Four years ago, ranked-choice voting made its debut in New York City’s mayoral primary. As the city ramps up toward what’s looking to be a closely contested Democratic nomination fight, candidates and outside political organizations have found that there remains much to learn about the still-novel system. In these final weeks, the mayoral hopefuls are working to tailor their campaigns to train voters on what they need to do when they enter their voting booths.
The city adopted ranked-choice voting for municipal primaries in 2019, allowing voters to rank up to five candidates in order of preference. If no candidate earns more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round, the candidate earning the lowest vote share is eliminated, with their ballots redistributed to the voters’ next choices. This continues for several rounds, until one candidate earns a majority threshold of support. If a voter does not rank five candidates, there is a chance their ballot will become “exhausted”: If they only choose two candidates, and both of their options are eliminated, their ballot will not count toward the final result.
After the 2021 mayoral election, exit polling by Common Cause and Rank the Vote NYC—campaigns that backed ranked-choice voting—found that 83 percent of Democratic voters ranked at least two candidates on their ballot, while 42 percent ranked five candidates. In an effort to understand the victory of moderate Democrat Eric Adams, who has been embroiled in multiple scandals during his four years as mayor, the New York Working Families Party—a powerful progressive party organization in the city—began analyzing how they might ensure a candidate more favorable to its ideals could win in 2025.
“Despite the skepticism at the time of ranked-choice voting and how voters would understand and engage in it, the fact is that most voters gave it a try. But the political ecosystem of candidates, of endorsing organizations, press, and elected officials, for the most part, didn’t actually try to guide voters how to use ranked-choice voting,” said Ana María Archila, co-director of the New York Working Families Party.
Archila said that her organization had learned a lesson from the actions of two of the 2021 candidates. One week before the Democratic mayoral primary, candidates Andrew Yang and Kathryn Garcia formed a late-breaking alliance, appearing together on the campaign trail. Yang encouraged his supporters to rank Garcia second, in an effort to stymie the momentum of the leading candidate, Adams.
The show of unity between Garcia and Yang indicated a new type of strategy, one where the would-be nominees recognized that their chances of winning would increase if their rivals’ supporters ranked them second or third on the ballot. The tactic worked, but only to an extent: In the eighth round of voting, after Yang had been eliminated, Garcia was boosted to second place behind Adams, as enough Yang voters had ranked her second. However, it wasn’t enough to push her across the finish line, and she narrowly lost the primary contest to Adams, who was then elected as mayor in November of that year. The eighth round of counting ended with more than 140,000 exhausted ballots—nearly 20 times Adams’s margin of victory. If even a small percentage had ranked Garcia in any position, she would have defeated Adams.
“We spent a lot of time looking at that to understand, what are the pieces that need to be in place?” said Archila. “We need to create an ecosystem that supports collaboration instead of just competition. We need to endorse a slate of candidates and help them work together. And we need to make sure that voters are told, very explicitly, not to rank the candidate of the opposition, which in this case now is Andrew Cuomo.”
The entrance of Cuomo, the former governor who resigned amid allegations of sexual harassment in 2021, further galvanized progressive candidates and groups in particular, hoping to stave off his headwinds due to name recognition. Recent polling has shown a surge in support for Zohran Mamdani, a progressive state lawmaker who appears to be closing in on overtaking Cuomo’s lead. The Working Families Party has put Mamdani at the top of its slate of preferred candidates. (The party originally only endorsed four candidates, but has since encouraged voters to fill out all five options.)
This is also a strategy employed by prominent supporters of candidates. When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Mamdani, she released her entire ballot ranking her preferred candidates. Representative Nydia Velazquez did the same, listing City Council President Adrienne Adams, City Comptroller Brad Lander, and Mamdani as her top three choices. Both Ocasio-Cortez and Velazquez explicitly framed their endorsements in terms of stopping Cuomo’s momentum. (DREAM, a small but influential super PAC, has aided these efforts by blanketing the city with its message: “Don’t Rank Evil Andrew for Mayor.”)
