Live NYC Mayoral Election Tracker: Andrew Yang Concedes as Eric Adams Leads
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Eric Adams says the city was divided into essential and non-essential workers during the pandemic, with some people left to work without proper protective gear.
Lovely Warren, the scandal-plagued mayor of Rochester, N.Y., who is under indictment and has faced repeated calls for her resignation, was defeated by a wide margin on Tuesday night in the Democratic primary.
The victor was Malik Evans, a city councilman, who was declared the winner by The Associated Press.
Ms. Warren will not be running under any other party line in November, all but assuring that Mr. Evans, who gained popularity for his work on the city school board, will become mayor in a city that leans heavily Democratic.
Ms. Warren, who was first elected in 2013, had came under attack last year after her administration mishandled the death of Daniel Prude, a Black man who had been placed in a hood by the police. It took months for city officials to make body-camera footage of his death public, leading to accusations of a cover-up, the resignation of the city’s police chief and calls for Ms. Warren to step down.
Shortly after, she was indicted on two unrelated felony campaign finances charges that threatened to remove her from office if she was convicted.
The controversies would not end there. Last month, her husband was arrested after the police said they found drugs and guns during searches of his car and home, and was accused of being part of a midlevel cocaine trafficking ring. Ms. Warren was not charged with a crime.
Ms. Warren, who was vying for a third term, is the first female and second African-American mayor of Rochester, a city of about 200,000 people in Western New York.
Eric Adams says there are more votes to be counted but adds, “New York City said our first choice is Eric Adams” as the crowd chants, “Eric.”
Jennifer Gutiérrez will win the Democratic primary for the City Council seat in District 34, according to The Associated Press.
“What a moment,” Eric Adams repeats. “The little guy won.” The race has yet to be called.
“This is the people sending a message,” Michael Blake, vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, says at Maya Wiley’s party. He still expects precincts that are yet to report to tilt toward Wiley.
Eric Adams takes the stage at 11:10 p.m. to his theme music, a repeating loop of “The Champ Is Here.”
Selvena Brooks-Powers will win the Democratic primary for City Council District 31, The Associated Press says. It also called races for Carlina Rivera in District 2 and Farah Louis in District 45.
Andrew Yang, a former 2020 presidential candidate whose name recognition once made him an early front-runner in the New York mayor’s race, conceded on Tuesday night after trailing badly in early vote tallies.
Mr. Yang was joined by his wife, Evelyn, and other supporters, and spoke in a somber tone that contrasted with the enthusiasm and energy that marked his campaign.
“Our city was in crisis and we believed we could help,” he told supporters gathered at a Manhattan hotel.
But as a self-described “numbers guy,” he said, the outlook for his campaign was bleak.
“I am not going to be mayor of New York City based on the numbers that have come in tonight,” he said.
Mr. Yang said he believed his campaign had influenced the debate over priorities for the city’s future, including elevating the discussion of cash relief for families, an issue he had also promoted in the 2020 presidential race.
He praised his ability to draw many small donors and cited his alliance with Kathryn Garcia, a fellow mayoral candidate and former sanitation commissioner, as a positive.
“I thought we could elevate each other,” he said.
But ultimately, he said he and Ms. Yang would seek to help the city in other ways.
Raymond J. McGuire, a former Wall Street executive who entered the Democratic mayoral primary with a hefty war chest and significant support from business leaders, appeared to accept on Tuesday that he would not win the race while stopping short of conceding.
Mr. McGuire thanked his supporters and said he was “humbled” that they had joined a campaign in which he styled himself as a political outsider whose business acumen would be invaluable in putting the city on a firm footing as it recovered from the pandemic.
“It’s not about me,” Mr. McGuire. “It’s about we.”
He took his time thanking his supporters before posing for selfies with a long line of supporters that snaked through the restaurant, the Red Rooster in Harlem.
Earlier in the night, supporters were optimistic that what had become a long-shot bid might still turn into a triumph.
