The heated citywide debates kicked the mayor’s race in the Democratic primary into high gear. With only a week until Election Day, polling shows that the rivalry between former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani has caught voters’ attention.
One poll, conducted by Public Policy Polling for Democrat Justin Brannan’s city comptroller campaign, made a splash with political headlines on June 6: It showed Mamdani pulling ahead of Cuomo in the race.
Other surveys, like the Honan Strategy Group’s polling headed by Bradley Honan, were posted on June 11 after the first mayoral primary debate. They polled hundreds of Democratic voters in the city, as well as a segment of anti-Trump surge voters, finding that Cuomo maintains a strong lead while Mamdani is still close behind.
City Comptroller Brad Lander is in third place with 12% of the vote, and City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams is in fourth place with 10% of the vote, they said.
Despite the strong showing of former Assemblymember Michael Blake and State Senator Zellnor Myrie in the first debate, they’re still polling low, although Honan has acknowledged many times throughout this election season that polling isn’t always the best indicator of how many voters will actually show up at the polls and how they will vote.
The conservative Manhattan Institute conducted a more recent survey, between June 10–16, of 1,000 likely voters. Their results show Cuomo defeating Mamdani 56% to 44% in the final round of ranked-choice voting. Their analysts said that despite the media narrative of a “Mamdani surge,” Cuomo remains the front-runner. However, the race is “fluid” with one week to go.
The biggest “wild card” will be younger voters. The Manhattan Institute predicts that if young voters turn out at significantly higher rates than in past primaries, the race could tighten. Mamdani is a popular progressive candidate among 18- to 34-year-old voters, mostly because of his online and social media presence, as well as his policies.
On the opposite side of the political spectrum, the Center for Strategic Politics partnered with the Don’t Rank Evil Andrew for Mayor (DREAM) campaign to also publish a poll from June 13–16 using Pollfish. They found that since the second Democratic mayoral debate, hosted by Spectrum NY1, Mamdani is now tied in a statistical dead heat with Cuomo.
The debate kicked off the final stretch of the race, and saw candidates start to cross-endorse one another and unite to highlight Cuomo’s “corruption and chaos,” said the center.
This week, Lander captured headlines when he was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at immigration court in Lower Manhattan when he was escorting a defendant out. He was released hours later after hours of protests from advocates and fellow mayoral candidates such as Mamdani, Adrienne Adams, Blake, and Myrie.