The New York City mayoral race appeared tighter on Monday as former governor Andrew Cuomo shaved Democratic state representative Zohran Mamdani’s lead to 10 points, according to a new poll.
David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, which conducted the poll, pointed to Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa as the primary obstacle to a Cuomo mayoralty.
“There is one person in New York City whose voters could have an outsized impact on the outcome,” Paleologos stated. “That person isn’t Mayor Eric Adams, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, Sen. Chuck Schumer or any New York billionaire. It’s Republican Curtis Sliwa, whose voters hold the 11% blocking Cuomo from winning the race.”
“When asked for their second choice, those voters preferred Cuomo over Mamdani 36% to 2%,” he said.
The Suffolk poll of 500 likely voters has Mamdani leading Cuomo 44% to 34%, which is the best Cuomo has performed in a poll in months.
The poll comes as tens of thousands of New Yorkers have begun early voting. The New York Board of Elections announced on Sunday that more than 160,000 voters had cast their ballots by the end of the second day of early voting—five times more than had cast their vote at the same point in the race in 2021.
The final days of campaigning have included bitter accusations and recriminations from the leading candidates.
At a rally alongside thousands of his supporters at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, Mamdani, who is a Shia Muslim, said his opponents are Islamophobic.
“They have sought to make this election a referendum not on the affordability crisis that consumes New Yorkers’ lives, but on the faith I belong to and the hatred they seek to normalize,” Mamdani said. “I speak of people whose names you are not familiar with, who have no qualms about contributing more to super PACs than we would ever tax them, and who celebrate when those PACs flood our airways with commercials that plaster the words ‘global jihad’ over my face.”
Mamdani has faced criticism throughout the campaign over his unwillingness to condemn the protest slogan “globalize the intifada,” which many people and mainstream U.S. Jewish organizations say is a call to murder Jews. At the second mayoral debate, Sliwa said that Mamdani had made statements “in support of global jihad” and “fanned the flames of antisemitism.”
In a radio interview on Thursday, Cuomo appeared to agree with the idea that Mamdani would have been “cheering” the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
“God forbid another 9/11. Can you imagine Mamdani in the seat?” Cuomo told WABC’s Sid Rosenberg, who replied, “I could. He’d be cheering.”
“That’s another problem,” Cuomo said. “But can you imagine that? If Mamdani was in the seat on 9/11, what would have happened in this city?” (Cuomo’s campaign denied that he was referring to Mamdani.)
In response to the comments from Sliwa and Cuomo, Mamdani delivered a 10-minute speech on Friday outside of a mosque in the Bronx and appeared to choke up when describing the effect of Sept. 11 on his family.
“I want to speak to the memory of my aunt, who stopped taking the subway after Sept. 11, because she did not feel safe in her hijab,” Mamdani said. “Growing up in the shadow of 9/11, I have known what it means to live with an undercurrent of suspicion in this city.”
“I will always remember the disdain that I faced, the way that my name could immediately become ‘Mohammed,’ and how I could return to my city only to be asked in a double-mirrored room at the airport if I had any plan on attacking it,” he said.
U.S. Vice President JD Vance weighed in on the local election to mock the state assemblyman. “According to Zohran the real victim of 9/11 was his auntie who got some (allegedly) bad looks,” Vance stated.
Mamdani’s comments about Gaza, including that Israel is committing “genocide,” and his left-wing platform of freezing rents and making busses free has divided the New York City electorate according to polls, with the assemblyman rarely breaching 50% support.
He has also earned a mixed reception from leaders of the Democratic party, with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) declining to endorse the Democratic mayoral nominee until Friday.
“Zohran is the Democratic nominee, and there’s alignment as it relates to the affordability crisis and the need to decisively deal with it,” Jeffries said of his endorsement in an interview with CNN on Sunday.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) slammed Jeffries for that endorsement on Monday. “Jeffries finally relented,” Johnson said. “He gave in, and he gave his endorsement to the socialist running to be mayor of New York City.” (Mamdani self-identifies as a socialist.)
“He sympathized with Hamas and openly embraced antisemitic language,” Johnson said, of Mamdani. “He has called to ‘seize the means of production,’ because he is a Marxist.”
