Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist whose blend of populist ideas and personal magnetism catapulted his upstart candidacy, won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City by a significant margin, according to The Associated Press.
The race was called for Mr. Mamdani on Tuesday afternoon, shortly after New York City’s Board of Elections released its tabulation of ranked-choice ballots.
Mr. Mamdani, a state assemblyman from Queens, won with 56 percent of the vote. Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo came in second with 44 percent. The board will certify the final vote in mid-July.
Mr. Mamdani, 33, now moves on to a contested general election in November, where he will face Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat who opted out of the primary to run as an independent; Curtis Sliwa, the Guardian Angels founder running on the Republican line; and Jim Walden, a lawyer also running on an independent line.
Mr. Cuomo, for now, is also running on an independent line, but he has not yet decided whether he intends to continue campaigning. Mr. Mamdani is expected to be the favorite in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by six to one.
“I am humbled by the support of more than 545,000 New Yorkers in last week’s primary,” Mr. Mamdani said in a statement. “This is just the beginning of our expanding coalition to make New York City affordable. And we will do it together.”
His victory was greeted by sharp attacks from conservative media and Republicans, with the latest coming from President Trump just minutes after the result was known.
On Tuesday, after a reporter mischaracterized Mr. Mamdani as a “communist” and said Mr. Mamdani had promised to “defy ICE,” Mr. Trump said that, “Well then, we will have to arrest him.” (During his primary night speech, Mr. Mamdani vowed to “stop masked ICE agents from deporting our neighbors.”) Mr. Trump also said that “a lot of people are saying he’s here illegally.” (Mr. Mamdani is an American citizen.)
The president’s comments have not phased Mr. Mamdani, who said on “Meet the Press” on Sunday that he was getting inured to his remarks about “how I look, how I sound, where I’m from, who I am, ultimately because he wants to distract from what I’m fighting for.”
Mr. Mamdani triumphed by bringing new voters to the polls with a campaign turbocharged by his energy, charm, social media savvy and an army of enthusiastic volunteers whose breadth appeared unprecedented in recent New York history.
He also benefited from a concerted effort by left-leaning groups, unions and others to strategize how best to use ranked-choice voting, and not repeat what they saw as mistakes from the 2021 mayoral primary. In that contest, the left failed to coalesce behind a common candidate, allowing Mr. Adams to win.
This year, many on the left made it a priority to work together and make group endorsements, often with Mr. Mamdani leading the way. Some candidates followed suit, with Mr. Mamdani entering cross-endorsement agreements with Brad Lander, the city comptroller, and Michael Blake, a former state assemblyman. Two second-tier candidates, Whitney Tilson and State Senator Jessica Ramos, endorsed Mr. Cuomo; he did not endorse them back.
Mr. Cuomo, who for months polled in first place, also contributed to Mr. Mamdani’s win, and his own demise, by running a campaign that was widely derided for its lackluster rose-garden strategy. He made relatively few, often tightly controlled appearances, and seemed out of touch with a city he had not lived in since the late 20th century.
In the end, Mr. Mamdani won primarily thanks to first-place rankings among white, Hispanic, and Asian voters, as well as middle- and higher-income voters. Mr. Cuomo won among Black and lower-income voters.
New York City primaries allow voters to rank up to five candidates in order of preference. If no candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote, the Board of Elections winnows out the contenders round by round. The candidate with the fewest first-choice votes gets eliminated; voters who ranked that candidate first then have their votes given to their second-choice candidate. The process continues until two candidates remain, with the one with the most votes winning.
On Tuesday, that was Mr. Mamdani.
The result was somewhat anticlimactic after Mr. Mamdani emerged last week with a commanding lead after the initial count of voters’ first-choice rankings. He garnered 43.5 percent of the vote, to Mr. Cuomo’s 36.4 percent. Mr. Lander was in a distant third with 11.3 percent.
The primary-night margin was so decisive that it prompted concession speeches from Mr. Mamdani’s opponents, including Mr. Cuomo, once a prohibitive favorite. He acknowledged Mr. Mamdani’s performance by saying simply, “He won.”
The margin between Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Mamdani only widened with the completion of the ranked choice tabulation, a reflection of how many voters ranked him on their ballot (even if they did not rank him first). With only the first-choice votes counted, Mr. Mamdani was leading Mr. Cuomo by seven points. After ranked-choice tabulations, Mr. Mamdani led Mr. Cuomo by 12 points.
Even so, Mr. Cuomo won 428,530 votes in this year’s primary, more than the 404,513 votes Mr. Adams won in 2021, when he beat out Kathryn Garcia in the Democratic primary by just over 7,000 votes.
In a statement, Mr. Cuomo’s spokesman thanked those who voted for him and suggested he was still considering whether to campaign on his independent line.
“Extremism, division and empty promises are not the answer to this city’s problems, and while this was a look at what motivates a slice of our primary electorate, it does not represent the majority,” said the spokesman, Rich Azzopardi. “We’ll be continuing conversations with people from all across the city while determining next steps.”
It remains unclear how votes were redistributed during the ranked-choice tabulations. The Board of Elections did what is called “batch elimination” on all but the top two candidates, because the combined first-choice votes they received added up to less than those received by Mr. Mamdani and Mr. Cuomo.
Vincent Ignizio, a spokesman for the Board of Elections, said that after the final vote is certified on July 15, the board will provide a detailed breakdown of how votes transferred from one candidate to another during the count.
While New York City is a Democratic town, and labor unions have increasingly consolidated behind Mr. Mamdani, his road to City Hall is not without obstacles.
His outspoken criticism of Israel’s conduct in the war in Gaza and his refusal to condemn the term “globalize the intifada” have caused concern in the capital of American Jewry. Mr. Mamdani has said he believes the phrase speaks to “a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights,” though many Jews consider it a call to violence invoking resistance movements of the 1980s and 2000s.
National and local Republicans have responded to the triumph of Mr. Mamdani, who is Muslim, with a wave of explicitly Islamophobic rhetoric. Some have also incorrectly typecast him as a “communist.”
Democratic leaders in New York, including Gov. Kathy Hochul, Senator Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, have praised Mr. Mamdani’s campaign but stopped short of endorsing him.
Mr. Mamdani has also prompted an outcry among business leaders by calling for expansive new government programs funded by higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations. He would need Ms. Hochul’s support to raise those taxes, but she has insisted she will oppose any such request.
In several discussions last week, some business executives talked about coalescing behind Mr. Adams, the scandal-tarnished incumbent mayor who was indicted last fall on federal charges of bribery and fraud.
Mr. Adams opted out of the Democratic primary to run as an independent in April, the day after the Trump administration successfully persuaded a federal judge to dismiss the charges against him.
Both the prosecutors who brought the criminal case against the mayor and the judge who dismissed it suggested that Mr. Adams had engaged in a quid pro quo with the Trump administration.
“Everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions,” the judge wrote in a 78-page decision that made clear he was not dismissing the case on the merits, but rather because as a federal judge, he had no authority to compel the government to prosecute the case against its wishes.
Mr. Adams, in turn, has swiftly turned to denigrating Mr. Mamdani as an antisemite, a radical and a privileged child.
“This election is a choice between a candidate with a blue collar and one with a silver spoon,” Mr. Adams said last week, as he launched his mayoral campaign.
But Mr. Adams has his own obstacles, even beyond the now-dismissed corruption indictment. His fund-raising irregularities have prompted the city’s campaign finance board to deny him lucrative matching funds. His poll numbers are at historic lows. He has yet to name a campaign manager.
Dana Rubinstein covers New York City politics and government for The Times.
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