NEW YORK — Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist whose blend of populist ideas and personal magnetism catapulted his upstart candidacy, won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City by a significant margin, according to The Associated Press.

The race was called for Mamdani on Tuesday afternoon, shortly after New York City’s Board of Elections released its tabulation of ranked-choice ballots.

Mamdani, a state Assembly member from Queens, won with 56% of the vote. Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo came in second with 44%. The board will certify the final vote in mid-July.

Mamdani, 33, now moves on to a contested general election in November, where he will face Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat who opted out of the primary to run as an independent; Curtis Sliwa, the Guardian Angels founder running on the Republican line; and Jim Walden, a lawyer also running on an independent line.

Cuomo Undecided Whether to Continue Campaigning

Cuomo, for now, is also running on an independent line, but he has not yet decided whether he intends to continue campaigning. Although the three independent candidates are all registered Democrats, Mamdani is expected to be the favorite in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by 6 to 1.

Mamdani triumphed by bringing new voters to the polls with a campaign turbocharged by his energy, charm, social media savvy and an army of enthusiastic volunteers whose breadth appeared unprecedented in recent New York history.

He also benefited from a concerted effort by left-leaning groups, unions and others to strategize how best to use ranked-choice voting, and not repeat what they saw as mistakes from the 2021 mayoral primary. In that contest, the left failed to coalesce behind a common candidate, allowing Adams to win.

This year, many on the left made it a priority to work together and make group endorsements, often with Mamdani leading the way. Some candidates followed suit, with Mamdani entering cross-endorsement agreements with Brad Lander, the city comptroller, and Michael Blake, a former state Assembly member. Two second-tier candidates, Whitney Tilson and state Sen. Jessica Ramos, endorsed Cuomo; he did not endorse them back.

Cuomo, who for months polled in first place, also contributed to Mamdani’s win, and his own demise, by running a campaign that was widely derided for its lackluster rose-garden strategy. He made relatively few, often tightly controlled appearances, and seemed out of touch with a city he had not lived in since the late 20th century.

In the end, Mamdani won primarily thanks to first-place rankings among white, Hispanic and Asian voters, as well as middle- and higher-income voters. Cuomo won among Black and lower-income voters.

New York City Rank Voting

New York City primaries allow voters to rank up to five candidates in order of preference. If no candidate wins more than 50% of the vote, the Board of Elections winnows out the contenders round by round. The candidate with the fewest first-choice votes gets eliminated; voters who ranked that candidate first then have their votes given to their second-choice candidate. The process continues until two candidates remain, with the one with the most votes winning.

On Tuesday, that was Mamdani.

The result was somewhat anticlimactic after Mamdani emerged last week with a commanding lead after the initial count of voters’ first-choice rankings. He garnered 43.5% of the vote, to Cuomo’s 36.4%. Lander was in a distant third with 11.3%.

The primary-night margin was so decisive that it prompted concession speeches from Mamdani’s opponents, including Cuomo, once a prohibitive favorite. He acknowledged Mamdani’s performance by saying simply, “He won.”

The margin between Cuomo and Mamdani only widened with the completion of the ranked choice tabulation, a reflection of how many voters ranked him on their ballot (even if they did not rank him first). With only the first-choice votes counted, Mamdani was leading Cuomo by 7 points. After ranked-choice tabulations, Mamdani led Cuomo by 12 points.

Even so, Cuomo won 428,530 votes in this year’s primary, more than the 404,513 votes Adams won in 2021, when he beat out Kathryn Garcia in the Democratic primary by just more than 7,000 votes.

It remains unclear how votes were redistributed during the ranked-choice tabulations. The Board of Elections did what is called “batch elimination” on all but the top two candidates, because the combined first-choice votes they received added up to less than those received by Mamdani and Cuomo.

Vincent Ignizio, a spokesperson for the Board of Elections, said that after the final vote is certified July 15, the board will provide a detailed breakdown of how votes transferred from one candidate to another during the count.

Mamdani’s Road to City Hall Not Without Obstacles

While New York City is a Democratic town, and labor unions have increasingly consolidated behind Mamdani, his road to City Hall is not without obstacles.

His outspoken criticism of Israel’s conduct in the war in the Gaza Strip and his refusal to condemn the term “globalize the intifada” have caused concern in the capital of American Jewry. Mamdani has said he believes the phrase speaks to “a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights,” though many Jews consider it a call to violence invoking resistance movements of the 1980s and 2000s.

National and local Republicans have responded to the triumph of Mamdani, who is Muslim, with a wave of explicitly Islamophobic rhetoric.

Democratic leaders in New York, including Gov. Kathy Hochul, Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, have praised Mamdani’s campaign but stopped short of endorsing him.

Mamdani has also prompted an outcry among business leaders by calling for expansive new government programs funded by higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations. He would need Hochul’s support to raise those taxes, but she has insisted she will oppose any such request.

In several discussions last week, some business executives talked about coalescing behind Adams, the scandal-tarnished incumbent mayor who was indicted last fall on federal charges of bribery and fraud.

Adams opted out of the Democratic primary to run as an independent in April, the day after the Trump administration successfully persuaded a federal judge to dismiss the charges against him.

Adams, in turn, has swiftly turned to denigrating Mamdani as an antisemite, a radical and a privileged child.

“This election is a choice between a candidate with a blue collar and one with a silver spoon,” Adams said last week, as he launched his mayoral campaign.

But Adams has his own obstacles, even beyond the now-dismissed corruption indictment. His fundraising irregularities have prompted the city’s campaign finance board to deny him lucrative matching funds. His poll numbers are at historic lows. He has yet to name a campaign manager.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Dana Rubinstein/Shaun Huang
c. 2025 The New York Times Company