New York City Mayoral Race Heats Up: Mamdani Leads as Voting Commences
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Polls have opened in New York’s mayoral election as voters cast judgement for the first time in nationwide local elections since Donald Trump’s tumultuous second presidency began.
Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist, faces 67-year-old Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat running as a more centrist independent after losing to Mamdani in the primary, four years after resigning as New York state’s governor in disgrace.
The campaign has laid bare the Democratic Party’s generational and ideological divides as it seeks to rehabilitate its damaged brand.
Mamdani has proposed ambitious left-wing policies, including freezing rents for nearly a million apartments and making the city’s buses free.
Mamdani, who was a little-known politician in New York’s state legislature only a few months ago, has led by double digits over Cuomo, with Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, 71, a distant third in most opinion polls.
A day after endorsing Cuomo, Trump said on Tuesday that any Jewish New Yorker who voted for Mamdani, a critic of the Israeli government who would be the city’s first Muslim mayor, was a “stupid person.”
Throughout his political journey, the US president has made recurring remarks hinting that Jewish Americans make electoral choices contrary to their best interests. While Mamdani hasn’t yet commented, he firmly denies the Republican claims of antisemitism.
As Tuesday’s results loom, Democrats are on high alert. With limited influence in Washington, they grapple with how best to counteract Republican Trump and carve out a strategy to regain political relevance.
In California, voters will decide whether to give Democrats the power to redraw the state’s congressional map, expanding a national battle over redistricting that could determine which party controls the US House of Representatives after next year’s midterm elections.
California’s ballot measure proposition 50, which would install a new Democratic-backed congressional map that aims to flip five Republican seats in response to a similar move by Texas, is also widely expected to pass.
Voters in Virginia and New Jersey are also choosing their governors, with polls closing on Tuesday evening local time (Wednesday morning AEDT).
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Former President Barack Obama, still the party’s most popular figure, headlined 11th-hour rallies over the weekend in New Jersey and Virginia, exhorting voters to elect Democrats to counter what he branded Trump’s lawlessness.
In interviews at polling stations on Tuesday, some voters said Trump’s most contentious policies were on their minds, including his efforts to deport immigrants in the US illegally and impose costly tariffs on imports of foreign goods, the legality of which is being weighed by the US Supreme Court this week.
More than 3 million people voted early in Virginia, New York and New Jersey, in each case far exceeding the totals from four years ago. In New York City, there were 735,000 ballots cast, according to the city elections board, more than four times the number in 2021.
While Tuesday’s results will offer some insight into the mood of American voters, the midterm elections are a year away, an eternity in politics.