NYC NOW - Midday News: City School Attendance Drops in June, New Jersey Promotes Beach Smoking Ban, and Political Fallout After Mamdani’s Upset

Episode Date: June 26, 2025

Thursday is the final day of classes for New York City public school students, but attendance has dipped significantly. A WNYC analysis found that many schools saw lower attendance this June compared to previous years. Meanwhile, New Jersey is spotlighting its ban on beach smoking with a 20-foot inflatable cigarette display in Asbury Park. Plus, in this week’s Politics Brief, WNYC’s Jimmy Vielkind and Brigid Bergin break down the implications of Zohran Mamdani’s presumptive win in the Democratic mayoral primary.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. It's Thursday, June 26. Here's the midday news from Veronica DeValle. Today is the last day of class for New York City public school students, but it's been a rocky month for attendance. WNYC analyzed daily attendance numbers posted by the Education Department. They show most schools had lower average attendance rates this June compared to the same. month in previous years. Some schools saw a drop of more than 20 percentage points. David Bloomfield is an education professor for Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

He has a theory as for why. I call it the June swoon. I think we've lost the discipline of just going to school. Bloomfield says a barrage of school holidays and the disruption of disstandardized testing are partly the blame, and he says students pick up on a sense that June attendance is optional. The Education Department, for one, says its own daily attendance data is inaccurate and that it takes months to finalize numbers. No, buts on the beach. That's the message from New Jersey officials at the start of beach season. In Asbury Park all day today, they're displaying an inflatable 20-foot-long cigarette on a flatbed truck with beach chairs and an umbrella.

The makeshift beach aims to draw attendance to the state's smoking ban at public beaches and parks. Those laws have been in place since 2018. Fines for violators start at $250 for a first offense. 76 and cloudy right now and keep your eye out for coastal flooding tonight throughout the region. Today, a chance of showers, partly sunny and a high of 80, tonight another slight chance of showers. Stick around. There's more to come. I'm Sean Carlson. And it's time for politics brief, our weekly segment where we break down. the news out of City Hall and across New York State, and there's a lot going on.

There was some huge news here in the city. We're joined by W.N.I.C. at Jimmy Vilkind in Albany and W.NIC's Bridget Bergen, right here in downtown Manhattan. All right, we got to start with those results of New York City Democratic mayoral primary. Zoron Mamdani delivered an upset victory over Andrew Cuomo. Governor Cuomo conceded, but Bridget, you were in the room with Cuomo, right? I just, I find it hard to believe that this is just the end of Andrew Cuomo on the New York political scene. Is that what's happening here? Well, Sean, I think it remains to be seen. He certainly issued a statement reminding everyone that he was still qualified to be on that independent ballot line. But let me give you a little TikTok of that room. Yeah, please.

You know, we were really ending things where it all started at the nearby Carpenter's Union. It wasn't a very large gathering. But as the night began, there was still this sense of optimism. And then things shifted pretty quickly when those early voting numbers came in, even members of his own. team seemed pretty surprised to see them break so hard for Mamdani. And then, you know, credit to the Board of Elections, those results came in pretty quickly, went under two hours. And it became clear that Cuomo was just not catching up on primary night. So he went to the stage with almost no notice and gave a comment that people, I think, interpreted as a concession. I want to applaud the assemblyman for a really smart and good and impactful campaign. Tonight is his night. He deserved it.

He won. Now, he went on to say that his team was going to take a beat, you know, make some decisions about their path going forward. And, you know, on the one hand, you have people who are suggesting that Mamdani's nomination is actually a crisis for the city. and Cuomo could once again try to make the argument that he's the moderate, he's the grown-up, he's the one who could lead the city, the electorate in a general election at large is just not the democratic base. But, you know, running on an independent ballot line is risking potentially

what could be another humiliating defeat. And if he runs the same kind of campaign, this sort of Rose Garden strategy that we saw in the primary, it's not clear to me that he's going to do much better, especially when we see, you know, the way the Mumdani campaign has built this real movement. Yeah, the thing I'm watching, Bridget, is what big institutional players in the Democratic Party are starting to do. Now, many of those people had either sat on the sidelines. That's people like Governor Kathy Hochel or Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. And now they're saying they're talking with Zoran. They're reaching out.

