The hot girls of New York are fighting, not over the Corner Store waitlist, Sandy Liang sample sale, or the age-old question of Manhattan or Brooklyn. Their new battleground is the city’s mayoral race and two of its candidates: Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo.
Mamdani, the 33-year-old front-runner, won the Democratic mayoral primary back in June. If you’ve wandered through Chinatown, Bed-Stuy, or any New York City neighborhood on a recent weekend and seen a sea of young people clad in Salomons, cargos, and electric blue T-shirts, then you’ve witnessed one of his canvassing events. The shirts say “Hot Girls for Zohran,” they’re a steady downtown staple, and celebrities including Emily Ratajkowski, Reneé Rapp, and Hasan Piker have all worn one, according to the grassroots group behind the merch. Independent from Mamdani’s official campaign, Hot Girls for Zohran has created a momentum so scintillating it’s reshaped the race itself, even inspiring a “Hot Girls for Cuomo” movement on the other side.
“People are now realizing there’s a lot of value in affinity groups and doing volunteer-led initiatives like this,” 25-year-old Cait Camelia, one of the founders of Hot Girls for Zohran, tells Vanity Fair. “The Hot Girl brand has become a little bit of a blueprint.”
Camelia, who explained this wasn’t initially intended to become an organization, was inspired by Hot Girls for Bernie, a hashtag turned grassroots campaign that began trending in 2020 when supporters of the Vermont senator rallied online in the lead-up to the Democratic primaries. “Bernie Sanders is hot and so am I,” one Twitter user said at the time; “#hotgirlsforbernie is a state of mind and a state of being,” wrote another.
This blueprint—since adapted and perfected for Mamdani—perhaps even dates back to “Crush on Obama,” the viral 2007 YouTube video featuring a young woman singing about her love for then US senator Barack Obama who called herself an “Obama Girl.”
“More stuff like this will be popping up all the time,” Obama told The Des Moines Register at the time, and he wasn’t wrong. The playbook inspired 24-year-old conservative influencer and journalist Emily Austin, who, after interviewing 67-year-old former governor Cuomo for the debut episode of her new podcast, The Emily Austin Show, last week, launched a Hot Girls offshoot in his honor.
“I wanted to humanize him a little bit,” Austin tells me over the phone, explaining her choice of guest. “I feel like Cuomo never had this persona of just being a guy.”
What started as a joke for Austin quickly snowballed into a full-blown moment of virality. Her announcement of the new Hot Girls club now has more than 47 million views on X, and moments after she posted it, someone else had registered the domain, redirecting it to New York attorney general Letitia James’s 2021 investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct against Cuomo. (Cuomo has denied wrongdoing.)
Austin, who admits she wasn’t historically “a fan of his policies,” was quickly inundated with hate, backlash, and an outpouring of support. Despite running in the Democratic primary before relaunching his campaign as an independent in the general election, Cuomo has made a conspicuous appeal to conservative New Yorkers in recent weeks, appearing on right-wing creators’ podcasts in a seemingly new direction for his campaign.
“I own Hot Girls for Vance. I bought Hot Girls for Rubio,” Austin tells me. “I got every Hot Girl domain for Republicans because if I had known it would go this viral, I actually would have made it a legitimate campaign.” (Hotgirlsforrubio.com still appeared to be available after VF initially spoke with Austin. After VF asked Austin to clarify the matter, the Whois.com database showed that the domain had been registered later that day, and a rep for Austin confirmed she owned it)
Speaking to Vanity Fair from her hotel room in Tel Aviv, Austin was preparing to appear on Eretz Nehederet, an Israeli sketch comedy show inspired by Saturday Night Live, to portray a New Yorker who fled the country because Mamdani won the election. She assures me that in real life, this isn’t the case.
“Do I prefer a Republican? Absolutely. In an ideal world, we can have another Rudy Giuliani. But I’m also a realist,” she says, reiterating that her lock screen is an image of Donald Trump. “I just feel better now knowing that I’m not only one supporting Cuomo because he’s better than Mamdani, but he actually has a vision.”
In recent weeks, Cuomo, the once stiff, behind-the-lectern, TikTok-ambivalent candidate, has gone all out in appealing to young voters. During an appearance on Logan Paul’s Impaulsive podcast, he was asked why Mamdani was currently leading the polls. “He has appealed with very simplistic solutions that would never work,” Cuomo responded, overlooking the fact that Mamdani’s carefully curated social strategy has helped engineer his success, making this an election that appealed to Gen Z.
On Monday evening, Cuomo made a cameo at a “Cool Girls for Capitalism” event hosted by Erica Wenger, the founding general partner at Park Rangers Capital, a venture capital firm. Participants wore pink “Cool Girls for Capitalism” T-shirts in what seemed to be the latest adaptation of the Hot Girls blueprint. In a post on X, Wenger shared several photos from the event, with Cuomo seen standing behind her as she delivered a speech in an elaborate, wood panelled library.
Mamdani has indeed appealed to many young New Yorkers by playing on their hunger for change but making it fun in the process. His social media presence has been solicitous, relatable, and forcefully energetic, deconstructing the formalities of what it means to be a politician. One day you’ll see him dancing at a parade, another, striding the length of Manhattan. Sometimes you’ll even see him as a spinning animation, his head popping out of a flower as he urges people to get down to the polls and vote. Hot Girls for Zohran has played into this ethos, constructing a guerilla campaign that’s flirty, fun, and wholly effective.
“This has grown beyond the size of just our group. There are other candidates across the country that are looking to us for advice,” says 28-year-old Kaif Kabir, cofounder of Hot Girls for Zohran, who told me that people from France, Brazil, and Japan have reached out to purchase T-shirts.
“There’s a lot of fear-mongering from the Cuomo camp,” Kabir adds. From the beginning, our ethos and messaging has always been that it should be from a place of love and from a place of helping others. I think that’s the message that’s very easy to spread.”
For now, it’s unclear whether a Hot Girls for Curtis Sliwa campaign will emerge. A few people have posted on X about it, but it’s yet to take off. One user, an “NYC girl living her best life,” did have something to say to the 16,000-plus accounts that viewed her post. “At least Hot Girls for Curtis don’t have to worry about a lawsuit,” she said. “Can’t say the same for Cuomo.”
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