“I’m kind of a pollster hater” former Primary School Podcast guest and current godking of NYC politics nerd discourse Michael Lange told the good people of the Hell Gate podcast this weekend. “I’m sort of like ‘wow, you guys have all this fancy technology… and I can just stick my hand in the wind and predict it better than you can.’” I do not have Lange’s confidence, or level of psychotic specificity (he dropped a precinct-by-precinct mayoral projection yesterday, but if you’re reading this, you almost certainly knew that already). Nevertheless, I’m going to give it my best shot for the housing ballot measures that I wrote about last week. And I’m going to rely on both vibes and polls.
Polls first. We have two public polls of the housing ballot measures, one from Adam Carlson’s Zenith Research, and one from Morning Consult, sponsored by the Partnership for New York City. They show Ballot Measure Four at 69-21-10 (Yes +48) and 66-16-18 (Yes +50), respectively. As I wrote last week, Ballot Measure Four functionally gets rid of City Council’s member deference policy that gives your local City Councilmember a de facto veto over any rezoning project. I’m using this one as a benchmark because I am pretty confident it is going to be the least popular of the three, both because both polls say so, because City Councilmembers have fought this one the hardest, because its language is confusing and procedural (whereas Number Two “fast tracks projects,” and Number Three “simplifies review,” Number Four “creates a three-member Appeals Board.”), and because I exit-polled seventy voters at two different early voting sites this weekend and did not talk to a single person who voted Yes on Four and No on Two or Three. If Four passes, Two and Three are a lock to pass as well.
The polls provide a snapshot of the electorate about two weeks ago. I would guess (here come some vibes) that support has dropped since then, possibly by a lot. It is illegal for the City Council to use public resources to sway elections, but that has not stopped Speaker Adrienne Adams (who I inexplicably praised as a viable and desirable candidate for mayor only seven months ago) and her Council Members from spending more than $2 million on savage mailers that decry these ballot measures as an attack on “your POWER to demand that the city and developers invest in neighborhoods.” The City Council website links to another negative advocacy site, disguised as a nonpartisan explainer. And they’ve rallied a coalition of tenants rights organizations and high-profile unions to come out against the measures, which is surely a big reason that Mamdani has not announced his support. On the other side, Brad Lander, Mark Levine, Mamdani’s lead tenant advocate ally Cea Weaver, the principled, pragmatic leftists of Jacobin Magazine, and yours truly have all come out strongly in favor. But our message is not resonating as much. Anecdotally, if you are a young person in left-liberal circles doing frantic last minute research, and you text your friends for help, if they don’t send you my blog from last week, they are probably sending a TikTok from a comedian or local activist who wants to make sure that local grassroots organizations can fight City Hall and the evil developers.
The question is, how big a slice of the electorate do those people actually make up? They make up about 90% of the people in my life, but that’s a bad way to forecast an election. So let’s be a little more rigorous. Lange breaks the electorate down into eleven colorful groups. Because I’m a rookie at this, I’m going to stick to four.
Highly-Educated Elites in Manhattan and Brownstone Brooklyn
(“MSNBC Viewers”, “No Kings Marchers”, “The Capitalist Corridor”)
Expected Electorate Share: 25%
Did you know that Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson spent 26 straight weeks on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction Best Seller list? If you’re wondering who bought all those books, it’s these people. The YIMBY movement runs on the back of elite middle-aged liberals who listen to every episode of The Ezra Klein Show and are eager to slurp up gently contrarian, pleasantly counterintuitive insights that they can repeat to each other wisely at the office water cooler or on the benches of their kids’ favorite local playground.
And yet there is also a significant strain of small-c conservatism running through this group. Whether because of their aesthetic distaste for hulking glass monstrosities casting shadows over their handsome pre-war apartment buildings and brownstones, their allegiance to an earlier era of climate activism that prioritized preserving the natural world and opposing “development” above the implementation of large-scale green energy infrastructure, their (subconscious) class interests as homeowners who actually benefit quite a bit from the artificial scarcity of their most valuable asset, or their human impulse towards nostalgia; for all of these reasons, members of this group often find it difficult to accept that something new must be built in their backyard. I exit-polled an early voting site on the Upper East Side (more Capitalist Corridor than No Kings, although there were some of both), and found an even split of Yes and No voters for Ballot Measure Four. Team Yes is going to need to do a little better than that, maybe around 65% for Ballot Measure Four to prevail citywide.
