Mamdani poised for victory as NYC plans release of ranked choice vote tally in mayoral primary
Mamdani already declared victory on election night last week after gaining a commanding lead over Cuomo, who swiftly conceded. But more results are needed to establish the victor due to the city's ranked choice voting model, which allows voters' second, third, fourth and even fifth preferences to be counted if their top candidate falls out of the running.
The board is scheduled to run through its first tabulation at noon, which may be enough for Mamdani to clear the 50% threshold needed. If so, he would move on to the November election to face a field including incumbent Mayor Eric Adams and potentially Cuomo again, if the former governor decides to run on an independent ballot line.
Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist and member of the state Assembly, was virtually unknown when he launched his candidacy centered on a bold slate of populist ideas. But he built an energetic campaign that ran circles around Cuomo as the older, more moderate Democrat tried to come back from the sexual harassment scandal that led to his resignation four years ago.
The results, even before they were finalized, sent a shockwave through the political world.
Mamdani's campaign, which was focused on lowering the cost of living, claims it has found a new blueprint for Democrats who have at times appeared rudderless during President Donald Trump's climb back to power.
The Democratic establishment has approached Mamdani with caution. Many of its big players applauded his campaign but don't seem ready to throw their full support behind the young progressive, whose past criticisms of law enforcement, use of the word 'genocide' to describe the Israeli government's actions in Gaza and 'democratic socialist' label amount to landmines for some in the party.
If elected, Mamdani would be the city's first Muslim mayor and its first of Indian American decent. He would also be one of its youngest.
For Republicans, Mamdani has already provided a new angle for attack. Trump and others in the GOP have begun to launch broadsides at him, moving to cast Mamdani as the epitome of leftist excess ahead of consequential elections elsewhere this year and next.
'If I'm a Republican, I want this guy to win,' said Grant Reeher, a political science professor at Syracuse University. 'Because I want to be able to compare and contrast my campaign as a Republican, in a national election, to the idea of, 'This is where the Democratic party is.''
New York City's ranked choice voting model allows voters to list up to five candidates on their ballots in order of preference. If a single candidate is the first choice of more than 50% of voters, then that person wins the race outright. Since no candidate cleared that bar on the night of the primary, the ranked choice voting process kicked in. The board is scheduled to certify the election on July 15.
Mamdani has been a member of the state Assembly since 2021, and has characterized his inexperience as a potential asset. His campaign promised free city buses, free child care, a rent freeze for people living in rent-stabilized apartment, government-run grocery stores and more, all paid for with taxes on the wealthy. Critics have slammed his agenda as politically unrealistic.
Cuomo ran a campaign centered on his extensive experience, casting himself as the only candidate capable of saving a city he said had spun out of control. During the campaign, he focused heavily on combating antisemitism and leaned on his name recognition and juggernaut fundraising operation rather than mingling with voters.
Confronted with the sexual harassment allegations that ended his tenure as governor, he denied wrongdoing, maintaining that the scandal was driven by politics and that voters were ready to move on.
Cuomo did not remove his name from the November ballot last week, ahead of a procedural deadline to do so, and has said he is still considering whether to mount an actual campaign for the office.
Adams, while still a Democrat, is running in the November election as an independent. He dropped out of the Democratic primary in April after he was severely wounded by his now-dismissed federal bribery case. Though he had done little in the way of campaigning since then, he reignited his reelection operation in the days after Mamdani declared victory, calling it a choice between a candidate with a 'blue collar' and one with a 'silver spoon.'