Some candidates seem to be pleased with earning support from a prominent endorser, even if they’re lower on the ballot. Lander, whom Ocasio-Cortez said she would rank third on her ballot, said in a press conference that he was “grateful to have her support now running for mayor.” Scott Stringer, another candidate, whom Ocasio-Cortez ranked fourth, said that her mention of him on her ballot was “going to help me tremendously.”
Archila said that when Working Families Party volunteers engage in canvassing and phone banking efforts, they are encouraging voters to rank their entire slate of preferred candidates, instead of focusing solely on Mamdani. “This time around, we are much more explicitly trying to establish that connection, saying, ‘If you like this person, then you’ll also like this other person and this one and this one, and you won’t like this person,’” she said.
Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York and chair of the board of Rank the Vote NYC—which led the campaign to introduce ranked-choice voting to New York City—said that she was expecting voters to employ ranked-choice voting in an even more effective and “nuanced” method in 2025, having learned from 2021. She also argued that candidates were more aware of how to effectively campaign for ranked-choice voting.
“We are seeing more mayoral candidates talk about ranked-choice voting earlier,” she said. “It’s more of a dialog with the voters. It also means the candidates themselves reach out and take the time to appear at events in parts of the community that previously they have not bothered to talk to.”
But the political dynamics of this election are complicated. Because New York City is so heavily Democratic, the primary outcomes often determine the result of the general election. Moreover, New York’s primaries are closed, meaning that only voters registered as Democrats will be able to vote on Tuesday. But this year, the general election may be actually competitive, with a larger universe of voters determining the outcome. Adams is running as an independent, and there is a good chance that, if Mamdani is the runner-up in the Democratic primary, the Working Families Party will put him on its party line. (The Working Families Party currently has a “placeholder” candidate as its nominee, who can be swapped out after the Democratic primary.)
Harry Siegel, a columnist for the Daily News, said that the focus on Cuomo and Mamdani was edging out consideration of other candidates who do not have the baggage of the former, and the relative inexperience of the latter. “The choice that both Cuomo and Mamdani have promoted to this day is that ‘this is what you have to decide between,’” Siegel said. “That is remarkably distinct from what New Yorkers seem to want, which is someone who’s not exhausting, scandal-prone, and difficult in the vein of Adams or Cuomo, and who has something more to offer in terms of actually delivering things than, I would say, Mamdani.”
Because Mamdani is seen as the most credible alternative to Cuomo in terms of polling, it may have inspired the more moderate candidates to carve out their own lane—but they could find it hard to leverage that strategy into success. In an interview with the New York Editorial Board, Adrienne Adams said that the system “makes things different for sure.”
“I’m not really critical of it because I think that it has helped for folks to exercise their vote even wider, in a wider perspective, even in a more democratic perspective, if we want to look at it that way also,” said Adams. “I’m not going to really be critical of it, but it is challenging for some folks like me.”
Siegel also argued that this system makes the entire process unnecessarily complicated, particularly for low-information voters. There will be state elections on the same ballot that are not subject to ranked-choice voting, which Siegel said could cause confusion.
“It takes many charts and a lot of thinking that tons of people will be doing from the ballot booth while desperately googling things or texting friends to figure out how to strategize and vote in this phase of the election,” Siegel argued. “It is too much to think about. It is too much to explain. It demands complicated sentences.”
Moreover, unlike the municipal primary elections, the general election does not use ranked-choice voting. There will be multiple candidates on the general election ballot, including the Republican and Conservative Party nominees, but voters will only choose one candidate, and the top vote-getter will win.
“The issue here is not the ranked-choice [voting] by itself. It’s the partial ranked-choice system with different rules applying at different phases,” Siegel said.
But Lerner argued that voters needed more experience with ranked-choice voting before the city could consider making even broader changes to the process, either with open primaries or adjusting how the general election is run. “It’s been our general feeling that it’s important to run with two large mayoral campaigns—the full slate of municipal elections with ranked-choice voting—through at least two cycles. And then let’s examine how it’s working in New York, and if there are changes we want to make,” she said.
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