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    A Primer on Primaries for New Yorkers

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    Should they be open or closed? In even years or odd? The mayor’s charter revision panel is considering shaking up the city’s voting system.Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll look at how open primaries would work in New York City, as a special panel appointed by Mayor Eric Adams considers the idea.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesNew York City’s mayoral race has certainly been eventful to say the least. After Zohran Mamdani’s primary win, some Democrats are strategizing to find ways to defeat him. And a city panel is considering overhauling the whole primary system. Let’s get into it.A special city panel appointed by Mayor Eric Adams is considering asking voters to approve an open primary system to allow those who aren’t registered with a party to vote in primary elections, according to my colleague Emma Fitzsimmons. The panel, a charter revision commission, released a 135-page report outlining the proposal, along with several others that could be on the ballot in November.New Yorkers may be wondering, what’s with all these changes?Ranked-choice voting came on the scene in 2021. If the panel places an open primary system on the ballot in November and voters approve it, it would take effect in 2029. Hold tight, there’s more. The charter commission is also considering moving elections to even years to align with presidential elections. If a majority of voters approve that proposal, it would require a change to the State Constitution.Right now, only New Yorkers who are registered as Democrat and Republican are able to vote in New York City primaries, and only in their party’s primary. The open primary would allow all registered voters to cast their ballots, and the top two candidates would battle it out in the general election.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      10 Ways of Making Sense of Zohran Mamdani’s Win

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      Four years ago, when Eric Adams was elected mayor, New Yorkers were told that it marked the end of a progressive wave that had shaped national Democratic politics at least since the shock election of Donald Trump in 2016. Just five months ago, as Democrats reckoned with the meaning of a second loss to Trump, the refrain was similar: The party had been pulled too far left by its activist flank, which it needed to not just discipline but also perhaps disavow. At the time, Zohran Mamdani was registering just 1 percent support.Now he has won a decisive primary victory by bringing a remarkably novel electorate to the polls. And a lesson of his shock victory is one we probably should have learned several times over the past decade: Politics are fluid, even quicksilver, and the just-so stories we tell ourselves about what is possible and what is not are almost always simplistic and in many cases just plain wrong.New York is only one city, exceptional in many ways, and last week’s was just one election — a primary at that, featuring a front-runner burdened by laziness and a toxic past. And there are obvious reasons to think that the Mamdani playbook now being debated so furiously both by its admirers and by its detractors would not work in other parts of the country — at least, not in all of them. But Mamdani’s triumph is nevertheless, as I wrote a few weeks ago in anticipation, an extremely big deal, elevating an avowed leftist closer to a more consequential executive office than any has held in generations. And though Mamdani’s ascension comes with meaningful risks, it also throws open a whole new horizon of political possibility. Mamdani’s supporters are exhilarated by the fresh air. But the oxygen spent on him by his haters over the past week shows that they, too, think Mamdani’s win is a major national event.Last month, I asked what stories we might tell about a Mamdani victory — for the left, for the city and indeed for the whole country. But election night delivered enough of an earthquake that a number of new and important story lines have emerged since — too many, I think, to organize in any way but as a grab bag of observations. Here are 10.1. The American left has a new face, and New York City is now an extremely high-stakes progressive experiment.These days, with American politics more and more nationalized, every candidate everywhere is, to some extent, required to participate in national debates and be subjected to national scrutiny (on cable news and social media as well as offline). Perhaps in another era or another city an election like this could be cauterized from the national landscape, allowing an experiment in one city to play out on its own terms. Not now.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What to Know About Ranked-Choice Results in the N.Y.C. Mayor’s Race

