Mamdani earned a bare majority – 50.39% or a little over one million votes – in the three-way mayoral contest against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and GOP nominee Curtis Sliwa.

During a Politico interview, Mamdani acknowledged nearly half of voters didn’t end up supporting him and promised to be the mayor of “every New Yorker, whether they voted for another candidate, or, frankly, whether they didn’t vote at all.”

He appeared to argue the massive 2 million-voter turnout bolstered his claim of a mandate.

“I am proud to be the next mayor, having received more than a million votes in an election which saw turnout the likes of which we hadn’t seen since 1969,” he said.

“And I’m glad that this was an election that saw a far greater number of New Yorkers seeing themselves in our democracy and in the policies and the proposals that have been put forward over the last year.”

Mamdani singled out childcare and freezing the rent on regulated apartments as two promises he aimed to tackle in his first year.

Gov. Kathy Hochul has signaled she wants to work with Mamdani on achieving his $6 billion universal childcare plan in 2026 – a shared priority that the democratic socialist told Gothamist is in the works.

“We will be building out a timeline to fulfill our commitment for universal childcare and to do so by not only reckoning with the ways in which the (Eric) Adams’ administration has made it harder to afford raising a child in the city, but also by going beyond that to the final point of having every child from six weeks to five years of age receiving that childcare,” he said.