Democratic candidate for New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani with wife Rama Duwaji.
Credit: Reuters
New York: Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old state lawmaker, was elected New York’s 111th mayor Tuesday, riding a historic surge of enthusiasm as the nation’s largest city embraced generational and ideological change.
The Associated Press called the race just 35 minutes after polls closed, cementing a stunning upset that took root in June’s Democratic primary. Then and now, Mamdani handily dispatched former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the scion of a New York dynasty, and the big-money super political action committees backing him.
Tuesday’s results underscored how thoroughly Mamdani has built his own new coalition of support, uniting younger voters with working-class immigrant enclaves in Queens. But he also made gains in working-class Black and Latino communities compared with the primary.
Here are seven takeaways from election night:
Mamdani got the most votes since the 1960s
In an era of low turnout nationwide, participation in Tuesday’s mayoral election in New York City was nothing short of electric, approaching numbers not seen in half a century.
More than 2 million New Yorkers cast their ballots. That figure was almost double the 1,100,000 people who voted for mayor four years ago. In some areas of Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan, participation approached presidential election levels.
Mamdani drove the surge. He was the first candidate since John V. Lindsay in 1969 to win more than 1 million votes in a mayoral election in the five boroughs. (Overall turnout that year, 2,458,203 people, still slightly topped Tuesday’s total, though.)
Mamdani built his own new Democratic coalition
For decades, Democrats in New York City have prevailed with a fairly static coalition: white liberals in Manhattan and Brooklyn, Black and Latino voters, ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities and a smattering of other immigrants.
Early results suggest that Mamdani reworked the contours of that coalition, stitching together new alliances that could shift the city’s political outlook for years to come.
He ran up 40- and 50-point margins in Brooklyn’s affluent Brownstone belt, swept northern Manhattan and secured slightly more narrow margins in historically Black and Latino areas of Brooklyn and the Bronx.
Cuomo pulled away in Orthodox Jewish precincts, where he approached 80% of the vote, and clearly won large numbers of more liberal Jewish voters in Manhattan and Riverdale in the Bronx that typically back the Democratic nominee.
But Mamdani, who will be the city’s first Muslim and South Asian mayor, more than made up for those losses with two groups most Democrats have overlooked: the young residents of gentrifying neighborhoods like Bushwick and Williamsburg, and the taxi drivers, bodega owners and other working-class South Asian immigrants in Queens and the Bronx.
Cuomo squeezed his Republican rival — but not enough
As he saw his chances fading, Cuomo, a lifelong Democrat, launched a furious and at times ugly campaign to pull away supporters from Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee.
He blanketed Fox News and conservative talk radio, at one point laughing along with a shock jock who said Mamdani would cheer for a Sept. 11-style terrorist attack. He flipped key Republican endorsers. And on the eve of the election, Cuomo even won an endorsement from President Donald Trump.
Cuomo’s message to voters on the right was blunt: “He cannot win. You vote for Curtis, save yourself the time, and vote for Mamdani.”
The effort appears to have been remarkably successful. Cuomo won Republican sections of Staten Island and southern Brooklyn handily. Sliwa was on track to win just 7% Tuesday night.
It was not enough for Cuomo to make up the difference.
Despite spending $40 million, super PACs could not pull Cuomo to victory
Billionaires such as Bill Ackman and former Mayor Michael Bloomberg pumped millions of dollars into super PACs supporting Cuomo with the hopes of defeating Mamdani.
In advertisements and on social media, they focused on the fact that Mamdani is an avowed democratic socialist; parsed his positions on the war in the Gaza Strip; and highlighted his relative inexperience.
At the end of the race, the political ads dipped into what Mamdani called “naked bigotry” and Islamophobia. An advertisement from one super PAC, For Our City, placed a picture of a smiling Mamdani in front of the collapsing World Trade Center.
Super PACs supporting Cuomo have raised more than $40 million while those supporting Mamdani have raised about $10 million. According to Campaign Finance Board records, Fix the City spent more than $29 million to boost the campaign of Cuomo and to attack his two opponents in the election.
It was not decisive.
Mamdani successfully framed the attacks as an example of how the very wealthy, whom he has proposed taxing to fund some of his campaign platform, were obstacles to New Yorkers seeking a better quality of life.
Mamdani made progress in working-class Black and Latino neighborhoods
During the primary, Mamdani struggled to win some working-class Black and Latino areas. He overcame those challenges in a major way Tuesday night.
With almost 90% of the votes counted, Mamdani was winning the Bronx by 11 points, a striking turnaround from the primary when he lost the county to Cuomo by 18 points.
In working-class neighborhoods like Kingsbridge in the Bronx, Cuomo beat Mamdani by almost 2 points in the primary. On Tuesday night, Mamdani was winning the neighborhood by 14 points.
In Brownsville, Brooklyn, one of the most economically deprived neighborhoods in the city, Mamdani was winning by 18 points. Cuomo had won the neighborhood by 40 points in the primary.
But things changed after the primary. Mamdani said doors to places in some of those neighborhoods that he lost began to open to him. As the Democratic nominee for mayor, community groups wanted to meet with him, and he suddenly found himself invited into pulpits to speak almost every Sunday.
The campaign also made a point of emphasizing how Mamdani’s focus on affordability would help a family of four in Brownsville as much as it would a young person who had recently moved to the city.
“It is really without a question an electoral victory that belongs to working-class and middle-class people who are dissatisfied with a political system that tells people who are struggling to just wait or endure,” said Ana María Archila, a co-director of the New York Working Families Party.
Andrew Cuomo has reached his expiration date
There was a time, not that long ago, when Cuomo, 67, was not only the most powerful Democrat in New York, but widely considered a viable candidate for the White House.
That seemed like another lifetime Tuesday night, as he faced his second stinging defeat in just five months. The results suggested he held onto support among some Black and many Jewish Democrats. But after running a scorched-earth campaign against Mamdani, the lifelong Democrat performed far better in many Republican precincts than solidly Democratic ones.
Cuomo may yet run for another office, but after decades of him and his father, Mario Cuomo, many voters said they were done.
“We need someone who’s trying to turn a new leaf for New York City,” said Alexis Pierson, 35, an interior designer from Brooklyn.
“Cuomo?” she added. “Been there, done that.”
The rich could not make up their minds
It was an election, in many ways, about New York City’s spiraling living costs, the haves and have-nots. Evidently, the haves could not agree about whom to vote for.
Cuomo, a Sutton Place resident who earned nearly $5 million last year, clearly appealed to his neighbors a few blocks away on the Upper East Side, long the bastion of New York’s superrich. He won every block touching Central Park on the East Side between 59th and 102nd Streets, and many more nearby.
The former governor won chunks of the more liberal but still affluent Upper West Side, too, and most of Tribeca, where the average home price is more than $3 million.
Mamdani, the son of a renowned filmmaker and a Columbia professor, was the choice of Brooklyn’s most exclusive neighborhoods. His margins of victory were staggering in areas like Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Park Slope and Fort Greene — where wealthy professionals and people in creative fields have congregated in recent decades.