What’s it Really all About, Zohran?
Even up here in Canada, the news of late has been full of US election results, particularly the news that Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old, exclusively-schooled dude who has never had a job other than a couple of years as a New York State Assemblyman, has been elected NYC’s mayor.
One ongoing theme of the news coverage of this event has been an emphasis on the record number of votes cast in this mayoral election.
An example is the graphic below. Look at that, more votes than have been cast in any NYC mayoral election since 1989. Decades of elections, indeed.
Well, everyone needs to take a breath, particularly the media, who have again demonstrated their disinterest in facts.
The number of registered voters in NYC is something between 4.9 and 5.3 million, depending on which account you read. You would think this would be easily available info, but apparently not, so let’s take the midpoint and say 5.1million.
Votes cast appear to have been 2.1million, as depicted in that chart above.
This means that the turnout in this election as a percentage of registered voters was some 41%. Beyond that, there are undoubtedly more than 5.1 million New Yorkers who were eligible to vote but did not even bother to register, as voter registration is not automatic in the US. Undoubtedly then, Mamdani was elected in an election in which fewer than 40% of those who could have expressed a preference bothered to do so.
And, as for the number of votes cast in 2025 being greater than in 1989, in 1989 NYC’s total population was about 7.2million, whereas in 2025 it is about 8.5million. So, some 300,000 more votes in ’25 than in ’89 is nothing to get excited about given that the population is more than 1million greater.
To be fair, this is pretty typical of municipal elections in North America. For an even worse example, the election in 2022 that put the current mayor and council in office in my city featured a turnout of 25% or so. For a US comparison, the municipal election in Chicago in 2022 saw a turnout of 45% of registered voters. (It was 66% in 2024, but that coincided with a US Presidential election, which always boosts turnout in lower-level elections.)
Mr. Mamdani declared in his victory speech that he was on a historic mission to do things differently in NYC. Well, if there are, at a guess, 5.6million residents of NYC who are eligible to vote, and we know he got 1.03million votes (compared to Cuomo’s 0.85million), then Mamdani’s vote represents 18.3% of voting-eligible adults. That’s not a lot of fuel for his great mission, in my humble opinion.
Such is politics – and political reporting – in the 21st century. But hey, you go, Zohran. It will be interesting indeed to see what he actually gets up to once in office, and what are the consequences of same.
Postscript:
A day after posting the above, I came across a story about the municipal election held the same day as NYC’s in Seattle, WA. (Elections at all levels in the US are almost always held on the Tuesday after the first Monday of November.) Seattle, you may recall, had seen a considerable spike in crime after the pandemic lockdowns of 2020, and in 2021 it elected a mayor, Bruce Harrell, and a city attorney, Ann Davison, who reversed a set of policies and procedures that their predecessors had put in place that had exacerbated the crime problem. The usual thing, like refusing to prosecute ‘minor’ offenses, refusing to incarcerate repeat-offenders, etc.
Well, in the election that just happened, it appears that Mr. Harrell will just barely stay in office after an electoral challenge from ‘community organizer’ Katie Wilson, but Ms Davison has been soundly defeated by Erika Evans. The WSJ labels Evans a ‘progressive’ whatever that means, and her campaign website has a lot to say about her defending Seattle from Trump administration over-reach. Again, I will look forward to seeing what results from this, but my point here is that the city of Seattle appears to have a voting age population of 650,000, out of a total population of around 800k. The total votes cast in the mayoral race were 230,000, and in the election for city attorney, 221,000. This puts the turnout at somewhere around 29% of the voting age population.