For the last half century, in good times and bad, perceptions of public safety have played a central role in shaping the race to win City Hall.
In 1977, public safety became the decisive issue in a New York City mayoral election for the first time — and there is a strong case that has remained the case in every seriously contested mayoral election since. After more than 40 years of a liberal-labor-minority coalition dominating city politics, 1977 was also the election when a more conservative coalition helped win City Hall for Ed Koch.
While history may not repeat itself, it does rhyme. That’s why it is essential to understand the 1977 election, and the new era it began in New York City politics, in order to understand the 2025 mayoral race.
It is easy to tick off the similarities between the 1977 race and today. A weakened incumbent due to the fiscal crisis, the state’s takeover of the city’s finances and a federal SEC investigation all helped to shape the 1977 election. A weakened incumbent due to a corruption crisis, the threat of a governor using her power to remove the mayor from office and a federal criminal investigation have defined the 2025 race so far.
To be clear, New York is a very different city than it was in 1977. Today, there are 1.4 million more New Yorkers. In 1977, the city was in the middle of a decade during which it lost more than 10% of its residents. Non-Latino whites made up 53% of the population back then, compared to 31% in 2024.
The economy is also different. In 1977, New York had an 8.9% unemployment rate — and that was a three-year low. In 2024, the average monthly unemployment rate was 5.3%. Manufacturing, which still employed nearly a half million people in New York City in 1980, now employs fewer than 60,000 workers.
While New York currently faces fiscal challenges, they are nothing like the near bankruptcy of the mid-1970s. A 2024 bond rating opinion noted the City’s economic strength and budgetary controls.
And the “rules of the game” are different as well. Ranked-choice voting, publicly financed elections and a growing role for independent expenditure campaigns, all of which drive campaigns in 2025, didn’t exist in 1977.
While 2025 New York differs greatly from 1977 New York, the fear of returning to the mid- and late-1970s New York has shaped mayoral politics ever since. In 1977, New York seemed like it could go the way of other major U.S. cities that were in seemingly irrevocable decline — places like Cleveland and Detroit. A feeling of doom was driven by the fiscal crisis, population decline and by both the reality and the perception of crime.
While history may not repeat itself, it does rhyme.
The candidates
Then, as now, the mayoral field was a crowded one.
When Ed Koch entered the 1977 race, he was given little chance of winning. He had served on the City Council and in Congress but had dropped out of the 1973 mayoral campaign after garnering little support.
Bella Abzug was a former member of Congress, a leading liberal and women’s rights advocate. After narrowly losing the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate the year before, she was the first woman to seriously contend for the mayoralty.
Herman Badillo was the first Puerto Rican to be elected to serve in Congress. He had previously served as Bronx Borough president and had unsuccessfully sought the mayoralty in 1969 and 1973, when he lost the Democratic runoff to Abraham Beame.
Beame had been elected mayor just four years earlier with more than 60% of the vote in the Democratic runoff primary, going on to beat his closest competitor by more than 40 percentage points in the general election.
Another candidate, Mario Cuomo, was the New York Secretary of State and had the backing of Gov. Hugh Carey and the Liberal Party. Percy Sutton was the Manhattan Borough president and the first Black candidate to seriously contend for the mayoralty.
Despite this formidable field, Koch was able to win the top spot in the September 1977 Democratic primary and go on to win both a runoff election and the general election against Cuomo.
Why? Initially, Koch sought to portray himself as the opposite of the prior two mayors who were widely blamed for the fiscal crisis — John Lindsay and Beame — on a slogan of “after eight years of charisma and four years of the clubhouse, why not competence?”
That all changed as the events of the summer of 1977 played out. A blackout in mid-July led to looting, violence and arson across the city. Police made more than 4,000 arrests, and damages totaled over $300 million. The blackout occurred as city residents were already on edge over the eight shootings carried out by the Son of Sam, a serial murderer who attacked young couples at random throughout the city, leaving six dead and seven injured.
