Zohran Mamdani's portrait. He won the mayoral election. Credit: Wikimedia
This year’s mayoral race saw over 2 million New Yorkers cast a ballot — nearly double the turnout from 2021 and the most since 1969. Still, significantly fewer people voted this year than in last year’s presidential election.
In 2024, more than 2.87 million people in New York City voted. This means (based on the preliminary results), about 3 in 10 presidential voters didn’t show up to vote for mayor.
In lower turnout elections, making sure your supporters get to the polls is crucial.
Which parts of the city saw the biggest dropoff between elections? I compared the number of voters in each election by Assembly District.
Five of the top six Assembly Districts with the largest voter dropoff were in the Bronx. The remaining Bronx districts all fell in the top half of turnout loss.
This was bad news for Cuomo. He had won the Bronx by almost 20% in the June Democratic primary — by far his best margin of any borough. (The only other borough he won was Staten Island, which netted him only 2,000 votes.)
The Bronx had the district with the biggest turnout drop: Assembly District 83, which saw fewer than half the number of voters in 2025 compared to 2024. Zohran ended up flipping the Bronx in the general election. Perhaps this result was due less to his gains than Cuomo’s voters staying home.
John Mollenkopf, professor of political science at CUNY graduate center and director of the Center for Urban Research pointed out that “The drop-off tended to be largest in Black election districts, which were ambivalent about Zohran’s candidacy.”
Brooklyn, the most populous borough, had the three assembly districts with the lowest turnout reduction (and five of the top seven).
One area that actually cast more votes in 2025 than 2024 was Borough Park in Brooklyn, a heavily Hasidic Jewish area, which would go against your hypothesis. The drop-off tended to be largest in Black election districts, which were ambivalent about Zohran’s candidacy. They did shift towards him between the primary and general, so those who did turn out favored him and those who did not favor him probably did not turn out (ever so slightly).
One district, Assembly District 48, was the only one in the city to actually increase its turnout compared to 2024. Mollenkopf said “One area that actually cast more votes in 2025 than 2024 was Borough Park in Brooklyn, a heavily Hasidic Jewish area.” In fact, this was Mamdani’s worst-performing district; he won only about 1 in 10 voters.
This high turnout level isn’t surprising since antisemitism and Israel were such big topics in this year’s election.
Despite fear of a huge Republican wave backing Cuomo, Staten Island — the red sheep in the New York political family — had a fairly middling turnout. The borough’s inter-election dropoff was about -27%, around the citywide average.
Cuomo won the borough handily, but Mamdani didn’t get totally wiped out. According to exit polling, Mamdani won 1 of every 10 votes cast by New Yorkers who voted for Trump in 2024. Keeping losses in red districts to reasonable proportions helped Mamdani win the election.
Shawn Donahue, assistant professor at University at Buffalo (SUNY), noticed that “The district in Staten Island with the biggest drop in turnout is also the minority majority district.” This supports the correlation between higher shares of nonwhite voters and greater drop in turnout.