By Morgan Munroe
Voting Rights Project Legal Intern — Summer 2025
The nation’s largest city could be on the verge of electing a mayor with less than 40% of the vote. The last time a New York citywide election was won with such a small plurality, it led to major changes in the city’s election laws. New York City’s upcoming mayoral election could be poised to have similar effects, with potential implications for election reform efforts far beyond the city.
The Importance of the 40% Threshold in New York Elections
This election is likely to be an unprecedented five-way race. Though the primary results are still fresh, and the general election is still months away, early polls strongly suggest that none of the five candidates is guaranteed to crack the 40% threshold. At the time of this writing, these polls have Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani leading the race with an average of roughly 38% of the vote, with a recent outlier poll showing him winning 50% of the vote. All the other post-primary polls show him receiving between 26% and 41%.
This is significant because New York has a history of viewing 40% as a minimum threshold of popular support for victors of citywide elections. In 1969, the Democratic nominee for mayor won the party primary with only 32.8% of the vote and was subsequently defeated in the general election. This led Democrats in the state legislature to enact a 1972 election rule applicable solely to party primary elections in New York City: If no candidate for the citywide offices of mayor, public advocate, or comptroller received more than 40% of the vote in a party primary, a runoff election between the top two candidates was required to determine the party’s nominee in the general election.
This runoff system remained in place until the 2019 ballot measure that enacted the city’s current ranked-choice voting system for primaries. In fact, two of the main arguments for passing the ballot measure were that it would ameliorate the high administrative costs associated with runoff elections and that it would eliminate the problem of decreased voter turnout in the runoffs compared to in the initial primaries.
Why This Year’s General Election Will Test the Limits of New York’s Election Rules
However, both of these election-reform measures applied only to primary elections. New York City’s general elections remain decided by traditional “first-past-the-post” rules, in which the person who receives the most votes wins, regardless of what percentage of the overall vote that represents. While formulating the 2019 ballot measure, the question of whether to use ranked-choice voting in general elections was considered, but the idea was ultimately rejected because New York’s policy of permitting fusion candidacies (i.e., candidates who run in the general election as the nominee of more than one political party) would make ranked-choice voting too complicated and confusing.
Despite being popular across the country in the 1800s, only five states, including New York, allow fusion candidates today; some states have even prohibited it. But just as some voting rights advocates see ranked-choice voting as a way to make elections more representative and enhance the voices of candidates and voters outside the two major political parties, fusion voting can be seen the same way.
What’s in Store for Election Reform in New York and Beyond
If New York City’s next mayor is elected with less than 40% of the vote, it could set the stage for a new era of electoral reform in the city, or perhaps even across the state. But what those reforms might look like remains unclear, especially given the looming conflict between the city’s use of ranked-choice voting and the state’s use of fusion voting. Will the city break with the state and abolish fusion candidates to allow ranked-choice voting in general elections? Or will the state follow the national trend away from fusion candidates and ban them across the state? Or will some middle ground be found that can allow both to function side-by-side? Or will reform be stymied by the view that this election is simply an outlier?
Regardless of what happens in New York City’s mayoral election this year, it is sure to spark many conversations about how our country’s democracy can function better and present an important case study for ongoing reform efforts across the country.