A blistering heat wave couldn’t stop the New York Democrats who trudged to their polling places on Primary Day to thin out a packed pool of mayoral wannabes.
“It’s a hot day!” newly minted voter Charlie Qucik, 23, said after voting at Public School 17 in Astoria, Queens. “But it’s my first election, so I wanted to come and do it.”
In fact, it was the hottest day of the year — with Central Park recording its highest temperature since 2012.
As of 6 p.m. Tuesday, some 830,875 New Yorkers had voted, according to the Board of Elections, including 384,338 who cast ballots during nine days of early voting. Another 50,382 voters had mailed in valid ballots.
As temperatures neared triple digits, voters across the city made their picks among the 11 Democratic candidates aiming to replace Mayor Eric Adams — who eventually skipped the primary he narrowly won four years ago to instead run for a second term in November as an independent.
The Board of Elections sent bottled water and fans to polling sites, as did some campaigns. Many of the city’s more than 1,200 polling locations lacked air conditioning or suffered from broken equipment. (A BOE spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment).
At P.S. 9 in Prospect Heights, poll worker Sarah Purvis tried to cool herself with a BOE-branded fan.
“I got my water bottle, plenty of healthy snacks,” she said.
The site had started the day with a single fan before a sympathetic neighbor brought an industrial-sized one to keep the air moving. Ellen Bolotin, a community associate at the school, handed out popsicles to poll workers.
A parent donated the icy treats, she said, “because they know how hot it is in our gym.”
Susan Fensten, a poll worker at a school in Bedford-Stuyvesant that lacked air conditioning, said the one large fan failed twice, with workers pulling in smaller fans from the school.
In the early evening, Fensten dialed 911 for a voter seemingly suffering from heatstroke.
“She looked very overheated,” Fensten said.
In East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, voters were sweating out the Primary Day election after the air conditioning tapped out at a Powers Street polling place.
Shortly after noon, 10 people waited on line to vote while fans circulated hot air. A row of water bottles sat at a check-in desk.
The scene was enough for Rafael Melendez, 77, to be grateful he had voted at 7:30 a.m.
“I went there now and I see that line and I said, ‘Wow, I did the right thing,’” said Melendez, who was seated on a bench outside the assisted-living facility.
‘We’re Tired of Surviving’
In Crown Heights, Brooklyn, poll worker Christopher Kelly Burwell, 56, held a large cup of light roast coffee with two extra shots of espresso — “More caffeine!” he said — while effusively greeting an early stream of arrivals at a community center on St. John’s Place.
But his enthusiasm wasn’t always returned from voters whose options included a pack of career politicians led by a former governor who resigned in the face of sexual harassment allegations and a heap of uncertainty about where the city is headed.
“We’re in a rut,” said 71-year-old retired counselor Carzei O’Neill, noting that she voted for Andrew Cuomo, the former governor. “People just don’t know whether to turn left or right, so we’re just in a jam.”
Voters listed the high costs of city living, crime and how would-be mayors would handle immigration and the Trump administration as areas of concern that drew them to the polls.
“I want the quality of life to go up and prices to go down,” said Terry Lin, 22, a Zohran Mamdani supporter who voted at Public School 13 on the North Shore of Staten Island. “I know people who have moved out of the city because it was too expensive.”
“I’m more in a progressive mindset and for reforming the Democratic Party,” O‘Keefe said. “Make it more for working people, not contributors who give them millions and millions of dollars.”
At the Tilden Community Center in Brownsville, Brooklyn, Valencia Shelby, 59, said her top voting priority was as simple as finding an option aside from Mayor Adams.
“We just want to live and be happy, because we’re tired of surviving,” said Shelby, who described Cuomo as “for the people.”
At a polling place in Park Slope, the Brooklyn neighborhood that Brad Lander calls home, several voters said they were backing their neighbor.
“He’s not flashy, he’s kind of dorky and that’s OK,” Gretchen Nealon, 50, said of Lander. “I think we need dorky at this point.”
Others said they were pulling for Mamdani, the Queens assemblymember and political upstart whose social media-friendly campaign helped draw in first-time voters and energize a youthful base of supporters. Mamdani and Lander cross-endorsed each other in the closing days of the ranked-choice election.
Yaniv Goren, 25, of Astoria, Queens, said he had been “disengaged” from electoral politics until Mamdani ran for mayor on a promise to make the city more affordable after just two terms in the assembly, the lower house of the state legislature.
“It was always the same old thing — you know, the person you want to get elected doesn’t get elected, or the concerns that they highlight are not the actual concerns we have,” Goren said. “And Zohran really shifted that.”
The fatigue wasn’t just because of the overwhelming heat.
Several New Yorkers told THE CITY they were put off by the length of the campaign, confusion over ranked-choice voting and the various scandals that have swirled around candidates.
“It’s too much to keep up with,” one voter who declined to give her name said outside the Mitchel Houses, a NYCHA development in the Mott Haven neighborhood of The Bronx. “I don’t bother with none of that.”
As Zohran Mamdani and former Assemblymember Michael Blake, who have also cross-endorsed each other, spoke on Tuesday morning with potential voters by Yankee Stadium, Vincent Hernandez, 30, praised Blake as a “common sense” candidate.
But Hernandez, a registered independent who was on his way to vote at the County Courthouse, was told by a reporter that he couldn’t do so today because he’s not a Democrat.
“Really?” Hernandez said. His consolation, he added, was that now “Imma have something better to complain at.”
At Public School 7 in East Harlem, Maria Pizzaro, 74, said she voted for Scott Stringer, the longtime city politico who ran a failed campaign for mayor in 2021. He was the only candidate to get her vote, she said, largely because of her confusion over a ranked-choice election that she called “too complicated.”
“I’m not gonna complicate my head with that,” Pizzaro said.
