More than two million New Yorkers went to the polls on Tuesday to cast their votes in a pivotal mayoral race that has drawn worldwide attention for its big personalities and clashing ideological visions of the city’s future.
It has been decades since so many people voted in a New York City mayoral election, and the robust turnout from brownstone Brooklyn to suburban Staten Island and the concrete canyons of Manhattan underscored the high stakes of Tuesday’s contest.
The victory by the front-runner and Democratic nominee, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, is poised to shake up the city’s longstanding power structure and sent a powerful message about the direction of the Democratic Party during the second Trump administration.
Mr. Mamdani is a democratic socialist who ran on a platform of making New York City — the global capital of capitalism — a more affordable place to live, in part by funding new social programs with higher taxes on companies and the wealthy. He will be the first Muslim and first South Asian mayor in the city’s history.
But he has many critics. Many of the rich people he seeks to tax devoted their abundant resources to try to stop his rise. He is a sharp critic of Israel, a once politically unthinkable stance in New York, and that alarmed many Jewish voters. And at 34 years old, he will be the youngest mayor in recent history, and the slimness of his résumé reflects his youth.
Mr. Mamdani’s critics divided their votes between his two opponents: Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, and former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who ran as an independent after losing in the Democratic primary in June.
Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Sliwa both argued that Mr. Mamdani was too inexperienced and too progressive to run the biggest city in the country. But in recent weeks, they spent almost as much time attacking each other as criticizing the front-runner.
Liam Stack is a Times reporter who covers the culture and politics of the New York City region.
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