Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll look at the aftermath of the New York City mayoral election.
Zohran Mamdani galvanized a new kind of coalition with a single-minded focus on affordability in an expensive city, and it paid off. After all the jockeying, all the endorsements and all the invective, Mamdani won, easily.
His victory in a grueling campaign for mayor will put a democratic socialist in City Hall in January. He defeated the same opponent he had beaten in the Democratic primary five months ago — Andrew Cuomo, a Democratic scion who resigned as governor in 2021 amid a sexual harassment scandal.
Also on Tuesday:
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Alvin Bragg, the first prosecutor to convict a former president when Donald Trump was found guilty in a case involving hush-money payments to a porn star, won re-election as the Manhattan district attorney.
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Voters sent a strong message in support of building more housing, approving three proposals that will shift power from the City Council to City Hall.
Turnout surged past two million votes, the most in a municipal election in New York City since 1969, when John Lindsay won his second term. Some of those casting ballots on Tuesday were probably among the 107,000 first-time voters who had registered in New York City since the primary. Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, took note of that at Mamdani’s victory party, saying that his success was about “the sleeping giant” — people who had never before been involved in politics who came out to vote for a young and exciting candidate.
Mamdani built his campaign around promises to make buses free, to freeze rents on rent-stabilized apartments and to provide universal, free child care. But he was also unsparing in his opposition to Trump. Perhaps one of the most confounding twists in the campaign came when the Republican president gave a double-edged endorsement to a lifelong Democrat — Cuomo, who ran as a third-party candidate. The Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa, refused to drop out despite what he said were offers of up to $10 million to do so.
But the three candidates’ respective standings had not changed as the campaign ground on. Voters appeared willing to overlook what might have been a liability for other politicians: inexperience. Mamdani has served in the Legislature for nearly five years. Before that, he had worked as a foreclosure prevention counselor, helping South Asian New Yorkers who were in danger of losing their homes because of tax liens and job losses.
Cuomo, who had run and won three campaigns for governor, tried to seem casual but somehow never seemed as comfortable campaigning for mayor as Mamdani did. Mamdani consistently led in polls. He did better in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods on Tuesday than he did in June.
But in beating Cuomo, Mamdani also beat the city’s elite, the power brokers who had run New York. Mamdani’s focus on affordability raised questions about money and politics. Mamdani took in thousands of small donations even as billionaires like former Mayor Michael Bloomberg poured millions into a pro-Cuomo super PAC.
Mamdani, in his victory speech, quoted Eugene V. Debs, who ran for president as a socialist five times in the early 20th century, and Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of modern India, before turning to one of the themes of his campaign: “Hope is alive.” He said that voters had chosen “hope over tyranny,” “hope over despair” and “hope over big money and small ideas.”
“We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible,” he said. “No longer would politics be something that is done to us. Now it is something that we do.”
Cuomo thanked Bloomberg on Tuesday as he congratulated Mamdani, although he mispronounced the mayor-elect’s name. But Cuomo also said that “this campaign was the right fight to wage.”
“This campaign was to contest the philosophies that are shaping the Democratic Party, the future of this city and the future of this country,” he said, “and this coalition transcended normal partisan politics. It brought together Democrats and Republicans and independents” drawn together “by the fact that their first allegiance is as citizens of New York City.”
It was unusual for the incumbent to be an also-ran, but Mayor Eric Adams’s tenure has been unusual. He was the first sitting mayor in the modern history of New York City to be indicted. The corruption charges against him were eventually dropped at the request of the Trump administration, in what the federal judge who dismissed the case said was an apparent quid pro quo. Adams, who had skipped the Democratic primary to run as an independent, called off his floundering campaign in September and endorsed Cuomo — and voted for him on Tuesday, even though his own name was still on the ballot. (The deadline to remove it had passed by the time announced that he was dropping out.)
Adams directed a zinger at Mamdani after he cast his ballot on Tuesday. “This city’s not a socialist city,” he said before sounding both wistful and defiant about leaving City Hall. “The only message I can give to New Yorkers as I go to the next leg of my journey: I’m leaving you with a good city,” he said. “Don’t mess it up,” he added, using a profanity.
Weather
Cloudy with a high near 64. Wind gusts up to 25 miles per hour. Tonight, it will start clearing after a chance of a shower, with a low around 49 and strong gusts continuing.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Tuesday (Veterans Day).
The latest New York news
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A despised floating jail heads for the scrap heap: The floating jail, a barge that could hold 800 inmates, had been docked across from Rikers Island for decades. It was the last of a handful of floating jails used by the city when the jail population exploded with the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and early 1990s, and had been decommissioned in 2022.
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Murder conviction for drunken driver who killed four: Prosecutors said that Daniel Hyden, who had written a book about sobriety, had been kicked out of a bar before he crashed his pickup truck into a Fourth of July barbecue on the Lower East Side last year. He was found guilty on 12 counts and faces a sentence of 25 years to life.
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A museum redefines 125th Street: The new Studio Museum has opened along Harlem’s main thoroughfare. The $160 million building rises seven stories. The Studio Museum originally opened in a loft over a liquor store in 1968.
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“Mothership” lands in the Meatpacking District: A colorful 30-foot-tall sculpture is now on display in Downtown Manhattan. Its creator, the British-Trinidadian artist Zak Ové, calls it “a mash-up.”
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Vanderbilt answers a seminary’s prayers
The land once belonged to the 19th-century scholar Clement Clarke Moore, whose poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” was the beginning of modern Christmas. Moore gave the land to the fledgling institution where he taught.
In time, 13 Collegiate Gothic buildings went up — the General Theological Seminary, the oldest seminary of the Episcopal Church and a quintessential New York institution. Over the last two centuries, it has educated more than 7,000 candidates for the priesthood. They prayed in the seminary’s soaring chapel and took their meals in the vaulted refectory.
But now the seminary is charting a new and somewhat different future. It will become a satellite campus of Vanderbilt University of Nashville.
My colleague Sharon Otterman writes that the move is part of Vanderbilt’s plan to open satellite campuses in several U.S. cities, taking advantage of what it calls its financial strengths. Vanderbilt’s plan for the seminary cleared a significant hurdle on Tuesday when it won approval from the New York State Board of Regents, which oversees public and private educational institutions in the state.
In making the match with Vanderbilt, the seminary appears to have found the ticket to its survival. Its enrollment slipped over the years as interest in the priesthood as a vocation declined. In 2021, it had only nine students. But in 2022 it began offering a program that turned out to be more in line with what modern candidates for the priesthood were seeking, a Master of Divinity program with mostly online courses.
Now, under a $44 million, 99-year lease with Vanderbilt, the seminary will retain a presence on campus, and Vanderbilt will renovate it on the way to setting up two academic programs there, one for about 100 undergraduates who will spend a semester there during their junior or senior years, the other for graduate students working toward a Master of Science degree in business and technology.
METROPOLITAN diary
One Way to Say It
Dear Diary:
I was on the No. 1 train when I heard a man talking to two tourist friends.
“It’s not Green-wich Village,” he said. “It’s Gren-wich Village.”
— Ivy Winters Mansky
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Lauren Hard and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post Mamdani’s New Coalition Brings Him an Easy Victory appeared first on New York Times.
