Zohran Mamdani jumps out to early lead over Andrew Cuomo in NYC mayoral primary
Zohran Mamdani seized an early lead in Tuesday's Democratic mayoral primary, giving the socialist upstart a dose of hope as he vies to become the youngest man in modern New York history to run City Hall.
With more than 81% of ballots counted, unofficial returns from the city Board of Elections showed Mamdani holding a roughly 8% lead over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has generally polled as the primary's front-runner. The AP had Mamdani leading with a margin of 43.7% to 35.9.
The Tuesday night tally only includes the No. 1 picks on voters' ranked-choice ballots. The Board of Elections won't start tabulating the secondary choices on voters' ballots until next week, making it unlikely any candidate will on Tuesday night reach the 50% threshold required to win.
Still, Andrew Epstein, Mamdani's communications director, struck an optimistic tone at the left-wing mayoral candidate's election night party in Long Island City.
'We have the message, we have the team, and we feel very, very good going into the rest of the night,' Epstein said.
Mamdani, a socialist Assembly member from Queens, has centered his mayoral run on affordability, leading a forceful campaign effort both on social media and through thousands of volunteers.
Polls closed Tuesday at 9 p.m., but a total of over 930,000 New Yorkers had already braved the heat wave and cast ballots by 7:30 p.m., putting the election on track to have the highest turnout in decades. There were also 45,597 mail-in ballots included in Tuesday's count.
Mamdani has generally outpaced Cuomo among younger voters, while the former governor has led among older Black and brown residents, according to prior polling.
City Comptroller Brad Lander was in third place in the early returns, pulling about 12% in the unofficial results, tallies showed.
In the final stretch of the race, Cuomo has taken hits on Mamdani's young age and lack of experience, and accused the Muslim lawmaker of antisemitism.
Mamdani has hit Cuomo over his deep-pocketed donor base, which shares overlap with Trump's, and argued the city needs fresh leadership.
While the race has largely been a two-man contest, Lander has had a strong couple weeks in the lead-up to the election. After being arrested by ICE agents last week while volunteering at immigration court, nearly all the Democratic candidates coalesced around him.
Cuomo and Mamdani would be the city's oldest and youngest mayors, respectively.
Although typically the results of the city's Democratic primary determine who will be the next mayor, this year's general election in November is expected to be competitive.
Both Cuomo and Mamdani, regardless of the final results of the primary, are widely expected to run in November on independent third party lines, as is Mayor Eric Adams, who dropped out of the Democratic primary earlier this year amid fallout from his federal corruption indictment.
Having once declared himself the 'new face' of the Democratic Party and the 'Biden of Brooklyn,' Adams was nowhere near the mayoral race spotlight Tuesday night, with nothing listed on his public schedule for the evening.
The intense heat on Tuesday, with feels-like temperatures above 100 degrees, could prove to be a problem for Cuomo since the former governor's voter base generally leans older, experts said. During a rally on Monday night he told union members to vote despite the weather and in a leaked call leaked by health care worker members, Cuomo beseeched the union to help him get out the vote.
'We can do it, but it's going to take all of us,' Cuomo said on the call with 1199SEIU, which has deployed members to canvass and phone bank for the ex-governor. 'Please, please, please make the special effort.'
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