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      Since no candidate received 50 percent of the vote on Primary Day, the Board of Elections proceeded to ranked-choice tabulations, which will be released on Tuesday.Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s strong performance in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary last Tuesday turned him into a national figure overnight, as his upstart campaign overtook that of the longtime front-runner, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. But it was not enough to make him the official nominee.That victory is likely to come on Tuesday.Since Mr. Mamdani received less than 50 percent of the vote in the first round of counting, a runoff was triggered under New York City’s relatively new ranked-choice voting system. The system allows voters to rank up to five candidates in order of preference. Now, the candidates with the least first-choice support will be eliminated, round by round, and their votes redistributed to voters’ next choices.The Board of Elections will release the ranked-choice results on Tuesday, one week after the primary. Here’s what to know:When will the results be available?The ranked-choice voting results are slated to be released online at noon, according to a news release from the Board of Elections.What will they include?The Board of Elections said it would report the tally of all the ballots that were counted during the city’s nine days of in-person early voting and on Primary Day, as well as mail-in ballots received and processed by Primary Day.The board plans to release updated numbers weekly on Tuesdays until all ballots are counted and final results certified. The final results will include absentee ballots.There were 11 candidates in the race. With an estimated 93 percent of the vote counted last Tuesday, Mr. Mamdani had the support of 43.5 percent of the city’s Democratic primary voters, leading Mr. Cuomo by about seven percentage points.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Plenty of Jews Love Zohran Mamdani

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      In 2023, a branch of the Palestinian restaurant Ayat opened in Brooklyn’s Ditmas Park, not far from where I live. The eatery trumpets its politics; the seafood section on the menu is headed “From the River to the Sea,” which I found clever but some of its Jewish neighbors considered threatening. An uproar grew, especially online, so Ayat made a peace offering.In early 2024, it hosted a free Shabbat dinner, writing on social media, “Let’s create a space where differences unite us, where conversations flow freely, and where bonds are forged.” Over 1,300 people showed up. To serve them all, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported, Ayat used 15 lambs, 700 pounds of chicken and 100 branzino fish. There were also sandwiches from a glatt kosher caterer, a six-foot-long challah and a klezmer band.The event captured something miraculous about New York City, which is, for all its tensions and aggravations and occasional bursts of violence, a place where Jews and Muslims live in remarkable harmony. In Lawrence Wright’s recent novel set in the West Bank, “The Human Scale,” a Palestinian American man tries to explain it to his Palestinian cousin: “It’s not like here. Arabs and Jews are more like each other than they are like a lot of other Americans. You’ll see them in the same grocery stores and restaurants because of the halal food.”Eating side-by-side does not, of course, obviate fierce and sometimes ugly disagreements. But while outsiders like to paint New York as a roiling hellhole, there’s an everyday multicultural amity in this city that’s low-key magical.I saw some of that magic reflected in Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, and especially in the Muslim candidate’s alliance with New York’s Jewish comptroller, Brad Lander. They cross-endorsed, urging their followers to list the other second in the city’s ranked-choice voting system. The two campaigned together and made a joint appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” and Lander was beside Mamdani when he delivered his victory speech.Mamdani’s pro-Palestinian politics have sparked enormous alarm among some New York Jews, but he’s also won considerable Jewish support. In a poll of likely Jewish voters done by the Honan Strategy Group in May, Andrew Cuomo came in first, with 31 percent of the vote, but Mamdani was second, with 20 percent. On Tuesday, he won most of Park Slope, a neighborhood full of progressive Jews, and held his own on the similarly Jewish Upper West Side.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Brad Lander Helped Push Zohran Mamdani Toward Victory

