Even though Zohran Mamdani — a Democratic socialist Queens lawmaker — appears to have decisively won last week’s Democratic mayoral primary, his margin of victory will not become entirely clear until Tuesday when the city Board of Elections is set to run ranked-choice voting tabulations.
Mamdani was ahead in the first round of votes with 44% — up roughly 8% from runner-up former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, came up with 36%. Cuomo conceded the race on Election Night.
However, he did not cross the 50% threshold needed to win the race outright under the city’s relatively fresh ranked-choice voting system, meaning the BOE will conduct additional rounds of instant runoff tabulations at noon on Tuesday. The board will also run ranked-choice tabulations for several down-ballot races.
The process involves eliminating the lowest vote-getter and redistributing their ballots to the candidates their voters ranked second. It continues until one candidate, most likely Mamdani in this election, nabs over 50%.
The BOE says will run the tabulations on Tuesday based on Election in-person votes, including both Election Day and early votes, and absentee ballots recieved and processed by Election Day. It will then run the ranked-choice process every week until all of the votes are counted.
Mamdani primary lead likely to grow
It is likely that Mamdani’s margin of victory will grow, given that he cross-endorsed with other left-leaning candidates — most notably city Comptroller Brad Lander — and was part of the Working Families Party slate.
A Mamdani spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
After suffering a staggering first-round defeat last week, Cuomo has said he is waiting for those tabulations to take place before making a final decision on whether to actively campaign on an independent ballot line in the general election. Last week the former governor, who is attempting a political resurrection after resigning in under a clowd of scandal in 2021, opted to keep his “Fight and Deliver” line on the ballot in order to keep his options open.
Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi said the former governor is more interested in seeing what the potential make-up of the electorate for the general will look like than the ranked-choice tabulations themselves.
“Given his alliance with Lander, which we expect to be a proxy for Mamdani’s vote, and the complete collapse of the rest of the field with Stringer getting less than 2 percent and Speaker Adams getting just 4 percent of the vote, we don’t expect the final tabulations tomorrow to be all that revelatory — we’ll be examining the expected makeup and opinions of general electorate voters while determining next steps,” he said in a statement.
However, even if Cuomo forges ahead, he is unlikely to have the same apparent advantages as he did in the primary—broad support among Democratic establishment pols and labor unions and millions of dollars spent against Mamdani on his behalf. Those factors, plus a consistent polling lead, contributed to the ultimately false sense that Cuomo would inevitably sweep the primary.
Two of the key labor unions that backed Cuomo’s run early on — 32BJ SEIU and the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council — have already abandoned him to support Mamdani instead. They joined Brooklyn Democratic Party boss Rodneyse Bichotte-Hermelyn, who threw her support behind her party’s likely nominee just hours after Cuomo conceded.
Cuomo also appears to have lost the support of at least one of the billionaire donors who poured half a million dollars into a super PAC boosting his campaign: hedge fund manager Bill Ackman. The Trump-aligned Ackman made clear in an X post last week that he is done with Cuomo and looking for another candidate to back, possibly current Mayor Eric Adams, who sat out the Democratic primary and is running as an independent as well.
Ackman charged that Cuomo lost because he “sat back and did not run a real campaign, relying on name recognition, early favorable polling, and keeping a low profile to make it through. Not a strategy that I have ever seen work, but so be it.”
Meanwhile, Mayor Adams officially launched his reelection bid last week and has been relentlessly attacking Mamdani over the feasibility of his plans to subsidize more city services by raising taxes on New York’s highest earners.
