Big mistakes': Pollsters face recriminations for missing the Mamdani surge
<p><img src="https://static.politico.com/a9/67/fb2cc8694355bbda186bc4df38f4/https-de…; alt="2221991799"></p><div> <p>“At the time, people treated it as a wild outlier,” O’Donnell said. But in retrospect, he said, it provided “a very accurate representation of where [the race] was at that time.”</p> <p>There was also a major lack of high-quality nonpartisan polling in the race.</p> <p>“They were bad. They were straight up bad,” said Democratic pollster Adam Carlson. “But you can count on one hand how many quality independent polls there were.”</p> <p>Of the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/polls/nyc-mayoral-primary-election-… total polls tracked by The New York Times</a>, just nine of them met the paper’s reliability standards, and only two came during the last month of the race. Still, none had Mamdani with a lead after the first round.</p> <p>“No one could have seen all of the changes in the electorate coming, but missing the first round by 20 points?” Carlson said. “Something is wrong.”</p> <p>The sparse amount of independent polling in the race helped Cuomo and his aligned groups continue to tout polling numbers from within his circle. Those numbers showed a big lead and helped him build a sense of inevitability early in the race.</p> <p>Democratic pollster Margie Omero, whose husband’s firm worked on ads for Mamdani’s campaign, said some of the polls were done too early, and that was compounded by the changes in the electorate.</p> <p>“It’s likely young people went from some of the least likely to turn out in previous elections to the most likely,” Omero said in an email. “Polling would’ve needed to be open minded that this change was really happening, and take that into account in their assumptions.”</p> <p>Predicting the electorate is easier said than done — pollsters are essentially making an educated guess based on past turnout about what the future pool of voters will look like. But moving forward, some pollsters said it should be a priority.</p> <p>“We have to have polling carefully mirror the voter file,” said Bradley Honan, whose firm <a href="https://www.honanstrategy.com/blog/2025/05/">conducted a few polls in the race</a>.</p> <p>There’s always nuance when it comes to polling, and an off-year primary can prove to be particularly difficult in an industry that’s full of volatility and error.</p> <p>“We all need to, in some degree, check our expectations about what polling can actually do in an election like that,” said Democratic pollster Nick Gourevitch.</p> <p>Pollsters are used to criticism. After a high-profile miss in 2016 when President Donald Trump’s victory took pollsters by surprise, they’ve been going through years of recriminations, tweaking their models and pledging to do better next time.</p> <p>“I don’t think it’s fair for the industry to take that hit as a whole, but I understand why people would jump to that conclusion,” Carlson said. “Because it was so stark.”</p> </div>