By the time the polls closed at 9pm, it was official: Tuesday was the hottest night in Gotham for a decade. All day, the television meteorologists were giddy as the records fell. The city pulsed and gasped and melted on a true dog day afternoon. Ninety-nine degrees Fahrenheit (37ºC) in Central Park by 3pm; the previous record in the city’s green acres, 96 degrees, dated back to 1888, the year New York City elected its youngest mayor, 31-year-old Hugh J Grant.
On the tarmac out at JFK, it was a rotten 102 degrees. Nightfall brought little relief other than the diversion of the vital Democratic primary mayoral election count, which has gripped the boroughs for weeks. And as the temperatures rose, so did the sense that something unique was on the cards.
The contest was a fundamental battle between old and new, and between a city scion and an outsider candidate who stunned the establishment with a nimble, social-media driven campaign and plain messaging that has caught fire in the imagination of younger voters.
The crowded field of 11 candidates had been reduced to a stark choice between two men. Andrew Cuomo, the former governor who resigned that post after sexual harassment allegations in 2021, was the old money, establishment choice. Of the $37 million spent on advertising, $20 million was attributed to Cuomo’s campaign.
His key rival, Zohran Mamdani, an assemblyman in the Astoria district of Queens, had, at just 33 years old and with four years of elected political experience to his name, stormed into contention on a platform promising rent control, free city bus transport and a chain of city-owned grocery (that old-fashioned, beautiful word) stores with controlled pricing.
Mamdani defies neat categorisation. The son of a Columbia-professor father and a film-director mother, both Harvard alumni, he belongs to a privileged class. He campaigns as a democratic socialist and is a fearless campaigner, embarking in 2021 on a 15-day hunger strike in support of New York City taxi drivers facing overwhelming loans, and another five-day hunger strike in 2023 to push for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Detractors claim Mamdani is all charm and no substance, with nothing like the experience or acumen to run a mayor’s office in a city with a budget of $115 billion and a staff of 300,000. But he ran a clever campaign, framed around class-based concerns that mixed skilful and persuasive social media messaging with traditional pavement pounding: 50,000 volunteers knocking on one million doors.
The Republican conservative establishment has watched his phenomenal rise in horror.
“You have a radical socialist, that’s right Zohran Mamdani,” Fox News host Sean Hannity warned his national audience on Tuesday night.
“He is to the left of AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], Jasmine Crockett, The Squad and Bernie [Sanders] combined. We will introduce you to the radical 33-year-old who would like to globalise the intifada, he wants to open the borders, bring capitalism to its knees, he wants government-run grocery stores and of course rent control – God forbid a landlord made a profit.”
All day in New York, there was an air of fabulousness about the Mamdani campaign. The prediction was that he would push Cuomo hard but that, ultimately, tradition would win out.
At about four o’clock, Paul Kreppel wandered into the voting station on 48th Street in Hell’s Kitchen. He has lived in New York since the 1970s, long enough to remember when this segment of Manhattan, once the stomping ground of the Irish-American “Westies” thugs, earned its reputation.
“You couldn’t walk around,” he says.
“Anything from 8th Avenue West, it was dangerous to walk the streets. And if anyone was coming to visit you on 9th Avenue, say, you would tell them: ‘okay, but it’s not a direct line. You have to make a left and avoid that street because there’s a park there and if you walk through that park, you will get mugged.’ We have evolved a little.”
Kreppel, easy going and friendly, is a professional actor, with television credits ranging from Fantasy Island to That ’70s Show and an accomplished stage résumé behind him. He remains a city enthusiast but concedes that many long-term residents are being priced out of Manhattan.
“I’ve lived long enough to understand that change happens. I talk to my kids who are now answering to kids 15 years younger than them. The city is a great place. It has always been a melting point. Things are changing so fast, though.
“I am not a fan of the current mayor [Eric Adams]. I don’t think I ever really was. Right now, I think the city needs to be a little moderate in the way it approaches the next couple of years. It is safer than people say it is. It has gotten dirtier. I live in the Times Square area and have seen that turn into an amusement park. And it is hard to live in Manhattan unless you are rent controlled. I’m not.
“So I don’t know how much longer I will be here because now I’m pretty much retired. And I see people leaving for the other boroughs. But Brooklyn is wonderful. Hoboken is cool to live in.”
Alison Woodhouse recently moved across the East River to Brooklyn but returned to the 48th Street station to cast her vote as she hadn’t reregistered.
“Yeah, I voted for Zohran number one,” she says.
“I think he has shown a lot of follow-through on his promises, based on his history and how he has impacted his communities. He is doing a lot of outreach. He is out and about. He is with the people he is representing, You can see it – he is wearing a suit today. It’s a hundred degrees and he is out campaigning. I haven’t met him but I have a friend that did. I’m jealous – I’m a little starstruck.”
For Woodhouse, “affordability” is the key issue facing those among her generation wishing to make a life in the boroughs.
“The average New Yorker working-class person is working two jobs just to stay afloat and pay their rent. That’s the case I find at least, especially in the outer boroughs. People are hustling day and night just to pay their rent, just to get by. And I think a lot of the costs have a lot to do with rent and housing security.
“If you reflect on Mamdani’s policies: even if you make over 500K and are worried about taxes going up ... that’s only for people making over a million. And if you are making that it is your job to contribute to the city because the city built you up.”
By late afternoon, the heat had become indescribable and inescapable. Tourists wilted. The city dog-walkers were nowhere to be seen – the pets stayed indoors. Mamdani, though, embarked on a closing-day tear through the boroughs, starting after 5am in Queens.
Three hours before the polls closed, he joined Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on her Instagram for a live stream. Both share the same constituency in Queens and for Ocasio-Cortez, the city mayoral race is representative of the internal battle for the future of the Democratic Party.
“I feel really good but regardless of what happens as of today, you have changed our politics today,” the congresswoman told him.
“To be the first major Muslim candidate for mayor – of any city in America today, let alone the largest city in America – it is a breakthrough thing. And you have represented so many people and when we talk about the Democratic Party, I think a lot of young people see that the party is not going to change willingly. I think about this a lot because you have run this amazing race.”
In the hour after nine o’clock, the amazement deepened. Mamdani’s returns had exceeded the wildest expectations of his supporters. He led by 43 per cent (428,995 votes) to Cuomo’s 36 per cent with 91 per cent of the voting counted.
Taking to the lectern at his watch party in the West Village, Cuomo struck an elegiac note as he conceded.
“I enjoyed having the team back together again. The Hud team came back from 30 years ago and friends that go back to my childhood. That was all enjoyable. And I am proud of the campaign we ran. But tonight was not our night. Tonight was assemblyman Mamdani’s night and he put together a great campaign and touched young people and inspired them and moved them and got them to come out and vote and really ran an impactful campaign. I called him. I congratulated him. And I applaud him for his campaign.”
Mamdani still has significant obstacles to overcome before the full mayoral election in November, not least the prospect of Cuomo returning as an independent and the reinvention of the wily, controversial survivor Eric Adams, who has formed a shrewd alliance with president Donald Trump and is set to seek a return to office as an independent.
But on a hot, hot night in New York City, Zohran Mamdani’s victory belonged to the rich tradition of vivid city mayoral characters. In the space of just a few weeks, Mamdani flipped the double-digit leads Cuomo enjoyed in Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens.
As the clock turned towards midnight, overjoyed supporters and volunteers were still waiting for his arrival in the sweltering rooftop bar in Long Island City. Nobody could have blamed the candidate for needing to sit down to take a breath, and not just because of the midnight furnace heat.
Not every night you get to deliver a New York City serenade.
