Why Does the New York Times Keep Ignoring Polls Showing Mamdani Leading with Jewish Voters?
Polling shows mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani in a commanding lead with Jewish New Yorkers, but you won’t read about it in the paper of record.
Adam Johnson
In the months leading up to New York assemblymember Zohran Mamdani’s surprise win in the June 24 Democratic primary, the New York Times—as I documented at the time—used innuendo, sectarian framing, and a heavy dose of weasel words to repeatedly imply that Mamdani was uniquely struggling to win the support of New York’s Jewish voters. “Mr. Mamdani, for example, has alienated parts of the city’s large Jewish community,” Nicholas Fandos wrote on June 5. “New York City is home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel and Mr. Mamdani has been criticized for accusing Israel of committing genocide in the war in Gaza,” Jeffery C. Mays and Maya King wrote on March 23. “Mr. Mamdani, who is Muslim, defends his use of the term ‘genocide’ to describe Israel’s actions against Gaza,” added Jeffrey Mays on May 19, in an article about “Israel and Antisemitism” looming large in the mayor’s race.
Reading this coverage of the primary, readers would understandably come away with the impression that Mamdani was having difficulty appealing to Jewish voters compared to the other candidates in the race. But there was only one problem: This narrative had zero empirical basis. Since the primary, the New York Times never bothered to support it with any evidence, and to the extent their claims were technically true — for example, that Mamdani had “alienated parts” of the Jewish community — they were fatuous to the point of meaninglessness. Any candidate without 100 percent support from any demographic will have technically “alienated parts” of said community. Why was this formulation only used for Mamdani and Jewish voters but no one else?
A more accurate description the New York Times could have printed is that Mamdani was struggling with pro-Israel organizations, but this would come off unduly political, so instead the outlet simply used “Jewish voters” as a stand-in for Zionist advocacy groups.
Indeed, two recent polls show Mamdani well ahead with Jewish voters. The first, a July Zenith Research poll, shows Mamdani with a 17 point lead with New York Jewish voters with 43 percent of the total, compared to 26 percent for his rival Andrew Cuomo, 15 percent for Mayor Eric Adams and 9 percent for Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa. A second poll, also from July, by GQR Research, which was commissioned by an anti-Mamdani, pro-Israel organization New York Solidarity Network, found Mamdani leading with Jewish New Yorkers by 12 percentage points — 37 percent for Mamdani, 25 percent for Adams, 21 percent for Cuomo, and 14 percent for Sliwa. No public polls released since the primary show Mamdani trailing among Jewish voters.
The Times’ response to these polls? To simply ignore them. Indeed, when the outlet finally got around to reporting on Mamdani’s relationship with Jewish New Yorkers earlier this month (“Many Jewish Voters Back Mamdani. And Many Agree With Him on Gaza”, by Liam Stack 8/4/25), they not only failed to mention the Zenith Research and GQR polls, but made the rather strange claim that finding out who Jewish New Yorkers prefer for mayor was apparently somehow ontologically unknowable.
“It is difficult to determine how many Jewish voters supported Mr. Mamdani because even in New York, the Jewish population is too small to be measured with precision by most polls,” the article states.
The estimated Jewish population of New York City is almost one million people — making it greater than the populations of five U.S. states. When In These Times reached out to the New York Times asking why the article had disregarded the two polls in question, Managing Director of External Communications Charlie Stadtlander responded by saying, “When considering what data to include in our stories, our polling and data teams look at all available data, but we try to only cite nonpartisan sources that are transparent about their methods and widely regarded as reliable, and we avoid citing data that is from pollsters with unclear methods or from organizations with agendas, such as campaigns, allies, outfits without a recognized history or advocacy organizations. In this instance the array of data — including the two polls you cited and other polls available at that time to assess Mr. Mamdani’s support among Jewish voters — yielded somewhat conflicting findings, and new data on the subject has not added much clarity.”
When it comes to the central issue of who was leading with Jewish voters, however, the publicly-available data did not yield conflicted findings: Both polls showed Mamdani with a double digit lead among Jewish New Yorkers. Moreover, the Times has cited GQR Research several times over the years and frequently uses GQR’s data in their Upshot election forecasting model. And while Zenith Research is a fairly new polling outlet, its founder, longtime pollster Adam Carlson is frequently quoted in the Times. While Stadtlander is correct that GQR’s poll was commissioned by a biased party, it was a poll commissioned by a biased party in opposition to Mamdani. The fact that even this poll showed Mamdani with a comfortable 12 point lead with Jewish voters is all the more reason the Times ought to have incorporated it into their reporting on Mamdani’s standing in the Jewish community. Instead, Stack’s article is peppered with a string of unhelpful weasel words—twelve “somes” and ten “manys” in total, including two in the headline alone.
It’s also worth noting that Zenith Research, anticipating criticism from pro-Israel, anti-Mamdani groups, laid out their poll’s methodology in detail.
When asked about this dynamic, and the fact that both polls showed a consistent lead with Jewish voters by Mamdani, Stadtlander and the New York Times did not directly respond to these points, instead offering vague reference to the alleged statistical pitfalls of polling Jewish New Yorkers.
“I don’t have more to offer beyond the comment I already sent over,“ Stadtlander wrote via email. “If you’re serious about looking into this topic I’d urge you to talk to experienced, nonpartisan pollsters about the challenges of measuring sentiment across the Jewish population. Pew is the generally acknowledged gold standard, but KFF, Ipsos, and SSRS are all well-established polling operations to consult as well.” To which I replied, “Can you please point to any academic or professional writing on why polling Jewish people is uniquely difficult? It’s a claim made in the August 4 article, but isn’t accompanied by any link or citation. Can you provide one for my own edification?”
At this point Stadtlander ceased replying. The New York Times, it’s worth highlighting, had no problem citing polls of Jewish New Yorkers this May and in the days before the June 24 election when they showed Mamdani in third place and second place, respectively. “In a recent Marist poll, Mr. Cuomo led with 26 percent of Jewish voters ranking him as their first choice. Mr. Lander was at 17 percent, followed by Mr. Mamdani at 14 percent,” Jeffery C. Mays wrote in May, citing a Marist poll of Jewish New Yorkers. “A new survey from the Marist Institute for Public Opinion released on Wednesday showed that Mr. Cuomo is the first choice of 40 percent of likely Jewish primary voters. But Mr. Mamdani is second, with about 20 percent” Nicholas Fandos and Dana Rubinstein wrote on June 19 in an article that fanned the flames of the so-called “Globalize the Intifada” non-story.
So, clearly some polls can pin down Jewish sentiment to the Times’ editorial liking. Yet the polls that have been released since the primary — which show Mamdani with a double digit lead among Jewish New Yorkers — apparently cannot. Bad luck for readers interested in what Jewish New Yorkers actually think of Mamdani beyond innuendo suggesting he is uniquely “alienating” them, or trend pieces that imply Mamdani has “some” support but give the reader the general impression it remains fringe and boutique in nature.
The reality is we have very good empirical reason to believe Mamdani is the top candidate with Jewish New Yorkers. Likely not the majority, but certainly a plurality, and in line with his broader polling numbers in a contested, multi-candidate general election race. This dynamic has been reported on by The Times of Israel, Haaretz, Jewish News Syndicate, The Forward, and Jewish Insider—but it has conspicuously been ignored by the New York Times, which hasn’t touched the evidence supporting this dynamic, or published any acknowledgment that it even exists.
Adam H. Johnson is a media analyst and co-host of the Citations Needed podcast.
