NYC's Upset Election Was Drawn Along an Odd Line: Car Ownership | Hacker News Reader

NYC's Upset Election Was Drawn Along an Odd Line: Car Ownership

jalopnik.com

34 pointsrntn40 comments

Not sure that's really "odd", given that NYC is a city where car ownership is an extreme class / living-situation signifier.

Just to be clear, it's extreme in the sense that owning a car means you are more likely to have less money.

If you live in a house out in Queens and work as a plumber then you definitely have a car.

If you live in Manhattan or Brooklyn and work for an investment bank you probably don't.

Having a car in the city can be a real pain. A lot really depends on your lifestyle, if you need one -- like if you go rock climbing every weekend, you do. If you're into restaurants and clubs, you definitely don't.

Not a huge surprise to anyone who lives in this city when so much of daily aggravation comes down to road use, either as a driver or a pedestrian. Cuomo also ran an anti-bike campaign while Zohran ran the opposite.

Not just an “anti-bike campaign.” Cuomo fought bike infrastructure — and subway infrastructure, and basically all the needs of the city — for his entire tenure as governor.

Growing up in the Rockies, I put together the power dynamics between large numbers of rural counties and then a single urban county a long time ago, but was still surprised to see it functioning out East.

I got to New York City, witnessed the deteriorating subway, see four lane one-way avenues with no bike lanes, and wondered where the hell all that tax money we're paying goes. Then I go upstate and see all these empty — but immaculately paved — freeways, and it all kind of comes together.

It's wild that Cuomo, who is personally responsible for making sure that as little NYC money actually gets spent in NYC as possibly, had the chutzpah to think he'd be welcome running this place.

Yeah, he can F right off as far as I'm concerned. Not sure I'd lament the bike infrastructure (I don't think it's the problem and I hate riding in the bike lanes, they're full of idiots) and the state of the subway (I take it every day and its generally fine) but yeah. Cuomo is nuts.

I would love the bike infrastructure if people (mostly cops) didn't act like it's just extra parking space. I'll be biking on it for awhile and enjoying myself, just to have to dodge a because some asshole cop refused to walk an extra forty feet.

Eh it's mostly the oblivious citibikers and delivery riders that get me. I like riding with the cars, you can flow at a smooth 20-25mph without the fear that a salmoning deliverista is going to round a corner head-first into you.

I imagine any other proxy for population density would probably produce a very similar map.

To me the correlation doesn't actually seem that high when I look at the two maps.

Same here, the correlation is not high at all.

I think this would require individual level polling to get this data, blurring the data by district fuzzes things too much.

I think we are inferring causation from correlation, but anyways cars are a really divisive and polarizing issue in NYC. Many who can afford it are addicted to the comfort of cars vs the bus or subway, especially in summer.

Meanwhile those who can't really have no need for cars and so never even learn to drive, exponentiated by college students and fresh transplants. Many of this group hate cars or are even afraid of them.

Neither group will ever be able to convince the other - comfort and fear have incredible staying power and are large drivers of political inertia.

> Many who can afford it are addicted to the comfort of cars vs the bus or subway, especially in summer

Car ownership in New York tends to signify someone from lower income and wealth brackets. Not higher.

I love a good counter-intuitive anecdote as much as anybody, but I think you'll need to back up this assertion with some evidence.

The expenses associated with owning a car in the city are prohibitive for lower-income residents. These costs extend beyond car payments and the highest insurance rates in the nation to include congestion charges, tolls and exorbitant parking fees, which can run hundreds of dollars per month.

I saw it mostly as "poor people voted for the socialist" which isn't surprising. If you include young people, then that isn't surprising either.

> "If you include young people, then that isn't surprising either."

Meanwhile, from actual poll results:

"A new trend has emerged in American politics: The very youngest voters — 18-to-24-year-olds — say they're more conservative than the cohort that's just older, according to the latest Harvard Youth Poll." https://www.axios.com/2024/09/28/gen-z-men-conservative-poll in September 2024.

