TAX THE RICH

We Made Taxing The Rich Go Viral

$5.3 Billion

DEFICIT ERASED

2

MILLIONAIRE POLITICIANS DEFEATED

1

FIRST-OF-ITS-KIND
PIED-À-TERRE TAX

0

BUDGET CUTS

The Story

Electing Zohran Mamdani and defeating Andrew Cuomo and his billionaire backers was step one. Now, it was time to tax the rich and fund the Mamdani agenda. Which meant pressuring New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who had pledged not to raise taxes on New York’s wealthiest.

The Challenge

Budget fights don’t get the same attention as elections. They are negotiated behind closed doors and under layers of bureaucracy, and are treated by the press and public as a spectator sport. And if that wasn’t hard enough, Mayor Mamdani dropped a bombshell revelation just days into the campaign: his corrupt predecessor had left behind a devastating deficit that would legally mandate cuts to critical public services, threatening to nip Mamdani’s mayoralty in the bud.

Now we weren't just taking on the governor to tax the rich, but to save New York itself.

How We Won

We got the public off the sidelines and into the game.

We turned backroom policy negotiations into public discourse with messaging memos and content toolkits that coordinated elected officials, movement leaders, and content creators. Our messaging campaign put the blame for the proposed cuts squarely on Hochul and her City Council Speaker ally, who we dubbed “Millionaire Menin”.

NEW MEDIA

With local media all-in on defending the rich, we needed to reach people where they’re at: on their phones. 

We created two new original content series: a weekly news show with Carla Marie Davis, and a man-on-the-street gameshow with the original Zohran content creator Cassie Willson.

We organized content creators with regularly-updated memos and built a social media ecosystem that kept influencers in lock-step with movement demands.

We were brought in by campaign partners like the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America to organize the creator/influencer program for their Tax The Rich rallies, including the tentpole event of the cycle with Bernie Sanders. 

The result? Months-long social media cycles reaching millions, featuring notable figures including Hasan Piker, Jess Craven, Jordan Uhl, and Edna the Runt as well as organizations like the Patriotic Millionaires — ultimately topping 17 million impressions in May alone.

PRINT MEDIA

A heightened focus on vertical video content left an opening for something else too: good old-fashioned physical advertising.

Rather than the generic templates commonly seen in Albany, we bombarded our onlookers with visually arresting messages you couldn’t scroll past, including billboards, wheatpasting, and a first-of-its-kind LinkNYC campaign that made waves from Manhattan to Japan.

MERCH MADNESS

We followed up our election-defining DREAM merch with the uniform of the Mayor’s first 100 days: the Anti-Billionaire Socialist Club sweatshirt. The right-wing media frenzy around Hasan Piker and Emma Vigeland of the Majority Report wearing our merch raised over $50,000 for the campaign.

But that's not all. We designed “Tax Me, I’m Rich” sweatshirts and gave them to wealthy and well-known New Yorkers. This mini-campaign played a small but important role in undercutting elite propaganda around rich flight from higher taxes.

Top podcaster Jennifer Welch and multimillionaire Morris Pearl demanding Kathy Hochul tax them more on I’ve Had It podcast

The Win

Together with our movement partners and the Mayor, our public-oriented mass media campaign pressured City Council Speaker Julie Menin to pivot and call for $1 billion worth of taxes on the rich, and flipped Governor Hochul from pledging no taxes on the rich to “proudly” approving a first-of-its kind pied-à-terre tax. New York zeroed its deficit without any major cuts, saving the city from austerity and the Mamdani mayorship from permanent damage. 

Less than six months into Mamdani’s first year, we proved taxing the rich was not only possible — it was achievable.

And with a new crop of Mamdani allies now headed to Albany, it may be just the beginning.