Michelle Jean, a friend and mentee of Mr. McGuire’s, said she felt gleeful voting for him on Tuesday. “I’d swim up and down the Hudson River for him,” she said. “He’s an extraordinary human being.”
Councilwoman Laurie Cumbo invokes the language of the city’s first Black mayor, David Dinkins, and says Eric Adams formed a gorgeous mosaic with his diverse support.
Kathryn Garcia tells supporters that the election will now come down to ranked-choice results. “We’re not going to know a whole lot more tonight than we know now.”
Kathryn Garcia has taken the stage for what is definitely not a concession speech.
Andrew Yang, addressing supporters: “I am not going to be the next mayor of New York City, based upon the numbers that have come in tonight.”
Andrew Yang, in a somber tone, concedes the mayor’s race.
Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, will win the Democratic primary for his position, according to The Associated Press. Williams endorsed Maya Wiley for mayor.
Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, has a strong lead in the election results reported so far tonight.
Mr. Adams is ahead in every borough except Manhattan, and Maya Wiley and Kathryn Garcia are neck and neck for second place.
Andrew Yang, the former 2020 presidential candidate, is trailing in fourth place with less than 12 percent — a disappointing showing for a candidate who once led in the polls.
Not all of the election results are in yet, and absentee ballots still must be counted. But Mr. Adams’s lead was substantial — with over 70 percent of the votes counted, Mr. Adams had roughly 30 percent, compared with roughly 21 percent each for Ms. Wiley and Ms. Garcia.
Mr. Adams was winning overwhelmingly in the Bronx, and he was doing well in Queens and Brooklyn. Manhattan was tilting strongly toward Ms. Garcia.
Still, the ranked-choice voting system being used for the first time in New York, as well as the need to count absentee ballots, mean the official winner will not be known for weeks.
Scott M. Stringer, addressing supporters at a results-watching party on the Upper West Side shortly after polls closed, appeared to acknowledge on Tuesday that his longstanding dream of becoming mayor had come up short, without explicitly conceding that the race was over.
Citing his long career in government and politics, Mr. Stringer, the city comptroller, gave what amounted to a valedictory to a campaign that he began as a leading contender, only to fade after two women leveled decades-old accusations of sexual harassment against him.
“This was a very tough election for me and my family,” said Mr. Stringer, with his wife, Elyse Buxbaum, at his side “but it was a very inspirational one as well.”
He pledged to support “the next mayor,” and he also made it clear he was not finished with public service.
“I want to tell all of you that I’m not going anywhere,” he said to cheers and applause.
Earlier, before Mr. Stringer spoke, his supporters had remained optimistic that a late surge would push him to victory.
“I see the numbers. I see the statistics, and they don’t seem to favor him,” said Hamid Kherief of Manhattan, who was taking a smoking break outside The Ribbon, the restaurant where the watch party was held. “But I think we do rely on the last push.”
Mr. Kherief, 65, of the Algerian-American Association in New York, said he liked Mr. Stringer for his deep ties to city government and “the establishment.” He acknowledged that Mr. Stringer’s campaign had been hurt by the sexual harassment accusations, which the candidate denied.
Andrew Yang has arrived in Hell’s Kitchen, speech expected momentarily.
Eric Adams is expected to take the stage at 11 p.m. Two City Council members, Laurie Cumbo and Ydanis Rodriguez, will speak. Adams will be introduced by his brother Bernard.
It’s looking likely that Gale Brewer, the Manhattan borough president, will win her primary for the City Council seat she held from 2002 to 2013. She’s got a massive lead.
The Associated Press calls Curtis Sliwa as the winner in the Republican primary for mayor. Sliwa is the founder of the Guardian Angels. He will face the Democratic winner in November.
The crowd at the Kathryn Garcia party is gathering for a speech.
Curtis Sliwa won the Republican primary in the New York mayor’s race on Tuesday, setting up a long-shot challenge in November to the Democratic Party’s eventual nominee.
With a significant portion of votes counted, Mr. Sliwa was beating Fernando Mateo by over 40 percentage points, according to The Associated Press.
