A Mayor's Race in Winter

There is scandal. There is drama. But mostly everyone is frozen.

- David Freedlander

Clockwise from left, Zohran Mamdani, Eric Adams, Andrew Cuomo, Brad Lander, Jessica Ramos, Zellnor Myrie, and Scott Stringer.

THE RACE TO BE THE next mayor of New York City kicked off on a Saturday morning in the South Bronx. It was late October, ten days before a presidential election that was by universal claim one with apocalyptic stakes, but that didn't stop five of the major declared contenders seeking to succeed Eric Adams from going to the Bronx Christian Charismatic Prayer Fellowship, a ramshackle house of worship on Morris Avenue, to make their pitch. There was hardly anyone in the pews save for a couple of reporters and a handful of early-hire campaign hands. A teen brother-sister hip-hop duo performed. Kirsten John Foy, a rabble-rousing activist and the host of the forum, gave an introduction that served as an oblique warning to the two biggest players in the race, neither of whom were onstage that morning: Mayor Eric Adams, he of the five-count criminal indictment and the submergent approval rating, and former governor Andrew Cuomo, who had been quietly indulging a will-he-or-won't-he comeback attempt after resigning from office in a sexual-harassment scandal.

"There will be some who show up later," said Foy, "claiming they want to be your mayor." Then the pastor of the church delivered a blessing: "Lord Jesus, you know what direction we need to go in, in these perilous times, Father, in these very confusing political times."

And so the five candidates who had bothered to show up for the first real event of the mayoral campaign bowed their heads and raised their arms in prayer.