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Atlantic
an hour ago
- Atlantic
New Yorkers May Soon Be Grocery Guinea Pigs
New York City—where takeout is a food group and ovens are for storing clothes —may soon get into the grocery business. If he wins the general election this November, Zohran Mamdani, the new Democratic nominee for mayor, has said he will build a network of municipally owned, affordable grocery stores, one in each of the city's five boroughs. According to Mamdani, the city could help pay for the stores' rent and operating costs by taxing the wealthy, and the stores won't seek to turn a profit, enabling them to sell food at wholesale cost. In the vision Mamdani laid out in a campaign video, the stores' mission would be combating 'price gouging' by offering lower prices than corporate grocery stores. If Mamdani is able to pull this off—a huge if, given the economic considerations, as critics are quick to point out—it will be the first time in American history that a city of New York's size has commanded its own grocery stores. New Yorkers are in favor of the idea: Two-thirds of them, including 54 percent of Republicans, support public groceries, according to a March poll by the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think tank. But because nothing exactly like Mamdani's plan has ever been tried before in a large city, no one can be certain whether it will really be able to sell more affordable food, let alone help address food insecurity and health disparities in the city. What Mamdani has proposed is a $60 million experiment, with New Yorkers as test subjects. A couple of other large American cities are trying out similar plans, but what little real precedent exists for Mamdani's plan comes mostly from rural America. A handful of towns have opened municipally owned groceries, mostly because they had no choice: Small towns once relied on mom-and-pop shops, but these are vanishing as dollar stores proliferate and big-box retailers in larger rural cities monopolize the wholesale supply. Without a supermarket, residents have to either drive out of town for food or rely on convenience stores and dollar stores, which don't stock many healthy options. In 2018, the town of Baldwin, Florida (current population 1,366), lost its only grocery when the local IGA closed. It became a food desert: The next-closest supermarket was 10 miles away—not a simple trip for older adults who don't drive or for people without a car. The mayor proposed a municipally owned store, which opened the next year. In Kansas, the cities of St. Paul (population 603) and Erie (population 1,019) started their own grocery stores in 2008 and 2021, respectively. St. Paul had not had a supermarket since 1985. The fates of these stores and their hometowns have varied. Baldwin Market became a lifeline for many residents, particularly during the pandemic. But it struggled to break even and closed in 2024. Now the town largely relies on a handful of convenience stores and a Dollar General as it awaits the rumored opening of a new private grocery. Erie Market similarly struggled to balance its books. Operations were a challenge; the store sometimes stocked expired food, and its refrigerated section lost power after a thunderstorm. Last year, the city leased it to a private owner, who has yet to reopen the store. By contrast, St. Paul Supermarket has operated as a fully municipally owned grocery since 2013 (before that, it was funded by a community-development group) and shows no signs of closing. Its success has been attributed to community buy-in. Locals were motivated by the desire to preserve their city, fearing that the lack of a grocery store would drive away current residents and scare off potential new ones. 'It's a retention strategy, but it's also a recruitment strategy,' Rial Carver, the program leader at Kansas State University's Rural Grocery Initiative, told me. The primary goal of a municipally owned store is to get food to people who need it. But the city will have to decide which food to stock and, inevitably, will face questions about how those choices influence the diet or health of potential customers. (Imagine the criticism a Mamdani administration might face for subsidizing Cheetos—or, for that matter, organic, gluten-free cheese puffs.) Theoretically, getting people better access to any sort of food can have health benefits, Craig Willingham, the managing director of CUNY's Urban Food Policy Institute, told me. But so few examples of successful municipal grocery stores exist that there is virtually no research on their health effects. Research on the health impact of opening a privately owned grocery in a food desert has had mixed results. An ongoing study of a food-desert neighborhood in Pittsburgh has found that after a supermarket opened, residents consumed fewer calories overall—less added sugar, but also fewer whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. A 2018 study set in a Bronx neighborhood with few grocery stores linked the opening of a new supermarket to residents eating more vegetables and fruit and consuming fewer soft drinks, salty snacks, and pastries, but their spending on unhealthy foods increased along with their purchases of healthy ones. A new grocery alone won't change food habits, according to a 2019 study led by Hunt Allcott, an economist at Stanford. 