Anthony Weiner, posted on a sunbaked corner of the East Village on Tuesday, had stooped to hear an older woman tell him that she had just voted for him when a much younger woman stopped, took a quick selfie in front of the candidate and muttered “pedophile.”
“What did she say?” the older woman asked.
“Supports another candidate,” Mr. Weiner deadpanned.
That he is himself a candidate is a plot twist in a story that many believed had ended badly. Mr. Weiner resigned from Congress in 2011 following a sexting scandal. A second sexting scandal cost him a run for mayor in 2013. Four years later, he was convicted of a felony and served 18 months in prison for sharing sexually explicit photos and texts with a 15-year-old girl.
He is now seeking an improbable comeback, running for a City Council seat in Lower Manhattan, asking voters to return him to an office he first won in 1991, in his mid-20s, in a Brooklyn district.
During his campaign, he has owned those dark episodes without, as he put it, “wallowing” in them — “contrition, but not scraping.” He hopes his practical, street-level ideas to fix what ails the city — hire more police officers, find proper care for the mentally ill and homeless living in parks — attract voters ready to set aside his past.
“I can’t think of another political campaign that’s quite like this,” he said.
One thing that is undeniable, watching him greet person after person under a punishing midday sun that reduced his pole-thin shadow to a sliver, is that Mr. Weiner loves this part of the game. He is a tireless retail politician.
“You guys vote yet?” he asked a passing couple.
“We’re not from here.”
“Maybe someday!” he replied.
He recalls running for the Council in 1991 and has pictures of himself that year, looking gaunt and strung out.
“I’d be out at 2 in the morning at a 24-hour-supermarket, walking the aisles,” looking for voters, he said.
“I always thought to be good at this job, you have to like this stuff — I do,” he said between greetings. “When I was cranky, my staff would send me to a senior center.”
He said the idea of running for office again sounded ridiculous just months ago. “Did you forget how that turned out the first time?” he’d ask people urging him to step forward. Then he found himself running out of reasons to say no.
He felt the city needed to move in new directions and urged others to run for office. “But I wasn’t willing to do it, because someone might say something mean to me. It didn’t seem fair,” he said.
And he looked around and found himself in ample company of fallen politicians from the #MeToo movement testing the waters of voter forgiveness. Why not him as well?
On the corner, a woman asked for a selfie. He smiled for the camera and asked, “Did you vote for me?”
“Yes,” she said.
“If I win by one vote, I’ll know who to thank.”
The woman, a 34-year-old high school teacher who did not want to give her name, walked away down the block, and confided, “I did not vote for him. What was I going to say? I grew up here, and I know the history of Anthony Weiner.” And, she said, she wants a woman in that seat.
The woman who had called him a pedophile, Kira Lonsdale, 26, from the Lower East Side, stepped out of a nearby bagel shop with her order and ignored the candidate on her return trip.
“I think it’s crazy that anybody would find him OK to represent this amazing city,” she said.
By then, Kevin Mahon, a lifetime New Yorker, had stopped to tell Mr. Weiner he appreciated his nuanced thoughts on crime — that while it is down overall, isolated incidents continue to make people uneasy.
“The pandemic, the homeless on the street, rattled everyone,” Mr. Mahon said. As for Mr. Weiner’s past, “Everyone’s got it,” he said. “He did his time, whatever. He deserves a shot.”
Mr. Weiner, who is facing four other Democrats in the primary, was wearing his third shirt of the day by 10 a.m., having sweated through the first two. He and his team — “the pirates,” he calls them — were on the streets at 4 a.m. posting campaign signs outside the district’s more than two dozen polling places.
The election capped a surreal couple of weeks. Earlier this month, his former wife, Huma Abedin — she divorced Mr. Weiner during the scandals — married Alex Soros, the son of the billionaire donor George Soros, in a lavish wedding in the Hamptons that attracted Democratic royalty.
“I didn’t go,” Mr. Weiner quipped, then softened. “I’m very, very happy for her,” he said.
Another woman asked for a selfie, guiding Mr. Weiner to face the sun for better lighting. “Let’s take a whole montage,” he said, and she walked away smiling.
“He’s an interesting New Yorker,” she said.
There was a time when his friends suggested Mr. Weiner should pack up and leave the city for someplace where he could lie low and be anonymous. He had a standard reply.
“Do I look like I would fit in anywhere else?”
Michael Wilson, who covers New York City, has been a Times reporter for more than two decades.
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