The mayor’s race has started in earnest and you better be paying attention

As you clear the cobwebs from a productive summer of unplugging a little bit, here is a rude reminder: the most important election of your life, the 2025 general election for New York City mayor, will be here sooner than you know. Nov. 4, to be specific. The Democratic primary had a lot of juice and captured many hearts and minds, but the main event is coming up soon, and unlike most years, it’s not a mere formality. 

With four candidates with real name recognition running to be the next guy who gets the “Not so easy to find a mayor who doesn’t suck shit” Onion story tweeted at them, the election isn’t as simple as “The Democratic nominee will win.” So let’s refresh our memories on who’s running and what their deal is, how they could win and some other important election information you need to know.

The deadline to register to vote in the general election this year is Oct. 25 which is over a month from now, but don’t put it off if you’ve been meaning to register, because these things have a way of slipping your mind. You can even do it online these days, so get to it. I’m not lecturing, I’m just speaking as someone who is constantly missing the return dates for library books and doesn’t do free trials of anything because I know I’ll forget to cancel before the actual price kicks in.

When can I vote?

Election Day itself is on Nov. 4. If you want to get your vote in before then, the early voting period for the general election will run from Oct. 25 to Nov. 2. Last year's early voting period featured Halloween-themed "I Voted" stickers, if you're motivated by that kinda thing or you consider yourself a collector.

Who are our guys?

This year there are four major candidates for mayor, with two independent candidates and two from the major parties.

Zohran Mamdani

Well well well, the primary candidate who knew the most about my dumb bullshit pulled off the win and stands on the precipice of sitting behind the big desk at City Hall. Zohran Mamdani shocked the world by going from relatively unknown DSA Assembly member from Astoria to winning the Democratic primary at the end of June, becoming one of the biggest political celebrities in the country in the process.

Mamdani hasn’t rested on his laurels since his unexpected victory over a crowded field that was seemingly being dominated by nepotism case and former two-and-a-half-term governor Andrew Cuomo, and has continued to lean on what got him this far: videos that showcase his ideas and sunny disposition, a ground game emphasizing volunteers eager to knock doors across the city, and an outlook that actually enjoys New York City as a concept. He’s added to that by racking up a slew of endorsements from Cuomo’s former boosters who were very eager to immediately throw dirt on the former governor’s political grave.

Mamdani is a socialist, but contrary to what his most pants-pissing opposition believes, he can’t actually turn New York City into a command economy on Day One. Or even Day Two Thousand Nine Hundred and Twenty. It does mean he can fight with the governor and state legislature over raising taxes to fund a more expansive local safety net to pay for things like free buses, universal child care and the radical proposition of dedicating .5% of the city’s budget to the public library system. Some of Mamdani’s other proposals, like municipal grocery stores and a Department of Community Safety that would replace some of the NYPD’s current job duties, are outside the bounds of what’s been considered normal politics in the city. But then consider all the wonderful things politics as normal have brought us. 

As a young, Muslim, socialist candidate who’s been an unapologetic critic of Israel’s occupation and genocide, Mamdani has torn up the script on what makes someone a successful politician on a citywide level and has thus far survived scandals like “Lives in a rent-stabilized apartment” and “Seemed fun at parties in college.”  The prospect of being governed by a brown guy who wants to raise taxes has caused a chunk of the city’s political and business elite to crash out hard and convince themselves Mamdani is some kind of dangerous outsider instead of just seeing what he really is: a nerd who went to Bronx Science and voluntarily lived in Albany half of the year for the better part of this decade.

If you don’t think pure gutter racism plays  a role in the way Mamdani is portrayed as unknowable and unpredictable instead of as a boy genius, ask yourself why the centrist world insisted Pete Buttigieg could be literally the president despite being not much older than the man from the People’s Republic of Astoria and leading a place that’s barely bigger than the Queens neighborhood.

How he wins
Mamdani hasn’t been able to coast on just being the Democratic nominee as so many candidates have before him, because enough Democratic power brokers have shied away from supporting him that Cuomo has found some room to run in the general election and siphon off some traditional Democratic support. Still, Mamdani is the heavy favorite, consistently polling 20 points ahead of the disgraced former governor in second place, so he wins if he just keeps doing what he’s doing and the people running behind him all fight over who really has the juice to beat him instead of agreeing to just put one guy up against him (something that’s too late now anyway).

Andrew Cuomo

Professional political scientists classify what happened to Andrew Cuomo in June as “getting his ass beat.” Cuomo lined up support from elected officials, unions and big money donors, and relying on his name recognition and decades in local politics campaigned like he was owed the job as mayor. He took a commanding lead in the polls into Election Night and then … all of that evaporated before the late night shows even started and he publicly conceded around 11 p.m. staring at a double digit loss. Now Cuomo is back, running as an independent with a promise to learn from his mistakes and not campaign like a guy who hasn’t lived in the city for decades.

Initially it seemed like he was going to try to rip off Zohran Mamdani’s “Fun guy making videos” style but then switched to “Hey remember when I was doing PowerPoints during the most traumatic months of your life” and now has been spending time huddling with the kinds of people who are gonna knock down the community center unless a ragtag crew can raise enough money to put on a show and buy the building. None of this has really gotten Cuomo above the mid-20s in polls, nor has it led to him being able to raise a lot of money.

