No, 1 in 11 New Yorkers will not move if Mamdani wins

The headline in the New York Post was characteristically cautious: “Nearly a million New Yorkers ready to flee NYC if Mamdani becomes mayor — possibly igniting mass exodus: poll.” Why the departure of almost a million of the city’s 8.4 million residents isn’t itself a mass exodus isn’t really explained in the article that follows, but, look. If the game is constantly ratcheting up the fear factor, you have to have somewhere to take the panic, right?

As someone within the fallout radius of the New York City mayoral race, it’s striking how much of the late-campaign rhetoric is centered on terrifying voters. My sons, aged 6 and 8, had never seen footage of the World Trade Center attack until this weekend when, during the World Series, an Andrew Cuomo ad used the footage to suggest that a Zohran Mamdani victory would somehow lead to a second such attack. You know, because “Muslim.” (That the actual mayor during that attack was an older Italian guy seems not to have occurred to Cuomo’s rabid ad team.)

The Post’s “nearly a million” story is based on a Daily Mail article that is itself derived from a poll completed for the tabloid by the firm J.L. Partners. Incidentally, the “nearly a million” is actually “at least 765,000 citizens,” according to the Daily Mail, a figure that is equivalent to 9 percent of the city’s population.

That 9 percent is the point, actually. According to the poll, that’s the percentage of all city residents who told the pollsters they would “definitely leave” if Mamdani is elected (as other polls suggest he will be). In other words, about 90 people told J.L. Partners they would absolutely, no-question move if Mamdani wins and that became “nearly a million” in New-York-Postese.

J.L. Partners isn’t a terrible pollster, earning a B/C grade in analysis from The Silver Bulletin earlier this year. It was, however, one of three pollsters that overestimated Republican support in the 2024 election cycle, which is perhaps not a surprise.

The problem here, really, is that you can’t extrapolate in the way that the Post and Daily Mail are extrapolating. Not because a poll of 1,000 people is too small to provide insights; it isn’t. But because it’s much, much easier to say “I will definitely move” than it is to actually move.

Consider, for example, that one-fifth of respondents from Staten Island said they would definitely leave the city. No, they won’t! They already barely live in New York City as it is. One percent of Mamdani voters are definitely going to move if he wins? I have to say that that seems a bit incongruous.

There have certainly been moments in the city’s past when people have actually packed up and left. There was a period of stagnation in the mid-1900s that became an exodus during the tumultuous 1970s. More recently, a big chunk of New Yorkers moved out during the coronavirus pandemic, as people were literally dying in the streets.

The covid-inspired departures made up only about 5 percent of the city’s population. The departures during the 1970s made up about 10 percent. (Notice that Staten Island didn’t lose a significant number of residents during the pandemic — and gained residents during the 1970s.) The Post/Daily Mail would have us believe that what’s looming is an exodus akin to the Bronx-is-burning era — simply if Mamdani wins.

Perhaps, if he wins, the city will see the sort of collapse that drove people away in the 1970s. Perhaps some chunk of those saying they’ll leave are certain that it will. But it seems far, far more likely that those people are claiming that they will move are simply making a political statement about their opposition to Mamdani and to Mamdani-esque politics than they are actually planning to leave.

If they did leave, it seems extremely safe to assume that the sudden glut of available rental units (and the accompanying price drop) would lead to a rapid repopulation. There are a lot of reasons that New Yorkers live in New York and there are a lot of reasons that non-New Yorkers want to live there. One reason many don’t is that there simply isn’t enough affordable housing for them to do so. If 8 percent of Brooklyn and 6 percent of Manhattan suddenly leaves (as this polls asserts), I’m very confident that there would be a lot of rental applications in short order.

On social media, the New York Post shared an image they apparently made, showing Wall Street executives wearing cowboy hats over a quote from another executive declaring that “you don’t sacrifice anything by being in Dallas versus being in New York.”

If that were true, a lot of those executives would already live in Dallas, a city with one-sixth the population of New York. But they don’t. They live in New York. And I’m pretty sure that the transition most of them are about to make is from sitting at expensive Tribeca restaurants and loudly complaining about the dire policy possibilities that would accompany a Mamdani victory to sitting in those same restaurants a year from now, loudly complaining about the policies themselves.

Photo: A street scene in New York City. (Eden, Janine and Jim on Flickr, shared under Creative Commons license)