NEW YORK — Zohran Mamdani has reason to be confident in the final days of the New York City mayoral race. Andrew Cuomo has reason to keep fighting. Both are saying the contest is far from decided.
As the top two contenders enter the homestretch, new polling, last-minute endorsements and early voter turnout numbers offer a hint at what’s to come: Mamdani is on track to win, but an 11th-hour surprise remains possible.
Mamdani, the Democratic nominee who has led in polls by double-digit margins for the entirety of the general election, instructed his supporters to take nothing for granted.
“People say: ‘We’ve got this.’ ‘It’s over.’ ‘Cuomo is cooked.’ Do not believe it,” he said in a campaign video released Thursday morning. “The billionaires who rigged our economy and tried to buy an election don’t give up easy.”
His video featured a clip of billionaire investor Bill Ackman, who’s poured $1.5 million into anti-Mamdani super PACs this month. Billionaire former mayor Michael Bloomberg also donated $1.5 million to a pro-Cuomo super PAC Wednesday and endorsed the former governor. That support comes a month after Mamdani and the former mayor engaged in what one longtime political adviser to Bloomberg described as a “cordial” discussion between the two. The nod represented a slight sign of hope for Cuomo, who’s running as an independent after losing to Mamdani in the June Democratic primary.
But where Cuomo has the money, boosted by an array of independent expenditure committees spending millions of dollars to help him, Mamdani has the poll numbers.
An Emerson College Polling/PIX11/The Hill poll of very likely New York City voters shows the Democratic nominee with a wide, 25-point lead, winning 50 percent of the vote while Cuomo trails with 25 percent and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa nets 21 percent. Just 5 percent of voters are undecided, or planning to vote for another candidate.
That poll released Thursday was an outlier, but several other recent surveys have shown Mamdani leading Cuomo by comfortable, double-digit margins — 16 points per Marist University, 10 points per Quinnipiac University and 16 points according to the Manhattan Institute.
With that, Mamdani is focused on keeping his supporters motivated and urging his army of 95,000 volunteers not to be complacent, reminding them that polling a week ahead of the primary showed Cuomo with a comfortable lead. The former governor is brushing off the polls too, noting that nearly 400,000 New Yorkers have already cast votes in the first five days of early voting, which could lead to the highest mayoral election turnout in decades.
“They have never seen this volume of turnout, which is great, which is great, and it’s all across the city,” Cuomo said Thursday at a campaign event in Harlem. “The polls have no idea what they’re talking about, because they have never seen this kind of turnout before.”
Voters over the age of 55 made up a slim majority of that early turnout, the Daily News reported. Mamdani polls best with younger voters, and older voters are split between the two — but experts urged against drawing too many conclusions ahead of the Nov. 4 election.
As voters kept pouring into polling places Thursday, the candidates continued to spar.
Cuomo contended, as he has throughout the campaign, that Mamdani doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to his key campaign proposals.
“Just false promises. Here’s the hard truth: there is no Santa Claus and there is no Easter Bunny,” he said. “The mayor cannot freeze the rent … There are not going to be any free buses.”
Some 58 percent of likely voters hold an unfavorable view of Cuomo, according to the Emerson poll. So his only path to victory involves convincing those people and voters on the fence about Mamdani’s prescriptions to vote for Cuomo anyway — even if they might prefer Sliwa — because defeating the democratic socialist Mamdani is that important.
To that end, he’s painted an increasingly dire picture.
“I do not believe the city of New York has a future if Zohran Mamdani is elected mayor,” he said Thursday. “I do not believe the city will survive and thrive.”
Two-thirds of voters already think the city is going in the wrong direction, according to the Marist poll. A relative newcomer to politics at just 34 years old, Mamdani has sold an optimistic vision of the city’s future, while the 67-year-old Cuomo has been carrying the baggage of five decades in public life.
He campaigned with Mayor Eric Adams on Thursday, and Cuomo had to dance around a reporter’s question about why he previously said the city hasn’t had a competent mayor since Bloomberg. “I believe Mayor Adams has been a more than competent mayor,” he said of the man with abysmal polling numbers who he pressured out of the race last month.
Asked about the Bloomberg endorsement at a campaign event in Brooklyn, Mamdani looked to the recent past and said he overcame a waterfall of campaign spending and negative ads in the primary through volunteers knocking on doors and making phone calls.
“As Taylor Swift says, ‘I’ve seen this film before,’ but unlike she says, we actually like the ending,” he said, referring to the pop star’s song “Exile.” “That’s what we’re going to show in the next five days. We’re going to knock on more doors than we’ve seen in this city before.”
Cuomo announced the endorsement of several Muslim community leaders Thursday in an effort to defend himself against accusations of Islamophobia from Mamdani. He also rolled out a nod from Rep. Tom Suozzi, a moderate Democrat, on Wednesday. And Rep. Mike Lawler, a Republican, endorsed him as “the lesser of two evils.”
Mamdani would be the first Muslim mayor, and he criticized Cuomo for agreeing when conservative radio host Sid Rosenberg said in an interview last week that Mamdani would be cheering on another terrorist attack like 9/11. Cuomo shot back, arguing it was actually Mamdani who was being divisive by accusing anyone of Islamophobia.
“Islamophobia is not real in this race, is not real in this context,” he said Thursday.
Mamdani is continuing to campaign hard and has a midnight press conference planned for Thursday night with shift workers in Jackson Heights, a Queens neighborhood with a large Muslim population.
No matter who wins, civil rights leader Al Sharpton urged Democrats to unite against President Donald Trump after the election.
“We need to be together,” he said after an event with Gov. Kathy Hochul in East Harlem Thursday. “The blood that binds us as New Yorkers is thicker than the waters that divide us.”
Caroline McCarthy and Emily Ngo contributed reporting.
