At the end of it all, there wasn't that much drama to it.
When Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani took the stage at his Brooklyn election night party just after 11 p.m. Tuesday night, it was clear that voters had handed him a mandate to run New York City—with votes still being counted, more New Yorkers voted for Mamdani than any mayor since John Lindsay in 1965.
"The future is in our hands. My friends, we have toppled a political dynasty," Mamdani told his supporters at the Brooklyn Paramount. "I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life. But let tonight be the final time I utter his name, as we turn the page on a politics that abandons the many and answers only to the few."
The campaign waged by the 34-year-old immigrant New Yorker was based on a positive vision of New York City, after four years of corrupt rule predicated on the idea of a debased, tacitly fallen polity that needed disciplining and reinvention. Instead, Mamdani spoke to an idea that New York City—in its diversity, its contradictions, its polyglot mess—is not only worth revival, but celebration. It is not the greatest city in the world because of its excess, its unabashed form of shameless capitalism, but because of the people that make it work, whose own opportunity to make a better life for themselves made it a beacon to the world.