More than a million New Yorkers will go to the polls today to elect the next mayor of the Big Apple in a very exciting challenge with no holds barred among the Democrats and with a national impact. The polling stations in the five districts will open at 6 am (12 pm in Italy) and will be open until 9 pm: voters will choose between the left-wing Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani, the former governor Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent, and the Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa. The results will begin to arrive within a few minutes of the closing of the polls, therefore in the Italian night.
According to the latest RealClearPolitics average, Mamdani leads with 46.1%, a 14.3 point lead over Cuomo at 31.8% and a 29.8 point lead over Republican Sliwa at 16.3%. Other polls in the last week had Cuomo 4 points behind Mamdani while another poll from a few days earlier had Mamdani ahead by 26 points. Over 730,000 New Yorkers have already cast their votes: a record turnout for early voting, almost double that of the Democratic primaries in June. The impressive numbers of the nine days of early voting that ended on Saturday could, writes the New York Post, suggest an overall turnout on Tuesday evening of over 2 million votes, for the first time since 1969.