“I am a populist,” Mr. Sliwa thundered to a roaring, well-dressed crowd of about 200 people at a Midtown Manhattan steakhouse after the race was called.
With Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former Republican mayor, standing beside him, Mr. Sliwa vowed to fight crime, address the city’s homelessness problem and stop animal shelters from euthanizing pets.
“That’s who we are — caring Republicans, caring independents and populists,” he said. “We will care for the emotionally disturbed, and the homeless and our animal friends and our companions in a compassionate way.”
Mr. Sliwa’s victory over Mr. Mateo capped a bitter campaign pitting onetime friends and first-time candidates against each other to become the standard-bearer of a party whose political power in New York has waned significantly since it vaulted consecutive mayors, Mr. Giuliani and Michael R. Bloomberg, to City Hall for a total of five terms.
With public attention on crime and safety increasing amid the city’s efforts to move past the coronavirus pandemic, both Republican candidates this year sought to claim the law-and-order mantle. But Mr. Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, a group of self-appointed crime fighters, was perhaps especially well positioned to capitalize on the circumstances.
Juan Pagan, who was among those celebrating Mr. Sliwa’s victory at the Empire Steak House, said the candidate’s background had given him a clear edge.
“He’s a hard-core New Yorker,” said Mr. Pagan, a 65-year-old retiree from the Lower East Side, speaking in room festooned with red and white balloons scraping the ceiling beneath a sparkling chandelier. “It’s in his veins, it’s in his blood.”
Ayton Eller, wearing a “Refund the Police” T-shirt and a “Trump 2020” skullcap, echoed that sentiment.
“He knows New York inside and out, he’s been to all the diverse neighborhoods, Harlem, the Bronx,” said Mr. Eller, 41, an accountant who lives in Brooklyn’s Flatlands neighborhood.
Mr. Giuliani said that Democrats discounted Mr. Sliwa’s chances at their peril.
“Every time this city has been in trouble, we’ve elected a Republican, and Republicans have come through,” the former mayor said.
A radio host and longtime fixture in the New York media landscape who joined the Republican Party only last year, Mr. Sliwa first gained prominence in the 1980s for his creation of the Guardian Angels, whose members roamed the subway and streets in red berets, offering a sense of safety to some New Yorkers who felt especially jittery at a time when crime was far more rampant in the city than it is now.
The group earned its share of headlines, but Mr. Sliwa, a former McDonald’s night manager, later acknowledged that some of them were based on events that had been faked for the publicity.
Mr. Mateo, a restaurateur with ties to New York’s taxi industry, was born in the Dominican Republic and is a longtime Republican fund-raiser. He gained his own measure of notoriety when it emerged that he had acted as a middleman in fund-raising efforts by Mayor Bill de Blasio that attracted scrutiny from investigators.
Republican leaders were divided over which candidate was the best option to vie for leadership of a city where Democrats hold an edge of more than six to one in registered voters. The Manhattan, Queens and Bronx Republican Parties endorsed Mr. Mateo; Mr. Sliwa had the backing of the Staten Island and Brooklyn parties.
The Republican nominating contest on Tuesday came as the party has grown increasingly irrelevant in the nation’s large cities, aligning itself firmly with rural, conservative voters since Donald J. Trump’s ascent.
Nate Schweber contributed reporting.
As Eric Adams’s lead widens, aides say that he is not likely to claim outright victory tonight. Instead, he will say something like “New York ranked Eric No. 1.”
Still a lot of mingling, and drinks and food being served at Andrew Yang’s party. I’m told some of his supporters might speak before he shows up.
The early results indicate a strong showing for Brad Lander in the city comptroller’s race. He is ahead of Corey Johnson. Lander was endorsed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
As results of the mayoral election began trickling in, optimism and apprehension ran high among a group of the youngest campaign volunteers at Andrew Yang’s election night party, as early results showed him trailing three candidate.
“You work all day, every day — for me a month,” said Declan Duggan, 18, a sophomore at George Washington University. “This is the culmination of that. We’re all anxious to see what happens.”
