This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
In the end, it wasn’t just one neighborhood like one of those left-leaning precincts that line the waterfront from Astoria over to Red Hook. No, when Zohran Mamdani won the first ballot of the Democratic primary for mayor on Tuesday night, he did so by winning nearly everywhere. A 17-point victory in Washington Heights, where one of Andrew Cuomo’s chief backers, Representative Adriano Espaillat, presides. Eighteen points in the Financial District, home to the kind of, well, financial types who are thought to fear what a democratic socialist would mean to the economy. Mamdani ran even with Cuomo in Black neighborhoods like Cypress Hills and Pelham Parkway and eked out near-double-digit wins in what were thought to be conservative-leaning white neighborhoods Dyker Heights and College Point.
“A neighborhood realignment,” one senior Mamdani campaign adviser said as the results trickled in. “We won everywhere.”
In This Issue
Zohran Mamdani
At the Cuomo Election Night party, held at the Carpenters Union hall on the West Side of Manhattan, a grim mood set in early among the longtime aides, elected officials, union bigwigs, and family friends gathered there. The usual chest-thumping from Team Cuomo was surprisingly muted, and aides huddled over their phones, checking the returns on the Board of Election website alongside everyone else.
For weeks, Cuomo aides and advisers have been looking at the possibility of a Mamdani victory, but few believed it could actually be real. Even as late as last week, some aides were discussing how large of a margin they needed to claim a mandate. Would five points be enough? Ten? Even as Mamdani crept upwards in the polls, the front-runner was slow to attack him, believing that the leftist was his most beatable opponent. Cuomo avoided the press and avoided the public too, scarcely putting out a public schedule even in the race’s final days. When the final results came in, and it was clear that he had lost an election for the first time in his life, Cuomoworld didn’t quite know what to say. “Shocked is vast understatement,” said one adviser.
Sometime before 10:30 p.m., a somber Cuomo hurried out to address his supporters. He had called his opponent moments early to concede in what Mamdani aides said was a remarkably gracious phone call. “Tonight was not our night. Tonight was Assemblyman Mamdani’s night,” Cuomo said. “He deserved it. He won.”
At just that moment at the Mamdani party in Long Island City, hundreds of young supporters screamed loud enough to rattle the windows. Mamdani’s mother, the filmmaker Mira Nair, began to cry. She was comforted by Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, who was also crying. Ella Emhoff started cheering. David Hogg, who was recently ousted by the Democratic National Committee, stood off in a corner, looking bored. Lina Khan huddled with Zephyr Teachout. Kal Penn screamed alongside everyone else, hugging whoever was in reach. Few could believe that it actually happened — not just a win but a landslide — and cheers washed over the party every time new results were announced, padding the young upstart’s lead. When Cuomo appeared onscreen, the Mamdaniacs serenaded him. “Nah-nah-nah, nah-nah-nah, hey-hey, gooooood-bye!”
It was by any measure one of the biggest upsets in New York political history, an order of magnitude bigger than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s own victory over the Democratic Establishment almost seven years to the day earlier. That was a low-turnout affair for a congressional seat, and no one saw AOC coming. This time, a former governor had a $25 million super-PAC behind him, the support of all the editorial boards, and his campaign saw Mamdani’s coming from a mile away and blitzed the airwaves warning that he was dangerously unprepared and far too left wing for the job.
None of it mattered. Cuomo never understood ranked-choice voting, while Mamdani teamed up with Brad Lander to consolidate the left and liberal vote in his favor. Mamdani’s failure to condemn the phrase “Globalize the intifada” last week, in the face of allegations from Cuomo and others that he was an antisemite, was scarcely a blip.
Mamdani’s victory comes just eight months after the city took a sharp right-ward turn in the presidential election, coming out for Donald Trump in a way that it has for no Republican in a generation. At the beginning of the mayoral race, the Democratic contenders tacked right too, talking up quality-of-life concerns and crime, and repudiating their previous stances from the woke era of four years earlier.
Only Mamdani remained resolutely in the left lane and stressed affordability. In the end, voters responded not just to someone coloring in broad strokes but someone whose entire campaign was a repudiation of a Democratic Establishment that failed to stop Trump’s return to power and then lined up behind a governor who had been driven from office in a sexual-harassment scandal barely three years earlier.
Despite what was by all accounts a crushing victory for Mamdani, it is also a race that is not over. Mayor Eric Adams will be running in the general election, as will Republican Curtis Sliwa, and another independent, the attorney Jim Walden. Cuomo has said that he is going to wait and evaluate to see if there is a path for him to run in November, but he would run as an independent too. The Democratic Party’s rejection of the governor has been complete.
