Marte Wins Democratic Nomination for City Council; Mamdani Ekes Out Downtown Victory with 11 Votes
Lower Manhattan residents went to the polls on Tuesday (following a week of early voting), to select Democratic Party candidates for (among other races) the City Council seat that represents Lower Manhattan and the upcoming Mayoral race. For the City Council race, although Tuesday’s primary election technically decided only the nominees of the political parties, the political landscape of Lower Manhattan usually makes the nod of the Democratic party tantamount to winning the wider contest, and often relegates the actual election to the status of a fait accompli. This year’s Mayoral contest has a more ambiguous outlook, because the incumbent, Eric Adams, has already committed to running in November as an independent, and former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who lost his bid for the Democratic nomination on Tuesday, is also considering an independent run.
Incumbent City Council member Christopher Marte captured the Democratic nomination to run in November for the seat he first won in 2021, with 49.2 percent of the vote, according to data from the New York City Board of Elections that was current as of 12:30 am on Wednesday morning. He was trailed by Community Board 1 (CB1) members Elizabeth Lewinsohn (with 24.3 percent), Jess Coleman (16.1 percent), and Eric Yu (10.0 percent). Term limit laws mandate that this will be Mr. Marte’s last stint as a City Council member.
In the contest for the Democratic nod in the November Mayoral election, State Assembly member Zohran Mamdani carried Lower Manhattan, as was the case for the City as a whole. But Mr. Mamdani defeated his chief rival, Mr. Cuomo, by a much narrower local spread than he did elsewhere throughout the five boroughs, carrying Lower Manhattan only by 11 votes, out of a total of 9,871 ballots cast. This amounts to a margin of slightly less than one-tenth of one percent. For the City as a whole, Mr. Mamdani won by more than seven percentage points.
Mr. Cuomo outpolled Mr. Mamdani in three of Lower Manhattan’s four primary neighborhoods, winning throughout Battery Park City (except for a strong showing for Mr. Mamdani at Gateway Plaza), Tribeca, and the Seaport/Civic Center area. Only in the Financial District did Mr. Mamdani take the lead, but his margin in this neighborhood was so wide (nearly doubling Mr. Cuomo’s total) that it offset his deficit elsewhere.