Sitting next to Mr. Duggan, Prince Wong, 19, remembered how Mr. Yang’s support for nuclear energy felt like a bold, brave position among the field of 2020 Democratic presidential candidates.
“I had become politically disengaged,” Mr. Wong said. “Yang reinvigorated me.”
He drove up from Virginia, where he’s a student at Virginia Tech University, about a month ago so he could be part of the campaign.
For Shivani Saboo, 22, the experience volunteering on the campaign was a memorable one, thanks in part to Mr. Yang’s enthusiasm.
“The energy comes from the top,” she said.
A cheer rang out as Maya Wiley came out to hug supporters. She and other female supporters are dancing to Beyoncé’s “Run the World (Girls).”
With a significant portion of the vote in, Alvin Bragg leads by about five percentage points in the race for Manhattan district attorney, keeping his foremost opponent, Tali Farhadian Weinstein, at bay.
Mr. Bragg and Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, both former federal prosecutors, have significant leads over the other six candidates. Mr. Bragg is performing particularly well in neighborhoods on the Upper West Side and in his lifelong home of Harlem, while Ms. Farhadian Weinstein is cleaning up on the Upper East Side, handily beating Dan Quart, an assembly member and fellow candidate, in his own district.
Tahanie Aboushi, one of three candidates without any prosecutorial experience, is in third, outperforming expectations.
The race for Manhattan district attorney is not a ranked-choice election, which makes it one of the few major contests in which voters can reasonably expect to see a result Tuesday evening.
Evan Thies, an adviser to Eric Adams, tells NY1 that “we feel great” and that Adams assembled a “five-borough coalition.” The early results show Adams ahead in Brooklyn and the Bronx.
Bruce McIver, former Mayor Ed Koch’s chief labor negotiator, is Kathryn Garcia’s father. He says he is feeling “a little freaky, a little anxious” this election night.
The early returns show Kathryn Garcia ahead in Manhattan, a dynamic that has been palpable on the ground in recent weeks. A big question for her: Does that translate citywide?
Joe Lhota, the 2013 Republican candidate for mayor, just walked into Kathryn Garcia’s party.
Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor, appeared on NY1 at Curtis Sliwa’s party. Giuliani said Sliwa ran an “unbelievably strong campaign” and a Republican can win the race.
Although their candidates may not have been in the top tier, supporters of Raymond J. McGuire and Scott Stringer were nonetheless upbeat as they gathered to watch the primary results come in.
“Seeing the interactions between Mr. McGuire and New Yorkers was really powerful,” said Drake Johnson, a campaign intern who was among those at the McGuire campaign’s event at the Red Rooster restaurant in Harlem, where the basement club Ginny’s was decorated with gold and black balloons and handmade posters that said, “Ray’s got receipts.”
“I’m really proud of what we’ve done,” Mr. Johnson added of the campaign that Mr. McGuire, a former Wall Street executive, had run.
Travis Aprile, a member of the campaign’s finance team, was also feeling confident though also unsure about what final results would be.
“Anything is possible,” he said. “I’d be surprised if we know anything tonight.”
At the Ribbon, a restaurant on the Upper West Side, supporters of Mr. Stringer, the city comptroller, said they were clinging to the hope that a late surge would push him to victory.
“I see the numbers, I see the statistics and they don’t seem to favor him,” said Hamid Kherief of Manhattan, who was taking a smoking break outside. “But I think we do rely on the last push.”
Mr. Kherief, 65, of the Algerian-American Association in New York, said he liked Mr. Stringer for his long-standing connections to city government and “the establishment.” He acknowledged that Mr. Stringer’s campaign had been hurt by acccusations of sexual harassment that had been leveled against him by two women. Mr. Stringer has denied the allegations.
“I think there’s still hope,” he said.
in New York
With much of the vote still out, Alvin Bragg has a narrow lead over Tali Farhadian Weinstein in the Manhattan district attorney’s race. Both candidates are up big over the other six.
