For months, opponents of Andrew Cuomo urged voters to leave the former governor unranked on their ballots in favor of the numerous other candidates in the crowded Democratic field, citing his tenure in Albany and past scandals. Well, a new analysis of primary-election data found that many voters did just that.
A Gothamist analysis of data released by the Board of Elections found that more than 70 percent of voters who fully filled out all five slots on their ballots, a number that comes to 376,418 voters, did not rank Cuomo among their chosen candidates. Notably, the outlet found that of the 469,018 voters who ranked Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani first, close to 8 percent of them also ranked Cuomo somewhere on their ballot.
The “Don’t rank Cuomo” movement had its beginnings in the D.R.E.A.M. campaign, which urged voters to “Don’t Rank Eric or Andrew for Mayor,” a reference to Cuomo and Mayor Eric Adams, who would ultimately leave the primary to pursue an independent bid for reelection. The Working Families Party embraced the message, issuing its own slate of endorsed candidates for voters to rank instead of Cuomo.
The data also shows that a late-stage alliance between two candidates likely had an impact on the final results. Just weeks before the primary election, Mamdani and comptroller Brad Lander announced that they would be cross-endorsing each other and urged their supporters to rank the other second on their ballots. According to Gothamist’s findings, 40 percent of the 120,544 voters who ranked Lander as their first choice would go on to rank Mamdani second on their ballots. Mamdani, who had long held second place behind Cuomo in the polls, won the first round of voting handily after the polls closed on June 24. But it was the third round of voting, which saw 103,414 votes transferred from eliminated candidates like Lander, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, and State Senator Zellnor Myrie, that pushed Mamdani over the needed threshold to secure the nomination.
