We Can Win Freedom for All
Image from Oneindia News Youtube channel
Looking out at more than 13,000 of you here in Forest Hills Stadium,
it is tempting to believe that this moment was always destined. Yet when
we launched this campaign on October 23, one year and three days ago,
there was not a single television camera there to cover it.
When we launched this campaign one year and three days ago, my name
was a statistical anomaly in every poll. Four months later, as recently
as this February, our support had reached the eye-watering heights of 1
percent. We were tied with noted candidate “someone else.” I always knew
we could beat him.
When we launched this campaign one year and three days ago, the
political world did not pay it much attention, because we were looking
to build a movement that reflected the city as it actually is, not just
the one that political consultants think exists on a spreadsheet.
And when we launched this campaign one year and three days ago, we
were dismissed as a punchline in the halls of power. The idea of
fundamentally changing who government serves in this city was
unimaginable. Even if we gained momentum, they asked, how would we ever
overcome the tens of millions of dollars in attacks that would follow?
Yet we knew then what we know now. New York is not for sale.
As young people showed up in record numbers, as immigrants saw
themselves in the politics of their city, as seniors once skeptical
dared to dream again, we spoke with one voice: New York is not for sale.
And now, as we stand on the precipice of taking this city back from
corrupt politicians and the billionaires that fund them, let our words
ring out so loud tonight that Andrew Cuomo can hear them in his
$8,000-a-month apartment. Let them ring so loud so that he could hear us
even if he’s in Westchester this evening. Let them ring so loud that
his puppet master in the White House hears us: “New York is not for
sale.”
Thirteen days after we announced our candidacy, Donald Trump won the
presidency once again. The Bronx and Queens saw some of the largest
shifts to the Right of any counties in our country. No matter what
article you read or channel you turned to, the story seemed to be the
same: our city was headed to the Right.
Obituaries were written about Democrats’ abilities to reach Asian
voters, young voters, male voters. Again and again, we were told that if
we had any hope of beating the Republican Party, it would only be by
becoming the Republican Party.
Andrew Cuomo himself said that we had lost not because we had failed
to speak to the needs of working-class Americans, but because we had
spent too much time talking about bathrooms and sports teams.
This was a moment where it seemed our political horizon was
narrowing. And in this moment, New York, you had a choice. A choice to
retreat or to fight. And the choice that we made was to stop listening
to those experts and to start listening to you.
We went to two of the places that saw the biggest swings to the
Right: Fordham Road and Hillside Avenue. These New Yorkers were far from
the caricature of Trump voters.
They told us they supported Donald Trump because they felt
disconnected from a Democratic Party that had grown comfortable with
mediocrity and gave its time only to those who gave millions. They told
us that they felt abandoned by a party beholden to corporations which
asked them for their votes after telling them only what it was against
rather than presenting a vision of what it was for.
They told us they didn’t believe in a system anymore that did not
even pretend to offer solutions to the defining challenge of their
lives, the cost-of-living crisis. Rent was too expensive. So were
groceries. So was childcare. So was taking the bus. And working two or
three jobs still wasn’t enough.
Trump, for all his many flaws, had promised them an agenda that would
put more money in their pockets and lower the cost of living. Donald
Trump lied. It was up to us to deliver for the working people he left
behind.
Over the eight months of the primary, we told New Yorkers how we
intended to address that very same affordability crisis. We did not do
it alone.
This was a movement powered by tens of thousands of everyday New
Yorkers who knocked doors between twelve-hour shifts at work and
phonebanked until their fingers were numb. People who had never voted
before became diehard canvassers. Community formed. Our city got to know
each other and itself. This, my friends, was your movement, and it
always will be.
As the snow melted and the frost thawed, this campaign began to grow
faster than anyone ever imagined possible. So many small donors chipped
in that we had to ask you to stop donating. Please stop.
We climbed the polls faster than Andrew Cuomo could dial Donald
Trump’s number. People started to learn how to pronounce my name.
And the billionaires got scared. Or, as the New York Times would describe it, the Hamptons was basically in group therapy about the mayoral race.
Andrew Cuomo and his corporate cronies did everything they could to
make this campaign one of fear and one of smallness. They pumped
millions into this race, artificially lengthened my beard to make me
seem menacing, painted our city as a dystopian hell hole, and worked
night and day to divide the people of New York.
They failed.
When I walked the length of Manhattan just a few days before the
election, hundreds of New Yorkers marched alongside me. And when we
strode into Time Square under a billboard with betting odds that showed
Cuomo’s chances of winning at nearly 80 percent. We knew that the
so-called experts were set to get it wrong yet again.
Andrew Cuomo was supposed to be inevitable. And then on June 24, we shattered that inevitability.
