This week’s biggest Winners & Losers

Zohran Mamdani has reached new heights – and not just the nosebleed seats at Madison Square Garden. From leftist obscurity to global superstar, he defeated a former governor and then defeated him again. He changed the way New Yorkers engage with elections, inspiring tens of thousands to join his cause and knock on 3 million doors throughout the city. It’s not every election that draws international attention, and Mamdani delivered a campaign for the ages. Now he just has to be mayor.

Columbia County Sheriff-elect Jackie Salvatore is New York’s first elected Black woman sheriff. Salvatore, currently undersheriff, won 58% of the vote. Salvatore will be the only woman sheriff in the state and the third in state history, following former New York City Sheriff Teresa Mason and former Jefferson County Sheriff Colleen O’Neill. Mason, who held an appointive office, was New York’s first woman and first Black woman sheriff.

Tuesday wasn’t a good night for Republicans, including in upstate mayoral races. One ruby red spot, however, was the reelection of Binghamton Mayor Jared Kraham, who captured 54% to win a second term. It was a battle of youth to lead the Parlor City with 34-year-old Kraham, Binghamton’s youngest mayor, defeating 33-year-old Democrat Miles Burnett.

The staffer-to-elected pipeline is alive and well in the New York City Council, as Democrat Kayla Santosuosso won her race to succeed her boss, term-limited Council Member Justin Brannan, in southern Brooklyn. She won with 59% of the vote against Republican George Sarantopoulos, a landlord and ATM owner who had the support of Curtis Sliwa. Santosuosso, Brannan’s chief counsel, was able to stave off the reddening of southern Brooklyn to pull off the win.

If there’s one lesson the political left can learn from the New York City mayor’s race, it’s the importance of building coalitions. It’s one Council Member Carmen Da La Rosa has taken to heart. She dropped out of the council speaker race last weekend and threw her support behind Council Member Crystal Hudson. It’s good momentum for Hudson going into Somos, but how much difference it makes – and whether other candidates follow suit – is yet to be determined.

The real question now is: Can Andrew Cuomo win a race for receiver of taxes at this point? The former governor, who once ruled the state with an iron fist and was the talk of the nation, lost this year’s New York City mayoral election to a back-bench Democratic socialist Assembly member twice by wide margins. It’s a complete fall from the pedestal of power that Cuomo seemingly occupied as his birthright for decades.

Bob Holden’s eight-year deputy chief of staff had a rough week. She ran as a Republican to replace her boss, vying against fellow staffer Phil Wong. The pair ran cordial campaigns for months, but Vaichunas and her fellow Republicans apparently felt she was the true heir to CD30, assuming Holden would back her in the end. After a shocking 10-point loss, she gave a tearful, bitter speech, calling Holden a backstabber and vowing to leave public life altogether. Wouldn’t want to be in that office right now.

In 2023, City Council Member Kristy Marmorato became the first Republican to win a seat in the Bronx in decades, but her tenure burned fast and bright. The former X-ray tech lost to Democrat Shirley Aldebol by about 5 points. “I just hope that the council member-elect is good to every pocket of the district, and that she shows attention to everybody,” Marmorato told City & State at her watch party.

James Moriarty and James Scheuerman, the GOP and Democratic commissioners of the Nassau Board of Elections, respectively, really thought they’d figured out how to speed up getting election results online: They would pilot a very high-tech method known as a memory stick. What could possibly go wrong in an age when everything is in the Cloud? Nineteen flash drives containing election data went missing for hours, and ballots had to be counted by hand. Get some AirTags on those things!

New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams worked hard to rally voters against three housing ballot measures, but it wasn’t enough. After spending around  $2 million on mailers warning the Charter Revision Committee’s proposals would fuel gentrification and severely limit local input, all three measures passed. Still, it wasn’t quite a landslide: All of them received between 57% and 58% of the vote.