Photo: Adam Gray/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Never before, in modern times at least, has a New York City mayoral race known such a generation gap.
Andrew Cuomo, the former governor and unquestioned front-runner in the June Democratic primary, appears poised to dominate the primary with Democrats over the age of 45. These Gen-X-ers and baby boomers, as the writer Michael Lange points out, form the bedrock of the electorate in the five boroughs. They are regular voters, participating in elections at disproportionately high rates. They tend to either be homeowners or longtime residents; they move less and feel, on the balance, deeply invested in local democracy. For more than a decade, they cast votes for Cuomo, and the polling shows they’re ready to do so again. Cuomo’s myriad scandals — his resignation in 2021 after he was accused of sexual harassment, his management of the pandemic — do not seem to bother them all that much. After four years of Adams-administration chaos, they long for a steadier hand, and a three-term governor with tangible accomplishments does, at the minimum, offer that.
Cuomo’s top rival, as of now, is a 33-year-old state assemblyman named Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani, an Indian American who was born in Uganda, has consistently polled second to Cuomo — if a distant second — and has rapidly built up name recognition through social-media channels Cuomo mostly ignores. Mamdani is the candidate of Instagram, X, and TikTok, a proud democratic socialist who has won a bevy of new fans through his witty videos and promises to freeze rents and make buses free. Like AOC, he has grown very popular in the younger, gentrifying belts of Brooklyn and Queens, and he’s outraised every candidate in the race, including Cuomo, though the ex-governor can still pound the airwaves with his super-PAC. (Disclosure: When I ran for office in 2018, Mamdani was my campaign manager.)
Cuomo and Mamdani couldn’t be more different. Cuomo is a 67-year-old white man who has been in the maw of politics longer than Mamdani has been alive. He spent much of his career as an executive, and he embodies the triangulating, centrist wing of his party. He has close relationships with corporate executives and real-estate developers; he loathes the progressive left and has made his mayoral campaign a referendum on their policies, including defunding the police and not sufficiently supporting Israel. Cuomo and Mamdani briefly overlapped in Albany: The democratic socialist entered the Legislature in 2021, representing the leftist hotbed of Astoria, and was one of the lawmakers who might have voted to impeach the governor if he hadn’t resigned.
The starkest divide between the two men might be on Israel — and this, perhaps more than any other single issue, represents the new generation gap. Cuomo is a staunch Israel hawk who has traveled to the Jewish State numerous times. Before COVID, his relationship with the Orthodox Jewish community was incredibly strong — voters there soured on Cuomo when he imposed pandemic lockdowns on their neighborhoods, though if the primary boils down to Mamdani and Cuomo, they will happily back the ex-governor — and he has never offered public criticism of the Israeli government, even in the wake of the war in Gaza. Last year, Cuomo joined Benjamin Netanyahu’s legal team after the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for his arrest, charging the Israeli prime minister with war crimes.
Mamdani, meanwhile, has spent much of his life in the trenches of pro-Palestinian activism. In the past, he has identified as an anti-Zionist, and he is a supporter of the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement against Israel. After the Trump administration tried to deport Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia student who led protests against the war in Gaza last year, Mamdani emerged as one of the fiercest critics of the MAGA movement, even confronting Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, in Albany. Cuomo said little about Khalil’s arrest.
In New York City, like America, Israel may be the greatest dividing line between voters in their 20s and 30s and those who are older. The youngest voters take an increasingly dim view of Israel; among Democrats, it’s almost impossible to find an Israel hawk who is overly popular with a voter born after 1984 or so. Most polling shows, though, that older voters remain loyal to Israel, especially Jews. Liberals of a certain generation can still recall Labor Zionism and a time when the right wing of the Israel was marginalized. Pro-Palestinian activism makes them wary, and many regard BDS as antisemitic.
Traditionally, a Democrat running for mayor of New York had to be unequivocally supportive of Israel. In the 2013 open Democratic primary that elected Bill de Blasio, every single candidate, de Blasio included, was an unflinching Israel backer. It was a time when proud progressives like de Blasio could still court Orthodox Jewish voters and take frequent Israel trips without encountering any backlash. In 2021, that began to change: Andrew Yang, the initial front-runner, took a great deal of heat from progressives for sending out a tweet in support of Israel and its military. Eric Adams, the eventual winner, was also a strong defender of Israel, but most media attention, at that moment, was trained on Yang.
That 2021 primary could have been a generation-gap election, but there were too many viable candidates and the polling remained far more volatile. That year’s Mamdani equivalent was probably Dianne Morales, a political neophyte who excited leftists but presided over one of the more chaotic campaigns in living memory. Maya Wiley, a former de Blasio administration official, also gobbled up votes from younger Democrats, but she lost out in ranked-choice voting to Kathryn Garcia, a relative centrist who won over more affluent liberals, and Adams.
If the left, technically, isn’t unified in 2025 — the Working Families Party has also endorsed Brad Lander, the city comptroller; Adrienne Adams, the City Council Speaker; and Brooklyn state senator Zellnor Myrie — all the energy and cash has flowed to Mamdani. In the precincts of Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bushwick, Sunnyside, Long Island City, Astoria, and Jackson Heights, Mamdani is poised to romp to victory. Given that he’s already on TV, blasting ads during Knicks playoff games, it’s plausible he’s winning votes wherever a television-owning Gen Z or millennial resides. If Cuomo truly blows him out with voters in their 50s, 60s, and 70s, the ex-governor is well on his way to becoming the next mayor, but the younger vote can’t be entirely discounted. In 2021, Mamdani’s Astoria Assembly District outvoted parts of Southeast Queens, an older, largely Black region where Cuomo should perform quite well. A growing share of younger, professional-class voters are registered as Democrats and showing up in primaries. The 2016 and 2020, Bernie Sanders campaigns taught at least one lesson to these progressives: Better register as a Democrat to matter in New York.
Mamdani’s campaign will be a test of how far pro-Palestine politics can go in a New York mayoral race. It’s not an exaggeration to say that there has never been a competitive candidate like Mamdani in a citywide Democratic primary before; he’s young, Muslim, and unapologetically left wing. Orthodox Jewish voters and many moderates won’t go near him. Progressives will do anything they can to elect him. One wild card that does transcend generations is the Muslim and South Asian vote. New York is home to an increasing share of both, and Mamdani is aggressively courting them, visiting mosques and temples and touting his work helping city taxi drivers. Cuomo’s base, meanwhile, is much more traditional, a mix of working- and middle-class Black and Latino voters along with older white ethnics. If the non-Mamdani, anti-Cuomo candidates can’t perform better, Cuomo may also swallow up some of Garcia’s voters in lower Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn. So far, Mamdani has performed as well as anyone could have imagined for a state legislator who is still too young to legally serve as president. But whether that’s enough to slow Cuomo’s juggernaut remains to be seen.
