As I detailed four years ago, New York City’s mayoral elections — which were extremely high-turnout affairs in 1989 and 1993 when Rudy Giuliani was making the case for fundamental change in how the city was governed and policed — have fallen off the cliff over the years. This year’s Democratic primary, while slightly better-attended than in recent years, nominated Zohran Mamdani with an electorate that included a startlingly small share of New Yorkers in general and registered New York City Democrats in particular. Fewer people voted in this primary than in the Democrats’ primary in 1989, when David Dinkins squared off against Ed Koch — and even with ranked-choice voting adding nearly 100,000 votes to his tally from people who didn’t pick him as their first choice, Mamdani got fewer votes than Dinkins did that year.
To put Mamdani’s 446,163 first-place votes and 545,334 ranked votes in context (compared with Andrew Cuomo’s receiving 374,818 first-place votes and 428,530 ranked votes and Brad Lander’s receiving 115,105 first-place votes): New York City has approximately 8,258,000 residents. The city’s population peaked at 8,804,190 residents in the 2020 census (pre-Covid), but it has been remarkably stable on the whole since hitting 7,454,995 in the 1940 census. In 1990, the year after Dinkins was elected, the census found 7,322,564 people in New York. According to the most recently available data, there are 5,126,009 registered voters in the city, of whom 3,343,648 are registered Democrats. That means that Mamdani was the first choice of 8.7 percent of registered voters in New York, and the ranked choice of 10.6 percent; he was the first choice of 13.3 percent of registered Democrats, and the ranked choice of 16.3 percent.
Eric Adams, even if he’s able to consolidate all the anti-Mamdani vote (which would require getting the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa, to stand down), has nearly as much baggage as Cuomo did. But for all of that, if the 93.3 percent of New York’s registered voters who didn’t make Mamdani their first choice in the primary acquiesce to his becoming mayor, they have nobody to blame but themselves for what will happen to their city.