New Election Tally Reveals Smallest Winning Margin in Decades

     by Yehudit Garmaise

     The New York City Board of Elections (BOE), which just released a new vote tally that includes all absentee and affidavit ballots for the Democratic mayoral primary, revealed that the gap between Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams and former Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia has shrunk even further to a razor-thin difference of 7,153 votes.

     On July 12, the BOE plans to certify the results of the June 22 Democratic Primary, which was the closest mayoral race in many decades.

     In 1977, Ed Koch, who ran as a Democrat beat Mario Cuomo, who ran as a Liberal, in what was considered a close race, Koch beat Cuomo by 129,463 votes.

     Although the margins in the Democratic Primary were quite slim, the New York Post reported that Adams won in the end because he was “the only real law-and-order candidate in the race.”

     “If there’s a lesson to be learned from the Democratic mayoral primary — and there definitely is one! — it’s that it’s easy to ignore street violence when there’s very little street violence to be seen,” Steve Cuozzo wrote. “Such is the oblivious attitude of mostly white Manhattanites who voted against Eric Adams.

     “Inhabitants of lower-income, high-crime, mostly minority neighborhoods turned out for Adams in huge numbers, up to 70% of votes.

     “Meanwhile, the neighborhoods that voted for Kathryn Garcia (and her wishy-washy crime-fighting strategy of replacing the NYPD’s “warrior culture” with a “guardian mindset,” whatever that means) are among the city’s least dangerous, as shown by NYPD CompStat data for each of the city’s 77 precincts.”