The Dawn of a New Mayor

This is The Sprint for City Hall, a limited-run series on the critical race for mayor of New York City.

We’ve made it to Election Day! If you haven’t voted yet, you can find your poll site here.

Today we’ll share seven of our biggest questions about the race, check in on some key demographic groups and test your knowledge of how celebrities feel about the election. We’ll be covering every twist and turn of Election Day over here. Let us know how things are looking in your neighborhood.

In the meantime, we’ll start with the headlines.

• President Trump, a Republican deeply unpopular in his hometown, endorsed Andrew Cuomo for mayor on his Truth Social account, writing that “whether you personally like Andrew Cuomo or not, you really have no choice.” We’ll explore the potential effects of that move below.

• Here’s what we know about the early vote.

• Headed into Election Day, Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, is the clear front-runner. But even some of his supporters worry about whether he has the experience to take on one of the hardest jobs in American politics.

• While the Democratic establishment has been deeply divided over Mamdani’s candidacy, Barack Obama called him on Saturday, praising his campaign and offering to be a “sounding board” into the future.

• Mamdani is seeking to become the first Muslim mayor of New York City. Many Muslim voters say they feel pride, but also fear amid an uptick in Islamophobic comments about Mamdani.

• Cuomo and Eric Adams, the current mayor, have had a fraught relationship — but Adams endorsed Cuomo, who is running as an independent, and the two campaigned together in the final stretch of the race.

• Tensions over Israel and the war in Gaza have played a central role in shaping this race. Mamdani, a sharp critic of Israel, has faced significant blowback from leaders of a number of major Jewish institutions and synagogues — even as there are emotional disagreements within the Jewish community over the race.

• Watch scenes from the campaign trail here. Our photographers have also been blanketing the city. See some of their Election Day work here.

CHARTING THE RACE

Seven big questions for Election Day

Who’s going to win? Will this race be remotely close? Will there be any surprises?

Beyond those obvious — but important! — questions, I chatted with political strategists, voters and colleagues who have been covering the race closely to come up with a few other big things to watch tonight and in the days to come, as we learn more about the electorate.

In no particular order:

1. If Mamdani wins, will he break 50 percent? That may be challenging to achieve in a three-way race, but the eventual winner’s margin of victory will signal how much political capital he has headed into City Hall — and how divided the city is over the result. It only gets harder from here.

2. How does Trump’s endorsement of Cuomo affect the race? You could argue this several ways.

The move could backfire with still-undecided Democratic voters who dislike their options, pushing them to embrace Mamdani at the last minute. It could also convince some Republicans to back Cuomo instead of Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, on Election Day. But it’s unclear how many voters are movable, one way or the other, at this very late stage in the race.

3. Parts of New York City shifted hard toward Trump last year. How do those neighborhoods vote now? In 2024, Trump made gains among Chinese and Orthodox Jewish communities in Brooklyn, in heavily Chinese and South Asian neighborhoods in Queens and among heavily Hispanic communities in the Bronx and Queens, we reported at the time.

It will be fascinating to see how those areas vote this year, and how the generational divide may shape the outcomes in some of those communities. I’m also curious to learn what turnout looks like in these neighborhoods, especially among Hispanic voters who have been shifting away from Democrats nationally.

4. Are there quiet Cuomo voters? I met a few of those New Yorkers at an early polling site in Park Slope, Brooklyn, last week. These are voters who don’t want to argue with their liberal neighbors, but oppose Mamdani’s candidacy and voted against him. Cuomo will need a lot of these voters if he’s going to do better than most polls suggest.

5. Did Mamdani start a real movement? Mamdani has plainly energized a lot of young people, some of whom have drawn parallels to Obama’s rise in 2008.

Where do they put their energy after the election if Mamdani wins? Do they become newly engaged in city politics — or move on after the mayor’s race? Alternatively, if the race is closer than expected or there’s an upset, will their enthusiasm wane?

6. Was Sliwa more of a spoiler or a stronger-than-expected candidate — or both? Sliwa’s center-left and Republican critics contended that he had no path to victory, and that his candidacy only served to split the anti-Mamdani portion of the electorate.

Sliwa, who memorably and colorfully rejected entreaties to drop out of the race, ran a high-energy campaign until the end. On Tuesday, we’ll see how much appeal the Republican actually had.

7. How does this race resonate nationally? In some ways, the answer is already coming into focus, at least if Mamdani wins.

His candidacy has inspired other young left-wing candidates around the country. Democrats broadly are racing to emulate his affordability message — even if they are far more divided over whether to embrace the messenger. And Republicans believe they have found their next boogeyman.

These themes and tensions are likely to kick into high gear after Election Day if Mamdani triumphs. If he doesn’t, prepare for an ugly intraparty Democratic battle over what happened.

Number of the day

1969

That’s the last time turnout in a New York City mayor’s race hit two million votes, when Mayor John V. Lindsay won re-election. Will turnout this year come close? That’s another big thing we’re watching. What we know so far: More than 735,000 New Yorkers cast early ballots, the highest early in-person turnout ever for a nonpresidential election in New York.

Has Mamdani made up ground with Black voters?

My colleagues Maya King and Benjamin Oreskes did a deep dive on some of the very complex constituencies that may help determine the race (Jewish and Muslim voters, Black voters, South Asian voters, young voters and Republicans). I asked Maya about what she was watching.

Katie Glueck: If you had to pick one constituency that you still had the most questions about, what would you say?

Maya King: I’m really curious to see how much ground Mamdani has made up with Black voters. We wrote about how a majority did not support him in the primary, yet he still won — an unusual dynamic in a heavily Democratic city like New York. While polling shows he has made inroads with Black voters since then, it is still unclear how much support he might ultimately capture from one of the most important constituencies in the Democratic Party.

quiz

Which of the following celebrities supported Cuomo?

• Mandy Patinkin, the actor

• Morgan Spector of “The Gilded Age”

• Jerry Seinfeld, the comedian

• Natasha Cloud, the New York Liberty point guard

Scroll to the bottom to see the answer.

We want to hear from you

Thanks so much for following along with The Sprint for City Hall. Once we know who won, I’d love to hear about your reactions. What questions do you have for the mayor-elect? And today, how’s your poll site looking? Please be in touch — I’m at [email protected].

The answer to today’s quiz: Jerry Seinfeld voted for Cuomo. The rest of the listed celebrities are Mamdani fans.