Many expect Zohran Mamdani to take the WFP line if he loses to Cuomo. That’s far from a sure thing

In the 11 months since City & State broke the news that Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani was planning to run for New York City mayor, the 33-year-old democratic socialist has seen his star steadily rise. Virtually unknown before he announced his candidacy in October, Mamdani has run a nearly flawless campaign and is now neck-and-neck with former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has led the polls since before he even entered the race. But Cuomo could still very well win Tuesday’s Democratic primary. What would Mamdani do if Cuomo becomes the Democratic mayoral nominee?

The widespread assumption among political observers has been that he will run in the November general election as the candidate of the New York Working Families Party, setting up a five-way race between him, Cuomo (the Democratic nominee), incumbent Mayor Eric Adams (running as an independent), Curtis Sliwa (the GOP nominee) and independent candidate Jim Walden.

But this is not necessarily the case. People close to Mamdani’s campaign told City & State that he has not yet decided whether to run in November if he loses the Democratic primary, and there are very compelling reasons why he may decide not to run in the general election as a third-party candidate. (Mamdani’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

Mamdani has so far declined to say publicly whether he plans to run in the general election if he loses the Democratic primary. “I’m focused on June 24,” he repeatedly told Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan in an interview earlier this month.

Cuomo has confirmed that he will run as an independent candidate if he loses the Democratic primary; he had to petition for a third-party ballot line (“Fight and Deliver”) in order to preserve the opportunity to run in November. Mamdani didn’t petition for his own third-party ballot line, which means he could only run in November if he wins the Democratic primary or gets the WFP nomination.

The open ballot line for the anti-Cuomo candidate

New York’s fusion voting system allows candidates to run on multiple ballot lines during the general election. Typically, the Working Families Party will give its ballot line to the Democratic nominee, allowing them to run on both the Democratic and WFP ballot lines. This is true even when the WFP supported a different candidate in the primary.

The mayoral election could be different, though. The WFP detests Cuomo, who tried to destroy the party after it once considered not backing him, and it has spent most of the primary advancing an anti-Cuomo message. WFP Co-executive Director Ana Maria Archila told City & State on Tuesday that they will never give Cuomo the WFP ballot line, even if he becomes the Democratic nominee.

The WFP encouraged its supporters to rank Mamdani No. 1 on their ballots, and it has little to lose and a lot to gain from hitching its wagon to Mamdani’s rising star. The party was once a powerful institution that married powerful unions with grassroots organizers. But most of the unions were pressured by Cuomo to pull out of the WFP in 2018, and the organization is now a shell of its former self. While the organization eventually ranked Mamdani No. 1, it can’t take much credit for his early success.

On the prospect of what happens to the WFP ballot line of no one from their slate wins, co-executive director Ana María Archila says, "It is safe to say we will never give it to Andrew Cuomo" pic.twitter.com/a8kKrmYHtf

— Becky says Pride ️‍⚧️️‍⚧️ (@_rebeccaclewis) June 24, 2025

Mamdani’s campaign was largely built by the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (of which I am a former member, though I left well before NYC-DSA began talking about a Mamdani mayoral run). Mamdani’s relative success in the Democratic primary – especially compared to non-socialist progressives like city Comptroller Brad Lander and state Sen. Zellnor Myrie – indicates that the center of gravity within New York City’s progressive movement may be shifting away from WFP and toward the socialist left.

But the WFP does have one thing that DSA can’t offer Mamdani: a general election ballot line. If the party ran Mamdani as its general election nominee, it would tie the party to the biggest progressive star since Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 

“Personally, I believe he will win the primary, but if he lost narrowly, I think it would make a lot of sense for WFP to recruit him,” said Michael Lange, a left-leaning political commentator and elections analyst who is close to Mamdani. “To have your brand as the Working Families Party so closely associated with someone whose star is so ascendant and is just, even in defeat, running a really, really excellent and transcendent campaign, particularly with your base, but also well beyond it.”

Mamdani’s decision

Mamdani is often caricatured as an unserious and idealistic dreamer, but he is – at least by the standards of leftist politics – actually a hard-nosed and disciplined campaign strategist. He won’t run a race that he knows he cannot win.

