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Early voting for Mamdani's old Assembly seat kicks off Saturday
By
Brigid Bergin
Published Jan 23, 2026
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Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images
By
Brigid Bergin
Published Jan 23, 2026
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Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s old Assembly seat in Queens won’t remain empty much longer.
Early voting is set to begin Saturday in a trio of special elections across New York City, including one for the 36th Assembly District Mamdani left behind when he took over City Hall at the start of the year.
Two other state legislative seats in Manhattan are also up for grabs: the 47th Senate district — which runs along the Hudson River from the Meatpacking District near 14th Street through the Upper West Side — and the 74th Assembly District, which runs along the East River from Alphabet City to Kips Bay.
Normally there are nine consecutive days of early voting in New York before an official election day. Early voting sites will open at 9 a.m. on Saturday. But due to the menacing snowstorm in the forecast, Gov. Kathy Hochul declared a state of emergency and suspended early voting on Sunday and Monday.
Vincent Ignizio, deputy executive director of the New York City Board of Elections, said the city will add additional hours the following weekend to recover some of the lost time. Information will be updated throughout the week at vote.nyc.
The special election date is Tuesday, Feb. 3. The winners can take office once the results of each race are certified, which in many cases takes several weeks.
The most contentious race of the bunch is for Mamdani’s old seat. Democratic and Working Families Party candidate Diana Moreno, who was also endorsed by Mamdani and the New York Democratic Socialists of America, is running against Rana Abdelhamid, who’s running on a party line called “Queens for All”. Mary Jobaida, who describes herself as a “mother, educator and organizer,” will run on the “People First” line.
Abdelhamid is a community organizer who in 2022 mounted a congressional bid challenging former Rep. Carolyn Maloney, but suspended it after her redistricting changed her district lines, splitting the Queens portion of the district between Reps. Nydia Velázquez and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Velázquez, who announced her retirement late last year, has endorsed Abdelhamid for the Astoria seat. The endorsement highlights a further fallout between her and Mamdani after the mayor endorsed Claire Valdez in the race to fill Velázquez’s own congressional seat. She has endorsed Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso.
Both Manhattan seats are open after the previous holders were elected to new offices in November. Former state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal was elected Manhattan borough president, while former Assemblymember Harvey Epstein was elected to the City Council.
The Manhattan district races have also garnered less attention since there is a well-known Democratic candidate vying for each one of the seats in predominantly Democratic districts.
For the West Side state Senate seat, City Councilmember Erik Bottcher is on the Democratic and Working Families party lines. His current Council district overlaps with the southern portion of the state Senate district. Bottcher is running against Republican Charlotte Friedman.
In the East Side Assembly district, former City Councilmember Keith Powers, whose former Council district also overlaps with the state Senate seat he hopes to win, is running against Joseph Foley, who is on the Republican and Conservative party lines.
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manhattan
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Brigid Bergin
Brigid Bergin is an award-winning senior reporter on the People and Power desk. She is fiercely committed to telling stories that help people engage and support democracy. In 2022, she hosted a live, ten-week call-in politics show ahead of the midterm elections called The People's Guide to Power. Brigid's reporting in 2017 included some of the first coverage of a political newcomer now known as AOC. In 2016, she broke the news of a voter purge in Brooklyn just days before New York’s presidential primary, triggering city, state and federal investigations. Brigid also guest hosts The Brian Lehrer Show and All Of It. She graduated from the University at Albany and the CUNY Newmark School of Journalism. Got a tip? Email [email protected] or Signal 917-723-4719.
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