Four years ago, New Yorkers had their first brush with ranked-choice voting, but few seemed ready to embrace it. Voters seemed puzzled by the process, and the Democratic mayoral candidates were hesitant to work together and make cross-endorsements to help each other.
This year was different.
All the campaigns tried to game the system, which allows voters to rank up to five candidates in order of preference. Organizations made group endorsements; campaigns told voters to avoid ranking specific candidates; and several contenders made cross-endorsement deals.
Most of this benefited Zohran Mamdani, a state assemblyman and democratic socialist who officially won the Democratic primary for mayor on Tuesday after ranked choices were counted.
He received nearly 100,000 additional votes from New Yorkers who ranked him lower on their ballots.
Those votes helped Mr. Mamdani beat his main rival, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, by 12 percent — a decisive victory that shocked Democrats in the city and across the nation.
Here are five takeaways from the ranked-choice count.
Lander’s Endorsement Helped Mamdani
For much of the campaign, Brad Lander, the city comptroller, was stuck in third place.
The only citywide elected official in the race, Mr. Lander was expected to be the standard-bearer for the left flank of the party. But Mr. Mamdani’s charisma, social media savvy and focus on affordability catapulted him past Mr. Lander in the polls.
As it became clear to Mr. Lander that he could not catch Mr. Mamdani, the two sat down at a Midtown restaurant and agreed to cross-endorse one another.
Mr. Lander and Mr. Mamdani filmed a commercial together, and Mr. Lander, a Reform Jew, likely helped Mr. Mamdani deflect some of the heavy criticism he was receiving from pro-Israel groups. At the end of the campaign, Mr. Lander spent $340,000 on ads and robocalls attacking Mr. Cuomo.
“I did not want to wake up the day after Election Day to find Andrew Cuomo had won and I had not done every single thing I possibly could,” Mr. Lander said in an interview.
His support appears to have helped Mr. Mamdani.
The results did not reveal how many of Mr. Lander’s 115,000 first-choice votes went to Mr. Mamdani. But Mr. Mamdani received nearly 100,000 ranked-choice votes, almost twice as many as Mr. Cuomo did.
Trip Yang, a Democratic strategist not affiliated with any mayoral campaign, said Mr. Lander had “ended up being the selfless hero for progressives.”
A Potential Mandate
In the 2021 Democratic primary, Eric Adams, a former police officer who would go on to be mayor, beat Kathryn Garcia, a former city sanitation commissioner, by 7,197 votes — less than one percentage point.
Mr. Mamdani’s victory was much more decisive. He beat Mr. Cuomo by nearly 117,000 votes, winning 56 percent to 44 percent after all other candidates were eliminated in the ranked-choice process.
Mr. Mamdani has already started to argue that his performance gives him license to implement his agenda.
“This is a popular mandate from New Yorkers to deliver a city that they can afford,” Mr. Mamdani said in an interview on the day after the election.
Voters Embraced the New System
The campaigns tried to educate voters about the new voting system, and it appears to have worked.
Roughly 95 percent of voters ranked either Mr. Mamdani or Mr. Cuomo on their ballots, allowing them to survive until the final round.
Most voters said they understood the system and wanted to keep it, according to an exit poll from SurveyUSA that was paid for by groups that support ranked-choice voting, including Common Cause New York and FairVote.
The poll found that 81 percent of voters said they understood the system “extremely or very well,” 16 percent said they understood it somewhat well and 3 percent said they did not understand it well.
“We’ve always said that we needed to get through two mayoral primaries to really see how ranked-choice voting was going to work,” said Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York. “Candidates really embraced ranked choice this go-around and I think that’s just an indication that the system is maturing in New York City.”
Roughly three-fourths of voters said they wanted to keep or expand ranked-choice voting, and about 17 percent said it should not be used for municipal elections.
A Missed Opportunity for Cuomo
Mr. Cuomo was much more reluctant to embrace a cross-endorsement strategy.
For much of the race, Mr. Cuomo led in the polls. The former governor courted support from fellow candidates, but declined to endorse them in return.
He received support from two other candidates: Jessica Ramos, a state senator from Queens who endorsed Mr. Cuomo, and Whitney Tilson, a former hedge fund executive who relentlessly attacked Mr. Mamdani for his positions on Israel and the war in Gaza. Both encouraged their supporters to rank Mr. Cuomo second.
But Ms. Ramos and Mr. Tilson were at the bottom of the rankings, receiving a total of just over 12,000 votes before being eliminated.
“What we see is that voters are very responsive to the candidates that they favor. And if a candidate that a voter likes says, ‘Don’t bother with anybody else, just rank me No. 1,’ that’s what the voter is most likely to do,” Ms. Lerner said. “And what we see over and over again in various races is that is a losing strategy the vast majority of the time.”
Mr. Cuomo’s critics declared victory on Tuesday. A group known as the DREAM campaign, which stands for Don’t Rank Evil Andrew for Mayor, said its ranked-choice campaign was “key in Cuomo’s downfall” and took credit for turning “what could have been a confusing ranking strategy into a popular mass message.”
Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, blamed the loss on a spike in first-time voters under 30 who shifted the electorate. Mr. Cuomo may still run in the November general election after securing an independent ballot line.
“We’ll be continuing conversations with people from all across the city while determining next steps,” Mr. Azzopardi said in a statement.
Fewer Exhausted Ballots
If voters do not rank either of the two finalists, their ballots are “exhausted” and their votes are considered inactive.
There were fewer exhausted ballots this year, evidence that a vast majority of voters used their ballots to rank either Mr. Mamdani or Mr. Cuomo.
There were 52,919 exhausted ballots this year, compared with 140,202 in the 2021 mayoral primary. That means that roughly 5 percent of ballots were inactive this year out of more than one million cast. In 2021, nearly 15 percent of ballots were inactive.
Jake Rubinstein, a senior manager at a polling firm, said the small number of inactive ballots this year was more “evidence that this was really a two-person race and 2021 wasn’t.”
Jeffery C. Mays is a Times reporter covering politics with a focus on New York City Hall.
Emma G. Fitzsimmons is the City Hall bureau chief for The Times, covering Mayor Eric Adams and his administration.
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