Updates: Mamdani wins New York City mayoral race; Cuomo concedes

Thank you for joining our coverage.

You can read our comprehensive news story about Mamdani’s win here as well as an analysis of what it could mean for the Democratic Party’s future here.

For more on California’s Proposition 50, go here.

We will be closing our live page soon. Here’s a recap of the Election Day’s events:

• Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, has been elected mayor of New York City after defeating independent candidate Andrew Cuomo, a former governor of New York state.
• Mamdani’s victory signifies a series of firsts. He’s the city’s first Muslim mayor, the first of South Asian heritage and the first born in Africa.
• In Virginia and New Jersey, moderate Democrats Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill won elections for governor, defeating their Republican rivals with commanding leads.
• In California, voters approved Proposition 50, a measure that will redraw congressional maps for the next three election cycles, adding as many as five Democratic-held seats to the US Congress. It was put on the ballot in response to Texas redrawing its own map to elect more Republicans.
• Top Democrats have celebrated the results as a major victory over President Donald Trump.

Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister of diaspora affairs and combating anti-Semitism, has launched a scathing attack on the New York mayor-elect, accusing him of holding views that are “not far” from those of the perpetrators of the September 11, 2001, attacks in the US.

“A supporter of Hamas, someone whose views are not far from those of the fanatic jihadists who murdered three thousand people 25 years ago,” Chikli said in a post on X, describing Mamdani’s election as a “critical turning point” for New York.

Avigdor Liberman, chairman of the Yisrael Beytenu opposition party, likewise accused Mamdani of supporting Hamas,

“Just three decades after the Twin Towers disaster, New York has elected a racist, populist, and openly Shiite Islamist as its mayor,” Liberman said on X.

The two men did not provide evidence for their claims that Mamdani supports Hamas.

Mamdani, a strident critic of Israel’s war in Gaza, has not publicly expressed support for Hamas and has described the Palestinian group’s October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel as a “horrific war crime”.

Mamdani attracted a firestorm of criticism last month, however, when he declined to directly answer a question about whether Hamas should lay down its arms during an interview with Fox News.

“I don’t really have opinions about the future of Hamas and Israel beyond the question of justice and safety and the fact that anything has to abide by international law, and that applies to Hamas, that applies to the Israeli military and that applies to anyone you could ask me about,” he said.

Trump’s weak approval ratings appear to have helped Democrats across a variety of races, exit polls conducted for CNN suggest.

Majorities of voters disapproved of Trump’s performance in New York, California, Virginia and New Jersey – all states where Democrats scored big wins, according to pollster SSRS.

In New York, where Mamdani was elected as the city’s first Muslim mayor, Trump is viewed favourably by just 26 percent of voters, according to the polling.

Voters also expressed a more positive view of Democrats than Republicans in all four of the states.

The Associated Press news agency is reporting that the Democratic incumbent, Jacob Frey, is leading challenger Omar Fateh in the mayoral race in Minnesota’s largest city.

But the 15-candidate race has moved into a second round of counting after no candidate secured an outright majority.

The way ranked-choice voting works in Minneapolis, if no candidate clears the 50 percent-plus-one threshold in the first round, candidates with the fewest votes are eliminated from the next round of counting while second- and third-choice rankings are allocated to the surviving candidates, AP reported.

The process is repeated until one candidate meets the threshold.

Frey is a mainstream Democrat seeking a third term while Fateh is a democratic socialist hoping to become the city’s first Muslim and Somali American mayor.

Dickens, who has been mayor of Georgia’s largest city since 2022, was easily re-elected in a four-way race, one of many strong performances by Democrats on Tuesday.

The Associated Press called the race for Dickens less than 15 minutes after voting had finished.

The US government shutdown has now entered its 36th day, making it the longest in the country’s history.

Hundreds of thousands of federal workers have been sent home or are continuing to work without pay as Congress has failed to pass a spending measure.

The impact is spreading nationwide with food assistance for about 42 million Americans now disrupted.

Trump is set to meet on Wednesday for breakfast with Republican senators, but no talks have been scheduled with the Democrats, who are demanding healthcare subsidy funding as part of any spending bill. The Associated Press news agency is reporting that expectations are high that the logjam could break once election results are fully tallied in Tuesday’s elections.

Earlier, Trump had suggested that the poor showing for Republicans was down to his not being on the ballot as well as the ongoing shutdown.

California Governor Gavin Newsom says the election wins for Democrats show the party is “in its ascendancy”.

He made the comments while speaking to reporters after Californians passed Proposition 50

“What a night for the Democratic Party, a party that is in its ascendancy – a party, that’s on its toes, no longer on its heels,” he said.

“We’re proud here in California to be part of this narrative this evening. We’re proud of the work that the people of the state of California did tonight to send a powerful message to an historic president. Donald Trump is an historic president. He is the most historically unpopular president in modern history. In every critical category, Donald Trump is underwater,” he added.

As we’ve been reporting, the approval of Proposition 50 gives Democrats a shot at winning as many as five additional seats in the US House, just enough to blunt Texas Republicans’ move to redraw their own maps to pick up five Republican seats at Trump’s urging.

Reuters has been getting the reaction of Wall Street to Mamdani’s win.

Mamdani, who describes himself as a democratic socialist, has proposed raising the state corporation tax and hiking income taxes on New Yorkers who earn more than $1m annually, causing jitters among the city’s financial elite.

