As former Gov. Cuomo made his final case to voters ahead of Tuesday’s election, he touted the results of a new poll that show him edging nearer to Democratic socialist Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani in the race for mayor.
According to an AtlasIntel poll released late Friday, Mamdani is still leading the three-man race with nearly 41% of the 1,587 likely voters canvassed, but Cuomo is catching up with 34%.
Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa is in third place with 24%.
The polling results come as hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers have already voted early in Tuesday’s mayoral election.
“If you look at the direction of the poll, he’s coming down. I’m going up,” Cuomo said at a campaign stop in Queens on Saturday. “That’s always good.”
Cuomo said the massive turnout of early voters proves the vested interest New Yorkers have in the race.
“New Yorkers are turning out in ways we’ve never seen before. Because I think they’ve been hearing this conversation,” he said. “I think they are frightened of a Mamdani mayoralty. I think they realize that he is dangerous and unqualified. And, literally, lives can depend on what that mayor does.”
The latest polling results also came the night before Cuomo visited Queens, where he was grand marshal in the 7th Annual We Can Because We Know We Can Parade in Cambria Heights.
Cuomo went to Queens with Mayor Adams, who has endorsed the former governor since he backed out of the race, driving home the importance of public safety to potential voters.
Following a campaign stop at Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, Mamdani shrugged off the new poll.
“I’m not worried at all. I continue to be confident, but I never let that confidence become complacency,” said Mamdani, who believes the large turnout of early voters equates to New Yorkers wanting a change in the city’s leadership.
“When you actually go out there and speak to New Yorkers yourself, you will find the momentum continues to grow, and it’s a momentum of young voters, of older voters, a momentum of New Yorkers who are hungry for change, and we’re excited to see, especially yesterday, how many New Yorkers came out to vote,” he said Saturday.
The likely voters questioned by AtlasIntel put Cuomo ahead of Mandani by eight points if Sliwa wasn’t in the race, the poll shows. Republican leaders have spent the last few weeks encouraging Sliwa to step down so die-hard Republican voters would side with Cuomo’s camp.
But the AtlasIntel poll — which uses “proprietary data collection technology and post-stratification algorithms” in its polling process, according to the company’s website — is an outlier of sorts.
A Marist poll released Thursday showed Mamdani with a robust 16 point lead over Cuomo.