New York has always been, in its own imagination and the country’s, a city of self-regarding and often contradictory superlatives — the biggest, brightest, richest, harshest, give-us-your-tired-est, little-too-wired-est spot on the American map, which might as well render those other cities in the sepia tone of afterthoughts, anyway.
So it can feel especially disorienting, for a place so confident of its position in the general pecking order, to find New York edging toward a moment of such spectacular uncertainty about what it is, whom it’s for, what happens next.
Answers are coming, whether the city likes it or not.
A volatile mayoral election this Tuesday appears poised to reshuffle and reconstitute the longstanding power structures of a city that so often sets the political, cultural and financial course well beyond its boroughs.
The New Yorkers who run much of Washington are heckling one another during an interminable federal shutdown, with accelerating consequences for America’s largest city.
And a collision of local and national forces — escalating deportation campaigns; searing mutual political disdain and disillusion; economic angst across income strata — seems primed to scramble New York’s very sense of itself, compelling it to confront some of the surface paradoxes that are core to its identity.
The capitalist capital of the world is now the epicenter of an ascendant and impatient socialist-led rebellion over affordability, over who gets to make a life in the New York that bred Wall Street and Occupy Wall Street — and now finds alums and avatars of both camps credibly contending that the future is theirs.
America’s archetypal city of immigrants is a place where many immigrants feel increasingly under siege, on alert for masked federal agents at an immigration courthouse about a mile from the ferries to Liberty and Ellis Islands.
The city of Sept. 11 and post-Sept. 11, with all its fear and unity and more than occasional Islamophobia, is on the cusp of electing its first Muslim mayor, a prospect that has thrilled and sometimes stunned many of New York’s politically potent Muslim communities.
The city that has long defined the Jewish experience for Americans — the land of “Seinfeld” and Katz’s Delicatessen and Sandy Koufax — may be led by a man who is openly hostile to the government of Israel, leaving some New Yorkers to question their standing in a city they do not recognize.
“I think there’s a question about whether this is still the capital of Jewish America,” said Howard Wolfson, a deputy mayor under Michael R. Bloomberg.
But then, he added, that is but one of “lots of different tests” whose answers for the city will reveal themselves on Tuesday and in the months to follow.
The truth is that New York is functionally dozens of cities, with hundreds of neighborhoods and thousands of sub-neighborhoods. It is urban and suburban and subterranean and coastal, with a shape-shifting demographic and socioeconomic composition and an evolving definition of what sets it apart.
“Eight point three million people,” the outgoing Mayor Eric Adams has said, while being jeered in public. “Thirty-five million opinions.”
This is the city that created Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old mayoral front-runner and assemblyman from Queens, who had formative stints at a private school in Manhattan and an elite public high school in the Bronx. He hopes to tilt the scales of state toward those he says have been left behind for too long.
And yet.
“This is also the city that created Trump,” Mr. Mamdani reminded Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” this week. “We have to reckon with that.”
Some in the studio audience seemed to gasp a bit, amusing the host.
“Everybody was like, ‘Oh, my God, that’s right!’” Mr. Stewart said. “‘Are we Dr. Frankenstein? Nooooo!’”
The specter of President Trump, whose city still broadly rejects him despite some inroads in last year’s presidential election, looms over much of what awaits New York, especially if Mr. Mamdani wins.
On paper, at least, the city has rarely been better positioned to argue for its own supremacy in Washington. The president’s circle includes other figures with long histories in New York, like Steve Witkoff, his Middle East envoy, and Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary. Mr. Trump speaks often with friends who still live in the city.
The Democrats leading their minority coalitions in both congressional chambers, Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, are New Yorkers. Some of the most famous progressives in office are, too: Senator Bernie Sanders once cheered the Dodgers in his native Brooklyn. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a district that encompasses parts of Queens and the Bronx.
But for all its nominal power, New York can in many ways feel powerless over its own future.
Mr. Trump has made clear that he intends to involve himself deeply in the city’s affairs — what will get funded (or perhaps defunded) in the federal accounting; which government authorities might become more conspicuous on the ground; where and how deportation pushes might proliferate.
Leaders from red states like Florida and Texas appear eager to watch New York squirm in its quest for federal dollars and its efforts to counteract Mr. Trump.
Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, mounting a third-party campaign for mayor after losing decisively in the Democratic primary, has staked much of his bid on a warning.
“If Mamdani wins,” he has said, “you’re going to see Trump come in here and take over New York City.”
His candidacy has come to represent assorted constituencies who have often helped choose past mayors but are in danger, this time, of finding themselves on the other side: older Black voters; moderate and conservative Jews; business executives who have long insisted that progressive leadership in New York would produce an exodus of talent and money.
“It would be the death of New York City,” Mr. Cuomo said this week, predicting flight by the “carload” if Mr. Mamdani wins.
Whether or not he is right, a failure from Mr. Cuomo, 67, would plainly reflect how much the city has transformed since his 1970s adolescence and even his governorship in the 2010s.
He has maintained in the campaign’s closing days that he is the rightful ambassador of New York and the truer Democrat, suggesting that the city has not changed nearly as much as Mr. Mamdani’s runaway rise would imply.
Yet if any big election, and its swirling aftermath, is something of a test — What did that mean? What didn’t we see coming? What now? — the difference this time is a matter of scale.
On Wednesday morning, and well after that, New York will still be the nation’s biggest and baddest and brassiest city.
Its exceptionalism demands that it can be no pure bellwether, exactly, but that this much will stay true: It will be the place that tells America the most about itself — and maybe a little more than usual soon — whether it likes that or not.
Matt Flegenheimer is a correspondent for The Times focusing on in-depth profiles of powerful figures.
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