Editor's Note

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is defending the city’s closed primary system. Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office

New York’s electoral system is a remnant of an era when the Democratic and Republican parties were more powerful. Closed primaries, where only enrolled party members could vote, helped protect incumbents.

The proudly progressive Empire State has passed long overdue laws in recent years enacting early voting and expanding mail-in voting. But matching our new age California cousins to open up the primaries? It’s never found much support.

After all, the current system, by definition, works for those who are in power. They all won elections within that system.

That includes Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has, in so many ways, found himself defending the system he once railed against. The latest is closed primaries, when asked this month about the newly energized push to expand the vote. “I am quite content with the system of primaries that we have thus far,” he said. And why wouldn’t he be? He won, and his brand of democratic socialist politics is ascendant.

Of course, Mamdani’s win also reinvigorated the campaign against that system. Supporters can talk all they want about the high-minded ideals of expanding the right to vote in New York, but the timing isn’t an accident. The effort is one to stop Mamdani and other democratic socialists like him.

For now, that’s Mamdani’s best argument against it. His core supporters may not love the Democratic Party as an institution, but they’ll push back against independents who are trying to change the rules so they can win.

That works while Mamdani is still broadly popular. But the mayor needs to tread carefully, or he could end up losing the system that got him elected.