In New York’s mayoral primary, he won a mere 36.1 percent of first-choice votes versus Zohran Mamdani’s 43.6 percent plurality. He has now conceded the race.

It’s the steamiest night of the year in New York City, with temperatures reaching well over 100 degrees. The (preliminary) results from the hottest race in the nation — the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City — are mostly in. These are not the final results, which will not be known for well over a week (see below). But these first-round results suggest a clear enough outcome: Former Governor Andrew Cuomo has wilted in the heat.

He has been decisively defeated in the first round of the primary. It doesn’t look to have been terribly close, either: With 89 percent of the vote counted as of this writing, Cuomo has won a mere 36.3 percent of first-choice votes versus Zohran Mamdani’s shocking 43.5 percent plurality. Those numbers may tighten up later in the night and tomorrow morning, but they will not flip. And they will likely not flip a week from now, when the vote is “recalculated” to reflect ranked-choice voting on the ballot. The third place finisher, Comptroller Brad Lander, campaigned on a public electoral pact with Mamdani (asking their voters to rank the other candidate in second place and exclude Cuomo). This is no guarantee that Lander’s voters actually took his advice, but one suspects Mamdani has many more votes to gain from Lander than Cuomo does.

We will not know the outcome of such “recalculations” until July 1 at the earliest. The various inanities, inefficiencies, and distortions of ranked choice voting are properly the province of a later piece; this is but one of its many frustrations. (UPDATE: Minutes after publication, Andrew Cuomo officially conceded the race to Mamdani.)

The most obvious takeaway from tonight is that the citizens of New York simply don’t want Andrew Cuomo. To put it another way, they were as enthusiastic about Cuomo as Cuomo himself seemed to be about the city and the job he was seeking. Forget about Cuomo’s baggage as governor of New York. Forget about his toxic reputation as a crude sex pest. New Yorkers might have gotten past that, but they could not get past his arrogance and seeming indifference to the issues facing the city itself. (Nearly every piece written about his campaign for mayor treated it as a temporary way-station on his way to his true goal: a 2028 presidential run.)

Long before Zohran Mamdani was perceived as a threat (or anything other than the obligatory joke “DSA” candidate in the race), back when Cuomo could portray himself as a historical inevitability, he treated both the press and voters alike with icily remote contempt, as if the duties of campaigning for a position as lowly as mere mayor of New York City were beneath the dignity of a former governor (and future president). Little wonder, then, that the city’s voters could not bring themselves to turn out for him with any measurable enthusiasm — billing one’s self as the “least worst” option on the table rarely inspires.

This brings me to my final thought on a remarkable night: Cuomo’s failed strategy reminds me of nobody so much as his fellow ’00s-era political allies Hillary Clinton and Bill Daley — that all of them hail from the same political generation of Democrats is probably no accident. Daley – Barack Obama’s former chief-of-staff and inheritor of the formidable Daley legacy in Chicago – ran his 2019 primary campaign for mayor of Chicago with such flaccidly half-hearted air of self-entitlement that he failed get through the first round of the vote. (I want you to imagine the improbabilty and symbolic meaning of a Daley being passed up by the voters of Chicago in favor of political heavyweights Lori Lightfoot and Jesus “Chuy” Garcia.) Meanwhile, Hillary ran both her 2008 and 2016 campaigns with a sense of regal and implacable inevitability — and paid a brutal and historic price for her presumption both times.

Now there are no more Clintons, Daleys  . . . or, with this humiliating result, Cuomos. An entire elder generation of Democratic political “talent” is finally facing its Götterdämmerung — and the twilight of old, decrepit gods is always an ugly spectacle to watch.