Latino Voters and the Political Earthquake in New York
Conventional wisdom held that Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist assemblyman from Queens, could not peel away enough Latino voters from Andrew Cuomo, considering that Latinos have always viewed the former governor favorably. But it appears that Mamdani has won a plurality of the Latino vote in the primary.
If anything, these results remind us yet again of what has now become almost a cliché: Latinos are not homogenous. We do not fit any once-size-fits-all formulations. Latinos are quite diverse in cultural variety, countries of origin, language nuances, and political philosophies. This can also be seen at the ballot box. In fact, we can see it in this election—most Bronx Latinos went with Cuomo, while a plurality of Latinos in other boroughs went with Mamdani.
