New York Just Ran the Election the Rest of America Needs

Real Choice, Real Turnout, Real Legitimacy: Lessons from New York’s De Facto All-Party Primary

Last week’s election in New York City was a big deal for all the reasons that have been noted. But let me offer one more that’s been overlooked: The election gave America a real-time lesson in the power of the all-party primary.

What America saw last Tuesday night was that all-party primaries make elections competitive, drive up turnout and give the winner real legitimacy. They saw that all-party primaries make elections matter.

An all-party primary is one in which all candidates, regardless of party, run on the same primary ballot, with the top vote-getters moving on to the general election. To be sure, New York City does not officially have an all-party primary system. But when Andrew Cuomo refused to accept the result of the Democratic primary in June and decided instead to run as an independent, he turned the mayor’s race into a de facto all-party primary.

In the Democratic primary, after two rounds of ranked-choice-vote redistribution, Zohran Mamdani had 573,169 votes and Cuomo had 443,229. Meanwhile, Curtis Sliwa was unopposed for the Republican nomination, so no GOP primary was held. But four years ago Sliwa won a competitive Republican primary with 40,794 votes, so it’s reasonable to assume he would have won about that many votes in an all-party primary this cycle.

With results like these in an all-party primary system, the general election would have been a head-to-head matchup between Mamdani and Cuomo, as this race essentially was. The race provided voters with a real choice, and a majority -- 50.4 percent -- chose Mamdani, who won 1,036,051 votes. Cuomo finished second with 854,995, while Sliwa won 146,137.

We now know exactly what New Yorkers think and want. There is no confusion about it. Even the Wall Street Journal editorial board acknowledged that: “Zohran Mamdani won his race for mayor on Tuesday, and it wasn’t close. The people have spoken, for better or worse, and his voters were willing to take a risk on his radicalism in the name of change.”

We learned something solid from last Tuesday’s election: New Yorkers want some seriously new ideas. This meaningfully advances the public debate about how best to tackle our shared problems.

Consider: With some 2 million votes cast, this genuinely competitive election drove turnout to its highest point since the 1960s! Two million people had a real choice and one that actually mattered. That’s what democracy looks like. That’s what it feels like.

And Mamdani, as he begins to govern, knows that he will need to maintain his majoritarian coalition. He can’t afford to let his governance methodology hew to the narrow concerns of one or another portion of his coalition. To succeed, he will have to be a pragmatic socialist — think Bernie Sanders as mayor of Burlington — and not an ideologue. This will be good for the city.

These are precisely the three benefits that can be expected from all-party primaries: real choice and a result that tells us what people actually think; higher rates of participation that reconnect our political institutions to the people and require them to be responsive to the people; and a need for positive governance strategies that sustain majoritarian coalitions. (For the opposite, see the White House right now.)

Some critics of all-party primaries argue that they will advantage conservative and moderate candidates over those on the left, or candidates backed by big money. In fact, the all-party primary advantages candidates who are broadly appealing to voters. Progressives win in progressive jurisdictions — like Mamdani and Boston’s Michelle Wu, who ran in what is indeed officially an all-party primary. Liberal Susan Crawford won in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race, which also employed this election system. Conservatives win in conservative jurisdictions — like Louisiana’s U.S. senators, where an all-party primary mechanism is also used. And recent results in all-party primaries make clear that money can’t guarantee success (see Andrew Cuomo in New York; Josh Kraft in Boston; and Elon Musk in Wisconsin).

Now compare that to the dynamics that flow from a system locked in by the party primaries. In 2021, Adams came out of the primary with 404,513 votes. Kathryn Garcia had 397,316. Sliwa had 40,794. Despite the clear preference of New Yorkers for Garcia over Sliwa, the general election pitted Adams against Sliwa. The result was a foregone conclusion: Adams won 67 percent to Sliwa’s 28 percent with a turnout of about 1 million.

Although Adams’ election margin was higher than Mamdani’s, it was a far less meaningful result. He had been selected in the primary without any of the city’s independents or Republicans weighing in. Though roughly 20 percent of the electorate, independents cannot participate in New York’s primaries. Adams’ mayoral win reflected only what the about 800,000 registered Democratic primary voters thought. This fact was always going to leave a question mark hanging over his administration. How much support did he really have? When people win in low-turnout party primaries, you never really can tell. Who did that missing million New York City voters want to be mayor in 2021?

When you don’t really have a meaningful choice in the general election, why turn out? Democracy withers when our parties strive to maintain control by squeezing competition out of the system.

Last Tuesday was exciting because we saw a real democracy doing serious work. The people made a choice. We will see how it goes, and they will get to judge the result in four years’ time. It’s awesome to watch, and we will all learn things together about what does and doesn’t work for tackling our problems of affordability and quality of life.

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