The night before Tuesday’s Democratic primary in New York City, Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander appeared on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” bringing their progressive bromance to a national viewership. Ostensibly running against each other to be New York’s next mayor, their alliance showcased what parliamentary-style coalition politics could look like in the age of so much vitriol and polarization.
Not long before early voting began, the candidates cross-endorsed each other in the name of an ideological victory and the defeat of the better-known, better-funded front-runner. “We both agree that corrupt, abusive Andrew Cuomo should not be allowed anywhere near City Hall,” Mr. Lander, the city’s comptroller, said on the show, as the studio audience cheered. And now it looks as if he won’t.
Against the predictions of nearly all polling, Mr. Mamdani is on track for a decisive win — and not after the tallying of several rounds of ranked-choice voting, assumed to be the only route to defeating an opponent with such an imposing advantage. Mr. Mamdani leads in the first round of counting by 7 percentage points, a margin significant enough that Mr. Cuomo quickly conceded on Tuesday night.
The result could reasonably lead to the assumption that a still-novel method of ballot casting in New York had little to do with the outcome. But in fact, ranked-choice voting, now in place in at least 60 jurisdictions around the country, shaped the competition from the beginning.
It rewards a campaign style that played to Mr. Mamdani’s strengths: ever-present, on-the-street, nonstop voter engagement. Mr. Mamdani was doing everything — even jumping into the freezing cold ocean to call attention to his proposal for a rent freeze — and his many thousands of campaign volunteers were everywhere.
All of this stood in sharp contrast to Mr. Cuomo’s I’ve-got-this-locked-up strategy, one that relied heavily on big-money TV advertising, little noticed by voters under 70, and the conviction that there was no one well-known or formidable or experienced enough to beat him.
For all that Mr. Mamdani relied on his charisma — and for all that Mr. Lander, who is on track to finish in third, helped bolster it as his funny, wonky, middle-aged foil — the two of them also ran on a shared, well-messaged vision of policy. Mr. Cuomo, instead, bet on the belief that his image and history were enough to carry him.
As Susan Lerner, one of the architects of the city’s ranked-choice voting system and the executive director of Common Cause New York, a nonpartisan good government group, explained, this system requires candidates to work harder to secure votes.
To become someone’s second or third choice, you need to talk to a broad spectrum of voters. “When your volunteers are knocking on a door,” Ms. Lerner said, “they say, ‘Hi, I’m here on behalf of John Doe.’ The voter says, ‘That’s nice, but I’m voting for John Smith.’ In the traditional structure, that is the end of the conversation. In ranked-choice, that’s the beginning of the conversation.”
But this was not the path Mr. Cuomo took. “The reason he conceded last night was that he knew he didn’t have a significant number of second- and third-place rankings,” Ms. Lerner said when I spoke with her on Wednesday.
“If you are seven or eight points behind, and you know that you haven’t asked voters to put you second or third, then you know you have no way to cumulate a majority. He disdained ranking. The message he gave to people was ‘I’m the only one,’ and that is not a winning strategy in ranked choice.”
Mr. Cuomo did not call on voters to rank him in any position but first place, and he also did not engage in cross-endorsements, which ranked-choice voting encourages. Although Jessica Ramos, a state senator from Queens and mayoral candidate, endorsed him, he did not return the gesture.
There is no question that Mr. Mamdani, 33, benefited from the arrangement he had with Mr. Lander, 55, a former city councilman with a long record of accomplishment who lent a sense of establishment gravitas to the state assemblyman with just four years in the legislature on his résumé.
It was also surely significant that Mr. Lander is the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in city government, given that Mr. Mamdani had alienated some Jewish voters with his pro-Palestinian activism and criticism of Israel. (Other Jewish voters enthusiastically supported him.) Some of the criticism directed at Mr. Mamdani centered on his remarks about the rallying cry “globalize the intifada.”
Asked in an interview a few weeks ago whether the expression made him queasy, Mr. Mamdani said that it conveyed a “a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.” In response, Dan Goldman, a Democratic congressman representing downtown Manhattan and a swath of brownstone Brooklyn, called him “unfit to lead a city with 1.3 million Jews — the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.”
Mr. Mamdani has said that fighting antisemitism would be a focus as mayor and has proposed substantially increasing spending on hate-crime prevention. But the stream of appearances he made with Mr. Lander, both in person and on Instagram, presumably gave some voters permission to look past foreign policy positions that have little day-to-day relevance in municipal governance; both candidates kept focused on the punishing economic realities of living in one of the world’s most expensive cities.
Mr. Lander repeatedly emphasized the meaning of a Jewish candidate and a Muslim one — if elected in November, Mr. Mamdani would be the city’s first Muslim mayor — coming together for the good of the entire electorate. “We are not going to let anyone divide Muslim New Yorkers and Jewish New Yorkers,” Mr. Lander said on primary night. “Our safety, our hopes and our freedoms are bound up together, don’t get it twisted.”
Among the other candidates committed to defeating Mr. Cuomo under the ranked-choice system, even if they themselves had little chance of winning, was Zellnor Myrie, the former Davis Polk lawyer and state senator from Central Brooklyn. Toward the end of the campaign, Mr. Myrie, who was hopelessly behind in the polls, used his remaining funds to buy radio ads railing against the former governor. (“Our subways and buses? Andrew Cuomo didn’t fix them,” began one ad. “Homelessness? Andrew Cuomo slashed funding for supportive housing.”)
Ranked-choice voting, experts tell us, often favors nontraditional candidates — those young and more responsive to collaboration. It also typically increases voter turnout. But Mr. Mamdani will face a general election in November that reverts to the standard procedure.
He will potentially face four other candidates, including Mayor Eric Adams, who is running as an independent; Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee; Jim Walden, a lawyer running as an independent; and Mr. Cuomo, who may run on a third-party line. Mr. Mamdani will be the youngest candidate in the field by far, and the only progressive. Already, the wealthy and powerful have committed to ensuring the millennial democratic socialist is not waved through.
The day after Mr. Cuomo’s concession, Whitney Tilson, the former hedge-fund manager who also ran for mayor and received not quite 1 percent of the first-round vote, sent an email to his followers, in hopes of getting the counteroffensive going: “While I’m no longer a candidate,” he wrote, “the fight to save our city from Zohran Mamdani and his comrades at the D.S.A. has just begun.”
Ginia Bellafante has served as a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the Big City columnist. She began her career at The Times as a fashion critic, and has also been a television critic. She previously worked at Time magazine.
The post How Brad Lander Helped Push Zohran Mamdani Toward Victory appeared first on New York Times.