The diversity of Eric Adams’s coalition is on display here: A group of Asian American supporters pose as Orthodox Jewish men chat nearby. A woman in a hijab is on the dance floor. Black and Latino supporters are mingling.
At the Maya Wiley party in Brooklyn, music is thumping under magenta lights. They’re talking a million miles an hour, grabbing Brooklyn Lagers and fresh veggies.
The crowd at Eric Adams’s party cheers loudly when NY1 posts early results showing him leading Kathryn Garcia with just 2 percent of the vote reported.
At the Dianne Morales party, songs by No Doubt, Tracy Chapman and Sister Sledge are playing. A campaign spokesperson says “the mood tonight is very optimistic and celebratory.”
No matter the primary results tonight, the mood at Dianne Morales’s election party was festive and celebratory: it also functioned as the candidate’s birthday party. (She turned 54 on Monday.)
Supporters and staff gathered at The Corners in Bedford-Stuyvesant, her neighborhood bar, and feasted on mac and cheese, fried chicken and ribs, all ordered from a local joint. A cake birthday cake was offered for dessert.
“It feels like we’re in the middle, at a crossroads, starting the next chapter,” Ms. Morales said, addressing the crowd around 9:30 p.m.
In a speech that referenced Frederick Douglass, Shirley Chisholm and Michelle Obama, Ms. Morales described the challenges her campaign, historic in its elevation of an Afro-Latina woman to the mayoral ballot, had overcome in order to make it to election night.
“The path has not been easy: my candidacy was erased, dismissed, subjected to racist and sexist tropes and underestimated,” she said. “But we challenged idea that political outsiders can’t run for office.”
Regardless of the outcome, Ms. Morales’ ideological effect on the race is a point of pride for her. She said that the excitement around her campaign, the furthest left in the field, had invariably pushed other candidates to be more progressive. “Almost every candidate in this race has shifted their positions to be closer to ours,” said Ms. Morales. “We can track the changes.”
She redoubled her commitment to working to transform the city, especially on behalf of marginalized communities. “I am convinced now more than ever that if anyone can do it, we can.”
No major hiccups at the polls today. But all eyes are on how the city’s Board of Elections conducts ranked-choice voting rounds for the first time in a major election.
Maya Wiley’s after-party is at Kai Studios, a Black-owned business in Brooklyn. Signs outside support Black Lives Matter and commemorate Breonna Taylor. Win or lose, supporters are in a buoyant mood.
Chris Coffey, one of Andrew Yang’s campaign managers, tells NY1 that the campaign feels “really good” about turnout in areas like Flushing and Borough Park, where they think support for Yang is high.
Guests are arriving at Andrew Yang’s election night party, where staff are checking people in and requiring masks for folks who aren’t vaccinated.
“Rank Crystal Hudson No. 1 for City Council.”
“Rank Michael Hollingsworth No. 1 for City Council.”
That was the refrain outside a polling station in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, where two leading candidates for a seat on New York’s lawmaking body are in a fierce fight. Both are running as progressives. Both embrace core liberal planks like the Green New Deal.
On a Primary Day that has the current mayor, at least, expecting disappointment for left-leaning Democrats, some of the most fired-up progressives are not even focused on the mayoral race. They are betting on council races, where they believe they can make their biggest gains.
They also say they have found that climate and environmental justice — key priorities that never rose to the top of the mayor’s race — work better as retail politics in local districts where they can be connected to specific neighborhood problems like pollution from power plants.
“The climate crisis is a winning talking point in a local municipal election,” Stylianos Karolidis, a climate activist with the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, said as he knocked on doors in Astoria, his home neighborhood, with Tiffany Cabán, who is favored to win the Council seat in the Queens district. “It’s incredibly exciting to be proving that.”
Ms. Cabán is one of six candidates D.S.A. is running for Council seats. All of them, including Mr. Hollingsworth, snagged the coveted approval of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“We’re opposing a new power plant in the neighborhood, because we already have high asthma rates here,” Ms. Cabán told a voter through a cracked door.
