Mamdani’s Unprecedented Coalition May Decide New York City’s Future

Zohran Mamdani became the Democratic candidate for New York City Mayor Tuesday, bolstered by a coalition of younger and middle-class voters across Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn. The decisive win comes ahead of the first competitive general election in New York City in more than a decade.

Mamdani’s victory comes via a new network of voters in a city that has historically tended to vote more along ethnocultural than income or class lines in primaries. The 33-year-old democratic socialist campaigned on a message of affordability, and it was renters and the city’s middle class who turned out to support him. Some of the poorest and richest New Yorkers, and the majority of homeowners, voted for former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

“Zohran Mamdani’s win is the climax of a 10-year-long progressive populist struggle based on class and energizing new voters and young voters,” said Democratic political strategist Trip Yang, who isn’t affiliated with any mayoral campaign.

“Zohran reordered citywide politics” with his primary win, Yang said.

Mamdani, who won 56% of the votes after three rounds of ranked-choice calculations, heads into a likely close general election in November.

A Bloomberg News analysis uses neighborhoods and results data to explore the new voter bloc that delivered the state lawmaker’s win.

A Housing Crisis Spurred Voters

In polls ahead of the primary, New Yorkers cited affordability as a top concern. Mamdani ran on a platform promising a rent freeze, a crackdown on landlords who don’t follow the tenants’ rights guide and a plan to build 200,000 affordable housing units within the next decade. The share of apartments currently vacant in the city is at a historic low of 1.4%. Construction of affordable housing has moved at a sluggish pace under Mayor Eric Adams compared with former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration.

Renters overwhelmingly flocked to Mamdani’s campaign. In a city where more than two-thirds of housing units are renter-occupied, Mamdani’s campaign had broad appeal. In neighborhoods where a majority of housing units are occupied by renters, Mamdani won 46% of the vote, a comfortable 12-point lead over Cuomo’s 34%. Meanwhile, Cuomo received 52% of the vote in areas with more owner-occupied units, a 20-point lead over Mamdani’s 32%.

An exception: Cuomo won some of the lowest-income neighborhoods in the Bronx, the borough with a median income of $49,000. The borough’s tenants are the most rent-burdened, with two-thirds spending more than 30% of their income on rent. Those neighborhoods have consistently voted for Cuomo in gubernatorial races, and many neighborhood faith leaders endorsed him for mayor. (Cuomo also won Staten Island, the borough predominantly inhabited by wealthier homeowners.)

Mamdani Captured NYC’s Middle Class

Mamdani also found a foothold with middle-income voters. Voters in middle-class neighborhoods, places with median household incomes between $50,000 and $150,000, chose Mamdani over Cuomo with a 10-point margin. The former governor, however, outperformed Mamdani in low income neighborhoods by a 13-point margin. Cuomo captured most of the higher-income areas in Manhattan, but it wasn’t enough to overcome Mamdani’s gains in rich neighborhoods like the Financial District and others outside Manhattan, like Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights.

High costs of living are pushing middle-income families out of New York City. A 2023 report by the left-leaning Fiscal Policy Institute found that New Yorkers from households earning between $32,000 and $65,000 were the group of people moving out of the city at the greatest rate, followed by people from households making between $65,000 to $104,000 a year. (The median household income in New York City is about $79,000.)

Young People Voted Early

Almost a quarter of early voters hadn’t participated in a Democratic primary in the past 10 years, according to John Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center. That suggests many were Gen Z and Millennial transplants, voting for the first time since moving to the city.

The early vote gave Mamdani a lead that never disappeared on election night. About 30% of early voters were under the age of 35 — and many belonged to areas that overwhelmingly chose Mamdani. Mamdani outperformed Cuomo in neighborhoods with a younger voter base.

Some of Cuomo’s Voters Stayed Home

Cuomo dominated the Upper East Side and Upper West Side in Manhattan, the South Bronx and Staten Island, and won parts of southeast Queens.

Average turnout in precincts won by Mamdani was 36%. Those won by Cuomo had an average turnout of 27%, a difference of nine percentage points. Turnout in Cuomo’s districts was more in line with previous primary elections, according to an analysis of the preliminary election results and New York City voter-roll data.

The results in the 2025 primary contrasted starkly with the former governor’s performance citywide in the 2018 gubernatorial primary election, when he ran against actor Cynthia Nixon. Cuomo resigned in 2021 following sexual harassment allegations, which he denies.

“The strength of Cuomo’s support in 2018 was tremendous and off the charts in predominantly Black neighborhoods in Brooklyn and southeast Queens and the Bronx,” said Steven Romalewski, a director at the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center.

“In 2025, Cuomo still got vote support from the areas like southeast Queens and Harlem but nowhere near as strong. Whatever campaign message he was emphasizing did not go over that well.”

Mamdani Activated Asian Voters

Asian New Yorkers are the fastest-growing demographic in the city, a population Mamdani tried to engage with during his campaign. In one video, he used cups of mango lassi as props to explain the ranked-choice voting system in Hindi and Urdu (spoken primarily in India and Pakistan).

Mamdani, who moved to New York at age 7 and became an American citizen in 2018, is the child of Indian parents and would be the first Muslim mayor and first mayor of South Asian descent in the city’s history.

Voters in majority-Asian neighborhoods chose Mamdani over Cuomo with an 11-point margin — Mamdani won five out of six of these neighborhoods. Cuomo won more majority-White neighborhoods in the city, but many of the more diverse neighborhoods won by Mamdani in Brooklyn and Queens had high shares of White voters.

Though the Democratic primary winner is typically victorious in general elections in New York City, where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 6 to 1, Mamdani will face what is likely to be an unusually competitive, multi-candidate general election on Nov. 4, where the results will be determined by whoever wins a simple plurality of the vote, rather than the ranked-choice system used in primaries.

He will face incumbent Adams, who was elected as a Democrat but opted to run for reelection as an independent after he became the first sitting mayor in the city’s modern history to be indicted on (now-dismissed) federal charges. Cuomo, who will appear on the “Fight and Deliver” ballot line he created, is still deciding whether to actively continue his campaign. Republican Curtis Sliwa and independent Jim Walden are also on the ballot.

Some donors and close advisers have been pushing Cuomo to drop out of the race, after his decisive 12-point loss to Mamdani in a race he was once favored to win handily.

There is energy for Mamdani: More than 20,000 donors gave to his primary campaign, the most donors for a single candidate since 2001, except for Andrew Yang in 2021. His grassroots campaign mobilized around 50,000 volunteers to knock on more than 1 million doors. Millennials and Gen Z alike donned shirts exclaiming “Hot Girls for Zohran” around canvassing events and watch parties.

If Cuomo chooses to stay in the race, he could pave the way for Mamdani, splitting voters with Adams.

“For Eric Adams and [Andrew] Cuomo, their electoral bases are pretty much the same,” Romalewski said. “If [Mamdani] again gets strong support in the neighborhoods where he won big in the primary, plus enough support from areas where Cuomo did OK, that will likely give him enough support to win.”

Participation in New York City’s general election is typically lower than in the primary since nearly two-thirds of the city’s voters are registered Democrats; elections are often decided by the June Democratic primary. (The last candidate to become NYC’s mayor who wasn’t the Democratic nominee was Michael Bloomberg, who ran as an independent in 2009. Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.)

In 2021, general turnout fell by 3.2% compared with the primary.

Romalewski said it’s not yet clear how November turnout will be affected by a competitive race.

“The question is, is it a blip or a trend?”