It was always going to be difficult for Mamdani to win the Democratic primary, but from the very beginning, he knew it was at least possible. He laid out a plausible path to victory: a young Muslim progressive campaigning relentlessly on bold solutions to affordability issues could win the support of three key constituencies: young voters, Muslim voters (many of whom either didn’t bother to vote in primaries or had previously supported Adams) and rent-stabilized tenants. He believed that he could easily raise enough grassroots small-dollar donations to unlock public matching funds, which he could spend on paid media while spinning up a large volunteer canvassing operation on a scale never previously seen in a citywide election. It was a risky strategy, but it has obviously paid off.

Mamdani epitomizes DSA’s electoral philosophy: only contest winnable races. The socialist organization frequently backs longshot primary challenges, and it often loses those challenges, but it doesn’t endorse in races that it considers to be unwinnable.

“We don’t get involved in races unless we think we can win. That’s part of our endorsement process,” said Grace Mausser, the co-chair of NYC-DSA and the socialist organization’s former director of candidate recruitment.

Dirty break

State Sen. Jabari Brisport is one of Mamdani’s closest colleagues in Albany. A fellow member of DSA’s State Socialists in Office bloc, Brisport has frequently collaborated with Mamdani – even co-starring in a comedy sketch with him about the New York Health Act – and has been an early and ardent supporter of Mamdani’s mayoral run. As Mamdani considers whether to run as a third-party candidate in the general election, he’ll likely tap Brisport for advice.

That’s because Brisport has experience with running as a third-party candidate. In 2017, he ran with NYC-DSA’s backing for a City Council seat in Central Brooklyn. Rather than running in the Democratic primary, though, he ran in the general election on both the Green Party line and on an independent ballot line. He did remarkably well for a third-party candidate, losing to Democratic nominee Laurie Cumbo by just 39 points. Three years later, he ran for state Senate, again with the support of NYC-DSA. But this time, Brisport ran in the Democratic primary, where he beat an incumbent Assembly member by 23 points before running unopposed in the general election. The lesson for NYC-DSA was clear. Ever since Brisport’s failed third-party run in 2017, the organization has only backed candidates running in Democratic primaries.

Brisport told City & State that he has not yet spoken with Mamdani or NYC-DSA about the possibility of Mamdani running in November if he loses the primary. But he acknowledged that it is far more difficult to win a general election as a third-party candidate than as the Democratic nominee.

DSA members have probably spent more time than anyone else thinking about the potential of third-party candidates against Democrats. For years, the national organization has been consumed by an ongoing debate over how to relate to the Democratic Party. Broadly speaking, there are two camps. The “clean break” camp argues that the DSA needs to immediately break away from the Democratic Party and form its own political party that would run candidates against Democratic nominees. The “dirty break” camp argues that DSA should slowly build a power base independent of the Democratic party but still run candidates in Democratic primaries for now.

So far, the “dirty break” strategy has won out, simply because it is virtually impossible for a left-wing candidate to defeat a Democratic nominee in a general election. DSA remains willing to endorse third-party candidates if they have a feasible path to victory. But they very rarely do.

“The vast majority of DSA candidates, not just in New York City but nationally, who have been endorsed have run on Democratic ballot line,” Mausser said. She added that DSA behaves like “a party in the European sense,” since it has total control over which candidates run as DSA-endorsed candidates, even though it does not have its own ballot line.

Five-way race?

If Cuomo wins the Democratic nomination, there will be either four or five serious candidates in November’s general election. In addition to Cuomo, there would be incumbent Mayor Eric Adams (running as an independent), Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa and independent candidate Jim Walden. The fifth potential candidate would be Mamdani or another progressive running on the WFP line. Could Mamdani win on the WFP line?

The bullish case for Mamdani on the WFP line is that Cuomo, Adams and Walden would split the centrist vote while Sliwa would win Republicans, paving the way for a progressive to win a plurality. Unlike the primary, it’s not a ranked choice contest. Nearly half of Democratic primary voters are anti-Cuomo, so maybe they would embrace an anti-Cuomo WFP candidate, while some of Cuomo’s Black and Orthodox Jewish base would defect to Adams or Walden, and Sliwa would keep Republicans from flocking to Cuomo – or Adams.

