Democratic-Socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani kicked off the final day of his whirlwind campaign early Monday morning, before sunrise, as he seeks to become New York City's first Muslim mayor and, at 34, the youngest in the last century. Hours later, a not-so-unexpected guest, US President Donald Trump, entered the final stretch with his endorsement of Mamdani's main rival, former Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is second in the polls.

Accompanied by dozens of supporters, union members, workers, and elected city officials, Mamdani set off in the early hours of the morning from Brooklyn to City Hall across the Brooklyn Bridge. In another of the dramatic moves by a politician who has mastered mobilizing voters with his style—a blend of charisma in face-to-face interactions and social media savvy—the group marched behind a banner that read “Our time has come,” chanting “Tax the rich.”

Once in Manhattan, Mamdani gave a speech of about seven minutes in which he repeated the essential points of his proposal, among which three stand out: a four-year freeze on rents in rent-controlled apartments, free daycare for children up to five years old, and free urban buses for their users.

With that platform, Mamdani won comfortably in the primaries last June, and he leads in all the polls leading up to Tuesday's election, in which polling stations will close at 9:00 p.m. local time, after more than a week of record-breaking early voting. Pollsters give him a near 100% chance of winning, but a last-minute upset cannot be ruled out.

One of the major debates in recent hours is the size of the lead attributed to him. Some polls give him a double-digit advantage over his main rival, an Italian-American politician, the son of another governor, Mario Cuomo, who represents the old guard and spent decades in positions of power until he resigned in 2021 following a sexual abuse scandal.

The third wheel

Right-wing media outlets, especially The New York Post, the battering ram of Rupert Murdoch's conservative empire in the city, which has been on attack against Mamdani for months, have seized upon polls in recent hours showing Cuomo narrowing the gap with the frontrunner, also to the detriment of the third contender, conservative candidate Curtis Sliwa, who lacks the support of the Republican Party. Sliwa has refused to step aside, as many have urged him to do, in order to prevent the rise to power of a politician who declares himself a socialist, but whom Trumpism labels a communist in an attempt to scare off voters.

This Monday, Cuomo toured the city's five boroughs to scrape together every possible vote. He also received the perhaps poisoned endorsement of Trump. The day before, Trump had hinted at it in an interview with CBS. After 5:00 p.m. on a day when his Truth Social account, a social network he owns, was abuzz with all sorts of somewhat incomprehensible messages praising the work of members of his party, Trump wrote: “A vote for Sliwa is a vote for Mamdani (He looks much better without his beret!),” referring to the conservative candidate's distinctive aesthetic attribute. “Whether you like him personally or not, there's no choice. He [Cuomo] is capable. Mamdani, not!”

Trump's endorsement of Cuomo, a native New Yorker, in a city where he is quite unpopular, came at the end of a message in which the president repeated his constant attacks on the socialist candidate, whom he called a"communist," even though the latter denies it, and even though he has not yet shown any signs of being one, and threatened to leave the federal funds that Washington gives to New York at the"minimum necessary."

“With a communist in charge, the situation can only get worse, and as president, I don’t want to continue wasting money. It is my duty to govern the nation, and I am firmly convinced that New York City will be a complete economic and social disaster if Mamdani wins. His principles have been tested for over a thousand years, and they have never succeeded. I would much rather have a Democrat with a track record of success win than an inexperienced communist with a history of utter failure,” he argued.

Trump's endorsement didn't seem to sit well with Cuomo, who, before the Republican published his post, hung up on a host of a popular radio show live on air after the host asked him a question about it. Mamdani's campaign spent the entire day criticizing that endorsement.

The pressure on New Yorkers from the Trump side continued unabated throughout the day. In a message on his social media platform, X, Elon Musk told his nearly 230 million followers to remember “that a vote for Curtis [Sliwa] is really a vote for Mumdini or whatever his name is.” “VOTE CUOMO!”

As for Texas Governor Gregg Abbott, he threatened to"impose a 100% tariff on anyone coming from New York once the polls close."

Everything indicates that Abbott's threat, which no one was clear on how he planned to carry out, is clearly illegal. But it could have consequences if a poll published by the Daily Mail and conducted by a polling firm called J. L. Partners proves accurate. According to the poll, almost 9% of New York City's population will leave if Mamdani wins.

Musk's endorsement, for its part, bolstered the arguments of Mamdani's campaign supporters, who number around 100,000 volunteers. Many of the socialist candidate's voters chose him over the former governor because they believe the latter is beholden to the economic powers that panicked when Mamdani won the primaries. Musk is the most powerful man in the world.