Some people have endorsed him, but people are just talking with him. That other category of people who were once with Cuomo but are now backing Mom Dani include the Democratic Party in Brooklyn, the most populous borough. The chair of that organization, Assembly member Rodneyese Bashat Hermelin, said that she's now with Mom Dani. Here's what she told me this morning. If the entire New York City screen, we want change and, you know, we want this guy. you got to listen to the party. Talking with sources today, it sounds like other people will also be coming over. Some, though, might be wary because they don't want to offend Eric Adams.

He's, of course, still the mayor, and he says he's running as an independent. Bridget, how did Mom Dani spend his first day as a presumptive nominee? Well, he gave one of his first post-primary interviews to our very own Brian Laird. And Brian asked him really directly, what would he say to someone like Mike Bloomberg, the billionaire, former mayor, who invested $8.3 million to boost Cuomo's campaign and defeat Mamdani. And really, instead of taking a shot, I think we started to get a sense of how Mamdani might be running in this general election. He went for a more unifying message and said he actually wanted to take aspects of Bloomberg's tenure. He talked about more park space, more visions for streets, kind of befitting the moment, and really took this different approach.

There's still some deep anxiety. I talked to some union leaders at the Cuomo headquarters. They were worried of what kind of investment businesses would make in the city if there was a Mundani administration. Now, Jimmy, you covered Cuomo as governor for years, right? How surprised were you by last night? And what do you think this means going forward? 11 years, Sean, but who was counting, really? You know, Cuomo is someone who, over time, became more feared than liked.

And I think we saw a lot of that in the campaign that he ran in his results. I always believe that Cuomo was leading in all those polls for so long in this campaign because he was seen as inevitable. People thought, this is the winner, I better get on board. He had the highest name recognition, so he had that early poll lead. And a lot of the people who I spoke with, people who endorsed him, who I know didn't particularly care for him, they just felt that it was something that they had to do out of necessity. So once that armor is pierced, things crumble very, very, very quickly. It seems as though we saw it when Cuomo was forced to resign from office in 2021.

And it looks like we're going to see it now. So as Bridget said, we don't know if he's done just yet. If Mondiani is able to build some quick bridges with those other Democratic players and institutions, I think it could really narrow Cuomo's path and also any path that might be available for Eric Adams. I mean, of course, the note here being, we still need to go through that ranked trace tabulation. Mamdani didn't go over the 50% mark that he would need to to, to win. outright. And I, you know, Cuomo has already done an interview. He spoke with WCBS's Marsha Kramer. It was almost 15 minutes. And repeatedly she asked him, was he going to run on the

independent battle line? If not, who would he support? And I think he's holding his cards pretty close to the vest. They want to see those numbers. They want to see how the vote shifts and figure out if there is a path forward, considering the amount of vote that he got from the Democratic electorate and, you know, knowing that the general electorate would be all parties, all registered voters, do they have a path to victory? Since also the general election is not a ranked choice election. It's just a winner take all. So they don't need to make some of the same calculations they were doing in the primary.

Wow. Just so much to unpack here. Jimmy, Mamdani's victory was boosted by higher voter turnout than we saw four years ago. But New York City, we should note, was not the only place with the mayoral primary on the ballot. So what are your takeaways from what we saw in other parts of the state? Well, just looking at preliminary numbers, Sean, turnout in the city is going to be around a million Democrats. That's roughly 30% of the total party enrollment. And that's historically in line with competitive races.

I think we last saw a million people vote in 1989, which was when David Dinkins first got elected. Allswear, nowhere else in the state did Democrats really crack that 30% mark. For example, in Buffalo, where there was a progressive state senator and a couple other people challenging the acting mayor. Ternet only made it to about 25%. In other cities, it was under 20%. So this is giving ammunition to people who want to open up the primary to unaffiliate voters. People like me, I would love to vote perhaps someday in a primary. And that's actually under consideration now by the city's Charter Review Commission. But it's one of those things that people talk about, maybe people get grumpy about around the primary, and then, well, you know,

they just forget about it. Well, that was WNYC's Bridget Bergen in Manhattan and Jimmy Feelkind from Albany. If you want to read more from our politics team, sign up for the Politics Brief newsletter at gotthmus.com slash newsletters. Thanks for listening. This is NYC now from WMYC.

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