Gov. Kathy Hochul and Congressman Lee Zeldin will begin to learn what verdict New York voters have rendered on their fates when the polls close at 9 p.m., ending the hottest statewide election in a generation.
Hochul spent most of the last week campaigning hard in New York City, attempting to boost turnout across the heavily Democratic five boroughs as polls showed Zeldin consolidating support from Republicans and independent voters.
New York City is home to 4.7 million voters and the Democrats have only lost one gubernatorial election when at least 1.5 million voters here turn out: 1994 as Mario Cuomo sought his fourth term against George Pataki.
Democratic gubernatorial candidates Eliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo won at least 76 percent of the vote in New York City in 2006, 2010 and 2018.
That allowed them rack up raw leads of more than 800,000 votes, a number that simply overwhelmed their Republican opponents.
Follow the Post’s up-to-the-minute coverage of Election Day 2022:
- Midterm Elections 2022 live updates: Results and more from around the US
- NY Election Day live updates: Hochul-Zeldin governor race, others
- 2022 midterm election results map: Live updates from across US
- New York elections live results map: Governor, senate and house races
Mario only got 67 percent of the vote in New York and came out of the city with a 637,000-vote edge, which Pataki topped with commanding performances in the suburbs and upstate.
The city Board of Elections reported at 6 p.m. that New York City’s early and Election Day vote tallies had crossed the 1.4 million threshold with three hours of voting left — putting it on pace to easily exceed the 1.5 million vote threshold.
That tally does not include the nearly 220,000 absentee ballots that had been mailed so far, more than half of which had been returned to the BOE by Monday. All absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day will be counted.
Zeldin’s campaign will be looking to cut into the significant margins that Hochul is likely to rack up in New York City and then to counteract them with a massive surge in votes from the Big Apple’s more conservative suburbs.
They’ll take comfort in the early partial turnout reports from Nassau County. Nearly 215,000 people voted there over the first nine-plus hours of voting on Tuesday.
If that rate holds, Election Day turnout would be expected to hit approximately 350,000 votes cast total.
The figure grows to approximately 530,000 votes cast when the absentee ballots and early votes are included in the county — potentially exceeding the turnout in the county in 2018, during the last gubernatorial election, in which 508,000 were cast.
Here are some numbers to keep an eye on as the night progresses:
- The closer overall New York City turnout gets to 2 million votes, the better for the Democrats
- Democrats will look to net an edge of at least 800,000 votes out of New York City to build a substantial edge against an expected surge for Republicans in the suburbs. That’s what they got in 2006 and 2010.
- Zeldin acknowledges he needs to get at least 30 percent of the vote in the five boroughs to compete — but probably needs more, per a Post analysis.