Copyright New York Magazine
For months, Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, independent candidate Andrew Cuomo, and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa have crossed the five boroughs to make their case to the voters on why they should be next to lead City Hall. More than 735,000 New Yorkers cast ballots during the early voting period that ended Sunday, and each campaign seems to see that record-setting turnout as a boon to its chances. I spoke with Michael Lange, a political researcher and strategist, about his views on the early-voting turnout, whether polling has improved in the race since the primary, and who has the momentum heading into Tuesday. Record numbers of New Yorkers cast their ballots in early voting across the city. What are your impressions of the data so far? I think Cuomo got a not-insignificant bump in the first couple days from older, wealthier voters in Manhattan, many of whom I guess you would describe as very Zionist and who do not like Mamdani’s position on Israel. There were many people I respect who normally never sound the alarm but were genuinely a little spooked by some of that. But Cuomo was never getting the numbers in other parts of the city that he would need to really make this super-close or to have Mamdani on upset alert. But some of the electorate being a little older, that’s of course a consequence of the general election, too. Sliwa’s voters, however many there are, they’re almost all over 55. The Republican off-year electorate in New York City is super-old. So that also contributed to it. But I never saw a reason for Mamdani to be concerned, really. I thought the only thing that might have been in jeopardy was him hitting 50 percent. I see that as kind of the biggest question of the next couple days, rather than just a win-loss thing. There’s always the most early voting kind of towards the end. Amongst that bump, it was very young. The Halloween stickers on Friday certainly paid off. It was the youngest day. Getting over 700,000 early votes puts us well in that 1.8, 1.9 million range for the total come Election Day. I think it further contextualizes that there was that little Cuomo flurry at the very beginning, in terms of a lot of his older supporters coming out. But then as time progressed, it got younger and younger and younger and the curve kind of leveled out and resembled more of the primary. And I think I’ve seen more and more evidence that Mamdani should be confident going into Tuesday, not only about winning, but about the margin of victory. How does this early-voting electorate compare with early voters in the primary? Are new groups being motivated? We saw very, very high turnout in the first few days of early voting from the Upper East Side and Upper West Side of Manhattan, that Sutton Place, Midtown East area. All of which were some of Cuomo’s few bright spots in Manhattan during the primary. Then if you compare that with the Democratic primary during early voting, the vote was almost exclusively coming from areas Mamdani would win besides the Upper East Side, Upper West Side. Early voting just in general is kind of skewed toward each coalition’s white voters, right? They’re more likely to have a car in the outer-boroughs to go to the polling site, or they’re a higher percentage of the demographics in some of these denser neighborhoods where people can walk to vote. So the distribution of the vote was a little more spread out than what we’re seeing in the general election so far. This general-election electorate, it’s very young compared with other general elections. It’s just not quite as young as in the primary. What do we know, if anything, about these older early voters? All we really know is which districts and neighborhoods they’re coming from. Right now, the biggest concentrations of support are, again, in those Central Park–adjacent neighborhoods in Manhattan, which I expect right now lean Cuomo. Then you have those neighborhoods adjacent to Prospect Park in Brooklyn; where Central Park leans Cuomo, the crew around Prospect Park is overwhelmingly Mamdani. And then you have Staten Island. The southern parts have had some pretty solid turnout that leans toward Sliwa and, to a lesser extent, Cuomo. Staten Island’s the most Italian county in the country. The thing about Cuomo, though, is that he has this support from very affluent voters but he’s been hemorrhaging support from all the working-class parts of his coalition. I think he can win the Upper East Side again or narrowly win the Upper West Side perhaps. But he’s going to lose almost everywhere else. The people who vote on Election Day in New York City are generally more working class and more diverse, and a few more of them are Republicans in the general election. In the primary, there was a worry in the Mamdani campaign, like, Oh yeah, we win early voting, but are we just going to be blitzed on Election Day when all these places in “Cuomo Country” can really start voting? But they weren’t. They won Election Day, just by a smaller margin than the early voting. I think now he’s poised to do even better with the people who vote next Tuesday. So I just don’t really see where Cuomo is gonna make up any of this deficit. Are there any signs, so far, that Cuomo has been able to cultivate the support he’ll need? No because we’re not seeing any type of upticks in some of the other areas that he did well in the primary. I should give a special shout out to Brigid Bergin from Gothamist and WNYC. She’s been doing a lot of anecdotal but also instructive talking to voters at different sites. And she chose two very good places to do it. She went to the southern shore of Staten Island and encountered some Republicans who are holding their nose and voting for Cuomo because he’s viable. I’ve encountered the same. But there are still plenty of Republicans, which is what Cuomo would really need to move the needle significantly, who are still sticking with Sliwa, even though he doesn’t really have a