The Civic Pulse — Issue #5

In 2004, Sean "P. Diddy" Combs launched Citizen Change, a voter turnout organization aimed at 18-to-30-year-olds. The slogan — stamped onto t-shirts, baseball caps, and an MTV blitz — was "Vote or Die."

That October, South Park skewered him for it. In the episode "Douche and Turd," a cartoon Diddy repeatedly chases Stan through the woods. It became one of the most quoted political satires of the decade, precisely because it sounded absurd.

Now, all joking aside, Diddy's personal legal situation today (he was convicted in July 2025 on federal prostitution-related charges and acquitted of racketeering) is separate from the question we're asking here. This piece is about the claim the slogan made: that young people's voting is decisive. Twenty-two years later, New York City just ran a real-world test.

Below is the full breakdown →

New York City's 2025 mayoral general election drew more than two million votes, the highest turnout in a city mayoral race since 1969. Overall turnout was roughly 39% of registered voters, and 735,317 New Yorkers cast early ballots, itself a non-presidential record.

For context, here's where turnout has sat for the last decade of city mayoral general elections:

Source: NYC Campaign Finance Board Voter Analysis Reports; NYC Board of Elections.

That is not a small move. The 2025 turnout was roughly double that of 2021.

The part of the data most relevant to the Diddy question is the 18-to-29 breakdown.

That is a ~2.5x increase in young-voter general-election participation over one cycle. CIRCLE's researchers called it one of the sharpest single-cycle youth turnout surges they've recorded in a major American city.

A few more data points worth sitting with:

Put differently: young New Yorkers did not simply show up in 2025. They showed up at roughly double their recent rate, they registered at roughly 10 points higher than the prior cycle, and they broke overwhelmingly for one candidate.

The fluke question

A common critique of Mamdani's win has been some version of: "He won because young progressives turned out once. They won't show up again." It is a testable claim. Here is what the data supports and what it doesn't:

What the data supports:

What the data doesn't support:

So: was the 2025 youth surge a fluke, or the new baseline? No one knows yet. The answer will come in the 2029 mayoral cycle and the off-year Council races in between. One data point we'll be tracking closely: whether newly-registered young voters from 2025 show up again when the top of the ballot is less galvanizing.

The South Park episode's premise was that telling people "vote or die" was silly because their vote didn't actually change anything, as evidenced by Stan refusing to vote; The choice was between a giant douche and a turd sandwich. It was a funny bit. It was also, in the context of a 2025 NYC mayoral race with a margin of roughly 150,000 votes and a youth-vote swing measured in the hundreds of thousands, empirically wrong for this cycle.

That does not make Diddy a prophet. It makes 2025 a cycle where the slogan, however cornily it was delivered in 2004, happened to describe what actually drove the outcome.

Whether you supported Mamdani, supported Cuomo, or sat it out, that is a useful thing to know. The electorate that elected this administration is not the electorate of 2021. Any analysis of the next four years’ budget fights, Council relationships, and the 2029 rematch has to start there.

Three markers we'll be tracking on the Promise Tracker and Civic Pulse:

1. The electorate changed — not just the turnout. It is tempting to treat 2025 as a turnout story. It was also a composition story. Young voters (18–29) made up a larger share of the electorate than in any recent mayoral cycle, new registrations skewed younger by 11 points compared to 2021, and early voting — once dominated by older cohorts — was nearly split evenly across generations. The people who voted in 2025 were not the same people who voted in 2021. That matters for every policy fight between now and 2029.

2. Youth turnout was necessary but not sufficient. Mamdani won by roughly 150,000 votes. The 18-to-29 surge accounts for a large share of that margin — but not all of it. Boomers still cast more early ballots than any other generation. Mamdani cleared one million total votes, something no mayoral candidate has done since 1969. Crediting the win to any single age group undersells what actually happened: a cross-generational coalition showed up at historically elevated rates across the board.

3. One cycle does not make a realignment. A 2.5x surge in youth turnout is remarkable. It is also exactly one data point. Municipal youth turnout has swung by 7+ points between cycles before. Whether 2025 was the start of a durable shift or a one-off spike driven by a uniquely galvanizing candidate is the single most important structural question hanging over NYC politics — and it won't be answerable until at least the 2027 Council primaries.