The Office of Mass Engagement has a $54 million budget and a grand brief: to reconnect New Yorkers with their city government. In practice this week, its most visible output was a barrage of mayor-branded reminders to vote that one political operative summed up as legal but unethical, and that appears to have moved turnout barely at all.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new office, which critics have already dubbed a “propaganda office,” spent weeks emailing and texting voters ahead of the June primaries, and even sent staff to canvass revellers at the Knicks ticker tape parade. The ads carried the mayor’s name and a typeface close to his campaign’s, and resembled spots run for the slate of socialist candidates he endorsed.
The result was thin. Tuesday brought roughly 570,000 ballots, only about 40,000 more than 2022, the last off-year vote, and that against a backdrop of fewer competitive races. The previous June, turnout had topped 1.1 million. In other words, the office’s get-out-the-vote push coincided with a fall, not a jump.
Some New Yorkers who received the messages were less than impressed. “Why is the mayor sending this out?” one asked, noting that the Board of Elections already handles voting material and wondering “where are they getting our names from?”
The technical point, as ever, is that the office has not clearly broken the law: elected officials cannot use their positions to sway a vote, but a city-funded reminder to participate sits in a grey zone that ethics watchdogs would scrutinise far harder if it bore any other mayor’s name.
“Democracy is strongest when everyone takes part,” said a Mamdani spokesperson, defending the effort. The numbers, though, suggest that a $54 million engagement office was not, this week, the difference.
Sources
- Mamdani's mass engagement office did little to get out the vote
- Mayor Mamdani Establishes Office of Mass Engagement (OME) – CB11M
