NEW YORK — New York City saw relatively sluggish turnout in the opening weekend of early voting for the Nov. 8 election, with about 100,000 ballots reported cast across the city, as the governor’s race kicked into high gear.
Though New York City lacks congressional battlegrounds — only the race to represent Staten Island and a sliver of Brooklyn appears competitive — the fight for city voters has become central in the governor’s race atop the ticket.
Rep. Lee Zeldin of Long Island, the Trump-allied Republican attempting to unseat Gov. Kathy Hochul, has spent weeks blitzing the five boroughs with a pledge to toughen the criminal justice system. Hochul, meanwhile, has scrambled in recent days to activate city voters after opinion polls showed her lead slipping to single digits.
In the first two days of early voting, 97,155 New Yorkers voted at polling sites in the city, according to the Board of Elections.
The two-day turnout fell far short of the start of early balloting in the 2020 general election, which saw historic engagement driven by the slugfest between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. In 2020, about 315,000 New Yorkers cast ballots on the first two days of early voting, according to the city elections board.
Statewide, Democrats outnumber Republicans more than 2 to 1, but the margin jumps to 6 to 1 in the city.
Alex Voetsch, a Democratic political consultant, said he saw the city’s early turnout as concerning for Hochul, but emphasized there is time to recover. “We would typically want to see like half the turnout in a midterm year,” Voetsch said. “I would not be very happy with that number.”
Still, COVID colored 2020 voting patterns. And Hochul could find some comfort in early mail-in ballot returns that showed about 60% of votes coming from Democrats, according to the governor’s campaign.
Outside of the city, some 165,000 New Yorkers voted in the first two days of early voting, according to the state Board of Elections, meaning that the city accounted for roughly 37% of the statewide total. Around 42% of all New York state voters are located in the city.
On Monday, Zeldin joined the Republican governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, at a rally in suburban Westchester. Zeldin told hundreds of supporters waving campaign signs that they have a chance to “change the trajectory of the state — to restore balance and common sense back to Albany.”
Hochul, a moderate Democrat who took office 14 months ago, has highlighted her work to safeguard New Yorkers’ abortion rights and to crack down on guns. After campaigning lightly in the early weeks of the fall, she has turned up the tempo in the last week, and had three Manhattan stops scheduled Monday.
“Lee Zeldin is extreme,” Hochul said at a Monday news conference in Harlem. “There is so much at stake.”
For the first time in the general election race, the governor stumped Sunday with Mayor Eric Adams, joining him for a rally at a shopping mall in Queens.
“We have a governor that is a partner, that is going to ensure we’re not leaving folks behind,” Adams told about 150 people in Rochdale, about a mile from his childhood home. “We’ve come too far.”
Zeldin has sought to align himself with Adams, a tough-on-crime Democrat, by emphasizing overlap in their views on the controversial issue of bail reform.
But Adams has rejected Zeldin’s appeals and has portrayed the congressman as a threat to New Yorkers’ rights. After the rally Sunday, he said his work boosting Hochul was just beginning.
“This is the best part now,” he told the New York Daily News. “This is the sprint. People are paying attention. And we are going to be there to get her over the finish line.
“She’s going to get tired of seeing me,” Adams laughed.
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