New York City held its primaries for November's mayoral race yesterday, where New Yorkers delivered an upset: Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won out over disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo in the first round of voting. Mamdani was expected to either suffer a close loss overall or creep back from behind through successive ranked-choice rounds, depending on which poll you trust, but the 33-year-old never dipped below a 7% lead over his centrist opponent — an upset that even the Mamdani camp didn't expect. Looking over the data shows an odd trend: Mamdani's victory was built on the backs of people who don't own cars.
Aaron Kleinman, director of research for The States Project, identified the trend late last night on Bluesky. It's the kind of thing that New York residents would almost immediately notice on a map of the five boroughs — Mamdani won in higher-density districts, Cuomo took less-dense areas — but the data backs up the vibes. The less time you spend in a car, the more likely it is you backed Zohran Mamdani.
The biggest dividing line based on this map is that Cuomo did best in neighborhoods with the most people who have cars while Mamdani won among people who take the subway.
On pure alignment, the breakdown makes sense. Mamdani doesn't own a car, preferring to take transit or bike, while Cuomo famously owns a Dodge Charger Scat Pack Widebody that he operates with little regard for NYC driving laws. Each represents their own constituency with their modes of transport, but the differences go deeper than that. Mamdani ran a heavily pro-transit campaign, promising fast and free buses and an increase in bike lanes, while Cuomo wanted to flood the subway system with police — a move widely loathed and viewed as wasteful by the subway riders who see cops scrolling TikTok on the platforms every day.
Even beyond transit itself, car ownership in New York City's outer boroughs speaks to their population density. The chart in the lead image here dates back to 2018, before the pandemic car-buying boom and post-pandemic mass car sell-off, but the general distribution remains largely unchanged: In denser areas of New York, better served by transit and with more apartments per street parking spot, car ownership simply isn't worth it. These are the areas that were drawn in not just by promises of improvements to the MTA, but promises around a rent freeze, city-owned grocery stores, and further protections for tenants — pocketbook issues tailored to New York City's working-class residents.
The maps may not be perfectly aligned — Cuomo managed to underperform in Staten Island of all places — but they speak to how diverse the living situations in New York's five boroughs really are. From the density of Manhattan or Downtown Brooklyn to the single-family homes of Staten Island or Eastern Queens, ideologies can vary as much as property sizes do. Car ownership and transit ridership serve as a shorthand for someone's entire living situation — and, apparently, their politics.