NYC NOW - How New Voters and Rising Costs Are Reshaping New York City Politics

Episode Date: October 4, 2025

Thousands of first time voters have registered in New York City this year, many citing frustration over affordability as their reason. WNYC’s Brigid Bergin explains how their arrival could shape the upcoming mayoral race and what it reveals about the city’s shifting electorate.

Okay. So I'm recording. So go ahead. Introduce yourself, say your first name, last name, how old you are, and the neighborhood you live in. My name's Jaron Foster. I'm 27 and I live in Ridgewood Queens. He's a model, does some commercial stuff, came here for his career. Did you grow up here in the city or did you move here from somewhere else? I moved here from Baltimore, Baltimore, Maryland. Janae, Jaron has lived in New York City for almost five years now, but he just registered to vote this summer. Oh, so he's missed two presidential elections and the last mayoral one. Why now? It's a good question.

Jaron told me he's been fighting against what he called a wave of political apathy, and this year he finally decided to do something about it. It feels kind of like we're at some sort of like, tipping point. I don't know how much more we can take as working class people. I feel like this is kind of like the worst I've felt like spending power-wise

in my adult life. The ongoing saga of affordability in New York City. Bridget, we're all feeling a squeeze. Yeah, and we're talking rent, transportation, student loans, even groceries. Cost of living is crazy. And I've been hearing this story.

again and again from people who voted in a city election for the first time this year. They're really desperate for something to change. Let me guess. Zoroamam Dani voters? Exactly. And this gives us a little insight into why a 33-year-old Democratic Socialist running almost exclusively on affordability is now the frontrunner for mayor. And it's changing who votes in local elections in pretty significant ways.

from WNYC, this is NYC Now. I'm Jene Pierre. It's exactly one month until Election Day, and Democratic nominee Zaramam Dani remains the clear frontrunner. The Democratic Socialists won the June primary in part by focusing on affordability, rallying around progressive policies like universal child care, free buses, and a rent freeze for the city's 1 million stabilized tenants.

Just four years ago, the city elected mayor Eric Adams, who made his tough-on-crime approach to restoring public safety his central pitch to voters. So why are voters ready to go from a former NYPD captain and political centrist to a 33-year-old assembly member and Democratic Socialists who talked almost exclusively about cost of living? WMYC's Bridget Bergen has spent the last few weeks speaking with new voters, many of whom appear to be energizing Momdani's campaign. Bridget, why are these new voters a big deal? I mean, come on. People turn 18 every year. Yeah, I know.

It seems sort of like an obvious question, but let me give you a few stats that might change your mind. My colleague, Joe Hong and I, worked together looking at this data. He crunched some numbers using data from the City Board of Elections. So new voters made up 7% of the overall electorate in the June. primary. We're talking about more than 76,000 people who voted for the first time in New York City in June out of more than a million total turnout. Now, that's up by comparison from 2% in the

June primary four years ago. That's a five-point jump, Bridget. That's valid. Yeah. I mean, it's a real change, but there's actually more than that. The vast majority of these new voters live in districts that Mumdani won in the primary. And so we can't know that all these new voters actually voted for him because secret ballots, but we do know that it's likely that many of these voters supported him because of the results in those districts. And for what it's worth, I sent out emails to about 250 first-time voters in New York City, just people who turned out during early voting. I didn't hear back from a single person who said that they voted for someone other than Mumdani.

like Jaron, who we mentioned at the top. I canvassed for Zoran. I've been going to some DSA meetings. I've been kind of like popping out to whatever. Jaron told me he just wasn't really inspired by candidates before now. He was hearing Mom Dani's pitch as the solutions to stuff that was making his life so hard. And so in June, the campaign sent out this message that really resonated with him. And it turns out other voters who reached out to me.

I saw a lot of people post on their stories like, oh, make sure you register before this state, before this state, before this state. Hold it right there. We'll talk more about what messages the campaign sent and how other voters responded like Foster by registering to vote. That's coming up after a short break. The other day on the subway, I met a New Yorker. But get this. They vote in California. This is Democratic mayoral nominee, Zeramam Dhani.

I know this is true for many of you. You're Democrats who've chosen not to vote here because you believe your vote counts more elsewhere. Every four years, you vote absentee from your parents' address in Philly or three apartments ago in Atlanta. But come on, you live here. I feel seeing. So today, this was from a video that the Mumdani campaign dropped on June 9th. When I reached out to new voters to ask them why they decided to register for the first time in this election, people actually sent me links to this video, including 25-year-old Mia.

Haraguchi. I think the video, the message was like, you know, maybe you're voting somewhere else. You feel your vote matters there. But we all live here and voting in local elections is like a way to materially change your life and the lives of your friends who live here. So, Janie, she moved to the city from Texas for grad school three years ago. And she studies the brains of fruit flies. Yeah. So she's a lot smarter than both of us. At least she's smarter than me. She's definitely smarter than me. She lives in student housing in the Upper East Side. And it was that video that told her what she needed to know to register and become a new voter in New York City. Do you have any sense of how many other people registered to vote after saying that video? I mean, we can't say exactly. I can tell you that the video itself has more than 750,000 views at this point. That's not how many people registered. But we do know that when the video dropped until the June 14th registration deadline, more than 54,000 people registered to vote.

