Is Andrew Cuomo toast?
Zohran Mamdani doesn’t quite have the mayor’s race locked up, but he’s a heavy favorite unless there’s an October Surprise.
Back in June, I wrote that Zohran Mamdani, although then an underdog to win New York’s Democratic mayoral primary — he had a 17 percent chance of prevailing in prediction markets at that time — was nevertheless an underrated prospect in the race. Now, the situation is almost reversed. Zohran is the favorite to win the general election on Nov. 4, with an 82 percent chance at Polymarket versus 17 percent for Andrew Cuomo, 1 percent for Eric Adams and less than 1 percent for Curtis Sliwa and the other candidates.
On Sunday, Mamdani received the endorsement of New York Gov. Kathy Hochul. I doubt that matters much given Hochul’s unpopularity — it didn’t move prediction markets — but it’s another sign that there isn’t any particularly coherent opposition building.
It would make for nice parallelism, I suppose, if I now thought the situation had flipped and the conventional wisdom had grown overconfident about Mamdani’s chances. But I can’t really get there. While 82 percent is far from certain, the price seems about right, if not even underrating Mamdani’s chances by a hair.
Or at least that’s my view after last week’s release of the New York Times/Siena University poll, which helped fill a gap in high-quality polling of the general election. So let me give you a quick-ish newsletter outlining my thinking.
Mamdani’s lead is slightly larger in the Times/Siena poll — he has 46 percent of the vote in that survey versus 24 percent for Cuomo, 9 percent for Adams and 15 percent for Sliwa — than in other recent polls. But only slightly: in three other polls with September field dates, Mamdani averages a 19-point lead over Cuomo. Plus, the Times/Siena polls would get a lot of weight if we had a formal model of the race given that it comes from one of our top-rated pollsters.
I’m not much of a crosstabs-cruncher, but the demographics of the Times/Siena poll pass a smell check if you know New York City. Zohran is ahead based on younger voters, college graduates, and residents of Brooklyn and Manhattan — basically what you might think of as the New York Times-reading portion of the electorate. While New York is more politically diverse than you might think — having been a site of considerable Trump overperformance last year — that’s probably enough to get the job done.
There are lots of fun details in this table, which I’ve festooned in NYC blue-and-orange — for instance, that Cuomo, despite sexual harassment allegations that ultimately forced him to resign the governorship, is actually performing better among women than men (though the differences are small and within the margin of sampling error). But the patterns are clear enough. Mamdani is dominant among some voting groups, while pulling his fair share among others. That latter part is essential: having a high floor among your worst groups is often underrated in politics. Mamdani is polling at 32 percent of voters aged 65 and older, for instance, tying him with Cuomo — whereas Cuomo has just 10 percent of voters aged 18-29.