chance. And I saw that she was also out Sunday in East Flatbush — which is the area that Cuomo won convincingly in the primary that he would need to hold to make the general competitive — and it’s basically switched to Mamdani. So, the way I’m thinking about the outcome, the margin, things like that, it really comes down to Cuomo versus Sliwa among Republican and more moderate conservative independents. If Sliwa holds on to any decent level of support, then Cuomo’s ceiling is cut down further. And then also just Cuomo versus Mamdani in the Black community and to what extent that’s competitive. Maybe it won’t be. Maybe Zohran will win super convincingly. But I think the other parts of all three candidates’ coalitions are relatively baked in. It’s a matter of turnout and enthusiasm and these other things. Those two that I mentioned, it’s very persuasion-based. Turnout is great because you can just kind of create votes from thin air. Persuasion is good because you gain a vote and it takes it away from an opponent. So, that’s kind of how I see it going into Election Day. I think all the other parts of the Mamdani coalition, they’re not really “under threat” of being captured by Cuomo or captured by Sliwa. I think they kind of exist as standalone Mamdani-friendly demographics, coalition groups, things like that. Mamdani and Cuomo were like a tale of two campaigns during the primary in terms of voter outreach and candidate accessibility. From what you’ve seen, how have both candidates adapted to the general-election season? With Cuomo, I would say they gave a very incomplete and convenient autopsy of why they lost. They’re like, Oh, we were too safe. We didn’t do enough social media. That’s kind of it. I don’t think they’ve reckoned with the bigger questions of their campaign where he didn’t really have any type of affirmative message. The suburban-esque scolding was just not going over well. But they kind of ignored that. They didn’t really adapt. It was very much like a surface-level pivot. And then, of course, Cuomo just reverts back to who he is. They scrapped much of the stuff they started doing right after. And now it’s replaced by this AI-slop nonsense, which is somehow even more hollow than, you know, the videos of Cuomo with his muscle cars. It just seemed like they could never quite get a handle on what New York City voters want, like they very much struggled to adapt. They were kind of running a 2020 Albany playbook. It’s different when you run for reelection as governor: You’re the most powerful person in the state; you have all the money in the world, all the labor unions, you’re on television all the time. They just tried to run the safe front-runner playbook and bludgeon their opponents, but they ran into someone genuinely talented who brought new people into the process. Frankly, they’re completely outmatched. They were outmatched even before the primary, but now Mamdani has a bigger team, more resources, more institutional support, and they’re just kind of getting crushed. Throughout the race, there has been a big question about whether Mamdani’s campaign can make inroads in the city’s Black communities against Cuomo and, until recently, Eric Adams. Have there been signs of these voters coalescing behind Mamdani now that he’s the Democratic nominee? Yeah, I would describe — very broadly, of course — the Black political community in New York as built heavily on relationships and certain political institutions, right? Since he has become the Democratic nominee, Mamdani has had opportunities to continue to build those relationships. To visit the churches on Sunday, to not only be double-booked but to get into the churches that have the biggest audiences and things like that. Now he has many more validators in those neighborhoods. In the most recent Emerson poll, he was at 70 percent among Black voters, right? I think if he even got anywhere close to that, it would be a big earthquake. It would portend well for him getting 50 percent of the vote. He has steadily increased his support there. And I think to the extent Cuomo support still remains, even more so than in the primary, it’s heavily indexed to age. After the primary, you wrote about Mamdani’s “coalition of the in-between,” saying he won overwhelmingly in districts that are majority renter and middle income as opposed to communities with more homeowners. Does that calculation change at all with an electorate that likely skews more moderate and Republican compared with the primary? I don’t think so. If anything, his coalition will get a lot stronger, ironically, with rent-stabilized tenants. He did best in the primary with market-rate renters. Especially in parts of the Bronx and Upper Manhattan where there’s a lot of dense rent stabilization, I think he’ll do a lot better. I still anticipate Cuomo will have some resonance with the folks at the relative bottom of the economic spectrum. It’ll be very interesting to see how the candidates perform in the city’s public-housing developments. But I think the Cuomo and Sliwa coalitions are very much built around a kind of outer-borough, white ethnic homeowner and then Cuomo is also very much leveraged with certain degrees of the financial elite. There are tons of people in Park Slope and Carroll Gardens who live in brownstones worth many millions of dollars who love Mamdani, love Brad Lander, and hate Cuomo. It’s not even a different type of wealth in terms of raw money than your Upper East Side penthouse-condo owner, but it’s more like an orientation to it, like old money vs. new money. So I think there will still be stiff resistance to Mamdani at the very top of the economic spectrum. I can’t imagine there will be too many Upper East Side penthouses for Mamdani, but we’ll see. Sliwa has been a hot topic in recent weeks as Cuomo and his supporters have described him as a spoiler, suggesting he’s standing in the way of a potential Cuomo victory. What do you make of Sliwa’s campaign this time around compared with his prior