Who Will Be The Next Mayor Of New York City?
A lot to parse out in the next five months
The Democratic primary for the mayor of New York is in five months from today.
That functionally means the election for mayor is in five months from today; only one mayor in the past fifty years has not been a Democrat. Right now there are still several open questions about who is even running. Our current mayor has been charged with multiple felonies, our former governor hasn’t yet formally declared he’s running, and the rest of the field — currently seven declared candidates besides Adams — is largely comprised of candidates unknown to the public. How are we supposed to reconcile all of this?
The burden falls on voters to understand what’s at stake in the upcoming election, as well as differentiate between a large pool of progressive candidates. Local media is dwindling. While Gothamist, Hellgate, and City & State provide dedicated and honest local coverage and reporting, their audiences are small. The New York Times declared earlier this year that they will no longer be making endorsements in local elections. However one feels about their outsized presence in the media — I had plenty of criticisms of their coverage of the NY-10 race in 2022 — their endorsements did carry a lot of weight locally. After the Times endorsed Kathryn Garcia for mayor in 2021, she got a significant boost in polling and landed less than 10,000 votes behind Eric Adams in the final vote. Without more dedicated coverage, even the most well-intentioned citizen can get lost in the details of parsing through podcasts and interviews, trying to understand the character and platforms of different candidates. More than any other outlet, the New York Post — boasting the fourth-largest print circulation in the country — will be the biggest publication with an influence on the election. In many ways this race feels like it’s been written off before it’s even begun.
By any measure, Eric Adams has failed as a mayor. He is currently facing five federal corruption charges. Several of his deputies have resigned after having their homes raided by federal agents as part of the larger investigation. His deputy mayor, chief of staff, chief housing officer, and buildings commissioner all quit in the first 18 months of his administration. He’s currently on his fourth NYPD commissioner in just over three years. His current approval rating sits at 28%. It seems very unlikely that he will be the mayor of NYC in a year from now.
Three years into an administration campaigning on public safety, total felonies are up by 30% relative to a 2019 baseline. Eleven people were killed in the subway system in 2024, compared to sixteen people killed in the subway system in the entire 2010s. While the rhetoric of the city returning to the high-crime era of last century is frustrating — murders were five times more prevalent in the early 1990s than they are now — the city is less safe than it was a decade ago under the leadership of a former cop who promised to make the city safer. This will certainly be one of the leading issues of the election.
Adams’ biggest accomplishment as mayor is undoubtedly the passing of City of Yes in December, a citywide zoning reform projected to add 80,000 units in the next 15 years. While this policy stands as the most extensive set of zoning reforms the city has passed in over 60 years, it is still modest relative to the estimated half-million units of housing needed to end the city’s housing emergencies. The city’s housing vacancy rate sits at a 50-year low, and a staggering amount of low-income New Yorkers are rent-burdened. 86% of households earning less than $50,000 a year spent over 30% of their income on rent. This has and will continue to be a major issue for voters; 81% of New Yorkers consider housing affordability a major problem.
Like many city issues, this is intertwined with — and in reaction to — the inability to solve problems on the state level. In 2023, Kathy Hochul proposed building 800,000 new homes in New York but had it shot down by the state legislature, driven by politicians afraid of ceding support to Republican challengers in the upcoming election. This fear also guided the compromised rollout of congestion pricing, with Hochul pausing the initial implementation less than a month before it was set to start, later re-starting the program after the election at a lower price point. Her tenure as governor has been feckless and frustrating, and the public has responded accordingly. She currently sits at a 48% approval rating, up from an approval rating of 34% last year.
Her predecessor looms over the mayoral election despite not officially declaring his candidacy, armed with a war chest of campaign funds and name recognition that places him well above any other candidate in early polls. Cuomo is New York politics at its essence: sleazy, combative, transactional, effective when his hand is forced, and surrounded by associates found guilty in federal investigations. It is hard to even parse out his worldview at this point (well, besides one thing), let alone his intentions or positions, but recent years of city and state governance may have voters harking back to simpler times.
And who can blame them? Landmark policies take years to pass after being batted around for years and scaled down in scope. City and state pass the buck between each other only to come out with half-measures that nobody is happy with. It is hard to not feel cynical about the future of New York politics given its present. This is completely leaving aside the open question of how the new presidential administration could affect New York, from deportations to reduced federal aid to the financial implications of Trump’s tariffs on people already living in the most expensive city in the country.
The distrust and confusion caused by these circumstances is a shame because several of the candidates have a lot of great ideas and have demonstrated the ability to execute in government. Brad Lander successfully passed a rezoning deal in Gowanus, initiating over 8,000 net-new units including 950 units of affordable housing. He is proposing expanding this model of affordable home ownership via rezoning to other neighborhoods. Zohran Mamdani successfully passed a pilot program where five bus lines ran without fare for a year, increasing ridership by over 30% and decreasing assaults on bus operators by nearly 40%. He is proposing making all buses free in the city, along with a citywide rent freeze for rent-stabilized apartments and no-cost childcare for all families. Zellnor Myrie sponsored the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act in 2019, giving tenants new protections against evictions and reducing the maximum allowable security deposit required from tenants. He is proposing building one-million new homes in the city along with providing free after-school care for all students. If affordability is an issue people are willing to vote on, these candidates have no shortage of approaches to address it.
Each of these three in particular strike me as qualified and inspired candidates. I’m not sure who I’m leaning towards yet, and I’m worried that that sentiment is a bad thing. Will any of these candidates get the chance to stand out from the pack? While ranked-choice voting theoretically increases voter turnout and gives voters the chance to support multiple candidates, it also disincentivizes candidates from pulling out, leaving the final field more crowded. I’d rather have Zohran or Lander debate Adams one-on-one than have seven candidates on stage fighting for air-time.
The better question may be whether there’s any broad appetite for a progressive candidate given the rightward shift in New York’s voters this past election. It’s a fair question, but I wonder whether any of these candidates can sell their vision on making life more affordable for New Yorkers, or sell themselves as change candidates of the status quo. Conversely I also wonder whether voters can still believe in a message of public safety given the state of the Adams’ administration, and the ineffectiveness and corruption of the NYPD during his tenure. Maybe these questions stem from naïveté, but I’d be curious to see how well their messages resonate, or whether they get the chance to be heard at all.
Plenty will unfold in the coming weeks and months. Cuomo will make a decision one way or another. There will be some televised debates. A few candidates will likely drop out. But this will all happen very fast, with limited local coverage and a near-guarantee of ongoing distraction, both locally and nationally. There is a fork in the road between complacency and change, and I hope we at least consider the latter.
Resources
If you’re interested in finding out more about the slate of candidates in the election, I’d recommend:
The New York Editorial Board has been slowly rolling out interviews with each of the declared candidates on Substack, so far speaking with Brad Lander and Jessica Ramos. These go extremely in-depth and I applaud the journalists here for pressing as hard as they do.
Brian Lehrer on WNYC has been interviewing a candidate each week of 2025, so far speaking with Zohran Mamdani and Zellnor Myrie.