'People shop at the new store, but they buy the same kinds of groceries they had been buying before,' Allcott told me. What does help nudge people toward buying healthier foods, he said, is making those foods affordable—while also taxing unhealthy items such as soda. With so little background information to go on, there's no telling how Mamdani's experiment will play out in a big city—or whether it will even get off the ground. New York differs from the sites of other municipal-grocery experiments not only in its size and density but also in its general abundance of grocery stores. Proximity isn't the major reason people can't get food, healthy or otherwise, Allcott said—cost is. From 2013 to 2023, the amount of money New Yorkers spent on groceries rose nearly 66 percent —far higher than the national average. The city's poverty rate—a metric based on the price of a minimal diet—is nearly twice that of the national average; from 2020 to 2023, one in three New Yorkers used food pantries. In Chelsea, a Manhattan neighborhood that is known for its luxury high-rises and is also home to a large housing project, some residents would rather take the train into New Jersey to buy groceries than shop at the expensive local supermarkets, Willingham said. Grocery stores are tough business. Profit margins are as slim as 1 to 3 percent, and prices are largely determined by suppliers, who tend to privilege volume. A single grocer (or the small network that Mamdani envisions) won't get as good a deal as a large chain. And running a store is hard, Carver told me: A manager needs to be nimble and adjust to customer demands, skills that municipal bodies are not exactly known for. In New York, at least, there's reason to expect that public groceries wouldn't actually be cheaper. Mamdani (whose campaign did not respond to a request for comment) has acknowledged that New York's city government might not be cut out for stocking shelves. If the pilot plan doesn't work, he said on the podcast Plain English last week, he won't try to scale it up. Yet he believes that it's worth trying. 'This is a proposal of reasonable policy experimentation,' he said. National grocery costs are expected to increase 2.2 percent this year, according to the USDA. Price hikes will hit poor Americans even harder if Congress passes President Donald Trump's megabill, which includes cuts to federal food-assistance programs such as SNAP. Among such threats to food affordability, the mere possibility of change could justify a trial of something new. Other large cities, too, are signing up as guinea pigs: Madison, Wisconsin, is in the process of opening a municipally owned store. Last year, Atlanta addressed food insecurity among public-school students and their families by opening a free grocery store—it functions like a food pantry but is stocked like a supermarket—funded by a public-private partnership. Its impact on health hasn't yet been studied, but demand is high. 'We do slots for appointments, and they're immediately gone,' Chelsea Montgomery, the adviser to operations of Atlanta Public Schools, told me. Mamdani's proposal is hardly the first unorthodox policy experiment New York has considered. The city took a chance on congestion pricing to reduce traffic and fund public transit, on universal pre-K to guarantee access to early childhood education, and on supervised injection sites to curb the overdose crisis. All have achieved their objectives. Perhaps, in a decade, millions of New Yorkers will get their organic, gluten-free cheese puffs on the cheap at a city-owned market. Or perhaps the whole project will go the way of the city's failed attempt to end poverty by offering cash in exchange for efforts to build healthy habits. The point of experimentation is to find out.
New York Post
an hour ago
- New York Post
Rev. Al Sharpton calls on Andrew Cuomo to drop out of NYC mayoral race: ‘Look at what is best for the city'
Rev. Al Sharpton called on Andrew Cuomo to drop out of the race for New York City mayor — urging the ex-gov to 'look at what is best for the city.' 'I think, in the best interest of the legacy of Andrew Cuomo, that he ought to let them have the one-on-one race,' Sharpton said Wednesday on MSNBC's 'Morning Joe.' 3 Al Sharpton called on Andrew Cuomo to drop out of the NYC mayoral race Wednesday. Lev Radin/Shutterstock 3 Sharpton urged Cuomo to 'look at what is best for the city.' Matthew McDermott 'He can endorse one or the other, and let them have a battle over what is best for New York.' Sharpton added that he had reached out to Cuomo's people to try to get him to abandon his bid. Calls to Cuomo's camp were not returned. The call comes just a day after the full primary results came in, showing socialist Zohran Mamdani trounced Cuomo by 12 points in just three rounds of ranked-choice voting. Days earlier, Sharpton hosted Mamdani at his National Action Network HQ, giving the Democratic nominee a chance to make his pitch to black voters, and seemingly endorsed some of the assemblyman's campaign vows, such as freezing the rent. 3 Zohran Mamdani trounced Cuomo by 12 points in just three rounds of ranked-choice voting. AP The influential Sharpton shopped short of formally endorsing Mamdani. Cuomo has flip-flopped on his run for governor, but he will still be on the ballot on an independent line come November along with Mamdani and GOP nominee Curtis Sliwa, as well as two others on independent lines, Eric Adams and Jim Walden.
