Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old Democratic Socialist running for New York City mayor, is coasting toward city hall. He has won over younger voters with promises to freeze rents, provide free child care for infants and toddlers, and open city-run grocery stores to cut living costs. His appeal also rests on being young, photogenic, and relentlessly easygoing. He benefits as well from a fractured opposition: instead of a single challenger in the November 4 election, he faces two—former governor Andrew Cuomo and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa—who are likely to split the anti-Mamdani vote.
Mamdani’s rise is striking for another reason: crime, one of the electorate’s top concerns, hasn’t derailed him, despite his past hostility to the NYPD and far-left statements on law enforcement. Just four years ago, worries about crime carried current mayor Eric Adams, a former cop and Mamdani’s ideological opposite, into office. Yet by early September, Mamdani led Cuomo, his closest rival, by more than 22 points and Adams by 37; Adams soon dropped out.
The turning point came in the June primary, when Mamdani shattered New York’s fragile political balance and left the city’s centrist forces unable to regroup. Adams’s narrow 2021 primary win, notes progressive journalist Ross Barkan, had reflected the lingering strength of the old coalition—machine politics, unions, business interests, and outer-borough voters concerned about crime—that governed the city for decades. That result, Barkan says, “tricked people” into thinking that the coalition could hold for Cuomo this year. But Cuomo’s effort to rebrand as a crime- and tax-conscious centrist, along with his union backing, could not overcome his liabilities—most glaringly, his 2021 resignation over sexual-harassment allegations.
As Barkan observes, a different kind of voter asserted itself in June—“not just the gentrifier, professional-class voter,” the stereotype of a Mamdani supporter, “but younger people of color, younger immigrant groups.” Mamdani’s victory reflects this demographic shift, as outer-borough voters of all races who remember the high-crime 1970s and 1980s steadily disappear from the rolls.
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