Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary in the race to be New York mayor by 56% to 44% for former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Photo / Shuran Huang, the New York Times
New York State Assembly member Zohran Mamdani has won the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York, the Associated Press reported today, a critical step towards becoming the first Muslim American to run America’s largest city.
His win, one week after voters cast ballots and he forced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to concede the primary, has shocked the political establishment.
But it is not a guarantee that he will become mayor.
He faces a quickly mobilising opposition ahead of the November election, which could include a rematch with Cuomo; a faceoff with the city’s current Mayor, Eric Adams; or both.
In the final ranked choice voting calculation, Mamdani won 56% of the vote to 44% for Cuomo. The newly adopted system allows voters to rank as many as five candidates on their ballots. Mamdani was ahead when first-choices were counted last week, but he did not yet have a majority.
The 33-year-old candidate, a democratic socialist who is backed by Senator Bernie Sanders (Independent-Vermont) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Democrat-New York), overtook Cuomo’s famed Democratic political dynasty backed by prominent figures from the party’s old guard. Cuomo had sought a political resurrection less than four years after leaving the governorship in disgrace amid allegations of sexual harassment.
However, in the week since Mamdani’s upset, powerful donors, lobbyists, and political consultants in both the Democratic and Republican parties have scrambled to amass a unified opposition to his candidacy - based largely on his support for liberal economic policies and avowed anti-Zionism.
Cuomo promised he would run in the general election as an independent even if he lost. But his well-funded campaign, which benefitted from the biggest super PAC in the city’s history, was knocked on its heels by Mamdani’s youth-powered volunteer army and voters’ reservations about Cuomo’s past.
Cuomo is contacting donors and other groups to gauge their support in the general election, according to three people who have fielded those calls.
So far, those donors have been mainly unenthusiastic about his candidacy, according to a dozen political operatives and donors active in city politics, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Mamdani’s campaign, in a statement released after the results were announced, said he had received the most votes in a Democratic mayoral primary in 36 years, and is “excited to expand this coalition even further as we defeat Eric Adams and win a city government that puts working people first”.
Mamdani prevailed in the primary election by focusing on the affordability crisis faced by many New York residents.
He pledged to ease the cost of living by providing free childcare, freezing rent among the city’s one million rent-stabilised apartments, opening a collection of city-run grocery stores to provide lower-cost produce and staples, and making city buses free.
In a city with the largest population of billionaires in the world, he has proposed to fund his ideas by raising taxes on the ultra-wealthy.
And in his effort to become the first Muslim mayor of New York, which has the largest population of Jews outside of Israel, he has run unapologetically as a critic of Israel, saying he would arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he came to the city.
Many Democratic voters said those ideas energised them, but they have drawn an array of opponents.
Members of his own party in his own state attacked him. Republicans have demonised him with Islamophobic and racist attacks - while also highlighting his progressivism. Many political donors in New York have scrambled to find a way to combat him.
In addition to Cuomo’s potential independent candidacy, Mamdani will also face Adams, a registered Democrat, who elected not to run in the crowded primary and instead is running as an independent in November.
Curtis Sliwa, the Republican primary candidate, could be the fourth candidate on the ballot.
Donors and Republican officials launched a national effort to persuade Sliwa to step aside and endorse Adams.
Stephen Bannon, a former Trump Administration official and far-right podcast host, appeared on former Representative Matt Gaetz’s show on One America News last week and described the effort to get Sliwa to step down so that anti-Mamdani forces could coalesce around a single candidate.
Adams also met donors and floated the idea that Sliwa, a longtime fixture in New York and the former leader of the vigilante group the Guardian Angels, could accept a job in the Trump Administration as an incentive to leave the race.
But Sliwa loudly resisted those calls. “The only job I’m focused on is earning your support to be the next Mayor of #NYC,” he wrote on X last week.
Adams won the race for mayor in 2021 as a Democrat but has been increasingly distanced from his party following his indictment on corruption charges in September 2024. Those charges were dropped in April, 2½ months after Adams visited President Donald Trump at one of his Florida golf courses.
Both Adams and Cuomo are unpopular with voters and face an uphill battle to overcome their respective scandals.
And both represent a fundamentally different style of campaigning - with institutional endorsements and big-money donations - to the small-dollar campaign that propelled Mamdani to victory in the primary.
“The outpouring of support that has come to Mayor Adams has been overwhelming and humbling, and we believe that energy is going to translate as an election for Mayor Adams as the leader of New York City,” said Frank Carone, Adams’ former chief of staff and a key member of his re-election campaign.
Cuomo’s campaign said Mamdani’s large showing with voters aged under-30 was hard to predict. Cuomo did not commit to campaigning in the general election but reiterated that he was “continuing conversations with people from all across the city while determining next steps”.
Hedge fund managers Dan Loeb and Bill Ackman have both thrown their support behind Adams, as have a variety of the city’s business and industry groups.
Jewish groups such as the New York Solidarity Network, a pro-Israel non-profit that represents centre-left Jewish New Yorkers concerned about growing anti-Semitism, have held discussions about backing either Cuomo or Adams, according to three people familiar with the various calls and conversations such groups have had.
Many are waiting to put their money towards a candidate in the northern autumn until they can see how the race plays out in the coming weeks and months, these people said.