UP TO YOU: As goes New York…

Kicking off our new series on the New York City mayoral race, journalist Nate Schweber reports on the meaning of the contest to succeed Eric Adams

Journalist and author Nate Schweber has covered everything from the great outdoors to the politics of the big city for publications like The New York Times, ProPublica, and Anthony Bourdain’s Explore Parts Unknown. In this new series, he will explore the race to replace New York City’s embattled mayor, Eric Adams, and the implications of New York’s decision for cities, the Democratic Party, and the country at large.

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By Nate Schweber

Whether or not you live in New York City, its upcoming mayoral race matters to you. As Robert Caro wrote in The Power Broker, New York “influenced the destiny of all the cities of twentieth-century America.” That remains true in the twenty-first. And what influences the destiny of all American cities influences America's destiny. And America's destiny influences the world's.

Voters say their top concerns are housing, education, the economy, and safety — and those are in the bones of New Yorkers who’ve lived through the city’s troubled 21st century. They have suffered through September 11 and Hurricane Sandy. They were at the first U.S. epicenter of the Covid pandemic. The George Floyd protests in 2020 brought them looting and police violence, and the first city curfews since World War II.

New Yorkers take to the polls knowing that, beyond quality-of-life concerns, they are choosing who will lead them through the next crisis—and who the world will see leading them.

In the minds of many, that crisis is already here in the phenomena of New York's least gracious expat, Donald Trump, making recession and repression global again. And it looms over the mayor’s race like his dark Fifth Avenue tower. New York’s choice of leadership will send a strong signal as to the way national Democrats should counter Trump.

That answer may be painful for progressive Democrats. It has become a truism that whoever wins the Democratic primary becomes mayor of an overwhelmingly Democratic New York City. But Trump significantly improved his New York City vote percentage in 2024, scoring 95,000 more votes than he got in 2020, and the Democratic Party must figure out how to recalibrate after turning out a half-million fewer voters in the 2024 presidential election than it had in 2020. The redheads — sorry, that was the violent mob perpetrating The Terrors in A Tale of Two Cities — the red hats of Trump’s supporters are now common enough in Manhattan to count as insurgent fashion.

So far 11 challengers have entered the mayoral race, plus the incumbent. The campaign for the ranked-choice primary election on June 27 is becoming a dramatic exercise in how Democrats choose their fighters, now and into the future.

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The challengers

Disgraced three-time governor Andrew Cuomo, 67, leads in polling. New Yorkers have always known there were two Andrew Cuomos. There was the able executive with progressive bona fides who improved lives. That Andrew Cuomo repealed community-destroying drug laws. He legalized same-sex marriage. He oversaw the completion of such effective and beautiful infrastructure as the Second Avenue Subway and the new Kosciuszko Bridge. He provided the city — and the nation — reassuring leadership at the onset of the Covid pandemic.

But there was also the imperious Cuomo who held grudges, persecuted enemies, and acted scuzzy. His leadership on Covid was undermined by his fatal mishandling of nursing home residents. He had the gall to take a $5 million advance for a memoir about leadership. Then he attempted to disband an ethics board investigating that deal. Then he was accused of sexually harassing 13 women and resigned.