In the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, Andrew Cuomo tried to run a campaign of inevitability. In these last few weeks of his general election bid as an independent, he is running a campaign of attrition, hoping to get enough voters to come to him through battered acquiescence as the choice they’re least unhappy with.

That isn’t the usual formula for a winning campaign. But this remains a strange race, with all the New Yorkers who don’t like Cuomo personally or politically overlapping at times with all the New Yorkers who can’t stomach Zohran Mamdani’s proud democratic socialism and opposition to Zionism, as well as all the New Yorkers struggling to see GOP nominee Curtis Sliwa as anything other than the wacky local character he’s spent a lifetime being.

For Mamdani, though, these final few weeks are less about winning — he and most outside observers believe he’s in good shape to — and more about how much he wins by. He could be elected mayor with a vote percentage in the mid-40s, which is where he’s been registering in most polls, but even committed aides worry that not getting at least 50 percent would complicate governing and winning the tax hikes he needs out of the state government, let alone asserting the dominance over the broader Democratic Party direction he is already claiming to have won.

“In order for the Mamdani administration to deliver on the platform, we need to demonstrate that the voters are with this agenda,” said Gustavo Gordillo, the co-chair of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, and a central supporter. “So we need a decisive victory.”

For Sliwa, meanwhile, it’s all about holding on to hope that there are enough Republican voters in this split Democrat