This is The Sprint for City Hall, a limited-run series on the critical race for mayor of New York City.
Good afternoon, New York City.
The mayor’s race unfolding here has captured presidential and international attention. It has exhilarated, enraged and exhausted New Yorkers. And now, the election on Nov. 4 is officially five weeks away.
For the homestretch, we are reviving The Sprint for City Hall, a limited-run newsletter series on this crucial race. I’m delighted to be your new host.
If we haven’t met yet — hi! I’m Katie Glueck. Usually I’m a national political reporter for The Times, covering the Democratic Party and its halting efforts to rebuild.
But I also love New York City politics. I helped lead our coverage of the 2021 mayoral election, and long before that I wrote about Anthony Weiner’s ill-fated but memorable 2013 mayoral bid. New York City politics, never boring.
I’m so glad to be back on the race for City Hall, along with a host of excellent reporters who have been covering every twist and turn.
We’ll be in your inbox twice a week, on Tuesdays and Saturdays, aiming to keep you up to speed, offer new analysis and fresh reporting, and also feature the lighter side of this wild, and wildly consequential, contest.
In this edition: What to make of Mayor Eric Adams’s exit from the race; how this election is reverberating across the nation; Nick Fandos on the most important question of the week; and a quiz that may trigger Mets fans.
We’ll start with the news.
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Candidates and donors are moving this week to capitalize on Adams’s departure from the race.
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Our polling expert Ruth Igielnik and I examined how the Adams coalition came to be, and who his remaining supporters may back now.
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This is how Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, helped galvanize South Asian New Yorkers, fueling a high watermark for their political participation.
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Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, is splurging on his six cats, according to his wife, Nancy. Catch up on other details of the candidates’ finances.
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Matt Flegenheimer may already have the headline of the week: “Swaggering, Scandalous, Strange: There Will Never Be Another Eric Adams.” Indeed.
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Here’s a refresher on some of Adams’s unique sayings and a deeply reported piece on how questions of character and corruption quickly overtook his administration.
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Do read Priya Krishna, who writes about food for The Times, on the biryani that made Mamdani forget his manners, as she examines how he built a campaign around food.
Catch Up Quick
A crowded field thins out
If you’re just tuning in, here’s where things stand.
Polls show that Mamdani, a 33-year-old assemblyman from Queens, is the clear front-runner after he electrified a broad swath of New York Democrats with his emphasis on affordability and his buzzy, personality-driven campaign.
There are also plenty of New Yorkers who are wary of the young democratic socialist.
But the force of their opposition has been diluted by the crowded field of rivals, all plainly flawed: former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who resigned amid sexual harassment allegations in 2021 (he denies wrongdoing) and who lost this year’s Democratic primary to Mamdani; Adams, who infuriated Democrats by courting President Trump, and benefited when Trump’s Justice Department ordered federal prosecutors to seek a dismissal of his corruption indictment; and Sliwa, the idiosyncratic Republican candidate running in a deeply Democratic city.
But with Adams out, the question is whether there will be serious new efforts — from donors or otherwise — to consolidate support behind Cuomo, who is running as an independent and polling in second place. Some Republicans, too, have talked in broad strokes about the need to unite around one candidate who is not Mamdani.
But Sliwa has said that he’s not going anywhere. And on Monday, he called his two rivals a “double-headed hydra” that would hurt the city.
The national view
Four years ago, as Adams declared himself the “face of the new Democratic Party,” many national Democrats rushed to embrace him (however briefly).
Now, Republicans are racing to bestow that title on Mamdani as they seek to cast Democrats as the party of the far left.
“Zohran Mamdani, who is running for Mayor, will prove to be one of the best things to ever happen to our great Republican Party,” Trump wrote on social media on Monday.
It’s questionable whether swing voters in, say, Iowa, will consider the potential mayor of New York City as a factor when they vote in next year’s midterms.
But, some argue, moderate voters living in competitive Long Island districts might.
Clearly, there are limits to what a municipal election says about the country’s mood or even the direction of the Democratic Party. But I wanted to understand where the race might actually matter nationally, so I asked current and elected officials in both parties, from around the country.
