The New Yorker:

Erin Neil
Newsletter editor

Just hours after polls closed for New York City’s primary mayoral election, following a day of record-breaking heat, the former governor Andrew Cuomo announced that he had conceded the race to Zohran Mamdani, the previously unknown thirty-three-year-old Democratic Socialist from Queens. “Tonight is his night,” Cuomo said. “He deserved it. He won.” It was a stunning upset in a race that, until election day, seemed to be an easy victory for Cuomo. When the current third-place candidate, Brad Lander, learned that Cuomo was unlikely to prevail, he turned to the crowd at his own election party and said, “Good fucking riddance.” Curious to understand why this race unfolded in such a spectacular way, I called Eric Lach, who writes about New York City politics and has been covering the election for the past few months. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

In your piece today, you admit that you were a “guilty party,” who underestimated Mamdani’s campaign. But you certainly weren’t alone, and, even until polls closed, it seemed like this was Cuomo’s race to lose. What happened?

I think that’s something that’s gonna be worth talking about, beyond just the morning-after takes. The surprise is about the defiance of all these demonstrations of power that Cuomo had—endorsements, fund-raising, and even the polls—combined with the fact that New Yorkers didn’t know who Mamdani was just a few months ago. The idea that voters would get on board with this young, unproven guy pitching a different kind of message is just remarkable. His supporters might suggest that it’s merely a blinkered kind of slowness among people following the race—that they’re just catching up to what was happening.There’s something in that. But, as Mamdani said last night, quoting Nelson Mandela, “It always seems impossible until it is done.” Without the results of the vote, it was hard to believe “Yeah, this was gonna be the guy.”

Do you anticipate Mamdani’s upset to change the way the general election unfolds? Will the other mayoral hopefuls campaign differently now?

In the weeks leading up to primary day, it had become apparent that the fall might bring us the first competitive mayoral general election in New York City in a couple of decades. And I still think that that’s possible, given that the current mayor, Eric Adams, intends to run and that Andrew Cuomo, despite losing to Mamdani last night, says he’s thinking about running as an independent. Five months is a long time in politics, and there are still many forces in the city and many powerful stakeholders and political actors who are going to be anywhere from skeptical to downright hostile to Mamdani’s candidacy. We have yet to see how those people arrange themselves in response here.

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