People cast ballots at a polling station in Brooklyn on the final day of early voting. The New York City mayor’s race has drawn the highest turnout since 1969. Photo / Dave Sanders, The New York Times
There was a time in New York City when just about every eligible adult voted in the mayoral election.
In 1957, when Robert F. Wagner won in a landslide, the New York Times reported that 91% of registered voters had gone to the polls and noted: “The normal turnout is 95% of those registered”.
That time is long gone.
In the last four mayoral elections, fewer than a third of registered voters could be bothered to vote.
In the last election, in 2021, turnout was 23%, a modern-day low.
There is a significant difference between 1957 and today: Back then, voters needed to reregister annually, so only motivated voters were on the rolls. Now registry is permanent, and there are registered voters who have not cast a vote in years.
This year’s election, however, offering voters a choice among Zohran Mamdani, former Governor Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa, is a bit of a throwback.
More than two million New Yorkers voted as of 8.45pm local time, the first time that total has been surpassed since 1969, when John Lindsay won re-election.
Why did voter participation drop so precipitously, and why has it surged this year? Many factors are at play — some local, some national and some having to do with the simple fact of who is running.
Here are a few of them:
The long decline of clubhouse politics
Decades ago, political machines ruled New York.
“In the old days, all the assembly districts had political clubs,” said John Mollenkopf, director of the Centre for Urban Research at the City University of New York Graduate Centre.
“Those clubs kept a very careful watch on who was a registered voter, and they turned out their people.”
Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, a nonpartisan good-government group, said that over time there had been “an atrophying of old-fashioned grassroots organising”.
Think mailers, spam texts and robocalls, rather than people sitting down and talking to one another about what their local government is and is not doing for them.
The decline in local news and a shift of coverage towards national races
The number of widely read newspapers (or news sites) in New York has dropped.
“If you have six or eight daily papers competing for local stories,” Lerner said, “then the impact of policies at the city level is going to be much more palpable and understandable to the general public, and you as a voter are going to weigh in on the issues.”
Hundreds of newspapers have folded over the last two decades. And what news outlets there are have divested from local political coverage, instead choosing to focus on national politics, presidential races and the Midterm elections for Congress.
“The message that the average voter is getting from that,” Lerner said, “is that we should be much more concerned about what is happening in Washington, DC, than on what is happening in our backyards that will have much more of an effect on our daily lives.”
The result, she added, is “a confusion and a lack of information among ordinary people about what city government does and why it should be important to them”.
New York’s changing demographics
New York, often called a city of immigrants, certainly is now: About a third of the city’s population was born abroad.
Different immigrant groups have tended to get involved in local politics to different degrees.
Mollenkopf said that in the 1950s, immigrants from Europe and their offspring “had all been ‘made American’ by World War II” and were assimilated into the political system.
Asian immigrants in the city, in particular, have tended to stay on the sidelines more, feeding a sort of negative feedback loop, Mollenkopf said. But in the last few years, Asian New Yorkers have expanded their political involvement, and with that has come greater representation.
In 2021, five Asian Americans were elected to the City Council, including the first Indian American and Korean American members and the first Muslim woman, a Bangladeshi American.
The presence in the mayor’s race of Mamdani, whose parents are from India, has galvanised the city’s South Asian communities.
The match-ups themselves
In the last three elections, where turnout has been at its lowest, it was a foregone conclusion that the Democrat would win, since registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by about six-to-one in the city.
This year’s contest pits an upstart Democratic nominee, Mamdani; against a once-popular Democratic governor, Cuomo, who is running as an independent after Mamdani defeated him in the Democratic primary; and a Republican, Sliwa, with a well-known profile in the city.
“Since Bloomberg, Republicans have not nominated somebody who’s been really competitive on a citywide basis,” Mollenkopf said, referring to three-term Mayor Michael Bloomberg, “and competition breeds turnout.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Andy Newman
Photographs by: Dave Sanders, Eddie Hausner
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