"According to a new Yale Youth Poll, a survey affiliated with the Yale Institution for Social and Political Studies, voters aged 18 to 21 lean Republican by 11.7 points when asked who they would support in the 2026 Congressional elections, while voters aged 22 to 29 favored Democrats by 6.4 points." https://www.newsweek.com/republican-support-poll-young-gen-z... in April 2025.

This is an unwelcome trend that bodes ill for Democrats unless they wake up and smell the coffee soon.

Actually the opposite.

Cuomo <$50k by +19

Mamdani 50k-100k +6

Mamdani 100k+ +13

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/24/us/elections/...

I'm not sure where you are getting this from -- many of the poorer areas of the city, such as the Bronx, went to Cuomo.

Literal Wall Street went 3:1 for Mamdani [0].

[0]: https://64.media.tumblr.com/4401d342f92344aa47da9469abd397ca...

Lol that's more likely dimes square, bankers don't really live in Fidi for the most part.

poor people voted for cuomo

Sure, I think it is an odd line. In this case car ownership is a proxy for geography. You could probably find some other interesting proxy variables for geography, that could be used to write 500 word articles. A proxy variable that is in interesting from a monetary perspective could be something that you could use for contextual advertising. I saw four our five car ads when I skimmed the article.

Jalopnik is a car themed website.

That makes a lot of sense. Jalopy is a term for a car that isn't in very good shape. I suspect that's why they chose the name Jalopnik.

> an odd line

the guy who ran on making public transportation free... is more popular with people that take public transportation...

For an article arguing the election broke on car ownership as a defining line, I would imagine there was a statistic like:

n% of car owners voted for candidate A

m% of non-car owners voted for candidate B

It doesn't even bother explaining the different neighborhoods and car ownership in those neighborhoods. It just shows a map and basically says "trust me". It's an entire article written on a single tweet.

I'm sorry, but this is really a garbage article

Reminds me of a joke:

Bill: "I used to think Correlation implied Causation, but I took a statistics class and I now know that's not true"

Bob: "Oh wow, sounds like that class helped!"

Bill": "..maybe!"

I first heard this joke in https://xkcd.com/552/

Correlation is not causation bla bla bla...

Interesting news, but the source seems blatantly partisan.

Not sure what you mean by partisan. This was the Democratic primary.

Mamdani is a member of the DSA. I'm not sure whether they were suggesting bias toward the DSA or the Democrats.

Jalopnik began their slow slide into the shit-tier of automotive journalism about 10 years ago. AI will have their jobs.

A decade+ ago they used to be proper automotive journalists. IDK if they sold out or there was a change in management but now they just write really shallow "radio DJ analysis of trending stuff" type content that seems designed to appeal to the terminally online segment of the market for automotive journalism.

Jalopnik's ownership history is as spotted and confusing as any web media brand out there. It was part of the Gizmodo group for years, which was bought by private equity and split into separate themed components merged with other media holding companies bought by the same private equity. Four months ago it was sold to something called Static Media, yet another media holding company that I've never heard of, but given the about us page showing a whole lot of VPs and C-suites who look about 25 or so, I'm not sure I would expect this one to last any longer than all the previous owners.

Notably the litigation-induced bankruptcy of Gawker Media (of which Jalopnik was a part) in 2016 is the reason why Jalopnik wound up owned by these private equity groups. Most of these publications are shells of their former selves, but I suppose it could be argued that a lot of written media has gone that way—Gawker-associated and otherwise.

Isn't this the same trend for almost all journalism?

Jalopnik greatly exceeded the level of garbage that was normal for the automotive niche at any given point in time. They had some good years early on but at some point there was a hard cut from that to "I can't tell if they're trying to satirize Reddit or if the journalists actually believes their own bullshit" content.

I argue it was about the time the GMG was recognized that quality took a major quality blow. Then it got dumped out from there and split out along with Gizmodo and the other blogs and their quality equally suffered.

"Partisanship" doesn't mean the same thing in this era where one party is run by a reality show personality. It's barely even politics to side by default with the adults.

Maybe this has something to do with the "Congestion Pricing" NYC has been experimenting with.

https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-03612

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