For a second time in New York City, a Democratic mayoral nomination has been decided by ranked choice voting. Once all the second, third, fourth and fifth preferences of voters were counted up, the results revealed Tuesday came down to 56% for Zohran Mamdani and 44% for Andrew Cuomo.

There are always “ifs” to wonder about. Had Mamdani faced Cuomo under the old system, would the results have been the same? Before ranked choice was introduced, the rule was that if no candidate won 40% in the primary, a runoff would be held two weeks later.

Mamdani got 43% of the first-place votes. Strategizing over ranked choice makes it unclear how he’d have done under the old method. In that scenario, Cuomo could have had the chance to spend more, to focus an ad blitz on smashing one opponent, to galvanize alarm, and to do the kind of retail campaigning he was shunning.

Second-place finishers could sometimes win runoffs. In 2001, primary day had been scheduled for Sept. 11. In the postponed Democratic contest, Fernando Ferrer landed first that year, Mark Green second. Green ended up winning the one-on-one runoff, before Republican Michael Bloomberg won the general election, his first ever.

Circumstance made that election a City Hall shocker of a different kind. Now, for Democrats across the state and nation, the political implications of Mamdani’s rise surpass even his profile as an avowed socialist and Ugandan-born Muslim who expresses solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and makes municipal promises unlikely to be fulfilled.

Mamdani is just one of 150 Assembly members, first elected in 2020 in a primary upset against a decadelong Queens incumbent. He has beaten an almost-three-term ex-governor who highhandedly ruled the state party before resigning in 2021. For the powers that be in Albany’s Democratic pecking order, it’s as if, on a national level, socialist Bernie Sanders had bested Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden for the presidential nomination.

Gov. Kathy Hochul is undoubtedly keeping tabs on how Mamdani’s rise will play out elsewhere in the state. Currently. she polls ahead of Republican candidates. But Mamdani becomes a statewide GOP target.

Everyone knows City Hall in New York is nothing like the U.S. Capitol, especially these days, especially under the grip of GOP President Donald Trump. As for controversial policy stances, Mamdani’s victory was locked down the very day that the Senate narrowly approved a massive Trump budget bill that right-wing populists might ultimately have as much reason to detest as do lefty Democrats.

Trump has already had a hand in the mayor’s race. Reminder: Mayor Eric Adams might not have been on the ballot at all if the new president had not intervened in an unprecedented way and prodded his Justice Department to squelch a major corruption case against him. “I helped him out a little bit,” Trump said Tuesday. What degree of support can GOP candidate Curtis Sliwa now expect from Trump?

The president’s low threat Tuesday to have Mamdami deported if his city doesn’t accommodate ICE can only motivate the new nominee’s supporters in the five boroughs.

Contacted for comment, Mark Green, now 80, marveled at the idea that Mamdani, whom he’d barely heard of months ago, would beat Cuomo, who issued a statement from his campaign that concluded: “We’ll be continuing conversations with people from all across the city while determining next steps.”

Twenty-five years ago, Bob Dylan released the song “Things Have Changed” with the lyric, “People are crazy and times are strange.” In New York as elsewhere, that’s still relevant.

Columnist Dan Janison’s opinions are his own.