News Politics

Young voters and a young mayoral candidate

By Jack Tergesen

Coming from a background where “money was always an issue,” Saha Guerrero, 21, is especially understanding of how his community is being affected by the current  skyrocketing inflation of everyday essentials, including housing and food. 

This understanding prompted Guerrero, the former president of New York University College Democrats, to join a record number of New Yorkers in voting for Democrat Zohran Mamdani, who ran on a platform of affordability. Mamdani received over 573,000 votes, a number that no other Democratic primary candidate for NYC mayor has received. 

Mamdani, 33, is a Muslim, self-described Democratic Socialist, who, if elected, would become the youngest NYC mayor. 

Since polling in the single digits in January, Mamdani’s campaign has gone viral, collecting over 3.6 million followers on Instagram and 13.8 million likes on TikTok. This digital surge reflects on a larger trend; a study by Tufts revealed that nearly 4 in 5 young people use a social media platform to be their main source of information for politics. 

Social media presence has proven again and again to be a winning strategy for politicians in order to pick up the youth vote.  

And with Mamdani, this case was proven once again. 

The NYC Board of Elections revealed that 40% of early voters were under 40, and a data analysis by Gothamist revealed that of that 40%, over 60% were first-time voters. He prioritized issues that were “impacting [young] people’s lives, which was clearly affordability,” 2021 mayoral candidate Kathryn Garcia said. 

61% of New Yorkers across the five boroughs believe that the affordability crisis is a major problem, with a large concentration of the crisis being weighted on college students and recent graduates. In New York City, college graduates must pay 56.3% of their income to afford a 1-bedroom apartment, 20.6% higher than the national average. 

On election day, youth, Guerrero included, were drawn to Mamdani’s promises to freeze the rents of around 1 million apartments in the city, make buses free, provide universal childcare, and construct city-owned grocery stores “focused on keeping prices low”, according to his website.