Leah Cumming, a furniture designer, hosted a meet and greet with the candidate in April at her Chelsea pad. It was a pizza, wine, and cake night for around 70 people. Guests stood and sat around Cumming’s living room as the candidate spoke to the crew of mostly late 20-somethings and early 30-somethings for about 20 minutes. By the end, his button-down shirt had come untucked as he worked the room. It felt “social” and “not too, too political,” says Lilly Sisto, a 30-year-old influencer who attended. “Super casual.”
“Make America Great Again” animated a swath of working class voters who were typically disengaged from politics. By way of response, Schlossberg offers his “Believe in Something Again,” a slogan he hopes will unlock a coalition of big-city professionals, Fashion Institute of Technology matriculators, and real-life Gossip Girl types. Their interest in the bakeoff to succeed 78-year-old Jerry Nadler in Congress often revolves around one person.
“I think they’re all irrelevant,” says one young Schlossberg organizer about the candidates in the race who aren’t TikTok-massive descendants of American political dynasties. The polls say otherwise—Schlossberg’s lead is in the single digits—but there is no doubt: Attending or hosting a fundraiser for this congressional candidate carries a contemporary Manhattan cool.
When Schlossberg announced his candidacy, Kiera Chambers, a 23-year-old talent agency assistant, felt excited about the prospect of a new young voice in Washington, DC, and began phone banking for him. When the campaign asked supporters to throw events, Chambers offered to host one and convinced a friend on the Upper East Side to open up her apartment to a few dozen of Chambers’s pals. “Almost everyone was around my age,” she says. “The outliers were the older people.” Going to political events on weekends isn’t a regular routine for Chambers and her cohort, and ahead of the event, one of her friends posted to her Snapchat story: “I’m about to go do something congressional.”
Guests jammed inside the apartment, which featured a spread from Gramercy Bagels next to an array of campaign pamphlets. Schlossberg discussed his campaign, but he also spent time chatting with guests, among them Manzie Allen, Woody Allen’s youngest daughter with Soon-Yi Previn. He also handed out a few rolled-up campaign T-shirts. “He went up to every group of my friends and was like, ‘How’s your weekend?’” Chambers says. “‘How’s it going? What do you guys think about? What do you care about?’”