mayoral run? He has certainly gotten a lot more attention. Sliwa’s opening statement in the debate was almost indistinguishable from Dan Osborn or Bernie Sanders. It’s fascinating to see both the Democratic and Republican nominees for mayor be so openly hostile to the billionaire class. And then you have the independent Cuomo, tail between the legs, supported heavily by that billionaire class. I think Sliwa is the classic outer-borough populist. He has certainly built a following for himself, made a name for himself. I’m sure he’ll bleed some Republican support being kind of tarnished as a spoiler. But I’ve met plenty of Republicans who are sticking by him and dislike Cuomo considerably. Sliwa will get a negligible share of the vote in Manhattan besides his own, but he’ll do well in some of the white ethnic enclaves: Italian neighborhoods in Brooklyn, the Russian Jews in southern Brooklyn. Cuomo will win more of the Sephardic and the Orthodox. In Queens, Breezy Point, Whitestone; in the Bronx, Country Club, parts of Throggs Neck. And then, of course, there’s the southern shore of Staten Island, the most Republican-leaning legislative district in the whole Northeast. It’s very, very Republican, and I don’t expect Cuomo to go in there and usurp that. I haven’t made up my mind, but I don’t think Sliwa will dip below the double digits. People have floated this idea of Sliwa actually passing Cuomo, but that is probably unlikely. The Emerson poll had them closer, but I don’t think it’s likely. It seems Sliwa is bleeding a degree of Republican support to Cuomo, which would just make it very hard because he’s not someone who has a ton of juice with independent voters, voters of color. It’ll be actually interesting. Sliwa did very well in Chinese neighborhoods four years ago, which was kind of the first warning sign of Uh oh, like, Democrats are on the verge of losing support in these communities. I’m curious if Sliwa can, to any degree, replicate some of that past performance or if it was just a flash in the pan. His coalition is pretty old. His numbers got a little bit of a flurry, I would say, from the debates because he put in a pretty solid performance and landed some blows. But as the voting gets close and you have a lot of prominent Republicans saying, “You can’t support this guy. You got to support Cuomo,” I think it’ll slowly trickle down. In the primary, we saw a significant polling miss, to say the least, as Mamdani won overwhelmingly despite months of polls showing him significantly behind Cuomo. Does it seem the polling has been corrected since then? Some have adjusted more than others. The younger part of the electorate, the under 45, under 50, is being underpolled. In the presidential election in New York City last year, 51 percent of voters were under 50, which is a lot. In a lot of these surveys, their ratio of that under-50 group is a lot less, and that is with Mamdani now on the ballot. I think they’re still making mistakes and Mamdani is in a pretty solid position to outperform the polling once again. His coalition is very hard to poll. It’s not even just because he brings in younger voters in droves that pollsters don’t know quite how to screen for. It’s also because he has tons of support in certain immigrant enclaves that pollsters just routinely ignore or don’t do as good a job reaching into. So it’s a unique thing. Given more time, the pollsters will start to adjust, but I haven’t seen a ton of evidence that they have to a significant extent. So I think we could again be on track for an overperformance to a lesser extent, but an overperformance nonetheless. A poll released over the weekend from AtlasIntel caused a stir as it showed Mamdani ahead of Cuomo by only six points, the smallest margin to date. Is this poll likely an outlier? It certainly seems that way. All due respect to AtlasIntel — it seems like some of their national polls have been relatively on the nose — but I’ve not seen them poll a race in New York City super accurately. Like Emerson has a track record, Data for Progress has a track record. But I try not to read into the polls most of the time, especially again where the electorate is going to look so different from 2021 and the turnout is going to be so greater that I try and be measured with that. But they had Mamdani at 40 percent. I mean, I would mortgage all my assets and say that he will finish above 40 percent. I would retire if he finished below 40 percent. It would just not compute with everything I know about politics in the city. You predicted Mamdani would win the Democratic primary. As you gather your thoughts for Tuesday, what stands out? I think the race has been, for four months, very static. There’s not a lot of persuasion, I would say, that each candidate has a solid idea of where their voters are and it’s just a matter of turnout and enthusiasm. Mamdani gets his people out with an affirmative message: hope, inspiration. There’s a huge community of people who volunteer for him and are inspired by him that has really taken off among younger folks in particular, but not just younger folks. Cuomo is trying to motivate his folks with, I would say, more fear, right? The polls say a significant percentage of Cuomo voters are going with him because he’s not Mamdani. But for as much as people might talk about how Mamdani has a ceiling, Cuomo has a ceiling too. We saw that in the primary. Cuomo was in many respects an ideal general-election opponent for Mamdani because he’s not very well liked by independents or Republicans. I think Mamdani, of the two, has the higher ceiling and more of that emotional momentum, more of that enthusiasm, the I’ll walk over broken glass to vote for you. There are certainly “swing neighborhoods.” Many in Queens and southern Brooklyn could split between the three candidates in an interesting way. But for the most part, it’ll just be another game of turnout and enthusiasm, and I think that favors Mamdani. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
