June 19, 2025
Mamdani’s marketing campaign deserves credit score for providing a transparent, inspiring, progressive message. However ranked-choice voting can also be serving to to make him aggressive.
With per week left till New York’s Democratic mayoral main, one might need thought that former governor Andrew Cuomo could be measuring the drapes at Gracie Mansion. Actual property builders, companies like Doordash, a smattering of billionaires and even Billy Joel have shoveled cash into his marketing campaign, along with his Tremendous Pac spending extra money than another outdoors pressure within the metropolis’s political historical past. That is on prime of his getting into the race with a serious name-recognition benefit, amounting to a 20- or 30-point lead as lately as Might.
However based on a brand new ballot, Zohran Mamdani—the rebel state assemblyman and democratic socialist whom The Nation recently co-endorsed together with fellow mayoral candidate New York Metropolis Comptroller Brad Lander—has pulled ahead 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 will also be partly credited to New York Metropolis’s ranked-choice voting (RCV) system. It’s a profitable system for candidates who would in any other case be sidelined or would cannibalize each other’s help—and for voters who can lastly solid their ballots based mostly on coverage somewhat than pragmatism.
America’s politics have lengthy been dominated (or diluted) by first-past-the-post voting. In it, residents solid their poll for one candidate, and whoever receives probably the most votes wins. Simple because it appears, this technique 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 typically elections, however it 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 rather more in frequent ideologically than their centrist opponents. However there was no electoral incentive for both of them to kind an alliance with the opposite. As a substitute, they fought to consolidate a minority faction inside the occasion, and obtained mired in a grisly and public feud. The mudslinging did go away one particular person standing—Joe Biden.
In distinction, RCV makes it doable 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 really consider—as The Nation’s editorial board wrote in our endorsement—New Yorkers deserve higher than Andrew Cuomo.
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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 percent of people who solid their ballots mentioned 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 percent of its voters favoring the system. Cities like Minneapolis and Cambridge, Massachusetts, have enjoyed higher turnout after the implementation of RCV.
However RCV is simply as efficient as its individuals 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 turned chaotic for different causes.
Scott Stringer and Dianne Morales’s campaigns collapsed. Advocacy teams needed to un-endorse and re-endorse—in some circumstances, a number of instances. 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, one in every of them might need defeated Adams. As a substitute, Adams gained the first within the last spherical by just over 7,000 votes.
This time, the mayoral candidates appear to have realized. On Friday, Mamdani and Lander cross-endorsed each other, encouraging their supporters to rank the opposite second. Mamdani defined the choice with a refreshing mixture of idealism and realism: “That is the required step to make sure that we’re not simply serving our personal campaigns—we’re serving the town at giant.” This was adopted by another cross-endorsement, between Mamdani and former assemblyman Michael Blake, on Monday. And the nationwide progressive motion is rather more united than it was in 2021, with each Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders endorsing Mamdani within the house stretch this time.
By treating one another like allies somewhat 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 Occasions’ non-endorsement endorsement that, in case you squint, could possibly be perceived as encouraging New Yorkers to help Cuomo, Lander, hedge fund supervisor Whitney Tilson, or flee the town.
The Nation has a protracted historical past of protecting New York’s mayoral races. Though no New York mayor has been elected to greater 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 greatest mayor within the metropolis’s historical past, took workplace on the top of the Nice Despair and led the town by the Second World Warfare. Over 12 years of cascading crises, he reworked 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 chance to deliver the town into a brand new period as soon as once more. And ordinarily, making that form of change doable would require making a troublesome alternative. But when it occurs this time, will probably be due to a ranked alternative.
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Writer, The Nation
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