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      In New York’s mayoral primary, Andrew Cuomo was no match for the energy of progressive rivals who saw a virtue in unity.The night before Tuesday’s Democratic primary in New York City, Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander appeared on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” bringing their progressive bromance to a national viewership. Ostensibly running against each other to be New York’s next mayor, their alliance showcased what parliamentary-style coalition politics could look like in the age of so much vitriol and polarization.Not long before early voting began, the candidates cross-endorsed each other in the name of an ideological victory and the defeat of the better-known, better-funded front-runner. “We both agree that corrupt, abusive Andrew Cuomo should not be allowed anywhere near City Hall,” Mr. Lander, the city’s comptroller, said on the show, as the studio audience cheered. And now it looks as if he won’t.Against the predictions of nearly all polling, Mr. Mamdani is on track for a decisive win — even before the tallying of several rounds of ranked-choice voting, assumed to be the only route to defeating an opponent with such an imposing advantage. Mr. Mamdani leads in the first round of counting by 7 percentage points, a margin significant enough that Mr. Cuomo quickly conceded on Tuesday night.The result could reasonably lead to the assumption that a still-novel method of ballot casting in New York had little to do with the outcome. But in fact, ranked-choice voting, now in place in at least 60 jurisdictions around the country, shaped the competition from the beginning.It rewards a campaign style that played to Mr. Mamdani’s strengths: ever-present, on-the-street, nonstop voter engagement. Mr. Mamdani was doing everything — even jumping into the freezing cold ocean to call attention to his proposal for a rent freeze — and his many thousands of campaign volunteers were everywhere.All of this stood in sharp contrast to Mr. Cuomo’s I’ve-got-this-locked-up strategy, one that relied heavily on big-money TV advertising, little noticed by voters under 70, and the conviction that there was no one well-known or formidable or experienced enough to beat him.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How NYC Neighborhoods Voted in the 2025 Mayoral Primary: Map

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      <!–> [–> <!–> [–> Zohran Mamdani 43.5% Andrew Cuomo 36.4% <!–> –> <!–> [–> <!–>StatenIsland–> <!–> –> <!–> –> <!–> –><!–> [–><!–>Zohran Mamdani, an upstart state assemblyman from Queens, was on the brink of winning Tuesday’s Democratic primary for mayor of New York City. While results were not yet final, Mr. Mamdani leaped ahead of […] More

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      Why Ranked-Choice Voting Could Have a Pivotal Effect on the Mayor’s Race

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      The candidates have struck alliances and made cross-endorsements to take advantage of the ranked-choice voting system.This year’s Democratic primary will be only the second time New York City has used ranked-choice voting — which allows voters to list up to five candidates on their ballots in order of preference — to select a nominee for mayor.The campaigns have worked hard to educate voters about how to make the most of their rankings, and some candidates have struck alliances to improve their chances of winning.A critical partnership emerged the day before early voting began this month when two progressive candidates — Zohran Mamdani, a state lawmaker, and Brad Lander, the city comptroller — cross-endorsed each other in an effort to beat the front-runner, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.The two candidates’ hope is that if most of their supporters rank them in the top two spots on their ballots — and leave Mr. Cuomo off — they can combine their share of the vote and overtake Mr. Cuomo.Trip Yang, a Democratic strategist who is not working on any of the mayoral campaigns, said that it was a smart move by Mr. Mamdani, who has been second in the polls and catching up to Mr. Cuomo.“Given how close the polls are, and the likelihood that Lander will be the last candidate eliminated before the Cuomo-Zohran climax, the X-factor is how overwhelmingly Lander’s votes go to Zohran,” he said.If 65 to 70 percent of Mr. Lander’s votes go to Mr. Mamdani, “then we might have our first Muslim, socialist mayor,” Mr. Yang said.Under the ranked-choice system, if a voter’s top choice is eliminated, their vote is transferred to the next candidate on their ballot, and so on.Before the city began using ranked-choice voting in citywide elections in the 2021 primary, New Yorkers would cast their votes for only one candidate. If no candidate received more than 40 percent of the vote, the top two finishers would go to a runoff. The ranked-choice system amounts to an instant runoff.Mr. Cuomo led in the polls for months, but Mr. Mamdani has generated momentum and the race narrowed considerably. Mr. Cuomo has struck his own alliances, but has not made a cross-endorsement with another candidate.Mr. Cuomo was endorsed by Jessica Ramos, a state senator from Queens who is running for mayor and who had reservations about Mr. Mamdani. Another candidate, Whitney Tilson, a hedge fund executive, also opposes Mr. Mamdani and said he would rank Mr. Cuomo second on his ballot.The left-leaning Working Families Party endorsed a slate of four candidates, including Mr. Mamdani and Mr. Lander, and held a rally on Sunday to show unity against Mr. Cuomo.Adrienne Adams, the City Council speaker who is part of the slate, said she supported the group, but chose not to make a cross-endorsement with Mr. Mamdani.Mr. Mamdani and Michael Blake, a former state lawmaker from the Bronx, also cross-endorsed each other. Mr. Blake has trailed the others in polls, but had a strong debate performance. More