Tim Ghriskey, a senior portfolio strategist at Ingalls & Snyder, told Reuters that Mamdani’s victory will be “an interesting experiment”.

“We’ll see how much he tries to really change New York City and how he is accepted,” he said.

Phil Blancato, chief market strategist at Osaic, told Reuters he was concerned about Mamdani’s tax plans, even though he could sympathise with concerns about the unaffordability of life in New York.

“When I look at the economics around the cost of living in New York City and when a one-bedroom apartment in New York City is $5,000 a month, that’s unsustainable,” Blancato said.

“And whether the rhetoric around what can be done or can’t be done is true or not, that’s the reason for this kind of … victory in New York City. But when you think about the increase in taxes at the small-business level, corporate level … that has a significant impact.”

A year ago, Zohran Mamdani was a political nobody, and now he’s been elected as the mayor of New York in a historic victory that’s grabbed attention around the world.

The Democrat defeated independent candidate Andrew Cuomo, former governor of New York state, and Republican contender Curtis Sliwa.

Watch our video report below:

Democrats have held onto a US House of Representatives seat in Texas, continuing the party’s winning streak in Tuesday’s elections. The party just doesn’t know which of its candidates will hold the seat.

Amanda Edwards and Christian Menefee, both Democrats, will face off in a run-off in Texas’s 18th Congressional District next year after the candidates took the top two spots in the 16-candidate race and failed to win a majority of votes.

The race for the seat, which covers much of inner city Houston, was prompted by the death of Democratic Representative Sylvester Turner in March.

With about two-thirds of ballots counted, Menefee had won about 30 percent of the votes while Edwards had about 26 percent, according to The New York Times.

About 91 percent of the votes cast in New York’s mayoral race have been counted.

Mamdani won 50.4 percent of the vote while Cuomo won 41.6 percent.

This translates to 1,036,051 votes to 854,995, according to provisional results.

Sliwa won 7.1 percent, or 146,137 votes.

The election of Spanberger and Sherrill in Virginia and New Jersey means that a record 14 of the 50 US states will have female governors next year.

The pair will be joining Kay Ivey of Alabama, Katie Hobbs of Arizona, Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas, Kim Reynolds of Iowa, Laura Kelly of Kansas, Janet Mills of Maine, Maura Healey of Massachusetts, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, Kathy Hochul of New York and Tina Kotek of Oregon.

Earlier, Hillary Clinton, a former Democratic presidential candidate, said Democratic women “have made history tonight”.

“Abigail Spanberger will be the first female governor of Virginia. Mikie Sherrill will be the first female Democratic governor of New Jersey. I’m looking forward to seeing these strong, dedicated leaders deliver for their states,” she wrote.

As Zohran Mamdani delivered his acceptance speech on Tuesday night before cheering supporters, he was flanked by his parents — father Mahmood Mamdani and mother Mira Nair.

Mahmood Mamdani, 79, was born in Mumbai, India, but grew up in Uganda, where his son Zohran was also born. A veteran anthropologist, Mahmood is a professor at Columbia University and continues to maintain links with universities in Uganda.

Nair, 68, is a celebrated filmmaker who has delivered multiple crossover hits touching on India’s evolution into a modern society and the identity struggles of its vast diaspora. Her best-known films include the Denzel Washington-starrer Mississippi Masala and the 2001 classic, Monsoon Wedding.

Mississippi Masala was set against the backdrop of the expulsion of South Asians from Uganda under Idi Amin, an exodus in which her husband was also caught up, in 1972. Monsoon Wedding explored child sexual abuse within traditional Indian families, a subject that was largely taboo at the time.

In a message posted on X, London Mayor Sadiq Khan has congratulated Mamdani for his “historic campaign” in the New York City mayoral race.

“New Yorkers faced a clear choice – between hope and fear – and just like we’ve seen in London – hope won,” Khan wrote, congratulating Mamdani on “his historic campaign”.

Khan had also made history in the UK in 2016 by becoming the first Muslim and first ethnic minority mayor of London.

We have Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s reaction to Mamdani’s win.

“As we know, President Trump has threatened New York City if we dare stand up for him. The people of New York came together, and we said, ‘You don’t threaten New York’,” she said.

“And we’re gonna step up, and we’re going to make sure that we get baby boxes to every parent. And we are going to try to make healthcare more affordable. And we will bring down the costs of groceries, and we’re not going to state – we’re going [to] stand up to bullies and thugs in the White House. And that’s what our target [is] today. But it’s going to take every single one of us as New Yorkers. It’s not – say it and forget it. It’s not – elect a mayor and let him do it. It’s going [to] take all of us,” she added.

The Democratic wins in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races are a very important victory for the party.

Abigail Spanberger is making history in Virginia.

She’s going to be the very first female governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Now, she was expected to win because she had a much better financed race and she was ahead in the polls.

Democrats are now going to see if they can gain more support in the state’s House of Delegates. If they are able to do so, that will send a message to Republicans that this could be the direction that voters will go in the midterms next year when members of Congress are up for re-election.

New Jersey is also very interesting.

The polls showed that this was going to be a close race between Mikie Sherrill and Jack Ciattarelli, a conservative radio host who had the full-throated backing of President Trump. But the vote showed it really wasn’t.

So members of Congress are going to go through how different people voted and how many people voted to see what it means for them in the coming midterms.