There both is less and more than meets the eye in last Tuesday’s variously-styled primary “bombshell” “tornado” or “watershed moment.”  Then New York Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani came first in an eleven-person Democratic mayoral primary contest and almost assured he would be his party’s candidate after rank choice tallying on July 1 lifts his 43.5% plurality above 50%.

Mario Procaccino

There are many historical examples that might illuminate why it happened and what is likely to occur in this November’s general election for Mayor of the world’s capital.  The best methinks is the 1969 NYC mayoral primary and general.  In those the young, handsome incumbent Republican Mayor John Lindsay lost his primary to John Marchi, a state senator from Staten Island.  In the Democratic primary, NYC Comptroller Mario Procaccino defeated a slew of much better-known opponents, including three-time former and never defeated Mayor Robert Wagner and novelist Norman Mailer, “The Prisoner of Sex” and General of “The Armies of the Night.”

Lindsay came to and lost his party’s primary – as current NYC Mayor Eric Adams certainly would have – with burdens and failures weightier than those heavy ones on Mayor Adams’ shoulders.  In labor strikes Lindsay had the heads of both the transit and sanitation unions thrown in jail where the transit union chief died.  Lindsay had lost his previously strong support from both Black and Jewish voters in his handling of a disastrous teacher’s strike that still haunts the city, the nation and its politics.  Lindsay had failed to get the snowbound Borough of Queens plowed for weeks in a fiasco that haunted him till his death.

John Lindsay

But Lindsay, like Adams today, had another line to use in the general election against opponents who were deeply flawed politically, if not generally.  Those, Marchi and Procaccino were touted by Jim Crow icon, Alabama Governor George Wallace, as having won their primaries by making the same speeches as Wallace had “except that they had New York accents.”  Marchi did little to distance himself from such support and in fact quickly announced that he would “unleash the police” while his supporters sang “to put it broader, he will fight for law and order.”  Procaccino tried but failed when he assured the members of an African-American congregation that “my heart is as black as yours.”

That 1969 post-primary lineup roughly tracks the one in NYC today.  We have Eric Adams a badly flawed incumbent, who no longer will be his party’s candidate and two men on the major party lines who either will be dismissed or reviled by large percentages of the likely general election voters in their party.  Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee is a vigilante, sporting a “raspberry beret”[1] and has become the vastly out-registered Republican perennial candidate and loser.  He will not be taken seriously by any Republican who wants the person voted for to actually win.

Mamdani, the presumptive Democratic nominee beat former Governor Andrew Cuomo by 7% on Tuesday, but lost to him in lower-income precincts and those with a majority of Black residents.  These are the very groups Mamdani’s promises of free city buses, free childcare till age 5, city-owned grocery stores, higher taxes on the rich and a freeze on rent rates are supposed to benefit the most.

Curtis Sliwa

Mamdani’s deficit with those voters may result from them having heard all this and having it unfulfilled before.  Mamdani did better, and much better than Cuomo, with middle and upper- income Democrats, but many in those demographies voted for candidates other than Mamdani and Cuomo and many more did not vote in the primary but will in November.  The reliably large Jewish vote will be even larger and for the first time since Lindsay give the Democratic candidate a minority of their votes.

In November 1969, Lindsay, the heavily damaged reject of his party, easily won the general election for mayor.  He did, as the candidate on an independent and the Liberal Party lines, against those two heavily flawed major party opponents.  The general electorate confronted by the unpleasant but clear choice among Lindsay, Procaccino and Marchi chose the least among three perceived evils.

Andrew Cuomo with his next move is the wild card in whether the 2025 general election will look and play out like it did in ’69.  If Cuomo runs on the independent line waiting for him, Mamdani will easily win the election.

Andrew Cuomo

However, if as is more likely, Cuomo bows out and the contest is among Mamdani, Adams and Sliwa, the first two will contest a very tight race.  The outcome will less depend on anything Adams can do and more on whether Mamdani finds some way to moderate some of his sillier promises without losing pie-in-the-sky supporters and/or he is able to convert liberal and progressive Democrats into the type of mindless zombies that constitute Trump’s base and accept every ludicrous promise he makes as guaranteed.

New Yorkers have lived with a C- mayor for the last 3.5 years and my prediction is that they will opt for that mediocrity again rather than the prospect of four years when virtually nothing that Mamdani promises progresses, let alone comes to fruition.  Years when New York City becomes the punching bag for America’s interior and for the tyrant in the White House.

[1]   “the kind you find in a second hand store.”