Forget Miami Beach — think Cleveland as your escape route from life in New York City under a Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

That’s the pitch from Vivek Ramaswamy, running to be the next governor of Ohio. He’s put up a billboard in Times Square wooing frightened New Yorkers to the Buckeye State.

Take a deep breath, New Yorkers. We don’t need Ohio as our Mamdani emergency exit.

The best remedy is to turn out and vote in November.

Many New Yorkers alarmed by Mamdani’s Marxist convictions, defund-the-police history and anti-Israel rhetoric seem convinced he’s impossible to beat.

With so many general election candidates — Republican Curtis Sliwa, Mayor Eric Adams, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and others — splitting the anti-Mamdani vote, the thinking goes, the socialist’s victory is inevitable.

That’s wrong: Mamdani can be defeated by surging voter turnout, even if all the candidates stay in the race.   

A look at history proves it.

In 1989, 60% of New York City’s registered voters turned out for a hotly contested mayoral election, and four years later, turnout reached 57%. 

But in 2021, it sank to a pathetic 21%.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Mamdani understood that instead of fighting for the biggest share of a small number of voters, the way to win is to expand the electorate.

For the June primary, he focused on voter registration: In the two weeks before the deadline, some 37,000 new voters joined the rolls, 10 times the usual number in that time period.

Then, Mamdani’s army of enthusiastic door-knockers helped drive the largest mayoral-primary turnout in New York’s history.   

Beating Mamdani at his own game with aggressive field operations and voter-registration efforts is possible, even in a crowded field.

Here’s the math.

If November’s turnout increases to 50%, whichever candidate tops 582,330 votes — that’s 50% of registered voters divided among the four candidates — wins.

That number — 582,300 — is 120,000 more votes than Mamdani got in Round 1 of the primary.

So he’d have a shot, but his victory would not be inevitable.

Young voters were the lion’s share of Mamdani’s primary support, and they are notoriously unreliable: In 2021 almost half of primary voters ages 18 to 29, and a third of those between 30 and 39, failed to come back and cast ballots in the general election.  

With young voters, it’s kiss and goodbye, while older primary voters reliably turn out to vote again in the general.

Driving turnout to 60% — standard in the five boroughs in presidential election years — makes the minimum number of votes to win higher, and the prospect of beating Mamdani easier. 

Presidential-level turnout is a plausible goal, because Mamdani’s upset victory in the Democratic primary is generating national press coverage and an epidemic of local angst — just what’s needed to push people to the polls.

Is surging turnout still possible with the election a mere four months away? Absolutely.

Mamdani came from nowhere to triumph in the June primary. An Emerson College poll in late February put Cuomo in the lead with 33% of the vote, Adams with 10% and Mamdani barely registering with 1%. 

Four months later, he took 43.5% of the votes in the first round.

Just as Mamdani went after the youth vote, his opponents need to analyze where the city’s anyone-but-Mamdani voters are to be found.

They should aim to drive up turnout among the 11% of registered New York City voters who are Republicans, the 20% who are independent, and most important, the 12% of Democrats I call the “persuadable purples” — those unwilling to vote for a far-left candidate.

In the 2024 presidential election, 573,618 Gotham Democrats who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 declined to follow the party’s leftward lurch and support Kamala Harris in 2024.

Some voted for Trump, but most sat out the election. 

Compare that number to the 462,966 Democrats who made Mamdani their first choice in the primary. 

The persuadable purples are numerous enough to turn November’s election against the upstart, if they turn out and vote for anyone but him.

After his stunning upset victory in the primary, Mamdani is racking up endorsements from politicians and labor unions, including SEIU and the New York State Nurses Association.

But the unions’ electoral pull is fading — and he’s now under newly intense scrutiny to explain how he’ll pay for free buses, free childcare and his other promises.

Will his support grow, or did he peak on primary day? 

That’s hard to say, with his heavy reliance on the fickle youth vote. 

One thing is certain: Defeating Mamdani is possible even in a crowded field, but it requires getting New Yorkers, lots of them, out to vote.

Tell your friends and neighbors.

Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and co-founder of the Committee to Save Our City. X: @Betsy_McCaughey.