New Yorkers will be voting for mayor with starkly divided views of their city’s needs and who they seek as a leader — the focus of a new survey that digs into what likely voters want.
Pollster John Della Volpe and his public opinion research firm SocialSphere surveyed 2,100 Democrats, Republicans and independents across the city and held focus groups asking for their views on proposed policy responses to public safety, housing, mental health and transit challenges.
The survey includes reactions to the field of mayoral candidates, minus Michael Blake and late entrant City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, finding that 79% of voters say they will absolutely not vote for incumbent Mayor Eric Adams or are unlikely to.
Using the survey results, Della Volpe segmented the New York City electorate into five groups that clustered around shared values and priorities, which he called discontented strivers, pragmatic progressives, law and order conservatives, progressive reformers and traditional outer borough voters.
Discontented strivers, the biggest bloc, is ethnically diverse and tends to prioritize quality-of-life issues and public safety, while also maintaining high expectations for government services. Pragmatic progressives, the second-largest group, are results-oriented and reliably vote Democrat, while progressive reformers — skewing younger and white — prioritize housing affordability and feel less concerned about crime.
Image courtesy of SocialSphere
The study probes how an electorate where 72% of whom voted for Vice President Kamala Harris in last year’s general election might diverge starting in June’s mayoral primary. About 66% of city voters are registered to vote in the Democratic primary and 11% in the Republican primary.
“You and I could both care deeply about transportation. We could both be Democrats. We could both have the same education. We could both be the same gender and race, but that doesn’t fully explain how we vote or what motivates us,” said Della Volpe.
The survey was commissioned and funded by Jamie Rubin, current chair of the New York City Housing Authority and former official working on storm recovery in ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration. (Rubin is also a funder of THE CITY.)
The survey shows that Cuomo’s prominence cuts both in his favor and against him, with more respondents who say they will definitely not vote for him (23%) than will definitely vote for him (20%) — while all other candidates came in in the single digits.
Rubin says the project grew out of his experience on the advisory board of the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service’s NYC 2025 project.
“Some possible success for this would be if one or more of the serious mayoral candidates digested this survey and decided that one policy that they believed was right, but didn’t think there was public support for it, then decided I’m going to go out on a limb and really push it,” he said.
The survey drills into proposals that align with Cuomo’s platform, notes CUNY Graduate Center Professor of Political Science David Jones, who added that the questions struck him more like campaign message testing than those that might get to the root of policy changes that New Yorkers want to see.
“My first impression is that the survey, and the fact that it’s connected with focus groups, just felt like a campaign survey,” he said.
The issues probed include stepped-up police enforcement, affordable housing development on New York City Housing Authority property and mandatory psychiatric treatment for people with threatening mental illness episodes.
Public safety questions revealed the sharpest divisions in perceptions of the city, with 66% of progressive reformers saying they feel safe in the subways at night in contrast to just 6% of discontented strivers.
Meanwhile, 78% of traditional outer-borough voters surveyed said the city is headed in the right direction, in contrast to 7% of discontented strivers and 13% of progressive reformers — ”suggesting voters essentially live in different versions of the same city,” says SocialSphere’s analysis.
Voters’ experiences on the city’s subways and streets, as well as their efforts to find affordable housing and manage a rising cost of living, drive competing priorities.
Surveyed voters were generally aligned on views on housing development — with strong support across the board for converting office space and developing on NYCHA property, and (except for law and order conservatives) for mandatory affordable housing targets in every community.
Voters had more mixed views on allowing backyard or basement apartments and limiting the ability of neighborhood groups to use historic landmarks to block development.
But public safety sharply divided voters. Of 1,100 total respondents, about half said they strongly support referring people caught using drugs for treatment instead of charging them with minor crimes. Nearly the same proportion said they’d like for police to crack down on minor quality-of-life offenses, like smoking and excessive noise.
Such divides are reflected in the Democratic field. Several mayoral candidates with progressive agendas, including Comptroller Brad Lander, Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani and State Sen. Jessica Ramos, have emphasized social and mental health services at the core of their public safety agendas. That stands in contrast to Cuomo, who vows to add 5,000 NYPD officers and target low-level crimes. Another candidate, State Senator Zellnor Myrie, has called for police staffing to return to 2018 levels, while Adams has also stressed quality of life enforcement.
Of the same pool of likely primary voters, 20% said they are sure to vote for Cuomo. As for the six other candidates included in the survey, the percentages of voters who are sure they’d vote for them come June are in the single digits. Mamdani led the rest of the pack but also polarized potential voters, with 39% of those polled saying they would either certainly, likely or possibly vote for him but 48% saying they will absolutely not or likely not.
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