4 hours ago
2
Explanations for Zohran Mandani’s victory emphasize his cost-of-living focus, his savvy use of social media, Andrew Cuomo’s shortcomings and the city’s growing number of South Asians and alienated young people.
But there’s a key additional factor. Mamdani’s allies in the Democratic Socialists of America, Working Families Party and left-wing foundations worked for years to change city election laws that gave his candidacy a powerful boost.
Foremost is ranked-choice voting (RCV), which voters approved in 2019 after a campaign in which there was almost no organized opposition but proponents, such as billionaire George Soros’ son Jonathan Soros, spent over $2 million.
Curiously, ranked choice only applied to party primaries and not general elections. This year, that anomaly allowed Mamdani to win his primary with only 44% of first-choice votes.
In the general election he won just 50.4%, and a Suffolk University poll last week found he was the second choice of only 3% of voters not backing him or Cuomo.
Josh Kraushaar, the editor of Jewish Insider, concluded: “If New York City utilized a ranked-choice voting system as it did in the primary, this race would be neck-and-neck.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has praised ranked-choice voting for allowing progressive candidates to cross-endorse each other.
In this year’s primary, she carefully explained to supporters how they should rank the candidates.
Deb Otis, director of research for the pro-RCV group FairVote, says without it “progressive candidates would have been sniping at each other the whole time.”
In 2021, the first election where New York used RCV, two Democratic mayoral candidates split the progressive vote, allowing the more moderate Eric Adams to win with 50.4% in the eighth round of voting.
But that same year ranked-choice voting helped progressives dominate the two other citywide races (comptroller and public advocate) and win many City Council seats.
“The incoming mayor is going to be surrounded from all sides by progressives,” boasted Sochie Nnaemeka, state director of the New York Working Families Party.
Mark Penn, who was President Bill Clinton’s pollster, laments that “the left has engineered voting rules in New York City” using RCV to have “left-leaning voters get a second vote, but not applying it in the general election, preventing Republicans from backing a moderate alternative.
Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran Democratic consultant, agrees. He says ranked-choice voting “disempowers people in this city and empowers the left.”
A second Mamdani advantage was the city’s lavish system of public matching funds, a long-time cause of left-wing groups.
Originally, the program had a 1-to-1 match between public and private money.
It rose over the year and by 2018, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, a key Mamdani backer, got it up to an 8-to-1 match of the first $250 in contributions from city residents.
Mamdani received $12.7 million in public matching funds — a majority of his total budget.
David Sirota, a former senior adviser to Bernie Sanders, says: “Without public money, it’s a good bet [Mamdani] never would have been able to raise enough resources to make sure voters knew who he was.”
Finally, a 2006 state-court decision struck down a law prohibiting parties from spending money in the primaries of other parties: That allowed the Working Families Party to fund, organize and recruit candidates and thus often pick the winners of Democratic primaries.
The party can legally take in contributions of up to $138,600 per donor — far more than other entities; that allows it to have a big impact in low-turnout races and develop a network that permeates city government.
“The WFP deployed these tools with precision in New York City’s 2025 mayoral primary,” Joseph Burns, a former deputy director at the New York State Board of Elections, told the Manhattan Institute.
“Its campaign focused not just on boosting Mamdani but also on blocking his chief rival and the WFP’s longtime nemesis, Andrew Cuomo. The WFP encouraged its supporters to rank anyone but Cuomo in the ranked-choice primary.”
Mamdani’s election can indeed be said to have been skillfully “engineered,” and progressives elsewhere are taking note.
RCV is in use in Maine, Alaska and Hawaii and the largest cities in seven states.
This Tuesday, progressive candidate Kaohly Her trailed in the first round of RCV for mayor of St. Paul, Minn., but then defeated the incumbent in the second round.
FairVote reports Democratic legislatures in Colorado, Oregon and Nevada may soon approve RCV and a ballot initiative is underway in Michigan.
“Our horizons have opened exponentially,” says Daniel Goulden, a strategy co-chair of the New York City Democratic Socialists, who calls Mamdani’s victory a “100% replicable model.”
Voters who want to prevent the rise of local Mamdanis in their cities or states would be advised to pay much more attention to the rules of the game and who writes them.
John Fund is a National Review columnist and a senior fellow at Unleash Prosperity.
English (US)