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      2025 NYC Mayoral Race: Photos From the Campaign Trail

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      New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary field is crowded, diverse and tenacious, like the city itself. It includes candidates who would be the first woman, the first Muslim and the oldest person elected to lead City Hall. As the race has heated up, the contenders have traversed the five boroughs in an effort to gain support from millions of voters who hold competing interests and visions of New York.Running for citywide office, like much of American politics, is a contact sport. Candidates seeking to raise money and boost their name recognition have had to take their message directly to voters — meeting them everywhere from the seats of the G train to the steps outside an N.B.A. playoff game at Madison Square Garden. And that was just before the first debate.Candidates often campaigned in places where they had personal connections, or sought out New York City icons like the Cyclone roller coaster and the Staten Island Ferry.Yet the dark political mood has cast a shadow over the contest. All the Democrats running have made big promises to bring the city they love back. Rising costs of living, threats from President Trump and enduring concerns over public safety have captured New Yorkers’ attention and are driving their votes. This atmosphere has prompted some of the candidates who currently hold public office to leverage their positions to make waves and force tough policy conversations.The race coincides with continuing tensions within the Democratic Party, which is still forging a path forward after bruising losses in last year’s presidential election. And as the candidates seek to galvanize voters and make a name for themselves, they have also sought to paint themselves as fighters for their city, and against Mr. Trump. Here are some moments captured by New York Times photojournalists of the leading candidates on the campaign trail.Adrienne AdamsAdrienne Adams marching in the Haitian Day Parade; marking the anniversary of her father’s death from Covid-19; and campaigning with Attorney General Letitia James and union leaders.Victor J. Blue for The New York Times, Janice Chung for The New York Times, Dave Sanders for The New York Times and Todd Heisler/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What to Watch for When the N.Y.C. Mayoral Results Come in

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      A winner on Tuesday night is unlikely, but not impossible. Ranked-choice voting will play a big role in the outcome. Here’s what else you should look for as votes are counted.We are unlikely to know the winner of the Democratic primary race for mayor on primary night.Polls show a close contest between two candidates, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani. In the ranked-choice election, voters can select up to five candidates in order of preference, and if neither man gets more than 50 percent of the first-place votes on Tuesday, a series of subsequent rounds will tally the final results based on voters’ second-through-fifth-place choices.But that count will not take place until July 1, a week after the election, because absentee, mail-in and affidavit votes, which can be important in a close race, can be received and counted up until then.Polls close in New York at 9 p.m., and first results will start to come shortly after that.Here’s what else you’ll need to know ahead of Primary Day:The math of ranked-choice votingThis is New York’s second mayoral primary election using the ranked-choice voting system. Vote counting proceeds in rounds, with the last-place candidate eliminated in each round. If a voter’s top choice is eliminated, the vote is then transferred to the voter’s next choice. Elimination rounds continue until there are two candidates left and one gets more than 50 percent of the vote.Most reliable polls suggest that neither Mr. Mamdani nor Mr. Cuomo will receive more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round of vote counting on Tuesday night. But their performances will offer a look at who has the upper hand: The closer a candidate is to 50 percent, the better chance that candidate has to win in the end.The first results to come in on Tuesday night, from a period of early voting that began more than a week ago, are likely to favor Mr. Mamdani. That’s because a jump in the number of early voters this year appears to be driven by younger voters, who tend to prefer Mr. Mamdani.Bill Knapp, a strategist and consultant for Fix the City, the pro-Cuomo super PAC that has raised roughly $25 million from billionaire donors and corporate interests, acknowledged that the first votes counted would probably not favor Mr. Cuomo.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More