This is The Sprint for City Hall, a limited-run series on the critical Democratic primary race for mayor.
We have a winner.
Hi, I’m Dean Chang, the editor running The New York Times’s coverage of the mayoral primary. Welcome to the ninth and last edition of The Sprint. The last time I was involved in a limited-run series, viewership was so low that Bravo decided to run the last two episodes back to back on the same day.
In this edition, we’ll examine some of the biggest reasons behind Zohran Mamdani’s significant margin of victory in the Democratic primary, and look ahead to the general election in November.
A side note: As the primary ends, so does The Sprint. Could we be back in the fall? Stay tuned. For now, thanks for spending some time with us, including this bonus post-primary edition. (Take that, Bravo.)
The News
The field is set
A democratic socialist, three independents and a Guardian Angel walked into a … joke? Nope. Welcome to the New York City mayor’s race, November edition.
The general election, set for Nov. 4, won’t be quite as crowded as the primary, but it already shows signs of being even more fractious. Mamdani, a state assemblyman, is the Democratic nominee; Curtis Sliwa, who founded the Guardian Angels, a group of volunteer would-be crime fighters, is the Republican. The independent candidates, at least for now, are Mayor Eric Adams, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Jim Walden, a former prosecutor.
Of the five, Cuomo’s candidacy seems the most perilous. He had been the favorite going into the primary, but finished a distant second to Mamdani. Many wealthy business executives fear a Mamdani mayoralty, and some want Cuomo to take him on again.
But Cuomo ran what even some of his allies said was a low-energy campaign, and seemed far from being committed to running on his independent line, “Fight and Deliver.” On primary night, he told The Times that he wanted to look at the ranked-choice voting breakdown “to decide about what to do in the future.”
The mayor seems more ready for a fight. Two days after the primary, he kicked off his re-election effort in front of City Hall, suggesting that Mamdani, a state assemblyman, had “a record of tweets; I have a record on the streets.” Later that day, when asked by Don Lemon, the former CNN journalist, if he thought Mamdani was an antisemite, Adams said, “Yes, I do.”
As for Mamdani, it seems he will continue to provide fodder for his staunchest foes. On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” he said he didn’t “think we should have billionaires” and sidestepped a question on whether he would denounce the phrase “globalize the intifada,” after he declined to condemn it during a podcast interview before the primary.
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Mamdani won the election by 12 percentage points, defeating Cuomo 56 percent to 44 percent. The ranked-choice tabulations increased his primary night lead of seven percentage points, indicating that organizers on the left were successful in getting voters to avoid ranking Cuomo and to list Mamdani on their ballots, even if he was not their first choice.
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Labor unions continued to coalesce behind Mamdani this week, with the New York City Central Labor Council on Monday announcing its endorsement of the assemblyman. The umbrella organization of 300 unions represents about 1 million workers. Its backing comes after Local 32BJ SEIU, which represents doormen and other building workers, and the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council abandoned Cuomo for Mamdani, and the nurses union endorsed Mamdani, too. All three are members of the Central Labor Council. Two others, the retail workers union and 1199 SEIU, which represents health care workers, remain on the sidelines, for now.
CHARTING THE RACE
Youth is served
Campaigns are not known for being particularly kind or truthful about an opposing candidate. The Cuomo camp lived up to that with its treatment of Mamdani. But it broke with tradition in its assessment of Mamdani’s campaign, crediting it for expanding “the electorate in such a way that no turnout model or poll was able to capture.”
The praise carried some element of self-interest. Immediately after his loss, Cuomo was more comfortable crediting Mamdani than he was acknowledging his own errors. (Days later, Cuomo appeared more willing to do so, telling CNN, “to the extent there were strategic errors, the buck stops with me. There’s no question a fall campaign would need to be a different effort informed by the lessons of this one.”)
But the initial sentiment was accurate. Mamdani did appear to draw thousands of voters to the primary who did not vote four years ago, and many of them were under the age of 34.
Natalie Livingston, 25, told our Samantha Latson that she voted for Mamdani because of his focus on making the city more affordable, noting how multigenerational residents were being priced out of the city, including in her Washington Heights neighborhood.
“It’s just so heartbreaking to me,” Livingston said on Primary Day, adding that if Cuomo were elected, “I don’t have faith that those people are going to be protected.”
