June 19, 2025
Mamdani’s marketing campaign deserves credit score for providing a transparent, inspiring, progressive message. However ranked-choice voting can be serving to to make him aggressive.
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New York Metropolis mayoral candidates Brad Lander and Zohran Mamdani, who cross-endorsed one another for mayor, collect with their supporters for an anti-Cuomo press convention at Bryant Park in New York Metropolis on June 14, 2025.(Melissa Bender / NurPhoto by way of AP)
This text was initially revealed at The Guardian and is republished right here with permission.
With per week left till New York’s Democratic mayoral main, one may need thought that former governor Andrew Cuomo can be measuring the drapes at Gracie Mansion. Actual property builders, firms like Doordash, a smattering of billionaires and even Billy Joel have shoveled money into his marketing campaign, along with his Tremendous Pac spending more cash than every other exterior pressure within the metropolis’s political historical past. That is on prime of his getting into the race with a significant name-recognition benefit, amounting to a 20- or 30-point lead as lately as Might.
However in response to a brand new ballot, Zohran Mamdani—the rebel state assemblyman and democratic socialist whom The Nation lately co-endorsed together with fellow mayoral candidate New York Metropolis Comptroller Brad Lander—has pulled forward of Cuomo for the primary time.
And whereas Mamdani’s marketing campaign deserves credit score for providing a transparent, inspiring, progressive message, the truth that he’s aggressive may also be partly credited to New York Metropolis’s ranked-choice voting (RCV) system. It’s a successful system for candidates who would in any other case be sidelined or would cannibalize each other’s assist—and for voters who can lastly forged their ballots based mostly on coverage moderately than pragmatism.
America’s politics have lengthy been dominated (or diluted) by first-past-the-post voting. In it, residents forged their poll for one candidate, and whoever receives probably the most votes wins. Easy because it appears, this methodology forces an both/or alternative, usually leading to voters’ deciding between the lesser of two evils. Not solely does this reinforce a two-party duopoly usually elections, but it surely additionally incentivizes a binary alternative between the 2 main candidates in primaries.
For the candidates themselves, the system encourages scorched-earth campaigns that divide events and inflame the narcissism of small variations. The progressive Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren got here into the 2020 Democratic presidential main as allies with far more in frequent ideologically than their centrist opponents. However there was no electoral incentive for both of them to type an alliance with the opposite. As a substitute, they fought to consolidate a minority faction throughout the occasion, and acquired mired in a grisly and public feud. The mudslinging did depart one particular person standing—Joe Biden.
In distinction, RCV makes it attainable for dark-horse candidates to work collectively. After Mamdani’s marketing campaign reached the fundraising restrict, he urged his supporters to donate to a fellow anti-Cuomo candidate, Adrienne Adams. Adams, in flip, has maintained a deal with criticizing Cuomo, even deleting a tweet that was perceived as a swipe at Mamdani. These contenders are making it clear they honestly consider—as The Nation’s editorial board wrote in our endorsement—New Yorkers deserve higher than Andrew Cuomo.
Present Challenge
Critics of ranked-choice voting argue that it’s too complicated, however profitable implementations of the system in different jurisdictions counsel in any other case. In Alaska’s 2022 congressional particular election, the primary statewide RCV election there, 85 % of individuals who forged their ballots stated they discovered the strategy to be easy. It additionally enabled the Democrat Mary Peltola to fend off an extremist problem from Sarah Palin. Maine has additionally seen promising outcomes from RCV, with 60 % of its voters favoring the system. Cities like Minneapolis and Cambridge, Massachusetts, have loved larger turnout after the implementation of RCV.
However RCV is simply as efficient as its contributors make it. Forward of New York Metropolis’s mayoral main in 2021, I wrote a column expressing excessive hopes for the way the debut of RCV may reshape the town’s politics. However that race grew to become chaotic for different causes.
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Scott Stringer and Dianne Morales’s campaigns collapsed. Advocacy teams needed to un-endorse and re-endorse—in some circumstances, a number of occasions. There was a progressive effort to coalesce round Maya Wiley, together with a belated endorsement from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In the meantime, pragmatists who felt Eric Adams and Andrew Yang lacked substance turned to the sanitation commissioner, Kathryn Garcia. If Wiley and Garcia had cross-endorsed, considered one of them may need defeated Adams. As a substitute, Adams received the first within the closing spherical by simply over 7,000 votes.
This time, the mayoral candidates appear to have realized. On Friday, Mamdani and Lander cross-endorsed one anotherencouraging their supporters to rank the opposite second. Mamdani defined the choice with a refreshing mixture of idealism and realism: “That is the mandatory step to make sure that we’re not simply serving our personal campaigns—we’re serving the town at giant.” This was adopted by one other cross-endorsementbetween Mamdani and former assemblyman Michael Blake, on Monday. And the nationwide progressive motion is far more united than it was in 2021, with each OCCASI-CORTEZ AND SANDERS endorsing Mamdani within the house stretch this time.
By treating one another like allies moderately than adversaries, the anti-Cuomo coalition may simply prevail. If something, it’s the institution wing of the New York Democratic occasion that’s struggling to coalesce—as evinced by The New York Instances’ non-endorsement endorsement that, in the event you squint, may very well be perceived as encouraging New Yorkers to assist Cuomo, Lander, hedge fund supervisor Whitney Tilson, or flee the town.
The Nation has an extended historical past of protecting New York’s mayoral races. Though no New York mayor has been elected to larger workplace since 1869—simply 4 years after the journal was based—the workplace has lengthy held fascinating implications for American progressivism.
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Fiorello La Guardia, whom Mamdani and Lander have each named because the biggest mayor within the metropolis’s historical past, took workplace on the peak of the Nice Despair and led the town by the Second World Struggle. Over 12 years of cascading crises, he remodeled the town with a daring imaginative and prescient characterised by increasing public housing and public areas, curbing corruption, and unflinchingly supporting the reforms of the New Deal.
Now, practically a century later, New Yorkers have a possibility to deliver the town into a brand new period as soon as once more. And ordinarily, making that type of change attainable would require making a tricky alternative. But when it occurs this time, it is going to be due to a ranked alternative.
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Onward,
Katrina Vanden Heuvel
Writer, The Nation
Katrina Vanden Heuvel
Katrina vanden Heuvel is editorial director and writer of The Nation, America’s main supply of progressive politics and tradition. She served as editor of the journal from 1995 to 2019.
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