PPP saw Zohran Mamdani’s first place finish coming before anyone else did for one simple reason: we polled the 2025 electorate instead of the 2021 electorate.

Usually when polling a primary election pollsters start out with a list of voters who have participated in similar elections in the past.

It was clear in this election though that Mamdani was building a movement that was going to bring a lot of people into the process that had never voted in a city election before. So we made a conscious decision not to require people we polled to have voted in 2021. If they said they were going to vote on our screening question that was good enough.

Tens of thousands of people voted in their first Mayoral election this year. We found those who didn’t vote in 2021 breaking 63-18 for Mamdani. We included them in our poll.

Beyond that this election brought serious demographic change to the electorate. The voters were much younger.

Pollsters know that most of the time it’s very hard to get young people to answer a poll and you often have to weight them up. There was so much enthusiasm from young voters in our raw data that we found 37% of likely voters were under 45 unweighted. Our poll correctly found a much different electorate than usually votes in primary elections. When all the final turnout numbers come in, it will probably turn out we should have projected an even younger electorate.

We appreciate the opportunity to have partnered with Justin Brannan’s campaign on this poll. His politically savvy team also foresaw the changing electorate we saw when we went into the field. He and his folks will continue to do great things for New York City.

PPP’s been at this for a long time. We first came on the national radar in 2008 when our polls tended to show Barack Obama doing better in the primaries than other polls did and tended to be right about that. It was the same dynamic- we polled the 2008 electorate instead of the 2004 electorate.

Our poll showing Mamdani ahead qualifies as one of the biggest outliers that proved to be right in recent polling history. Most polls conducted in the same time period had Cuomo leading by double digits and the best other poll for Mamdani still had him down by 6 points. No herding here.

Over the last couple decades PPP has become one of the most frequently used private Democratic pollsters in the country. Our polling in both 2024 and 2022 was extremely accurate. Campaigns and organizations looking for an accurate poll- combined with affordability and speed- should keep turning to PPP.

And PS- I was so confident in our numbers that I wrote most of this dispatch last Wednesday, six days before the election, right after Marist came out and said Cuomo was still up double digits. We knew the electorate had changed and that our numbers reflected it when others didn’t.