In the 2021 mayoral primary, the largest number of voters came from the 60 to 69 age group; this year, the biggest turnout came from voters aged 30 to 34, with those aged 25 to 29 close behind. The largest increases were seen in the 18 to 29 demographic, while turnout fell in the age groups between 50 to 74.
One theory was that the heat wave last Tuesday would depress turnout from older voters, a solid part of Cuomo’s base. Yet turnout actually increased from voters in the 75 to 84 age range.
Inside Mamdani’s winning campaign
His win wasn’t an overnight victory, but rather many months in the making, as his campaign manager, Elle Bisgaard-Church, told Emma Fitzsimmons. For much more on how Mamdani won, read here.
When Mamdani entered the race last October, his team knew it faced an immense challenge. Few people knew Mamdani’s name or what he stood for. The team was “realistic about where we started and all of the inroads we would need to make in order to win,” Bisgaard-Church said.
Mamdani’s buzzy online videos played an integral role in the campaign’s early success, but plenty of political upstarts can seem like budding superstars on social media. Bisgaard-Church, 34, said their huge canvassing team deserved credit for making the difference.
“It’s really hard to overstate how extraordinary our field campaign was, with over 50,000 people volunteering, and all the doors knocked and the phones called and their incredible work, especially through the heat wave,” she said.
I asked her when she realized Mamdani might actually win. She said it was at a candidate forum in February with a prominent union, District Council 37, which ended up endorsing him as part of its slate. She said the city workers in the crowd “reflected a truly diverse coalition.”
“The energy in that room when he was on the stage was absolutely remarkable,” she said. “I remember sitting in the front row and feeling completely overwhelmed by it. That was a major sign to me of the breadth of this campaign’s resonance.”
Some of the difficult moments during the campaign came over concerns about Mamdani’s positions on Israel, including his resistance to condemning the phrase “globalize the intifada.”
“Zohran has been devoted in articulating, since the moment he entered office in January 2021, a complete commitment to the dignity of all people, the human rights of all people, and this is part of the territory people will politicize and weaponize about anything they can,” she said.
“But we’ve tried to drive back to the message of the campaign, and the positive vision we are providing for people whose lives are just simply too hard in New York right now.”
On the night of the primary election, Bisgaard-Church was surprised when Mamdani appeared on track to win outright, without ranked choices being counted. The team had prepared three speeches for three outcomes and scrambled to make edits to the one he gave onstage.
“The call from Cuomo came quite, quite fast, and then his concession speech as well,” she said. “We immediately moved to try to create a speech that would be commensurate with the decisive victory.”
— Emma G. Fitzsimmons
Who is Jim Walden?
In New York City, mayoral races are typically decided during the Democratic primary, with the winner often assured of winning the general election. Exceptions include Michael R. Bloomberg and Rudolph W. Giuliani, who won as Republicans during times of perceived crisis.
But to win as an independent running on a third-party line? Inconceivable. And yet, three candidates will be trying to do just that this year. Two of them, Adams and Cuomo, have received much of the scrutiny, but also come with baggage.
The third, Jim Walden, will be trying to underscore how he’s different. He entered the race on Oct. 24, the same day as Mamdani, with just as little fanfare and less political experience. He is a former prosecutor who, in private practice, has been involved in major New York City cases with political implications, including securing $250 million for public housing tenants in 2018.
He has qualified for matching funds, and as of the latest reporting period, had $1.9 million to spend in the general election. Some of that has gone toward his first television ad of the campaign. Shot completely in black-and-white, the ad focuses on Walden’s career and says he will focus his campaign on improving New Yorkers’ quality of life and making the city more affordable and its government less corrupt.
“I don’t have any negatives, but everyone else does,” he said in an interview. “I fundamentally believe New York needs a time out from Democratic leadership,” which he blamed for foisting Adams into office even though he said insiders knew “he was corrupt for years.”
He said he did not want to criticize Mamdani, but he dismissed much of Mamdani’s central platform as unwise and unrealistic, requiring help from Albany that would never come.
On Tuesday, Walden received an endorsement from Paul J. Massey Jr., a real estate sales executive who ran a brief campaign for mayor as a Republican in 2017. And he boasted of having received the only endorsement from a New York City police fraternal organization, the Retired Sergeants Association. Not quite “Zo-mentum,” but it’s a start.
For a more detailed look at the candidates, go over to our Who’s Running tracker. And if you want to find other stories you may have missed, our mayor’s race landing page is right here.
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Exit stage left
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