I was born and raised in Maryland, which is a pleasant way to be, but I’ll happily admit that New York is the center of gravity for my way of thinking. My father’s family was from the outer boroughs, and the city—New York, that is, unless you say it with capital letters, The City, which only ever means Manhattan—has been the distant background for me since my childhood in the DC suburbs. I lived in the city while I was in grad school and still try to make it back when I can. It’s a fine place.

So it always depresses me to see the city going down the tubes—something it admittedly does from time to time, without lasting ill effect, but still no fun in the interim. The last time the city went down the tubes was the mayoralty of the weird, hateful Clinton crony Bill de Blasio (whom, I hasten to note, was not actually Italian, but adopted from a family of German extraction). De Blasio was an ideal study in how to be a bad mayor. 

A New York mayor has to do only four things well to be considered a winner: don’t mess with the public schools; keep the subway basically safe and in basically good repair; support the police as they crack down on sickos and crooks, even when that entails a little light brutality; and keep the city solvent. De Blasio, who was the most hated mayor of my own lifetime, did the opposite of all those things. He introduced race-based admissions to the city’s magnet schools; the subway got so bad the state took it over from the city; the police were discouraged from doing anything about street-level disorder; and he strained the city’s fisc with novel, budget-busting welfare programs like universal pre-K. In addition to all this, de Blasio was a titanically off-putting weirdo who had come to power basically thanks to his longtime connection to the Clinton machine. No wonder New Yorkers hated the bum.

De Blasio was followed by the current Hizzoner, Eric Adams, who is running for reelection as an independent. Adams is also extremely weird. He swore an oath to get an ear-piercing if he won the mayoralty, which he fulfilled on camera; he is a vegetarian; he is a single gentleman who is no stranger to the club; he has a distinctive rhetorical style that is—well, you have to see it to understand it. On the other hand, he reversed de Blasio’s school wokeness, has backed the cops (he’s a former police captain), and generally has gone about the business of being a C+ mayor. The fact that he was sort-of, kind-of accepting bribes from the Turkish government in a federally prosecutable way cannot diminish Hizzoner’s success qua mayor. 

So anyway, New York’s cretinous, washed-up former governor, Andrew Cuomo, tried to take advantage of Hizzoner’s late difficulties to make a comeback as the Democratic nominee for the mayoralty (who invariably wins against the perennial Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa, a kindhearted eccentric who runs a neighborhood watch group that wears red berets). The problem is that everyone—including normal, cynical New Yorkers who work for moving companies or accounting firms or the MTA—hates Cuomo, so he lost. He lost to the embarrassingly dated, 2018-style “scumbag left” tribute act Zohran Mamdani, a Ugandan-born Muslim of Indian extraction who supports rent control, LGBT rights, state-owned and -operated grocery stores, and all that jazz. Indeed, Mamdani seems in large part to define himself by opposing the Four-Point Way for mayors laid out above. So much more the humiliation for Cuomo.

What next for Gotham? Well, Cuomo can run again as an independent against Mamdani alongside Adams, although reporting has it that he is unwilling to repeat the ordeal; the polling suggests that Cuomo would functionally tie with Mamdani, Adams in the third position. If Cuomo does not run, polling suggests that Mamdani will clobber Adams—I am actually skeptical of that, but the numbers are the numbers. If Adams withdraws and Cuomo runs in the general, polling suggests he’d beat Mamdani pretty thoroughly. Of course, poor, noble Sliwa’s quixotic Republican campaign hasn’t a chance.

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So the fight is far from over in the city that never sleeps. Cuomo is one of the most hateful figures in American politics—a pure cynic who faked Covid casualty numbers to cover up the fact that, while he was preening at his daily televised press conferences, New York’s nursing homes were being decimated. On the other hand, he would basically uphold New York’s Four-Point Way. 

Mamdani has some of the worst political ideas ever tried, but he speaks well and hasn’t been accused of molesting any of his secretaries or assistants yet. Adams has nothing wrong with him besides being a crook. Much could happen before November 4; it seems to be anyone’s race. And, as in so much of American public life in 2025, there seems to be a singular question: Do you prefer the devil you know, or are you going to risk a change? My own money is on New Yorkers choosing one of the devils they know.

Editor’s note: A prior version of this article referred to Adams as a former police commissioner.