With three more days of early voting to go and less than a week before Election Day, top Democrats united behind Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani — as his rival, Andrew Cuomo, sang a tune of a party never more divided.
At a Brooklyn Democratic Party gala Thursday night in Red Hook, party leaders from the city and state honored the frontrunner, who later headed to a midnight campaign stop at Elmhurst Hospital.
“I am so excited that in a few days we’re going to make history in this nation. We’re gonna stand together and elect the first Muslim mayor of this city,” said Attorney General Letitia James. “We’re gonna stand together and elect someone who believes that we should all be united.”
Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani speaks at a gala hosted by the Brooklyn Democrats in Red Hook, Oct. 30, 2025. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
Unity was also the theme with Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, the powerful Democratic party leader in Brooklyn.
“Here in Brooklyn, look at our stage — you see a number of different Democrats who believe in one. We are here in unity. Brooklyn is speaking in one voice,” she said.
“This happened because of this individual next to me,” she continued, with Mamdani at her side. “We all fell in place because we heard him and we heard how he addresses the issues of our New Yorkers. And this is just the beginning.”
With the clock running out before Election Day, three new polls from academic polling institutions bolstered Mamdani’s edge over Cuomo, most by double digits.
An Emerson/PIX 11 poll found the former governor trailed Mamdani by 25 percentage points, 50% to 25%. A Marist poll found Mamdani leading Cuomo 48% to 32%, and a Quinnipiac poll found a smaller margin of 42% to 33%.
As the Democrats consolidated their support around the Queens Assemblymember, Cuomo — now running for mayor as an independent after losing in the primary — has been charging that Mamdani, a democratic socialist, is not a real Democrat.
On Fox News Wednesday, Cuomo described a “quiet civil war going on in the Democratic party.”
“You have an extreme left, a radical left. Bernie Sanders, AOC, Mamdani is just the banner-carrier for that movement, versus the mainstream moderate Democrats,” said Cuomo, one of the most identifiable Democrats nationwide and an heir of New York’s blue establishment. “That’s what this election is about. It is that civil war. I believe the far left will destroy the Democratic party. I believe it will destroy the Democratic party nationwide if that far left becomes dominant.”
Nothing for Granted
On the campaign trail Thursday, Mamdani brushed aside the polls, instead encouraging his supporters to canvass.
“Winning this race in and of itself is a mandate to deliver for New Yorkers,” Mamdani said, after watercoloring with seniors in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, dismissing the idea of needing to win with 50% of the vote. (In New York City, a candidate in a general election needs to win only a plurality, not a majority, of the vote.)
Cuomo also dismissed the polls, saying record-high turnout could skew that.
“I think the polls have no idea what they’re talking about because they’ve never seen this type of turnout,” he said at an endorsement press conference at a senior center inside the King Towers public housing complex in Harlem.
Andrew Cuomo mayoral campaign flyers were scattered at an East Harlem bus stop, Oct. 29, 2025. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
Inside the 57th Street F train subway station on Thursday, Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa too pooh-poohed the polls — and his lagging status in them.
“Another day, another poll, another day, another billionaire throws millions into the race,” Sliwa said, referencing former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s endorsement of Cuomo on Wednesday and his latest $1.5 million donation to Fix the City, a pro-Cuomo political spending group.
Sliwa already had a tough path to victory in a city where more than half of voters are registered Democrats, made worse by Cuomo’s open courting of GOP supporters. This week, Fix the City and Stop the Socialists — another pro-Cuomo spending group — released ads online and in bus stops warning Republican voters that a vote for “Sliwa is a vote for Mamdani.”
It’s a phrase that Cuomo and his backers have invoked more and more in recent weeks.
So far, Sliwa has resisted making explicit overtures to moderate Democrats to vote for him as an antidote to Mamdani, though he touted the endorsement from City Councilmember Bob Holden, a moderate Democrat who has at times aligned with local Republicans.
Sliwa said Democrats reluctant to vote for a Republican should vote for him on the “Protect Animals” ballot line instead.
Islamophobia in Focus, Again
At a press conference Thursday joined by Mayor Eric Adams and African and Muslim leaders, Cuomo again denied being Islamophobic, even as he has attacked the frontrunner — who is Muslim — for leftist policies the former governor described as “haram,” or against Islamic law.
At the presser, Cuomo said there wasn’t any Islamophobia in the race, and blamed Mamdani for a “toxic” campaign.
“This is all toxic, this is all divisiveness, trying to pit one against the other, trying to raise differences,” Cuomo said.
One of the Muslim leaders who endorsed Cuomo but was not present on Thursday, Sheikh Ibrahim Niass of the Masjid Ansarudeen Islamic Center in the Bronx, split with some of the other leaders from his mosque who endorsed Mamdani. Zahra Thiam, the mosque’s community liaison, said that the mosque’s leaders make political endorsements in their own personal capacity and not on behalf of the mosque or its congregants.
The former governor has been criticized for not speaking out against attacks against Mamdani seen as Islamophobic, including during a controversial radio interview last week.
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