To stop Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayor’s race, there can be only one anti-Mamdani candidate.

How many times must we encounter the collective-action problem before we wrap our hands around its fundamental contours? You cannot beat a major party nominee for high office — even one with relatively weak support — with nobody. And when you’re advocating “anybody but . . .” as an alternative to somebody, you might as well be supporting no one in particular.

Orthodox Democrats are taking some measure of the experience endured by establishmentarian Republicans over the last decade. “Our goal is anybody but Mamdani,” the real estate developer Marty Burger declared in an email to supporters obtained by the New York Times. Burger’s super PAC, New Yorkers for a Better Future, seeks to register anti-Mamdani voters, place anti-Mamdani advertisements, and boost anti-Mamdani “rivals” — plural — ahead of New York City’s general election for mayor.

As Times reporters Dana Rubinstein and Nicholas Fandos observed, however, it is “far from clear if the anti-Mamdani forces can find a successful path.” That conclusion is buttressed by a rare poll of the mayor’s race described to the Times journalists.

Among likely voters in November’s election, Zohran Mamdani wins a majority of the vote in a five-way race against former Governor Andrew Cuomo, incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, attorney Jim Walden, and the GOP nominee, Curtis Sliwa. He wins a larger share of the vote (55 percent) if Cuomo drops out. Without Adams in the race, Mamdani wins 51 percent of the vote. And, in a head-to-head matchup against either Adams or Cuomo, Mamdani earns 59 and 52 percent of the vote, respectively.

The Public Progress Solutions/Zenith Research survey found that Mamdani’s totals decline when the city’s population of registered voters is polled, but not enough to prevent the progressive candidate from emerging victorious.

Zenith co-founder Adam Carlson describes the scale of the challenge before “anybody” who attempts to emerge as the consensus anti-Mamdani candidate:

In addition, Carlson’s firm broke down the major candidates’ support among subgroups, some of which are so small in number that getting a representative sample of them is a dubious prospect. Still, it’s interesting data if you take it with a grain of salt:

If little else, this partisan polling does illustrate the scale of the challenge before “anybody.” If Burger’s forces are to succeed against the long odds they face, there can be only one anti-Mamdani candidate — and every one of the viable alternatives thinks he deserves that mantle. There will be no stopping Mamdani so long as his challengers believe that the only logical choice is for everyone else to drop out and rally around them.