Prediction platform Kalshi believes Democrat nominee Zohran Mamdani has a 90% chance to win the New York City mayoral election on Tuesday.
The platform reported more than $90 million in trading volume at noon Eastern on the day of the election.
Key Takeaways
- Mamdani beat Cuomo in the primary by 12.8 percentage points.
- Kalshi users in NYC and in New York are showing more support for Cuomo.
- Younger traders and those risking less money are the ones heavily supporting Mamdani at Kalshi.
Despite their recent foray into sports contracts, prediction platforms are well-known for allowing their users to buy and sell contracts related to the outcome of political events.
Kalshi, the leading prediction markets platform, has Mamdani listed at a 90% chance of winning the election at the time of writing. Independent Andrew Cuomo, who gathered 43.6% of votes during the Democratic primary to Mamdani’s 56.4%, is second in New York City mayoral election odds with a 10% likelihood.
Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, has less than a 1% chance. A Republican NYC mayor hasn’t been elected since Michael Bloomberg, who served from Jan. 1, 2002 until Dec. 31, 2013.
Mamdani has been a heavy favorite for more than a year, only briefly dropping below 70% likelihood in July and mostly staying above 80% likelihood.
Despite the outward appearance, Kalshi reported that Cuomo has serious support from in-state traders. Their data, reported on Monday, showed that NYC users gave Cuomo a 49% chance to win the election, compared to Mamdani’s 40%. New York users as a whole were 11% more confident in Cuomo than they were in Mamdani.
Kalshi shared that Mamdani’s support has largely come from out-of-state traders at a 58% to 33% difference.
BREAKING: Cuomo holds significantly more support inside of NYC than Mamdani, per Kalshi data. pic.twitter.com/CNW0nvlEQp
— Kalshi (@Kalshi) November 3, 2025
Local traders favor Cuomo over Mamdani
Manhattan traders, who are in Cuomo’s base, are 57-36% in favor of the Independent. Mamdani leads in Queens, 54% to 33%, and in Brooklyn, 46% to 42%.
Staten Island traders are backing Cuomo, 42% to 27%, while users in the Bronx are split at 36%.
Mamdani backers are also much younger on average, following the same trend established during the summer primary. A huge 67% of Mamdani traders are 18-34, 16% higher than the total reported for Cuomo.
Meanwhile, only 11% of the Mamdani crowd is 45 or older.
Building on that, Mamdani traders have the lowest mean ($1,537) and median ($29) trading positions of the three candidates. Cuomo’s mean ($1,625) and median ($200), as well as Sliwa’s mean ($3,920) and median ($467) are much higher.
What’s at stake?
More than 735,000 votes were submitted during New York City’s nine-day early in-person voting window. That’s over four times more than the total reported during the 2021 election, which was the only other mayoral race with that type of voting.
Nearly every recent poll has suggested that the 34-year-old Mamdani will become the first muslim mayor of New York ahead of Cuomo, a former New York Governor, and the former chair of the New York Reform Party.
Incumbent mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, had planned to seek re-election, but announced that he had dropped out of the race following repeat poor polling performances.
