Good morning. It’s Thursday. We’ll look at what the blue wave that swept across the country in Tuesday’s midterm elections might mean for New York. We’ll also find out about an auction of art from a cemetery in Brooklyn.
Now the winners have to govern.
The force of the blue wave that swept across the country gave Gov. Kathy Hochul a second term by a 20-point margin. She will be one of 29 Democratic governors, the most in a generation. That could expand the state-level resistance to Trump’s policies on tariffs and immigration, which Hochul has already pushed back on.
Will such a sizable victory clear the way for a tax increase on millionaires next year? My colleague Emma G. Fitzsimmons notes that it is one of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s top policy goals, and he’ll need the money to keep expanding free child care.
His universal child care plan is expensive — after he won office last year, Emma estimated the cost of universal child care at $6 billion a year, seven and a half times the cost of another of his signature proposals, making buses free. But Democrats in New York could be emboldened to do ambitious things, and the progressive wing of the party wants a tax increase to underwrite its agenda.
Mamdani was asked on Wednesday whether Hochul would be open to taxes on wealthy people. He didn’t answer directly. “What I’ve found from the governor is a commitment to a productive working relationship,” he said. But he also said that it had been some time since they had talked about anything other than the election.
Friends in high places?
Representative Hakeem Jeffries is in line to become the speaker of the House. Senator Charles Schumer is expected to continue as the Senate majority leader. That would make the new Congress the first in 66 years with people from the same state filling those posts. (Here’s the footnote to that sentence: The last same-state pair was from Texas. Sam Rayburn was the speaker and Lyndon Johnson was the Senate majority leader from 1955 until Johnson’s Senate term ended on Jan. 3, 1961. He had another job lined up: He was inaugurated as vice president 17 days later.)
Does it matter if the top two congressional leaders come from the same state?
Maybe, maybe not. It might mean more federal money for New York, which has historically received less back in federal spending than New Yorkers paid in federal taxes. The state comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, said in September that New York got back only 97 cents on every dollar of federal tax payments in fiscal year 2024.
Former Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Monday that having Jeffries and Schumer in power “could actually be the beginning of, like, a golden age where Washington is on our side.”
“Look, we as a city were supposed to have federal support for NYCHA,” de Blasio said on NY1, referring to the New York City Housing Authority, as well as for infrastructure projects and “for so many things for decades that were often just left by the wayside” and summed up in the New York Daily News headline from the 1970s, “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”
Mamdani said on Wednesday that having leaders in Washington who are from New York “is of incredible importance” because “for them, the struggles of New Yorkers are not intellectual concerns” — they are what “they experience and hear about from their constituents every day.” He said that “we are looking first for an end to the kind of policies that have had cruel impacts on New Yorkers’ lives,” such as cuts to food-stamp programs.
He also said that he had a “good working relationship” with Jeffries.
My colleague Annie Karni points out that while Jeffries is not expected to face a challenge for the speaker’s job, Democrats are not unanimously thrilled about seeing him become the most powerful person in Congress.
At 56, he is seen as a fresh face compared with the octogenarians who led Democrats in the House the last time they were in charge. He is also more moderate than Nancy Pelosi, the last Democratic speaker, and the progressives who make up the largest bloc in the caucus.
Weather
Expect a mostly cloudy day with a high near 70. Rain is possible. Cloudy conditions will continue into the night as temperatures fall near 65.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Sunday (Diwali).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Every New Yorker — especially our children — deserves to live free of such hatred.” — Mayor Zohran Mamdani, on graffiti, including swastikas, painted on four buses that serve Orthodox Jewish schools in Brooklyn. The police have opened a hate crime investigation.
The latest New York news
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Mamdani wins fight over second-home tax: A panel of appellate judges in Brooklyn ruled that Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration could proceed with efforts to collect a new tax on high-end second homes, giving the mayor his first major legal victory on a key piece of his agenda.
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Outside counsel for Cornell case: The New York attorney general appointed Jacqueline Kelly, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan, to lead a criminal investigation into a former Cornell University student’s allegations of sexual assault at a fraternity party in 2024.
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Paid coverage: The publicist for the Alexander brothers, the three men who were sentenced last week on federal sex-trafficking charges, said that writers were paid on the brothers’ behalf to to create online posts and articles that discredited their accusers.
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Snowball thrower gets community service: Gusmane Coulibaly, who started a snowball fight in Washington Square Park during which police officers were hit with packed snow and snowballs, received 20 hours of community service in a plea deal.
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What we’re listening to: Even if you get to the top in New York, you have to fight to stay there. In the latest episode of the “Metro” podcast, Sarah Koenig looks at two battles for control: one, on a small college campus; the other, inside the city’s biggest political party. Listen here.
Some treasures from Green-Wood go on sale
Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where more than 570,000 people are buried, is selling off some of its holdings.
They include more than 250 paintings, along with a few prints and a Lee Jaffe photograph of the Brooklyn-born artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, who is buried at Green-Wood. So is Edmund Coates, a British-born 19th-century painter who created landscapes like the one above of Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn. That painting and the other items are to be sold today by Doyle, the Manhattan auction house.
“We have hundreds of pieces of art,” said Meera Joshi, the president of the cemetery. “As you see with many museums and places that have art, there’s only so much you can display.”
The rest goes “unappreciated, unseen and unknown,” she said. And it takes up space.
“We’ve had a space problem,” she said. “And artwork is a responsibility. Storing and caring for artwork takes up space and bandwidth.” Some of the paintings have been kept in temperature-controlled storage, others in what she called “interior offices.”
Peter Costanzo, a senior vice president at Doyle, said that most of the works in the sale “derived from artists who are buried at Green-Wood or are related to them.” He said the Coates canvas was “a beautiful painting of a long-forgotten view.” The painting also shows Fort Lafayette, offshore, which was demolished in the 1960s to make way for the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge.
The cemetery wants to focus on research and its archives, and the money for the sale will go toward additional archival work. Green-Wood has digitized 60 volumes of its burial registry, listing everyone buried there from the first interment in 1840 through 1937.
Joshi said there “direct individual stories” in Green-Wood’s logbooks, which show when people purchased a lot and when they were buried. “I found my husband’s great-great-great-grandfather, who died in an S.R.O. on Cherry Street,” she said, “information that none of us knew before.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Modern art
Dear Diary:
I was 17, fresh out of high school in Paris and on my first trip to New York. The Museum of Modern Art was high on my list of sights to see.
I wandered through the galleries, encountering one mysterious installation after another. I didn’t understand much at first, but gradually I began to feel more confident in my appreciation of what I was looking at. My eye was adjusting. I was getting it.
On a stairway between floors, I noticed a striking object mounted on a white wall. Bright red. Cylindrical. Industrial, but elegant. I stopped to look.
After a moment, a man coming down the stairs stopped beside me. We stood there silently, contemplating the object together.
“Pretty good,” I said.
The man glanced at the object, and then at me.
“Very,” he said, continuing down the stairs. “Especially in a fire.”
I took a closer look. I had been admiring a fire extinguisher.
— Thibaut Kazemi
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.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post How Will New York’s Victorious Democrats Govern? appeared first on New York Times.
