Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on today's show is

the writer Dave Seminera. Though he lives in Florida, Dave hails originally from Buffalo, New York,

and he's contributed a number of pieces to City Journal, most recently about the Buffalo mayoral

election, which was very surprising. Today, we'll dive into that result and what it means for

the Queen City more broadly. So, Dave, thanks very much for coming on 10 blocks. Hey, thanks for

having me on the show. I appreciate it. So you wrote a piece for us some months ago after the

socialist India Walton captured the Democratic nomination for the mayor of Buffalo.

Your piece at that time ran through her surprisingly checkered background, which included a conviction for food stamp fraud,

and her truly dreadful platform, which included a moratorium on charter schools,

defunding the police, making Buffalo a sanctuary city, a sort of whole series of very,

very far-left positions.

Walton's success, he wrote, should be a wake-up call for centrist Democrats.

And it certainly turned out to be exactly that.

After she won the nomination, the incumbent mayor of Byron Brown jumped in the race as an

independent, and he appears to have pulled off something that's very, very rare in American politics,

which is a writing campaign to retain his position.

So what happened between July and Election Day and how did Brown manage to pull this off?

Yeah, those are all good questions.

So India won the primary with a total of about 11,000 votes, right? So you had something like 20% turnout, which is very low, obviously. So I think what we found out is a number of things. First of all, it's not that hard to get 11,000 votes, especially if you, you know, if you have a progressive platform and, you know, you're

fairly well known as she is in the city. And you're, you're offering to sort of give away a lot

of things. You can create some constituency group that are like 11,000 votes to win a primary.

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