The problem with this theory is that more people vote in the general election than in the Democratic primary. Even if Mamdani maintained all of his support from the primary, Democrats who did not vote in the primary will likely just vote for Cuomo because he is the Democratic nominee. The overall electorate would be much more conservative than in the Democratic electorate – full of conservative-leaning independents and Republicans – which seems almost tailor-made for Cuomo.

“The general election electorate empowers many voting blocs, much more than the Democratic primary, that are very hostile to left-leaning insurgents,” Lange said. He specifically pointed to the South Shore of Staten Island, a conservative region that is almost irrelevant in the Democratic primary but has some of the highest turnout of the general election.

Mamdani could always hit upon an unexpected strategy that would make him viable in the general election. But even if Mamdani did somehow build a movement of independent voters, he could still be undone if Republicans abandoned Sliwa and backed Cuomo en masse just to stop him. Former GOP Rep. George Santos reluctantly endorsed Cuomo this week, inveighing against Mamdani and writing on X that “the flip side of this is Cuomo whom we all hate, but one thing is for certain, we know how to deal with him.” Santos’ plea to stop Mamdani is unlikely to matter much now, since his audience of Republicans aren’t eligible to vote in the Democratic primary, but it could preview a general election strategy to mobilize Republicans to support Cuomo just to stop Mamdani.

The bottom line is that it’s very difficult to see how Mamdani could win the general election. And if he doesn’t see a path to victory, he’s unlikely to run.

Winning isn’t everything

Which of the following sounds like a more impressive feat for a 33-year-old democratic socialist: winning 45% of the Democratic primary vote against a former thrice-elected governor backed by $25 million in dark money or winning 15% of the vote in a five-way general election race?

Even if he loses the Democratic nomination, Mamdani is now indisputably a leader of the left in New York City, talked about in the same breath as Ocasio-Cortez. His near victory in the Democratic primary and sky-high favorability ratings among younger Democrats ensures that. In the coming years, he will continue to be one of the loudest voices of opposition to a Mayor Andrew Cuomo and President Donald Trump, and he is sure to run for higher office again – perhaps replacing Ocasio-Cortez in Congress if she runs for U.S. Senate in 2028.

But running a doomed general election campaign could puncture some of the Mamdani mythos and burn out his army of volunteers, since it’s not clear that Mamdani’s tens of thousands of canvassers would want to spend the next four months grinding it out in a hopeless race.

“I think it will be really hard to make the case to people that they should give as much time as they have to a general election just because,” Mausser said. “Running a race just to run a race is a waste of people’s resources, in my opinion, and I think people realize that and that’s why they’re not willing to turn out and knock doors.”

Still, the fact that Mamdani shouldn’t run as a WFP candidate doesn’t mean that no one should.

A poll conducted for the WFP in May and obtained by Politico showed that Democratic primary voters would prefer New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams over Cuomo in a general election. But there’s already been significant friction between the speaker’s relatively moderate politics and the WFP during the Democratic primary, so it’s difficult to imagine that she would want to run on the WFP line in the general.

A more compelling option might be Lander. The city comptroller’s pragmatic progressivism could have more crossover appeal to anti-Cuomo Democrats and independents than Mamdani’s democratic socialism, and Lander has little to lose from continuing his anti-Cuomo crusade. He is likely to come in a distant third in the Democratic primary, so a third-place finish in the general election would hardly be a downgrade. Running in the general election would also allow him to keep his name at the top of voters’ minds, which could be useful if he ends up running against Rep. Dan Goldman next year, as many progressives have suggested he should.

Zohran Mamdani will know within a week, and potentially even within twelve hours, whether or not he will be the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor. If he’s not, then he’ll spend the subsequent days and weeks talking with advisers, including the leadership of NYC-DSA, about whether it makes sense to run in November. It’s always possible he could come up with an unprecedented strategy to mobilize voters and carve out a narrow, but plausible, path to victory – just as he did in the Democratic primary. But most likely, he would determine that there’s no viable path to victory and it makes more sense to end his campaign on a high note, while still serving as an effective surrogate for another candidate who does take up the WFP’s anti-Cuomo mantle. 

If Mamdani wins the Democratic primary, then that will be a whole other story.