Candidates for Congress are looking for a positive spin on the early voting numbers.

“We’ve always known this is going to be a very close race,” said Brooklyn Borough President and candidate for NY-7 Antonio Reynoso.

What You Need To Know

Voters under 30 have comprised 11% of the primary vote so far in the city

Only 5% of registered Democrats in the city have cast ballots so far

Numbers are much lower than the 2025 primary 

One of his rivals, Julie Won, told NY1: “It’s not that low. It’s still a significant amount of people that voted.”

Claire Valdez, another contender for the Brooklyn and Queens congressional district, put it like this: “There are many more voters left out there.”

It’s a positive outlook despite lower turnout — the Mamdani momentum at the polls last year has yet to materialize in this year’s primary.

“Our side tends to do better when there is more people voting,” Jasmine Gripper of the Working Families Party told NY1. “We knew not to expect the 2025 numbers and actually advised campaigns to expect something between 2024 and 2025 when calculating their win number.”

More than 172,000 people voted in the nine days of early voting for this year’s primary election, according to numbers from the Board of Elections. That’s 45% of the people who turned out to vote early in last year’s mayoral primary.

So far, only approximately 5% of all registered Democrats have cast ballots. Though there was historic turnout for young voters last year, that trend is not continuing.

An analysis of early voting data by NY1 found that citywide, 11% of voters were under 30. In some of the highly watched contests where the Democratic Socialists of America have put forward candidates, younger voters are not emerging like last year.

“The beginning of the week, we were pretty concerned about the youth turnout that we were seeing in the early voting data. We started to shift some tactics,” Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of the NYC Democratic Socialists of America, said. “I think those efforts have shown results, and we’ve had more young voters under 50 vote in the early voting period every day.”

In the 10th congressional district, which covers Lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, Brooklyn is driving much of the turnout — 65% of early votes cast have been from that borough. It may signal an advantage for Brad Lander in that contest against incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman.

“Obviously, this is home. This is my base. This is where we are organizing,” Lander said.

His opponent had a different take.

“A significant part of the uptick in turnout in Brooklyn is Borough Park, Brooklyn Heights, areas that I traditionally do well in,” Goldman said.