It’s kind of hard to say why Cuomo is running beyond the theory that he still believes he is owed the job. His major policy proposals since entering the general election have been “Free transit for some but not all,” income thresholds for rent stabilized apartments and mayoral control of the subway and bus system. No one anywhere has really stepped up to endorse or validate the ideas, even landlords weren’t into means testing rent stabilized units, because while Cuomo had surrogates to push his ideas in the primary, most of those people endorsed Mamdani because they understand being a party hack means sticking with the guy who got the party’s nomination.

How he wins
It starts and ends with the election becoming a two-man race, or at least Cuomo thinks that. For a minute there it looked like there was going to be some real consolidation in the field, as President Trump and his cronies did their best to deliver a bribe good enough to Mayor Adams to get him out of the race. Adams is still here though, and Cuomo’s allies are still spending most of their time asking a supercomputer to develop a bribe good enough to get him out of the way instead of urging Andrew Cuomo to “come up with good ideas” and “pretend you actually like New York City.” Meanwhile, more and more polls are showing that Mamdani is pulling away even if Adams drops out.

Curtis Sliwa

For a second election in a row, the Republican Party is running the closest thing we’ll ever get to Mayor Mike Haggar. In 2021, Sliwa got 30% of the vote, and Republicans believe that could be enough to win in a four-way race. Sliwa is the founder of the Guardian Angels, a gig he parlayed into being a radio and TV screaming head back when NY1 did more Pardon the Interruption-style bullshit. It was during that gig that Sliwa decided to sexually harass City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito over the airwaves, something that merely earned him a suspension from the radio instead of getting fired.

To some degree, Sliwa is a fascinating case, as he is a rare New York City Republican who isn’t in thrall to Donald Trump. That’s meant he has refused to entertain dropping out of the race in order to clear the field for Andrew Cuomo, and has even had the decency to say Zohran Mamdani should not be stripped of his citizenship. Wow!

That being said, Sliwa is still the man who as recently as last year was leading anti-immigrant hate marches and cheered on his vigilante gang as they beat up a random guy on TV for the alleged crime of being an undocumented immigrant. And in a race where Zohran Mamdani’s lack of experience is seen as a cause for concern, it has to be said that Curtis Sliwa has never held an adult job outside of “vigilante gang leader” and “talking head.” His policy positions are the traditional city Republican talking points of cutting undefined government waste, relying on police for basically everything and allowing “local character” to be the defining factor in whether you can build a single building in a city gripped by a housing crisis.

How he wins
We wake up one day, the Foot Clan is a real thing and New Yorkers decide they need a guy who’ll fight Shredder on the roof of the Time Warner Building.

Fine, you want a real scenario? Eric Adams drops out, all of his voters move to Curtis Sliwa instead of Andrew Cuomo, and Zohran Mamdani finds a way to start leaking support to Cuomo by, I don’t know, deciding now he does support defunding the police, allowing Sliwa to win 34 percent to his opponents’ 31 percent each. The Foot Clan thing is more realistic at this juncture.

Eric Adams

Hoo boy. When Eric Adams won the 2021 election, the laziest take makers of our era rushed out to call him the next face of the Democratic Party. Four years later, he’s the odds-on favorite to be just the second mayor in the last five decades to fail to win a second term in office, and will do so as an independent candidate after declining to even run in the Democratic primary. 

As late as last Friday at 4:30 p.m., everyone was expecting Adams to drop out of the race and take some type of job with the Trump administration, which would be his reward for creating a clearer path to victory for Andrew Cuomo, who swears Donald Trump doesn’t want him to win. Adams swerved the city though and in the second-craziest press conference of his tenure (second only to his post-indictment presser) announced he was staying in the race for mayor and by the way Cuomo and Zohran Mamdani were “spoiled brats” and that Cuomo himself was “a snake and a liar.” As of press time, the city’s scummiest capitalists are still trying to figure out a bribe that will get him to drop out of the race

Adams’ pitch for re-election is essentially a promise and a threat at the same time. Want a mayor who will push through the City of Yes and an ambitious redesign of Flatbush Avenue? Vote for Eric. Want a mayor who will openly conspire with the president to terrorize immigrants and put his awful cronies in charge of important positions? Vote for Eric.

Adams is more or less right that the city isn’t doing terribly under his leadership, but it starts to get exhausting and embarrassing when the Buildings Commissioner, (second) Police Commissioner, schools chancellor, deputy mayor for public safety, campaign donors and various extremely trusted advisors get popped for graft; the next deputy mayor for public safety brings Dr. Phil on for ridealongs and every bus lane and bike lane project is seemingly completed or killed based on a coin flip. And that’s not even getting into the fact that Adams himself was indicted for graft and escaped only after a procession of federal prosecutors resigned rather than drop the case against him.

Earlier this year the mayor promised that he would register “one million” new voters, not unlike the way Zohran Mamdani captured the hearts and votes of tens of thousands of new voters. We have not heard an update on that, but we do know that Adams’ canvassing team has been accused of submitting many, many false signatures to get him on the ballot. Also last week he tricked a bunch of Muslim clerics into coming to an endorsement event at City Hall by telling them it was an event to celebrate the Prophet Muhammad’s 1500th birthday.

How he wins
His three opponents fall victim to three separate misfortunes that don’t allow any of them to actually stand for election in November. I’d like to see that!