The Commie Corridor
(“Jr.” and “Sr.”)
Expected Electorate Share: 30%
Okay, this is the young left-liberal voter caricature I drew up a few paragraphs ago. These voters care deeply about housing affordability, it’s why they’re so damn motivated to vote today. However, they too have an internal disagreement about how to get there. Some will be swayed by their local City Council Members, others by Brad Lander and co. (Brad is very popular among this group! Which is impressive!) I think the inclusion of the words “affordable housing” in all three ballot measures will have a slightly more positive effect on this group than on their elders, but then again, Ballot Measure Four especially is not written particularly well. When I exit-polled in Crown Heights this weekend (Mamdani +90, lol), one voter told me that he had voted no on Four because it created an additional three-person council and that “we don’t need anymore councils.” Ironically, a measure that aims to remove a procedural obstacle has been written to seem like it actually adds another one.
I don’t want to overstate this, though. Overall, Yes outnumbered No twenty-four to eleven among the voters I talked to. That’s a great sign. Ballot Measure Four will need to breakeven here in order to prevail citywide.
Republicans
(“Archie Bunker’s Descendants”, “Swing States”)
Estimated Electorate Share: 15%
Curtis Sliwa proudly opposes these ballot measures, just as he proudly opposes congestion pricing. So do his supporters in Staten Island, Bay Ridge, Marine Park, and parts of Queens that are so far north and east that I’m too nervous to even namecheck them in case they are secretly Google Maps Paper Towns meant to trick elitist posers like me. While the moderate Democrat homeowner on the Upper West Side may use innuendo and obfuscation to oppose an affordable housing development in his backyard, a Vicki Palidino-aligned Queens Republican has no need for this pretense. These people care about their parking spots, and they care about having control over the stability and continuity of their neighborhoods. They don’t want new neighbors and they certainly don’t want to subsidize their new neighbors’ housing.
The more recent, more ethnically diverse MAGA converts may be more amenable. These people play an outsized role in the mythmaking of the Mamdani campaign. Yesterday, in one of the very last appeals of the campaign, the campaign put out a video celebrating the one-year anniversary of the famous man-on-the-street Trump voter interviews that Zohran conducted in Fordham Road and Westchester Square in the Bronx after the 2024 election. People did complain about how housing had become too expensive in that original video, so some of them should be on the table for Team Yes. Still, I anticipate that No’s will clean up here. Ballot Measure Four needs 20% here in order to prevail citywide.
Outer Borough Multiracial Working Class
(Everyone Else)
Expected Electorate Share: 30%
This is the group that actually bears the brunt of the city’s housing crisis. While the Educated Elites worry about the Future Of The Democratic Party™, and the Commie Corridor nonprofit workers and grad students grumble about unexpected rent hikes forcing them to move incrementally further away from their college classmates who chose to work in finance and consulting instead, these people (who often have lived in their neighborhoods for generations) are simply getting priced out. They are watching their neighbors move to New Jersey suburbs, or the Sun Belt, and watching the Commie Corridor folks replace them.
I will confess that as a complete outsider to this group, my vibes really fail me here. Intuitively, it would make sense that many in this group are militantly anti-gentrification, highly skeptical of any external organization or city-agency coming in and trying to build a big shiny new project, and eager to cling to as many levels of local power as possible to fight that.
On the other hand, the Zenith poll shows, quite clearly, that nonwhite voters are actually significantly more supportive (80% of Black voters, 79% of Latino voters) of Ballot Measure Four than white voters (65%). That poll also found that Cuomo voters (many of whom belong to this group, though perhaps fewer than there were in the primary) support Ballot Measure Four by a net of fifty-five percentage points.
Finally, this group, more than any other, is an amalgamation of so many different diverse neighborhoods, ethnicities, and voter profiles that the whole project of coming up with a generalized overview feels impossible, and possibly irresponsible.
Nevertheless, it’s what’s called for in this exercise. So here we go. The Outer Borough Multiracial Working Class will decide this race, and Ballot Measure Four will need 55% Yes among them in order to prevail citywide.
Overall, I predict that Ballot Measure Four will clear these benchmarks by about 3-5% in each group, and will prevail 59-41.