Their comments have been lightly edited and condensed.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent supporting Mamdani:
“The lesson to candidates all over this country is that if you stand with working people, if you have an agenda that fights for working people, if you put together a grass-roots campaign, you don’t have to worry about billionaire campaign contributions. You don’t have to worry about big-money consultants. You can win.
That is Trump’s nightmare, that what Mamdani is doing will spread all over this country. And if he pulls this off, there’s a good chance that is exactly what will happen. I certainly will do everything that I can to make sure that it does.”
Representative Mike Lawler, a New York Republican running for re-election in a competitive Hudson Valley district:
“I do not want to see him win, because the policies that he is espousing, that he has fought for in the State Legislature and will fight for as mayor, are destructive to New York’s economy and to public safety.
From the standpoint of next year, obviously these policies will not play well in an area like mine.”
Representative Laura Gillen, a Long Island Democrat from a swing district and an outspoken Mamdani critic:
“I don’t normally wade into political races in jurisdictions outside of my own, but because I feel that this is such a concern for my residents, I had to speak out.
I am a moderate and I do not embrace socialism. His policies will not be good for my constituents.”
Mayor Justin Bibb of Cleveland, president of the Democratic Mayors Association:
“What’s fascinating has been how Mamdani has effectively, in many ways, communicated the No. 1 issue facing New Yorkers and the No. 1 issue facing Americans, the cost-of-living crisis.”
Brinker Harding, a Republican city councilman in Omaha who is running for Congress, on why he alluded to Mamdani and New York in his launch video:
“I don’t know that necessarily Nebraskans know who Mamdani is, but they understand that how we have been able to address crime and support our police has been effective in bringing crime rates down. You turn the TV on, you see in major cities across America that that’s not necessarily the case in those cities.”
(But, he acknowledged, “Do I intend to use Mamdani specifically in my ads, or what I say? No, not specifically Mamdani. There are certainly other examples around the country.”)
Former Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, a possible presidential candidate and onetime chair of the House Democratic campaign arm, noted that more moderate candidates won races outside New York City this year. He was also skeptical that focusing on Mamdani would be broadly persuasive:
“If somebody wants to run an advertisement, put money behind what’s happening in New York City to a targeted race in Michigan, it’s what they’re going to go spend money on.
But if the other candidate is spending money talking about premiums, utility rates, homeownership, price of groceries, I can tell you which is going to be a more persuasive ad to swing voters.”
What we’re watching
Fund-raising by anti-Mamdani super PACs has been sluggish. Nick Fandos, who is helping to lead coverage of this race, is watching closely for whether that begins to change in a meaningful way. More from Nick:
Now that Adams is out of the race, is the big-money cavalry finally coming for Mamdani? Some of New York’s richest donors have threatened for months to uncork as much as $50 million in super PAC spending — but have kept their checkbooks closed since the primary. If they now begin to follow through after Adams’s exit, there might just be enough time to change the shape of the race’s final month.
Quiz
Zohran Mamdani is a Mets fan. How old was he when the Mets last won a World Series?
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Sixteen
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Two
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Had not yet been born.
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Eight
Scroll to the bottom to see the answer.
key dates to Remember
Oct. 16: First general election debate (7 p.m., WNBC).
Oct. 22: Leading contenders general election debate (7 p.m., NY1).
Oct. 25: The last day to register to vote in person or online. Applications to register by mail must be received by this date.
Oct. 25 to Nov. 2: Early voting.
Nov. 4: Election Day. Polls are open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.
We want to hear from you
If you haven’t decided yet how you will vote, or if you will vote, what are you weighing? What burning questions do you have for these candidates? How is the race playing out in your neighborhood? I’m at [email protected] — please be in touch!
The answer to today’s quiz question: Mamdani had not yet been born. The Mets last won the World Series in 1986. Mamdani was born in 1991. Read about his baseball allegiances and more in a recent interview he did with The Times.
The post Breaking Down the Mayor’s Race After Adams’s Exit appeared first on New York Times.
