From Coney Island to the Bronx, the candidates in New York City’s mayoral race spent Monday crisscrossing the five boroughs in a final, frenzied day of campaigning on the eve of Election Day.

As candidates made their final pitches to voters, US President Donald Trump urged New Yorkers to cast their ballots for former governor Andrew Cuomo over Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa in an effort to defeat Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, who is widely predicted to win the race. The president posted that voters “really have no choice.”

The campaign hurtled toward its end after more than 735,000 votes were cast during the city’s nine days of early, in-person voting — more than four times the number of ballots cast during the only other mayor’s race to allow early voting, in 2021.

The tally was well short of the nearly 1.1 million early, in-person votes cast during last year’s presidential election, but some voting locations saw large crowds Sunday, the last day of early voting. The line at one polling place in downtown Brooklyn snaked around the building and, at one point, took an hour to cast a ballot.

Cuomo’s schedule was packed on Monday, with stops in each of the boroughs for a get-out-the-vote effort. He wasted little time in attacking Mamdani. At one early stop, the former governor likened a potential Mamdani administration to left-wing governments in Latin America.

“Socialism didn’t work in Venezuela. Socialism didn’t work in Cuba. Socialism is not going to work in New York City,” he said.

Cuomo, 67, is trying to make his return to political office after resigning as governor four years ago following a barrage of sexual harassment accusations that he denies. A Democrat running as an independent, he’s shifted to wooing Republican voters to bolster his centrist base, pitching himself as the only candidate who can stop Mamdani.

Mamdani kicked off the day by crossing the Brooklyn Bridge at........

© The Times of Israel