New York Mayor’s Race Sees Highest Voter Turnout in Decades

There was a time in New York City when just about every eligible adult voted in the mayoral election. In 1957, when Robert F. Wagner won in a landslide, The New York Times reported that 91 percent of registered voters had gone to the polls and noted, “The normal turnout is 95 percent of those registered.”

That time is long gone. In the last four mayoral elections, fewer than a third of registered voters could be bothered to vote. In the last election, in 2021, turnout was 23 percent, a modern-day low. This year’s election, however, offering voters a choice among Zohran Mamdani, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa, is turning back the clock.

As of 6 p.m., about 1.85 million New Yorkers had voted, already more than the final total in any election since 1993. Turnout is on track to surpass 2 million for the first time since 1969, when John V. Lindsay won re-election.

Why did voter participation drop so precipitously, and why has it surged this year? Many factors are at play — some local, some national, and some having to do with the simple fact of who is running.

Here are a few of them:

The long decline of clubhouse politics

Decades ago, political machines ruled New York. “In the old days, all the Assembly districts had political clubs,” said John Mollenkopf, the director of the Center for Urban Research at the City University of New York Graduate Center. “Those clubs kept a very careful watch on who was a registered voter, and they turned out their people.”

Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, a nonpartisan good-government group, said that over time there had been “an atrophying of old-fashioned grass roots organizing.” Think mailers, spam texts and robocalls, rather than people sitting down and talking to one another about what their local government is and is not doing for them.

The decline in local news and a shift of coverage toward national races

The number of widely read newspapers (or news sites) in New York has dropped.

“If you have six or eight daily papers competing for local stories,” Ms. Lerner said, “then the impact of policies at the city level is going to be much more palpable and understandable to the general public, and you as a voter are going to weigh in on the issues.”

Hundreds of newspapers have folded over the last two decades. And what news outlets there are have divested from local political coverage, instead choosing to focus on national politics, presidential races and the midterm elections for Congress.

“The message that the average voter is getting from that,” Ms. Lerner said, “is that we should be much more concerned about what is happening in Washington, D.C., than on what is happening in our backyards that will have much more of an effect on our daily lives.”

New York’s changing demographics

New York, often called a city of immigrants, certainly is now: About a third of the city’s population was born abroad. Different immigrant groups have tended to get involved in local politics to different degrees. Professor Mollenkopf said that in the 1950s, immigrants from Europe and their offspring “had all been ‘made American’ by World War II” and were assimilated into the political system.

Asian immigrants in the city, in particular, have tended to stay on the sidelines more, feeding a sort of negative feedback loop, Professor Mollenkopf said. But in the last few years, Asian New Yorkers have expanded their political involvement, and with that has come greater representation. In 2021, five Asian Americans were elected to the City Council, including the first Indian American and Korean American members and the first Muslim woman, a Bangladeshi American. The presence in the mayor’s race of Mr. Mamdani, whose parents are from India, has galvanized the city’s South Asian communities.

The matchups themselves

In the last three elections, where turnout has been at its lowest, it was a foregone conclusion that the Democrat would win, since registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by about six to one in the city. This year’s contest pits an upstart Democratic nominee, Mr. Mamdani, against a once-popular Democratic governor, Mr. Cuomo, who is running as an independent after Mr. Mamdani defeated him in the Democratic primary, and a Republican, Mr. Sliwa, with a well-known profile in the city.

“Since Bloomberg, Republicans have not nominated somebody who’s been really competitive on a citywide basis,” Professor Mollenkopf said, referring to the three-term mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, “and competition breeds turnout.”