Copyright New York Daily News
As former Gov. Cuomo made his final case to voters ahead of Tuesday’s election, he touted the results of a new poll that show him edging nearer to Democratic socialist Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani in the race for mayor. According to an AtlasIntel poll released late Friday, Mamdani is still leading the three-man race with nearly 41% of the 1,587 likely voters canvassed, but Cuomo is catching up with 34%. Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa is in third place with 24%. The polling results come as hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers have already voted early in Tuesday’s mayoral election. “The gap is closing fast — we can feel it on the ground everywhere from the Bronx to Staten Island,” Cuomo said in a statement Saturday. “At this rate, we win the race.” The polling results also came the night before Cuomo visited Queens, where he was grand marshal in the 7th Annual We Can Because We Know We Can Parade in Cambria Heights. He was also expected to greet voters in Jamaica, Queens and Brownsville, Brooklyn, as he continues to court Black voters. Following a campaign stop at Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, Mamdani shrugged off the new poll. “I’m not worried at all. I continue to be confident, but I never let that confidence become complacency,” said Mamdani, who believes the large turnout of early voters equates to New Yorkers wanting a change in the city’s leadership. “When you actually go out there and speak to New Yorkers yourself, you will find the momentum continues to grow, and it’s a momentum of young voters, of older voters, a momentum of New Yorkers who are hungry for change, and we’re excited to see, especially yesterday, how many New Yorkers came out to vote,” he said Saturday. The likely voters questioned by AtlasIntel put Cuomo ahead of Mandani by eight points if Sliwa wasn’t in the race, the poll shows. Republican leaders have spent the last few weeks encouraging Sliwa to step down so die-hard Republican voters would side with Cuomo’s camp. But the AtlasIntel poll — which uses “proprietary data collection technology and post-stratification algorithms” in its polling process, according to the company’s website — is an outlier of sorts.
