Zohran Mamdani holds a strong lead in the race for New York City mayor, with remaining votes largely split between former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, a New York Times/Siena College poll released Tuesday showed.
According to the survey, 46 percent of likely voters said they would vote for Mamdani, the Democratic nominee who rocked the party earlier this year when he handily won the mayoral primary against Cuomo, a longtime politician and bastion of New York politics.
By contrast, 24 percent of voters said they would support the former governor. Cuomo announced his candidacy as an independent in the race for the city’s top spot after Mamdani clinched a decisive victory in the Democratic primary earlier this year.
Adams, who is also running as an independent, secured support from 9 percent of likely voters, while Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa garnered 15 percent support from respondents.
Jim Walden, an independent, received less than 1 percent support.
The survey was conducted as reports emerged that President Donald Trump was seeking to create a one-on-one matchup between Cuomo and Mamdani for the seat, saying that he didn’t want a “communist” mayor of the city, a dig at Mamdani’s progressive positions.
To that end, Trump has considered granting Adams a position as ambassador to Saudi Arabia, a move that would consolidate votes for Cuomo. Adams has also discussed moving into a position at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, in addition to other potential diplomatic posts in various other Persian Gulf states.
But the former mayor has maintained that he hasn’t been approached by the president for jobs in the administration and last week sloughed off suggestions that he was getting pressured to remove himself from the race.
A limited race between Mamdani and Cuomo would significantly narrow the Democratic nominee’s lead, Tuesday’s survey showed. Voters who backed Adams and Sliwa in a wider race overwhelmingly shifted their support to Cuomo in a hypothetical one-on-one with Mamdani, tapering his lead to 48 percent ahead of Cuomo’s 44 percent.
Mamdani’s primary success was largely owed to his successful campaign effort to hook into New Yorkers’ frustrations over the lack of affordability in the city.
According to Tuesday’s poll, Mamdani’s affordability messaging is still proving successful with voters. Forty-nine percent of likely voters said they thought the democratic socialist would perform the best on affordability issues, compared with 23 percent who said the same of Cuomo, 13 percent for Sliwa and 10 percent for Adams.
Similarly, 46 percent of voters expressed confidence in Mamdani’s ability to handle housing issues, compared with 24 percent for Cuomo, 16 percent for Sliwa and 11 percent for Adams.
Still, New York’s Democratic leadership — including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — have withheld endorsements from Mamdani, despite his overwhelming popularity among the party’s voters in the city.
The New York Times/Siena College poll was conducted from a pool of 1,284 likely voters in New York City from Sept. 2-6 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.