Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign claims a volunteer army of 25,000. But on a balmy evening in Greenpoint, fewer than a dozen showed up to canvas. Still, spirits were high. Mamdani had just scored the coveted endorsement of progressive firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, giving his campaign a timely boost. “This could get us over the line,” a volunteer told me, grinning.
In a normal race, the prospect of a Muslim-American socialist (not to mention anti-Zionist) candidate running America’s largest city would be seen as fanciful. But these are not normal times. The incumbent, Eric Adams, has been forced to run as an independent amid corruption allegations. Andrew Cuomo, the former governor, is the unloved frontrunner. And the city, which has experienced sweeping demographic changes over the last 10 years, has become Trumpier. This has fuelled an anti-establishment feeling that could, paradoxically, benefit outsider candidates like Mamdani.
As voting starts on 14 June in the Democratic primary, the result of this race will ripple far beyond the city’s five boroughs. Should Mamdani pull off an upset, progressives elsewhere in the country may challenge incumbents in their own states, using the victory as a chance to reshape the national party and pull Democrats to the Left. Meanwhile, if Cuomo wins, it will be seen as proof that voters don’t want radicals — just a “return to normalcy,” to borrow Warren G. Harding’s 1920 campaign slogan.
As things stand, the odds remain stacked in Cuomo’s favor. Despite the sexual-harassment allegations that led to his resignation as governor in 2021 and a federal investigation into his handling of nursing-home deaths during the pandemic, the 67-year-old maintains a prohibitive lead over his opponents. The latest polls put him around 10 percentage points ahead of second-placed Mamdani, and in a projected run-off, he would win with 56% of the vote to Mamdani’s 44%.
The gap, however, has been narrowing. In March, Cuomo enjoyed a nearly 30-point lead over Mamdani, but as that advantage has shrunk, fears are growing that he may be getting complacent. Instead of hitting the campaign trail, the former governor has adopted a Bidenesque basement strategy, eschewing media appearances in favor of a few limited appearances across the city.
Mamdani, meanwhile, has run a sophisticated grassroots campaign that bears an uncanny resemblance to AOC’s original bid for the House of Representatives. Through a combination of intensive door-to-door canvassing and buzzy policy proposals like Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and a Green New Deal, the then-28-year-old bartender pulled off a huge upset by unseating 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary back in 2018.
Taking a leaf from her book, Mamdani touts free buses, city-run grocery stores, and universal childcare. He promises to fund these initiatives with higher taxes on the extremely wealthy and corporations, even though there is little sign that the state’s governor, Kathy Hochul, is receptive to such plans. Yet even so, Hochul is up for re-election next year. If Mamdani does win, she may feel obliged — or even pressured — to offer something up.
Cuomo, by contrast, has made public safety the centrepiece of his campaign. In his announcement video, he gravely indicted the city’s leadership for its anti-anti-crime stances: “We know that today our New York City is in trouble. You feel it when you walk down the street and try not to make eye contact with a mentally ill homeless person, or when the anxiety rises up in your chest as you’re walking down into the subway.”
It is a strong message — but one that might have landed more effectively during the 2021 election than today’s. For while those concerns persist, they aren’t felt as acute as they once were: the migrant crisis is subsiding, violent crime is down, and tourism has rebounded. “Cuomo is running a crisis campaign when people don’t feel that way,” says Dan Turrentine, a Democratic strategist. “New Yorkers want a more positive message.”
The relative improvement in the city’s mood has created space for Mamdani’s more expansive (or panglossian) economic proposals. Ironically, his Left-populist message may have been bolstered by Trump’s win last year. “Trump has actually made things easier for a democratic socialist,” says Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “When the president says Walmart can eat the cost of tariffs, it makes Mamdani’s idea of government-run grocery stores seem less crazy. Trump says things no one from either party has dared to, which gives the extremes on both sides license to go further.”
“Ironically, his Left-populist message may have been bolstered by Trump’s win last year.”