Canvassers for Jo Anne Simon, a State Assembly member running for Brooklyn borough president, have emphasized her sponsorship of a “public power” bill to authorize projects like an alternative to private utilities that charge consumers to build new infrastructure that remains reliant on fossil fuels.
And although Mr. Hollingsworth has focused mainly on housing, volunteers campaigning for him on Tuesday said he had also won support from residents fighting a pipeline through North Brooklyn and a tower that would overshadow the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
“You ask them how they’re doing, and they say, ‘Man, I just got this insane ConEd bill,’” said James Thacher, a volunteer. “And then you start talking about municipally-owned renewable energy.”
No matter the results tonight, the mood at Dianne Morales’s election party is festive and celebratory: She turned 54 on Monday. There are rumors of a cake.
We don’t have any City Council results, but the Working Families Party is heralding “a more progressive, diverse and representative” body than ever before.
Ranked-choice elections can go one of two ways. The first is that someone wins outright by earning a majority of first-choice votes. But few think that will happen in the crowded Democratic primary for mayor.
What’s more likely to happen is we’ll see candidates be eliminated over multiple rounds of counting: Each round, the candidate with the fewest votes gets cut, and his or her votes are reallocated to the candidate the voters ranked next. Watch the video above for a sense of how that works.
Kathryn Garcia stood in front of the black iron gates at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn on Tuesday, holding a single red rose in her hand. Behind her, the sky began to clear as the sun broke through the clouds.
Slowly Ms. Garcia studied the photos and artwork, adorned with messages of heartache and pain and celebration of life that lined the fence to honor the tens of thousands of New Yorkers who died of Covid-19.
She slid the rose into mesh netting that covered the fence.
“We lost more than 30,000 people, and we need to remember that as we think about what we are going to do in the future,” Ms. Garcia said, her voice breaking. “It is a moment where we should have a lot of optimism, but every single person we lost has a family and we need to remember that.”
The cemetery was her last campaign stop on Tuesday, and Ms. Garcia said she felt positive about what she had seen and heard from voters and about the path ahead. “I want to be able to roll up my sleeves and do the work of rebuilding,” she said.
But even after a long, damp and cold day spent talking to voters, and a monthslong campaign that she started as an underdog, Ms. Garcia will not get to sleep in on Wednesday.
“My niece has a graduation at 9:30 in the morning, and I’ll be there — apparently with a gift,” she said, adding that she hadn’t bought one yet.
As Ms. Garcia headed back to her van, a runner hurried past and called out, “I ranked you No. 1.”
transcript
transcript
Andrew Yang Campaigns on Primary Day
Andrew Yang greeted voters in the rain outside a polling site in Brooklyn in a final push to win the Democratic primary race for mayor of New York.
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“I ranked you first.” That’s what I heard all day today. “I ranked you first.” Thank you. Yeah, come on over, get a picture. “You’re in my neighborhood. My kids’ school. They graduated from here. Thank you.” Thank you. It’s been a privilege running for mayor. I’m being in position to potentially serve as the mayor of a city of 8.3 million. To be able to impact that many lives, it’s incredible. You know, it would be a true honor. But when you talk to New Yorkers on the street, you know, they have a range of situations. Some might be independent. Some might be independent — I just talked to someone who was registered with the Working Families Party and then found he couldn’t vote in the primary today. So there are different people with different situations, but hundreds of thousands of people are going to be voting today. And I know that our supporters are going to be among them. I’m so glad that Eric Adams had earlier to me committed to abiding by the results of the ranked-choice voting election. I think it’s the future of democracy. I’m excited to see the vote count tonight, but I’m even more excited to have the final results tallied a number of days or weeks from now. And know New Yorkers don’t like to wait, but we should really be patient on this one. Thank you for being here, everybody. Thank you. All right. Thank you.
Andrew Yang made a number of stops across the city on Tuesday. In Brooklyn, he greeted voters in the rain amid a final, feverish push to get people to the polls.