Posted on Wednesday, July 16, 2025
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by Outside Contributor
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Forget Miami Beach. A new Times Square billboard is wooing New Yorkers to move to Ohio to flee the threat of Mamdani-ism. It’s put up by Vivek Ramaswamy, who’s running for governor of the Buckeye State.
But New Yorkers can take a deep breath. We don’t have to move to Ohio to escape the Mamdani threat.
The best remedy is to turn out to vote in November.
New Yorkers alarmed by Zohran Mamdani’s Marxist convictions, “defund the police” history, and anti-Israel rhetoric keep insisting he’s impossible to beat with so many candidates splitting the anti-Mamdani vote. The thinking is that with Republican Curtis Sliwa, Mayor Eric Adams, and former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo all running, Mamdani’s victory is inevitable.
That’s wrong. Mamdani can be defeated by surging voter turnout, even if all the candidates stay in the race. The numbers prove it.
In 1989, 60% of voters turned out for the mayor’s race, and four years later, turnout still reached 57%. But in 2021, it sank to a pathetic 21%. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Mamdani understood that instead of fighting for the biggest share of a small number of voters, the way to win is to expand the electorate. In the June primary, Mamdani’s doorknockers were largely responsible for making turnout the largest in New York mayoral primary history. He also focused on registering new voters. In the two weeks before the registration deadline, some 37,000 new voters were registered, 10 times what usually happens in that time period.
Beating Mamdani at his own game with aggressive field operations and voter registration efforts is possible, even in a crowded field of four candidates. Here’s the math: If turnout can be pushed up to 50% overall, then whichever candidate gets a minimum of 582,330 votes will win. That’s 50% of registered voters divided by four candidates. It’s also 120,000 more than Mamdani got in round one of the primary. He’d have a shot, but his victory would not be inevitable.
The lion’s share of his primary support was young voters, and in 2021, almost half of primary voters aged 18 to 29 and one-third of voters aged 30 to 39 failed to turn out again for the general. With young voters, it’s kiss and goodbye, while older voters reliably come back to vote again in the general.
Driving turnout to 60% – standard in presidential election years – makes the minimum number of votes to win higher and beating Mamdani easier. Sixty percent turnout is a plausible goal because Mamdani’s upset victory in the Democratic primary is generating national press coverage and an epidemic of local angst – just what’s needed to get people to the polls.
Is surging turnout still possible with the election a mere four months away? Absolutely. Mamdani came from nowhere to triumph in the June primary. A late-February 2025 Emerson College poll had Cuomo leading with 33%, Adams with 10%, and Mamdani barely registering with 1%. Four months later, he took 43.5% of the votes in the first round.
Mamdani went after the youth vote. His opponents need to drive up turnout among the 11% of registered voters who are Republicans, the 20% who are independent, and most importantly, the 12% of Democrats who are persuadable purples – unwilling to vote for a far-left candidate.
In the 2024 presidential election, 573,618 New York Democrats who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 declined to follow the party’s leftward lurch and support Kamala Harris in 2024. Some voted for Donald Trump, but most sat out the election. Call them persuadable purples. Compare that number to the 462,966 who made Mamdani their first choice in the primary. Persuadable purples are numerous enough to turn the election against Mamdani.
After his stunning upset victory in the primary, Mamdani is racking up endorsements from politicians and labor unions, including the Service Employees International Union and the New York State Nurses Association. But he’s also under newly intense scrutiny to explain how to pay for free buses, child care, and his other promises.
Will his support grow, or did he peak on primary day? That’s hard to say, with his heavy reliance on the fickle youth vote.
One thing is certain. Mamdani can be defeated by getting enough New Yorkers out to vote. Tell your friends and neighbors.
Betsy McCaughey is a former Lt. Governor of New York State and founder of SAVENYC @SAVENYC.org. Follow her on Twitter @Betsy_McCaughey.
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