And that's 43% of all the registrations in 2025 until that cutoff date. Wow. So the message worked. It certainly seems that way. Bridget, all these new voters you're introducing us to, they all seem pretty young. Yeah, but our analysis found that the vast majority of this year's new voters, more than 83%, were between the ages of 18 and 34. And yet that's still old enough to be dealing with some actual adulting.

For sure. Right? Housing, transportation, child care costs. It's also when you're deciding where you want to put down roots long term. Okay. Were all the new voters you spoke with also recent transplant? Actually, no. I spoke with some lifelong New Yorkers. My name is Dante Cookington.

I am 32 years old. And I live in the same neighborhood I grew up in. I live in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. So Jeney Pilkington originally registered to vote where he went to college because it was a swing state. And then he updated his registration to where his parents had a house in a swing district here in New York, but upstate. And so finally, his wife, you know, they're trying to have their first child. She said to him, like, you got to vote here. You live here.

And so she convinced him to update his registration for this particular election. The way I see the city is that we've sort of been living in the wake of Bloomberg era policies. I had my fourth birthday in Brooklyn Bridge Park. My dad loves telling the story that before everybody showed up, he had to pick up the used condoms and hypodermic needles. And now it's like incredibly luxurious park. And I think that Bloomberg really, it was really like creating a leisure. a luxury playground for the super rich. So, Jinnah, here's this guy who is doing pretty well.

He's a freelance television producer, but things still feel tight. And he and his wife, you know, they are really interested in Mom Dani's universal child care proposal. They want to have a child. He also says he doesn't want the city to lose the diversity that makes it the place that he actually wants to be living. What I love about New York City is it feels like a place where, if he's a place where, if he's you walk around for an hour, you're going to see every type of person and you might talk to somebody

who's totally different from you. Just that's random. And I want this city to be that way forever. And not just a giant sweet green. I feel that, you know, spoken like a true New Yorker, but that's why so many people love to call this city home. Yeah. And I talked to other people who talked about seeing themselves in Mamdani. My name is Varun Shrikhan. I'm 26 years old, and I'm a middle school history teacher in the Bronx. It was really appealing to me that there was a progressive South Asian candidate in such a publicly visible political position. All my friends and community that are also South Asian,

I think among all of us there was a general sense that it's like finally nice to have representation that we feel represents our views to not just. just our skin color or ethnicity. So Jenei Shrinkov told me that, you know, he's been to a couple of events. Mamdani held four South Asian voters specifically at restaurants and cultural centers that are meaningful to him and to the people he knows. He's quite proud about what his identity is, and I think that that has been meaningful to me to have somebody at that level of visibility, openly acknowledge who they are and where they

come from. Okay, Bridget. So the numbers of new voters went up in the primary. We saw this big jump in new registrations in June after that video dropped that we mentioned. Certainly, Momdani is pitching a very progressive brand of politics, totally different from what we're seeing in this Adams administration, totally different from the Bloomberg policies that were mentioned earlier. Free buses, free child care, and a rent freeze for rent-stabilized tenants. So how do we get to this point? Yeah, that's the key question that I really wanted to try to understand.

And so I posed it to a political scientist, John Mollinkoff, who directs the Center for Urban Research over at the CUNY Graduate Center. He's someone who has been studying demographics in voter turnout for decades. And he says, Mammani's coalition signals really a potentially tectonic shift in New York City's electorate. The baby boom generation held on for a long, long time. And it's probably time for us to get off the stage. Exit left. Yeah. And, you know, Momdani is 33.

He's a millennial running against independent candidate, former governor, Andrew Cuomo, who's 67, and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, who's 71. Yeah, so it's boomers against millennials and Gen Z when it comes to so many of these voters. Exactly. Malenkov also cited deepening inequality and, changes in the city's population, you know, fewer non-Hispanic whites, growth among other ethnic groups. And that really foreshadows where the country at large is going. New York City is sort of where the rest of the country will be headed in 20, 30 years in terms of demographic change.

He actually compared this moment in New York City to around World War II. In a way, it'll be the most fundamental reform challenge from the left that the city is seen probably since the days of LaGuardia. He says we are literally watching the future of American politics, not just New York cities, playing out right before our eyes in this election, multiracial demographics and new coalitions with younger voters who expect different things from their leaders, like addressing the cost of living in really systemic ways. But also, Jenae, in the context of this race, winning the primary on the single issue of affordability comes with major pressure. These voters expect Mumdani to deliver and to deliver fast. Yeah, yeah. But of course,

the general election is not over yet. Absolutely not. One month in counting. And I should note that the deadline to register to vote in the general election is October 25th. That's WMYC's Bridget Bergen. Thanks so much for joining me. Thanks, Janay. And thank you for listening to NYC now from WMYC. I'm Jene Pierre. Enjoy your weekend.