The GSD Bump — what Tuesday’s preliminary results tell us …

Voting is over, and there’s still a lot of uncertainty about results. Since New York allows time for absentee ballots to be returned and corrected before being counted, and because the next rounds of counting ranked choice votes won’t start for a week, we’re left sitting with a lot of preliminary results.

But there’s still a lot we do know:

City Council District 1

Chris Marte picked up a lot of votes in the Grand Street co-ops compared to his 2017 campaign, and is very likely to win the Democratic nomination for City Council in District 1.

© Sam Hudis and Competitive Advantage Research, 2021. (sam@compadre.us)

After narrowly losing to Margaret Chin in 2017, Marte never stopped working for downtown Manhattan, and in those four years he added a lot of support, especially in our neighborhood. Even though this year’s field had many more candidates, Marte’s raw total and percentage of votes increased on Grand Street. In fact, while Margaret Chin performed better in this neighborhood in 2017 than she did over the whole district, this year that feat belonged to Chris Marte, who won our neighborhood with a wider margin than his (already strong) district-wide performance.

Let’s call this the GSD bump.

Remember, in 2017, GSD did not yet exist — we were running our own original challenge that year to the old Truman Club candidates and we stayed out of that competitive City Council race. This year, having established a solid membership and trust among our neighbors, our partnership with Chris Marte and endorsement of his candidacy made a difference. 

Borough President

Lindsey Boylan won’t be the next Borough President, but she got a huge GSD bump. Neighbors here really responded to Boylan’s clear advocacy for East River Park, and while she received only about 10% of votes borough-wide, in the Grand Street co-ops she received nearly 24%. (Mark Levine leads the results right now with a slim margin over Brad Hoylman, and we’ll need to wait for the counting to finish to know who won.)

District Attorney

In the one big race that did not have ranked choice voting, Alvin Bragg will win the nomination for District Attorney. Bragg got one third of the vote in an 8-way race, enough to secure victory. There are still absentees to count, but the result is unlikely to change.

In other races

  • Eric Adams’ lead in the Mayoral primary is likely to hold (there’s no clear block of ranked choice votes that might coalesce against him, which is the only way for a candidate to leap-frog the first round winner). Our endorsed candidate, Kathryn Garcia, performed very well in our neighborhood, getting more first-round votes than any other candidate in 9 of our 11 election districts.
  • Brad Lander’s lead in the Comptroller race is also likely to hold. Lander also got a GSD bump, scoring 9.4 points higher in our neighborhood than he did city-wide.
  • Jumaane Williams easily won re-election with no need to count ranked choice votes.
  • Edward Irizarry did not win the nomination for Civil Court judge, unfortunately, but he also got a GSD bump, scoring 6 points higher in our neighborhood than he did district-wide.

This was GSD’s first NYC primary season. Not all of our endorsed candidates won, but that’s not entirely the point. Over the past year many of you engaged deeply with these candidates and campaigns, and that experience creates a more effective connection between this neighborhood and our elected officials moving forward. That’s exactly what GSD was formed to do.