With 92% of votes counted, the Associated Press estimates that as of this writing, Democratic Socialist Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani leads the Democratic mayoral primary with 43.5 percent (roughly 431,000 votes), followed by former governor Andrew Cuomo at 36.4 percent. Even as a final result is yet to be reached due to the process of counting ranked choices, Mamdani’s commanding lead means that he is the presumptive winner of the primary.
Andrew Cuomo indicated in a statement that he contacted the Bernie Sanders-endorsed assemblymember to congratulate him, and is waiting to see the ranked-choice totals. “I will then consult with my colleagues on what is the best path for me to help the City of New York, as I have already qualified to run for mayor on an independent line in November,” the former governor said. Sources within his campaign have indicated that it is unlikely that he is going to take the route of running as an independent candidate, according to Spectrum News 1.
Zohran Mamdani and City Comptroller Brad Lander had cross-endorsed each other’s campaigns, encouraging supporters who rank either of them first on their ballot to rank the other second. An Associated Press estimate places Lander in third place with 11.3 percent of the vote on the first ballot.
One factor that many thought could influence the outcome is New York City’s heatwave. Temperatures climbed in the week leading up to election day, with Tuesday topping 100 degrees. Emerson reports that according to their survey, voters who have already voted during the early voting period break for Mamdani 10 points, 41 percent to Cuomo’s 31. Election day voters, who have to brave the hottest day of the year so far, instead break for Cuomo by five percent.
However, the vote margins were wide enough to indicate that the deciding factor was Mamdani’s grassroots campaign to activate voters across the five boroughs who do not usually participate in primaries — an advantage that would not show up as much in polls, which are generally done with “likely voters” who have probably participated in the process before. Mamdani devoted significant resources to a canvassing operation that knocked on over a million doors across the five boroughs in the months leading to the election.
When Cuomo announced his campaign in early March, a Quinnipiac poll showed him leading the pack of 11 hopefuls at 31 percent among registered Democrats, with Mamdani a distant third at seven percent (incumbent Eric Adams, who was still expected to run as a Democrat, was at 11 percent). Since then, Mamdani’s upstart campaign has steadily climbed in the polls, drawing level with the former governor in recent weeks and turning the primary into a two-horse race between them.
