“When the final numbers are in, we expect record Jewish voter turnout,” Sydney Altfield, of Teach Coalition, told JNS.
Anna Rahmanan, JNS Staff
(JNS)
Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee who has a history of anti-Israel rhetoric, won the New York City mayoral race, the Associated Press reported shortly after 9:30 p.m.
At press time, with 75% of the votes counted, Mamdani had 860,327 votes (50.4%), followed by 704,866 (41.3%) for former Democratic state governor Andrew Cuomo running as an independent and 128,400 (7.5%) for the Republican, Curtis Sliwa.
The Republican Jewish Coalition stated that “it’s official. Zohran Mamdani is the face of the Democratic Party now.”
“Democratic ‘leaders,’ including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Gov. Kathy Hochul, have handed their party over to what was once the radical left wing fringe,” the RJC said. “This is a deeply distressing result for New Yorkers, particularly Jewish New Yorkers, but in fact this election will affect all of us.”
The Democratic Party “owns this election and all its results, and voters across the country will hold them accountable when they vote in 2026 and 2028,” the RJC said.
It added that New Yorkers now have “a mayor who will ruin their economy, their education system and their transportation system with communist fantasy policies.”
“They will have a mayor who took money from terror-supporting Islamist organizations for his campaign, who is virulently anti-capitalism, anti-police and anti-Israel, and who will not lift a finger to protect Jewish New Yorkers from the ‘globalize the intifada’ crowd,” the RJC said. “This is a dark day for the City of New York, and the Democrats own all of it.”
“The exit poll shows Mamdani up by about 7. Roughly 47% of the vote. Sliwa dropped a lot, but not enough for Cuomo,” wrote Henry Olsen, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and host of the Beyond the Polls podcast, shortly before AP called the race.
“Mamdani wins every racial and ethnic group but really wins on the college-plus vote. He beats Cuomo among them by 20% while losing the non-college vote by only 5,” Olsen wrote. “He loses white non-college voters big, but carries non-white non-college voters by 7.” Olsen added that Cuomo “wins the Jewish vote by only 60-31.
Jewish community leaders told JNS that civic engagement among their constituencies have reached unprecedented levels.
Sydney Altfield, national director at Teach Coalition, an Orthodox Union program that pushes for government funding of nonpublic schools, told JNS that her sense, after visiting polling sites in Jewish neighborhoods in four boroughs on Tuesday, was that the election had “accelerated the progress of the last several years in the Jewish community understanding the importance of voting for our interests.”
“Tens of thousands of new Jewish voters have been registered, and we’ve seen engagement in all segments of the community,” Altfield said. “When the final numbers are in, we expect record Jewish voter turnout. The lasting impact transcends a single election. It’s a movement, not a moment.”
Scott Feldman, executive vice president of the One Israel Fund, which supports Israelis in Judea and Samaria, told JNS that Orthodox Jews in New York City have been motivated by concerns about a Mamdani victory.
Mamdani has accused Israel of “genocide” and said that he would have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrested if the premier came to the Big Apple.
“Mamdani is very dangerous to the Jewish community,” Feldman said. “He is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Unfortunately, there are plenty of Jews who have fallen for his rhetoric, but he is really an existential threat to our community.”
“Everybody that I talk to in my part of the city, in Far Rockaway, are very, very concerned,” he told JNS. “The turnout at our local precinct is almost at the point, and I think by the end of the night it will exceed the amount of votes that were cast last year in the presidential election.”
Jewish organizations have spent months registering voters and on get-out-the-vote campaigns.
“We all realize the potential problems of a Mamdani mayoral election,” he said. “It’s not just about the Jewish community. We all feel that he would be a terrible mayor for the city of New York, for quality of life, for safety and security, for the police, for the real estate and housing industry, for the stock market and everyone who works in the financial industry.”
Although Cuomo had a nearly 30 point lead on Mamdani in the Jewish vote, Jews are just 15% of the electorate, according to Olsen, the polling expert. “No religions are 23% and Mamdani won them by 52,” he wrote. “He also won the 14% who practice non-Judeo-Christian religions (14%) by 43%.”
“The only income group Mamdani loses are those making $200,000 or more, and that by only 11%,” he said. “He barely wins among straight voters by 43-42. But among the 14% who are LGBTQ he wins by 64.”
Image: Wikipedia CC – Zohran Mamdani at the Resist Fascism Rally in Bryant Park on Oct 27th 2024