That a city as blue as New York increased its support for Trump consistently over three election cycles shouldn’t be mistaken for a broader conservative shift. Rather, it is a sign of growing frustration with the establishment, which has hurt Cuomo’s campaign more than the others. Even though he has never been mayor, progressives have framed Cuomo as the incumbent and tied the city’s failures to him. During last week’s debate, the 67-year-old faced relentless attacks from his opponents about his decade as governor. At times, he was left on the backfoot.
“Cuomo has been battered — the Left is determined to break him down,” says Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran strategist who worked on the campaigns of Bill Clinton and Michael Bloomberg. “It’s a bad time to be an establishment centrist Democrat because everything is changing. And when everything changes, that hurts those in the middle the most.”
Recognizing Cuomo’s weakness, progressive candidates have been doing something they almost never do: cooperating. Learning from their mistakes in the last mayoral election, progressives have launched a concerted ABC (Anyone But Cuomo) campaign, which could negatively impact the former governor under the primary’s ranked-choice voting system. The push was epitomized by AOC, who told voters in her Mamdani endorsement: “do not rank Andrew Cuomo on your ballot at all. Leave the bubble next to his name blank.”
Mamdani’s late surge means that it’ll be more likely for progressive voters to coalesce around his candidacy. But his shortcomings are hard to ignore. His legislative record is thin — he has passed a grand total of three bills during his time in the New York state Assembly — and his free-bus pilot scheme was not renewed. Then there is his ferociously anti-Israel stance, which risks alienating many of the city’s 1.3 million Jewish residents. Asked about whether he supported Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state in last week’s debate, Mamdani could only offer a mealy mouthed response. “I believe Israel has a right to exist as a state with equal rights,” he said.
There is also another inescapable truth that becomes all too evident at Mamdani’s rallies. Ironically for an Indian-American born in Uganda, his supporters are almost exclusively white, largely concentrated in the gentrifying neighborhoods of Queens and Brooklyn. This was confirmed by the recent Emerson poll, in which Mamdani leads white voters with 57% support, compared to Cuomo at 43%. Among black voters, however, he pulls less than 26%, and Hispanics are even colder on him.
For a candidate who claims to represent the city’s (largely nonwhite) working class, this is a glaring disconnect. It’s a testament to the tension between whom progressives like Mamdani claim to speak for versus who actually shows up to support them. After all, it was the city’s voters of color — long a moderating force on the Democratic Party — who handed former NYPD captain Eric Adams the mayoralty and who, by wide margins, tell pollsters they want the same or more policing in their neighborhoods, not less. Mamdani, by contrast, has called for slashing the NYPD budget by at least $3 billion and supports community-led alternatives to public safety — stances that very few working-class New Yorkers support.
Cuomo’s base is far broader. He’s backed by Jews in Manhattan, black churchgoers in Brooklyn, Latino families in southeast Queens, and older homeowners across the boroughs — the coalition that forms the bedrock of the city’s electorate. He has also promised to add 5,000 additional NYPD officers, which would likely be well-received by these communities.
Taken together, these factors give Cuomo a clearer path to victory than Mamdani, but the implications of this race stretch far beyond New York. For the rest of America, it could offer a revealing lesson about the Democratic Party’s unresolved identity crisis. Whichever faction prevails will claim a mandate: a Mamdani victory might embolden progressives like AOC to pressure establishment figures — including Sen. Chuck Schumer, who faces re-election next year — to shift further Left or risk a primary. A Cuomo win, meanwhile, would strengthen the hand of moderates arguing that the party must reclaim the center to stay competitive. With party figures across the country jockeying for consideration in the 2028 presidential race, all eyes will be on how this one turns out.
In fewer than two weeks, voters will find out who will lead the Democrats into the general election at the end of this year. But as Hank Sheinkopf, who has worked on some 700 campaigns around the world, said, all bets on this race are off. “One given in New York politics,” he says, “is that nothing is predictable.”
