New York City might elect a truly progressive mayor – thanks to ranked-choice voting | Katrina vanden Heuvel

Mamdani's campaign deserves credit for offering a clear, inspiring, progressive message. But ranked-choice voting is also helping make him competitive

With a week left until New York's Democratic mayoral primary, one might have thought that the former governor Andrew Cuomo would be measuring the drapes at Gracie Mansion. Real estate developers, corporations like Doordash, a smattering of billionaires and even Billy Joel have shoveled cash into his campaign, with his Super Pac spending more money than any other outside force in the city's political history. This is on top of his entering the race with major name recognition advantage, amounting to a 20- or 30-point lead as recently as May.

But according to a new poll, Zohran Mamdani - the insurgent state assemblyman and democratic socialist whom the Nation recently co-endorsed along with fellow mayoral candidate and New York City comptroller Brad Lander - has pulled ahead of Cuomo for the first time.

Katrina vanden Heuvel is editorial director and publisher of the Nation, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a contributor to the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times