Zohran Mamdani’s continued strength in New York City’s race for mayor has bewildered many business leaders who have tried to paint the democratic socialist as too extreme for the city.

But the success of Mr. Mamdani’s campaign has not surprised many young professionals at tech start-ups, law firms and investment companies, who, despite earning well above the New York’s median household income of about $81,000, feel that living in the city is harder than it should be. They believe the upstart candidate has the best ideas for improving affordability.

These Gen Z and Millennial white-collar workers are proving to be a significant source of Mr. Mamdani’s support.

During the Democratic primary in June, Mr. Mamdani, 33, overwhelmingly won the votes of young, high-earning voters. In wealthy precincts where the median income is at least $200,000, Mr. Mamdani won 67 percent of the vote where the median age was 45 or under, including precincts in Brooklyn’s Park Slope and Williamsburg, and the Financial District in Manhattan. In those precincts where the median age was more than 45, including most of the Upper East Side and Upper West Side of Manhattan, he took only 45 percent of the vote.

Since the primary, individual donations to Mr. Mamdani’s campaign have surged, while funding to his chief rival in the race, Andrew M. Cuomo, the former New York governor, has lagged.

The enthusiasm for Mr. Mamdani is particularly pronounced in the tech sector, according to the most recent campaign finance data released last month.

More employees from Google donated to Mr. Mamdani than from any other private company in the city, with at least 238 employees contributing a total of $45,823 to his primary and general election campaign. The vast majority of those donations came from Google employees living in New York, while a few dozen workers living in other cities also made contributions.

While Mr. Adams has seen an influx of individual donations since the primary, few have come from employees at major technology firms. Only four Google employees, for instance, contributed to Mr. Adams’s re-election efforts. Mr. Cuomo received donations from eight Google employees and the Republican, Curtis Sliwa, received a donation from one. Other major tech companies, including Amazon and Meta, were also among the top private companies where employees donated to Mr. Mamdani.

Four of the city’s young high-earning workers explained their rationales for supporting Mr. Mamdani.

Some said they see parts of themselves in Mr. Mamdani, an immigrant who rose through an elite education system and wants to engage with the full breadth of life in New York City.

The four, all Democrats, said they ruled out the other candidates for a range of reasons. Some cited concerns about the sexual harassment complaints against Mr. Cuomo and the corruption investigation into Mr. Adams and his administration. The charges against Mr. Adams were dropped, but some in his orbit have remained under investigation.

The four voters recognize they are less affected by the city’s affordability crisis than working-class residents, but they say remain concerned about the issues Mr. Mamdani is championing.

The Data Analyst

Sophie Wang has a lot going for her.

Ms. Wang, 26, graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and was recently hired as a data analyst at a fast-growing tech start-up in New York City, earning $150,000 a year. The position, which came with a pay bump from her previous job, allowed her to leave her East Village apartment, which she shared with a roommate, and rent a studio on the Upper East Side.

Still, Ms. Wang is worried. She worries that the country is facing increasing political instability and she fears the rise of artificial intelligence, which some tech experts warn will make data analyst jobs like hers “obsolete,” she said. Most of all, she worries about widening inequality across the city.

“For a lot of people in my generation there’s a doomsday-ism,” Ms. Wang said.

But the “antidote” for her anxiety, Ms. Wang said, is Mr. Mamdani, who has promised free buses, a freeze on rents on stabilized apartments, and 200,000 new affordable housing units. Whether Mr. Mamdani could achieve such sweeping reforms as mayor remains an open question, but his vision for an expanded social safety net is nonetheless “thrilling,” Ms. Wang said.

She added that people assume, based on her job and her degree, that her politics “shouldn’t be very populist.” But, she said, “things can always be better for more people even if they are already good for you.”

A stronger social safety net, she added, would help alleviate the uncertainty she and other young New Yorkers feel about their future.

The Marketer

People move to New York because they have “faith in their ability to build from scratch,” said Jessica Jin, a marketer at a Brooklyn-based tech start-up called Clay.

Ms. Jin, who lives in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, said she thought Mr. Mamdani was looking to preserve “that kind of spirit.”

A Texas native and the child of Chinese immigrants, Ms. Jin began her tech career in San Francisco. In 2023, she moved to New York City in search of the diversity and culture that she felt had been drained from San Francisco as the tech industry boomed. Now, she fears the same thing is happening to New York.

“Being able to keep people who are not just like me here means that it’s a richer place to stay,” she said, adding that Mr. Mamdani showed a “commitment to keeping New Yorkers here.”

She also thinks the candidate’s policies, particularly his plan to provide free child care, makes the city a more attractive place even for higher-earning New Yorkers like herself. Ms. Jin, 34, and her partner hope to have children in the near future. “My bare minimum goal in life is to be able to provide for my future family the way that my immigrant parents did,” she said. Her parents paid for child care, a home with separate bedrooms for her and her sister, many extracurriculars and her college tuition. Doing the same for her future children while living in New York City feels out of reach, she said.

In New York City, a family needs to earn $300,000 a year to meet the federal standard for affordability to pay for care for just one child, according to a New York Times analysis. Ms. Jin declined to share her salary, but a role similar to hers was recently posted by her company with a salary range of $170,000 to $200,000.

The Consultant

Ananya Ramachandra, a 26-year-old consultant at IBM who earns $137,000 a year, skips on takeout, tries not to go out with friends on weeknights and avoids buying coffee in her Lower Manhattan neighborhood, where a latte can run up to $10.

“I feel the affordability crisis very much,” said Ms. Ramachandra, who immigrated from India to the United States when she was 5 and naturalized as a U.S. citizen when she was 12.

Despite her careful budgeting, her expenses are encroaching on her wages: The rent on her studio apartment recently increased to $3,225 from $3,075; her local supermarket’s grocery prices have gone up, and her electricity bill in July was $138 more than it was last year.

Last month, Ms. Ramachandra said she was passed over for a promotion she was betting on to help her balance her expenses. New York is becoming an “impossible place to live,” she said, adding that Mr. Mamdani feels like the candidate most “empathetic” to that feeling.

The Lawyer

Sage Arik Mason, 28, is an associate lawyer at a top tier corporate law firm who earns $225,000 a year.

Yet he’s been living in his mother’s rent-stabilized East Harlem apartment since he graduated from law school last year, partly because he has $75,000 in student debt.

“You shouldn’t have to be a doctor, a lawyer or an investment banker to survive in New York,” Mr. Mason said.

The two-bedroom that his mother moved into in 2001, he said, has given their family a “foundation of security” financially.

He likes Mr. Mamdani’s ambitions to create hundreds of thousands more affordable housing units to help low-income families like his own.

Mr. Mason acknowledged that financing such policies through higher taxes on corporations and the wealthiest 1 percent of New Yorkers might drive some wealthy individuals and businesses out of the city. But he thinks most will stay. “New York City is just a place to be and to go anywhere else is going to be a loss,” he said.

Jeff Adelson contributed reporting