New Yorkers will find out the identity of their next mayor on Tuesday, in a race that will decide who will run, and defend, the US’s largest city at a time when Donald Trump has threatened to send military troops there.
Against that backdrop, New York has seen a mayoral election that has pitted two very different Democrats against one another. The race has become an increasingly bitter face-off, laced with alleged racism and Islamophobia, but it is the political differences between the two main candidates that could have major implications for how the Democratic party performs in next year’s midterm elections.
In the progressive corner is Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist whose meteoric rise and grassroots campaign has brought international attention. Representing the old guard is Andrew Cuomo, the former Democratic New York governor now running as an independent – and benefiting from the backing of ultra-rich donors and corporations.
With days to go until election day, it is Mamdani, the one-time underdog who defeated Cuomo in the Democratic primary who is firmly installed as the frontrunner. Mamdani, who has run on a campaign of affordability and promised to freeze rent for about 2 million New Yorkers, has led Cuomo by double-digits in every poll conducted in October, and it is very much the younger man’s election to lose.
Yet Cuomo, who resigned as governor in 2021 amid allegations of sexual harassment, has made it clear he will fight to the end, and not necessarily in an above-the-belt fashion. He has trashed Mamdani’s goals as unachievable, and in recent days chuckled along as a radio host made Islamophobic remarks about Mamdani, who is Muslim. Two weeks ago, Cuomo was widely condemned as racist after posting an AI-generated ad that featured a slew of racist stereotypes and showed Mamdani releasing a group of criminals (Cuomo’s campaign said the video was posted in error).
It’s been a rather grubby end to an election that could be key to the direction that the Democratic party, floundering in its response to Trump’s authoritarian grabs, takes in the coming years.
If Mamdani wins convincingly, the establishment party leaders who have refused to endorse his campaign will be forced to reckon with a message that has appealed to Americans’ anger at inequality, soaring price rises and the establishment. It would be hard for Chuck Schumer, the senior Democrat in the Senate, and Hakeem Jeffries, his counterpart in the House, not to embrace at least some of Mamdani’s ambitious ideas about affordability, given the newcomer has generated an enthusiasm within the party arguably not seen since Bernie Sanders ran for president eight years ago.
However, should Cuomo, who had been expected to sail to victory in the Democratic primary in June, complete a remarkable riches-to-rags-to-riches win, it could cement national Democrats’ current model of considered, uninspiring opposition – a tactic that has infuriated grassroots members of the party. A New York rejection of Mamdani’s progressive, positive message could convince Schumer and Jeffries that the best plan is to stick to the center – even as polls show the current iteration of the Democratic party is deeply unpopular nationwide.
Voters in New York appear to favor the Mamdani vision. Polls show that Mamdani supporters are far more enthusiastic about their candidate than Cuomo backers, something that has been evident throughout the campaign. Mamdani’s snappy videos on social media, his optimistic vision for New York and his willingness to actually get out and meet people in the city has drawn an army of more than 50,000 volunteers, many of them young or first-time voters.
Yet Cuomo, 67, isn’t giving up. And with the stakes against him, the former governor has turned to ugly messaging in recent weeks.
After spending months throwing basically everything at Mamdani to see what might stick, Cuomo has narrowed his focus to attacking Mamdani personally. He has labelled Mamdani, who was born in Uganda to Indian parents, an “extremist”, and popped up on Fox Business for an interview with Maria Bartiromo, a rightwing Trump supporter, where Cuomo claimed New York “will not survive” Mamdani as mayor. It reached a nadir last week, when Cuomo laughed along and said “that’s another problem” after a radio host said Mamdani would “cheer” another 9/11-style terrorist attack. (Cuomo’s campaign said he does not believe Mamdani would celebrate a terrorist event.)
The line of attack echoes much of what Trump, who has deployed the national guard to Washington DC and threatened to do the same to New York, has said about Mamdani, and perhaps that shouldn’t come as a surprise. A set of billionaire New Yorkers, including some who donated to Trump in the 2024 election, have pumped millions into trying to elect Cuomo, as other influential figures have pressured Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate, to drop out of the race, in the hopes his voters would pass to the Cuomo camp. (Sliwa, who is polling at about 15%, firmly rejected the idea.)
As far as the Cuomo camp, and his billionaire supporters, are concerned, it should never have come to this. When Mamdani, one of 150 New York state assembly members, launched his campaign for mayor in October 2024, few had heard of him, and in truth, few even noticed.
Cuomo, by contrast, eased his way into the race in March 2025 and became the immediate frontrunner. He was the big beast who seemingly held all the advantages. The quintessential political insider, he had married a Kennedy – specifically, a sister of Robert F Kennedy Jr (the pair divorced in 2005) – and served in Bill Clinton’s administration. He became New York governor in 2011, 17 years after his father, Mario Cuomo, stepped down from the same position.
Mamdani, who was elected to the New York state assembly in 2020, does not have the same political heritage. But his commitment to providing free buses and free childcare – along with the freeze-the-rent pledge – offer a more positive vision of the future than Cuomo’s dire warnings about “mayhem” and unfettered crime, and his promise to hire more police officers.
Still, Mamdani has faced some challenges in recent days, after footage emerged appearing to show him suggesting the New York police department and the Israel Defense Forces were intertwined.
“We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF,” Mamdani said in the clip, filmed at a Democratic Socialists of America convention in 2023. Mamdani, a longtime critic of Israel who has said the country is committing genocide in Gaza, suggested he was criticizing joint training exercises between the NYPD and IDF.
As the race closes, Mamdani appears to have won sympathy and support, however, for his response to Cuomo’s increasing rhetoric.
Mamdani responded to Cuomo’s 9/11 remarks in an emotional video. In it, Mamdani recalled how, when he first ran for state assembly, a Muslim uncle suggested to him that he did not have to tell people about his Muslim faith. It was a lesson, Mamdani said, that many Muslim New Yorkers had been taught “again and again”: “That safety could only be found in the shadows of our city. That it is in those shadows alone where Muslims could embrace their full identities, and that if we were to emerge from those shadows, then it is in those shadows that we must leave our faith.”
Speaking to the actions of Cuomo and Sliwa, who has claimed Mamdani supports “global jihad”: “While my opponents in this race have brought hatred to the forefront, this is just a glimpse of what so many have to endure every day across this city. And while it would be easy for us to say that this is not who we are as a city, we know the truth. This is who we have allowed ourselves to become.”
The video was viewed more than 25m times on X alone. It led some to compare Mamdani’s speech to Barack Obama’s landmark 2008 address on race. It was welcomed by Muslims in New York and elsewhere, and hailed by liberal commentators. After a months-long, intensely bitter election, it was the youngest man in the room showing he may be the best suited to lead the US’s largest city.
