It’s a big, brutal job ultimately hamstrung by competing state and federal authorities over its shorelines and infrastructure. But that doesn’t mean the race matters any less
Though we have no Silly Party here in New York City, we’ve had no shortage over the years of silly candidates for mayor. We’ve also had a tradition of performative campaigning that involves shaking hands at subway stations, marching – or even better dancing – in countless parades, and the proper consumption of various ethnic foods. Boston-native Bill DeBlasio was already mayor when he tore into a pizza with a knife and fork like a Bostonian.
Thankfully this primary season hasn’t produced anything like the spectacle of Anthony Wiener in 2013 who, having already resigned his Congressional seat due to a sexting scandal, was confronted on the mayoral campaign trail with all-too graphic evidence that “Carlos Danger” had never stopped sexting. After four years of Eric Adams, who sold the city for better seats on Turkish Air, and the feckless eight-year reign of DeBlasio, many are wondering why New York can’t find someone better to run the place.
To be fair, it’s a brutal job. New York and London are roughly comparable in terms of population and economic heft, but New York is much more centralised. The mayor has more power and more responsibility, overseeing all city agencies including education, housing, fire, police, sanitation and planning, and they produce the annual $100 billion-plus budget. The wild card is that many of the things that matter most to New Yorkers are out of the mayor’s control, starting with the subways. The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) is a public “authority” controlled at the top by the governor. Same with the bridges and tunnels, all property of the Port Authority, along with the World Trade Center, the Hudson River shore and other healthy chunks of the city’s coastline.
Taxes, too, are out of the mayor’s hands; the state must approve all city taxes. New York is choked with 400 years of red tape, so if a mayor initiates anything truly transformative, they’ll likely be watching from the bleachers when the ribbons are cut. Rudy Giuliani’s 1990s revival, for example, was largely a harvest of good ideas sown by Ed Koch and David Dinkins before him. And finally, there’s us, the nine million or so New Yorkers who don’t hesitate to make our feelings known. Koch famously walked the streets of 80s New York asking “How’m doin’?” – but he stopped listening by his second term.
For all the wailing about Tuesday’s candidates, there were people on the ballot who could do the job well. Clear-eyed progressives Brad Lander, the current comptroller, and his predecessor Scott Stringer, and Adrienne Adams, the current City Council Speaker are all competent, experienced and principled. Yet to general astonishment, Andrew Cuomo and Zohran Mamdani topped the polls this spring.
We want someone who feels like the mayor, who looks in control while we manage our own chaos, who expresses who we are.
Cuomo, a fan of muscle cars who resigned as governor under more of a cloudbank than a cloud, brings a chequered legacy of sexual harassment claims and fatal choices during Covid, along with the abilities to build Big Things like airports and bridges and, he says, to out-bully Trump. As proof of that last point, donors and institutions have lined up behind him more out of fear of his dark arts than any belief. His rival Mamdani, a 33-year-old member of the Democratic Party’s left wing, led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, has made many, many promises that start with either “free” or “tax,” though the mayor’s office lacks the actual power to effect them. Imagine Snape versus Harry before the latter had learned how his wand worked.
So what are we really complaining about? Whether it’s true anymore or not, New Yorkers still see their city as the centre of the known universe and the mayor as the one person crazy enough to stand on top of that storm, catching the lightning bolts and throwing them back. We want someone who feels like the mayor, who looks in control while we manage our own chaos, who expresses who we are.
And that’s the problem. As New Yorkers become more and more divided in terms of money, race, class and even age, finding someone who can speak to any majority of us feels increasingly impossible. By no means has this been the most contentious or unsightly primary – that honour would likely go to Koch vs. Mario Cuomo, Andrew’s father, back in 1977 – and the extremes of Gilded Age New York were arguably worse than today’s. But the national mood, polarised in every direction, is overwhelming the practical realities of living next to and on top of each other the way we always have; the constant compromises, the daily balance of Me and We over nine million lives that weaves a diverse city together.
As the legendary Mayor Fiorello La Guardia once said, “There is no Democratic or Republican way of cleaning the streets.” If we want a better mayor, we have to want a mayor for New York City, not just for ourselves.
Photograph by Adam Gray/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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