (in Greek) in Kathimerini on 21 August 2026, as Antonis Kaloudis's contribution to the feature "Dialogues in K: The TikTok Election Battle".

Zohran Mamdani built his campaign for the New York mayoralty on the grammar of TikTok. He produced short vertical videos, with humor and direct language, keeping the cost of living firmly at the center. He mobilized roughly 50,000 volunteers, who knocked on 1.6 million doors, turning online virality into a massive ground campaign.

This change coincided with a deeper shift in the news: the news item no longer waits for the audience to seek it out — it finds them, inside the social media feed.

The media adopted reels, shorts, and vertical video. Politicians followed, initially seeking a more direct route to younger generations. Inside the feed, however, the rules of the game changed too. There, the political message competes with the entire platform — from creators and news to entertainment and every next video that appears on screen.

Between recognition and the actual vote stand understanding, familiarity, trust, political preference, mobilization, and ultimately turnout at the ballot box. TikTok's grammar is particularly effective at the start of that journey, quickly winning attention and name recognition.

The hard part is what follows. The international research literature shows that additional campaign exposure has, on average, a very small effect on changing votes. By contrast, social media are most effective when they mobilize an audience that has already begun to take an interest or to identify.

That is why they are invaluable as a starting point, but not sufficient on their own to guarantee a result at the ballot box. Turning that first digital relationship into electoral behavior requires political credibility, substantive content, and organizational presence.

Mamdani's case is telling precisely for this reason. He used TikTok to win attention — and then carried that momentum off the screen. The next step for politicians is to learn to do the same. Because elections may now begin in the feed, but they are still won outside of it.