Former MTA Chairman Joseph Lhota is the projected winner of the Republican nomination for New York City mayor, setting aside billionaire businessman John Catsimatidis on his quest to extend the GOP’s two-decade run on mayoral races.
Exactly whom Lhota will face in the general election remains unclear. Democrat Bill de Blasio, the city’s public advocate, holds a wide lead in his party’s primary, but may not hit the 40 percent of votes needed to avoid a runoff with his closest competitor, former comptroller and 2009 Democratic nominee Bill Thompson.
No matter who his opponent ends up being, Lhota seemed to sense that it would be a fight.
"Our journey continues, just at a faster pace," he told a gathering of supporters.
With 92 percent of precincts reporting, Lhota had 52 percent and Catsimatidis had 41 percent, according to unofficial returns compiled by The Associated Press. De Blasio lead the Democrats with 40 percent, Thompson had 26 percent and Quinn had 15 percent.
Catsimatidis addressed his supporters at around 11:15 p.m. and said he'd called Lhota to congratulate him on his victory.
In the campaign for city comptroller, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer is leading former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, but the race is too close to call, according to unofficial returns and exit polls. The AP's unofficial returns showed Stringer with 52 percent and Spitzer with 48 percent, with 88 percent of precincts reporting.
The public advocate race is looking like a battle between City Councilwoman Letitia James and State Sen. Daniel Squadron that could go to a runoff, early returns show.
The final word on the Democratic winner -- or whether there will be a runoff -- may still take a while, due in part to widespread reports of problems with the city’s 1960s-era lever-operated voting machines, rushed back into use after the Board of Elections warned they couldn’t certify results from the city’s new electronic machines in time for a runoff.
All over the city, voters reported encountering jammed or broken machines, causing longer lines at the working machines, and forcing many people to have to fill out paper ballots. The reliance on paper ballots has heightened concerns that every vote gets counted, which could lead to a long wait for results.
Lhota was among those who had to vote by pen and paper, at his voting place, Congregation of Mount Sinai in Brooklyn Heights.
“It may be a long night based on the fact that, at least in my election district, the machines weren’t working,” Lhota told reporters.
Although a Republican has won every mayoral election since 1993, Lhota faces an uphill battle against the Democratic choice. Democrats outnumber Republicans 6-to-1 in New York, and Lhota does not have the extreme money advantage that the billionaire Bloomberg (who switched from the GOP to independent while in office) enjoyed.
Primary day arrived with de Blasio completing a steady, summer-long rise from the middle of the pack, portraying himself as the most progressive of the candidates and pounding at the city’s economic inequalities and offering the cleanest break from the policies – particularly stop and frisk -- of three-term Mayor Bloomberg. He also benefited from campaign advertisements that featured his black wife and mixed-race children, notably his teenage Afro-wearing son, Dante.
De Blasio’s surge left Quinn, the one-time front-runner, fighting for her political life. Aiming to be the first openly gay mayor, and the first woman to hold the office, Quinn is the most politically powerful of the candidates. She said Tuesday that she was confident she’d make a runoff.
She is the one responsible for making council deals and negotiating with Bloomberg, but that record has dogged her for much of the campaign. De Blasio accused her of making backroom deals with the mayor, and for backing his bid to change city law to allow him to run for a third term. Quinn pointed out that de Blasio, as a council candidate, once spoke in favor of overturning term limits, but that argument did not seem to hold much traction. It is as if she is burdened with many of the negatives associated with the sitting mayor, and little of the positives.
Post-vote surveys provided some insight into that divide. Only 22 percent of Democrats told an Edison Research/Marist exit poll that they wanted a candidate who would continue Bloomberg’s policies, while 73 percent said they wanted the next mayor to move the city in a different direction. The survey included more than 1,700 voters, has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Asked to choose what issue mattered most to them in deciding who should be mayor, 30 percent said jobs and unemployment, 20 percent said education, 16 percent said crime, 12 percent said the city’s finances and 11 percent said housing.
Thompson, who won the Democratic primary in 2009 before narrowly losing to Bloomberg, has run a cautious but steady campaign, remaining in second or third place for most of the race. The race's only black candidate, Thompson spent primary day wrapping up another of his 24-hour campaign marathons, which ended with his proclamation that he felt “energized.”
The primary could turn out to be the end of former New York Rep. Anthony Weiner’s political career. Weiner has longed for the mayor’s office, and has been derailed twice before, in 2005 and 2009. In 2011, he resigned from Congress amid revelations that he’d sexted with women, but chose the 2013 mayoral primary to try for redemption.
Weiner enjoyed an early spike in the polls, and sparked an avalanche of late-night talk-show jokes. Then things turned dark again, when he was forced to admit that he’d continued online relationships with women after his resignation. He sat near the cellar ever since.
He was the first candidate to concede Tuesday.
“I have to say ladies and gentlemen, there is no doubt about it -- we had the best ideas," Weiner told supporters. "Sadly I was an imperfect messenger.”
The only major Democratic candidate to consistently poll worse than Weiner is Comptroller John Liu, who has been dogged by a federal investigation into fundraising improprieties.
De Blasio, the one candidate who seems in a position to potentially win the primary outright, said he wasn’t expecting that to happen. To assume otherwise would be folly, he said.
That was why, he said, he’d be up and campaigning again on Wednesday.