During the blackout, Koch called for the National Guard to come into the city. After the blackout, Koch regularly trumpeted his support for the death penalty, even though the mayor had virtually nothing to do with either imposition or implementation of a death penalty law.
While 2025 New York differs greatly from 1977 New York, the fear of returning to the mid- and late-1970s New York has shaped mayoral politics ever since.
The results of the Democratic primary could not have been closer. The top five candidates were separated by fewer than 50,000 votes out of just over 900,000 cast. Koch — with slightly more than 180,000 votes — came in first by less than 10,000 votes over Mario Cuomo, who made it into the runoff by just 7,000 votes over Beame.
An exit poll found that the fiscal crisis was the most important issue for voters, but that crime ranked second — and Koch carried the voters who ranked crime as most important.
Koch was the top vote-getter in the primary, despite not winning any of the five boroughs and winning just 10 of the city’s 67 Assembly districts. Just 11 days after that win, Koch went on to beat Mario Cuomo with 55% of the vote. In the general election, Koch again beat Cuomo — then running on the Liberal Party line — in a four-way race.
Perceptions of public safety
Since 1977, public safety has been a decisive issue in every contested mayoral election in New York City. Crime can be measured, but public safety is something that people feel.
In 1989, the beating and murder of Yusuf Hawkins weeks before the Democratic primary helped David N. Dinkins stop Ed Koch’s effort to win a fourth term.
Dinkins lost his re-election bid to Rudy Giuliani in 1993 because of unease about public safety — even as crime had started to decline — driven by a riot in Crown Heights, itself the subject of a 600-page state investigation under then-Gov. Cuomo that was released in the summer of the re-election.
The 2001 election was transformed by the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, which occurred on the day of the Democratic Primary, forcing the election to be postponed after voters had already started to go to the polls. In the November election, Michael Bloomberg won with the support of both Rudy Giuliani and Ed Koch in the closest mayoral election in a century.
In 2013, Bill de Blasio won the mayoralty in part because of his backing of legislation and other reforms designed to curb stop-and-frisk and racial profiling by the NYPD.
And Eric Adams stood out in the 2021 primary as the Democrat most focused on crime as an issue.
In the 40 years before 1977, a liberal-labor-minority coalition had backed Mayors Fiorello LaGuardia, Robert Wagner and John Lindsay. After 1977, a more conservative coalition has elected Mayors Koch, Giuliani and Adams — with the mayoralties of David Dinkins and Bill de Blasio as exceptions.
Crime can be measured, but public safety is something that people feel.
What will happen in 2025? Will New York elect another mayor out of the Koch-Giuliani-Bloomberg-Adams tradition, or will the city revert to its historic liberal tradition? Or will 2025, like 1977, be a pivot point for something entirely new?
Sen. Charles Schumer recently noted that: “Crime is actually lower. But I talk to lots of people, they go on the subway and almost inevitably there’s someone there who’s not hurting people, but disruptive, and frightening them because they read in the paper that some people were hurt … New Yorkers are willing to put up with a lot to live in New York, but they want to be safe.”
In 1977, in his announcement of his run for mayor, Mario Cuomo cited “every filthy and violent street in Brownsville, every pothole on Queens streets … the open drug markets of Harlem and … the halls of high schools, where safety is as much sought after as is education.”
Nearly 50 years later, Andrew Cuomo announced his candidacy by declaring that “New York City is in trouble. You see it in the empty storefronts, the graffiti, the grime, the migrant influx, the random violence — the city just feels threatening, out of control and in crisis.”
A March 2025 Emerson College poll suggests that voters believe that public safety should be the top priority for the next mayor — with just under 33% citing public safety and crime compared to the 23% who cited housing. Whether voters will pick a candidate who responds to their concerns about public safety by promising more police or improved responses to street homelessness is unclear. But just as in 1977, the path to Gracie Mansion in 2025 will likely depend upon how voters view the public safety issue and the solutions offered by candidates.