Fox News
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- Fox News
NY Dems who have yet to endorse Mamdani unite in his defense against Trump
New York Democrats, who have been reluctant to endorse socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani after he secured the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City, united to defend him Tuesday when President Donald Trump threatened to arrest him if he didn't comply with federal immigration officials. "I don't care if you're the president of the United States, if you threaten to unlawfully go after one of our neighbors, you're picking a fight with 20 million New Yorkers — starting with me," Gov. Kathy Hochul, D-N.Y., fired back at Trump on Tuesday evening. The New York governor has sparred with Trump since he returned to the White House this year on issues like education, abortion and immigration. More than a week after Mamdani declared victory in the Democratic primary, Hochul has yet to endorse the socialist mayoral candidate. New York Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres, who endorsed former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the primary and has yet to endorse Mamdani in the general, said on Wednesday, "For a sitting president to causally threaten to arrest and deport a US citizen who won a major-party nomination is disgraceful. Free societies do not arrest, deport, and otherwise weaponize government against their political opponents." Mamdani also hit back in a statement on Wednesday, responding to Trump's comments. "His statements don't just represent an attack on our democracy, but an attempt to send a message to every New Yorker who refuses to hide in the shadows: if you speak up, they will come for you. We will not accept this intimidation," Mamdani said. Veteran Democratic strategist Joe Caiazzo told Fox News Digital, "The only people that matter in this election are the people of New York." "Trump's rhetoric will only serve to solidify support for Mamdani in the city. Trump is trying to nationalize the New York City mayoral race in an attempt to distract from the horrific policies he is peddling in Washington," Caiazzo added. "Look, we don't need a Communist in this country, but if we have one, I'm going to be watching over them very carefully on behalf of the nation," Trump said Tuesday, as he expressed willingness to arrest him. Trump doubled down on his disdain for Mamdani in a Truth Social post Wednesday, vowing to "save New York City." "As President of the United States, I'm not going to let this Communist Lunatic destroy New York. Rest assured, I hold all the levers, and have all the cards," Trump said. Trump's jabs at Mamdani are the latest from Republicans working to paint him as the poster boy of far-left politics. Following his primary victory last week, Republicans instantly attacked Mamdani's platform, which calls for free rides on city buses, freezing the rent on rent-stabilized apartments, offering free early childcare and setting up city-owned grocery stores. The president went as far as to call Mamdani a "100% Communist Lunatic." Mandani has also been targeted for his criticism of Israel and over his age and inexperience at just 33 years old. Mamdani surged to a primary victory thanks to an energetic campaign that put a major focus on affordability and New York City's high cost of living. Endorsements by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive rock star and New York City's most prominent leader on the left, and by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the progressive champion and two-time Democratic presidential nominee runner-up, helped Mamdani consolidate support on the left. Mamdani made smart use of social media platforms, including TikTok, as he engaged low-propensity voters. He proposed eliminating fares to ride New York City's vast bus system, making CUNY (City University of New York) "tuition-free," freezing rents on municipal housing, offering "free childcare" for children up to age 5, and setting up government-run grocery stores.
