A Graveyard of Bad NYC Mayoral Election Narratives

According to his detractors, Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral race primarily because of highly-educated, relatively affluent, urban and suburban whites (including and especially symbolic capitalists). By implication, “normies” across racial and ethnic lines sided with other candidates at disproportionately high levels.

Meanwhile, the mayor-elect’s supporters argue that Mamdani built an extraordinary coalition, pulling in lots of people who would not otherwise have voted for Democrats, and ultimately pulled off an historic win for an overtly socialist candidate.

In reality, both of these narratives (and many other popular culture war claims about the 2025 NYC mayoral election) are demonstrably false.

Historic? Not So Much…

The Democratic nominee won the 2025 NYC mayoral race. This is hardly an unprecedented or surprising turn of events.

Democrats control the NY city council by 9:1. They dominate the NY state legislature by 2:1. The governor of NY is a Democrat. Looking at New York’s federal delegation, the state’s representatives in the House skew Democrat nearly 3:1. Both of the state’s senators are Democrats. Kamala Harris went down in flames in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Yet, despite losing every single swing state, she notched more than twice as many votes as Donald Trump in NYC.

Put simply, New York City is very “blue.” Democrats winning municipal elections in the Big Apple is the most banal outcome imaginable. Between 1932 and 2024, there were 26 NYC mayoral elections. Republicans won 7 of them. Independents won 3. The rest were won by the Democratic Party. Democrats won the last three consecutive mayoral races, each of them by 2:1 margins. Even the last Republican mayor of NYC was functionally a Democrat.1

Zohran Mamdani is not the reason Democratic Party succeeded in the 2025 mayoral race. If anything, Democrats won despite him. In a world where Mamdani was not on the ballot, the outcome would have almost certainly been the same: the Democratic candidate (be it Adams, Cuomo or someone else) would have won. In Mamdani’s absence, the Democratic nominee likely would not have faced a well-funded intraparty challenger in the general election. Consequently, they probably would have won the election by far larger margins than Mamdani did (albeit with significantly lower turnout). In other words, the main “Mamdani effect” on the topline outcome of this cycle was that he made the race much closer for Democrats than it otherwise would have been.

Granting this point, ...