New York City’s mayoral race will end on Wednesday as Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist, faces 67-year-old Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat running as a more centrist independent after losing to Mamdani in the primary, four years after resigning as New York state’s governor in disgrace.
The campaign has laid bare the Democratic Party’s generational and ideological divides as it seeks to rehabilitate its damaged brand.
Andrew Cuomo, New York City mayoral candidate, arrives to cast his ballot at a polling station in New York Bloomberg
Democrats will be watching Tuesday’s results carefully, with the party locked out of power in Washington and struggling to find consensus on the best way to oppose Trump, a Republican, and find a path out of the political wilderness.
Mamdani, who was a little-known lawmaker in New York’s state legislature only a few months ago, has led by double digits over Cuomo, with Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, 71, a distant third in most opinion polls.
Mamdani has proposed ambitious left-wing policies, including freezing rents for nearly a million apartments and making the city’s buses free. A day after endorsing Cuomo, Trump said on Tuesday that any Jewish New Yorker who voted for Mamdani, a critic of the Israeli government who would be the city’s first Muslim mayor, was a “stupid person”.
New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani votes at a voting site AP
It was the latest in a string of comments over the course of the US president’s career suggesting that Jewish Americans vote against their own interests. Mamdani, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, rejects Republican accusations of antisemitism.
For Democrats, Tuesday’s candidates offer a chance to assess differing playbooks.
For Republicans, Tuesday’s elections will test whether the voters who powered Trump’s victory in 2024 will still show up when he is not on the ballot.