We won by 13 percent, with the most votes in any citywide primary in
New York City history. Some of those New Yorkers had voted for Trump.
Many others had never voted before. And when Andrew Cuomo called me to
concede at 10:15 that night, he said over the phone that we had created a
tremendous force.
When you insist on building a coalition with room for every New
Yorker, that is exactly what you create: a tremendous force. That force
has only grown over these past four months. We now have more than 90,000
volunteers.
And we have spoken to millions more New Yorkers. We have put forth
new plans in these last few months for how we will govern, hiring
thousands more teachers for our schools, taking on the consultants and
the contracts in city government, and tackling the final boss of New
York City infrastructure: scaffolding.
But over the past few weeks, as this race has entered its final days,
we have witnessed displays of Islamophobia that shock the conscience.
Andrew Cuomo, Eric Adams, and Curtis Sliwa do not have an agenda for
the future. All they possess is the playbook of the past. They have
sought to make this election a referendum, not on the affordability
crisis that consumes New Yorkers’ lives, but on the faith I belong to
and the hatred they seek to normalize.
We spent months working to convince the world that New Yorkers have a
right to afford this city that we all love. Now we are being forced to
defend the idea that a Muslim is even allowed to lead it.
These same big money donors and disgraced politicians have sought to
rob us of our ambition, because they do not think that you deserve the
beauty of a dignified life. And time and again they have encouraged you
to imagine less because they know that a reimagined New York hurts their
bottom line. I believe that this city is like the universe, constantly
expanding.
We deserve a city government as ambitious as the working New Yorkers
who make it the greatest city in the world. We cannot wait for someone
else to deliver it. We are not afforded the luxury of waiting, because
too often to wait is to trust those who delivered us to this point. On
November 4, we will set the course of our city back in the direction it
belongs.
And in doing so, we will answer a question that our nation has
wrestled with from the dawn of our founding: Who is allowed to be free?
There are some who hear that question, and they know the answer
without hesitation. They are the oligarchs who have accumulated vast
wealth off those who labor from before the light breaks on the horizon
until long after color has drained from the sky. These are the robber
barons of America, and they believe their money affords them a larger
say than the rest of us.
I am not just talking about the Bill Ackmans and Ken Langones of the
world. I speak of people whose names you are not familiar with, who have
no qualms about contributing more to super PACs than we would ever tax
them, and who celebrate when those PACs flood our airwaves with
commercials that plaster the words “global jihad” over my face.
Their freedom doesn’t just come at the expense of dignity and truth.
It comes at the expense of the freedoms of others too. They are the
authoritarians who seek to keep us pressed beneath their thumbs, because
they know that once we shake ourselves loose, we will never be held
down again.
Each and every one of these people think New York is for sale. For
too long, my friends, freedom has belonged only to those who can afford
to buy it. The oligarchs of New York are the wealthiest people in the
wealthiest city, in the wealthiest nation, in the history of the world.
They do not want the equation to change. They will do everything they
can to prevent their grip from weakening.
The truth is as simple as it is nonnegotiable. We are all allowed freedom.
Each one of us, the working people of this city, the taxi drivers,
the line cooks, the nurses, all those seeking lives of grace, not greed —
we all get to be free.
And on November 4, thanks to the hard work of more than 90,000
volunteers across every corner of this city, that is exactly what we
will tell the world. Because while Donald Trump’s billionaire donors
think that they have the money to buy this election, we have a movement
of the masses. And we are a movement that is not afraid of what we
believe. And we’ve believed it for quite some time.
Those who worry about what this movement may look like on January 1
are the ones who worried on October 23 what it may look like tonight.
But our purpose has not changed and neither have our promises.
As I said on the evening I announced, the job of government is to
actually make our lives better. And in the exact words I said on October
23, here is what we stand for, my friends.
We are going to freeze the rent for more than two million
rent-stabilized tenants and use every resource at our disposal to build
housing for everyone who needs it.
We are going to eliminate the fare on every single bus line and make
what are currently the slowest buses in the nation move around this city
with ease.
And we are going to create universal childcare at no cost to parents,
so New Yorkers can raise their family in the city they love.
Together, New York, we’re going to freeze the [crowd yells “rent!”]
Together, New York, we’re going to make buses fast and [crowd yells “free!”]
Together, New York, we’re going to deliver universal [crowd yells “childcare!”]
We will make our city one where every person who calls it home can
live a dignified life. No New Yorker should ever be priced out of
anything they need to survive.
And we believed then, we believe today, we will believe tomorrow that it is government’s job to deliver that dignity.
Dignity, my friends, is another way of saying freedom.
Standing before you this evening, I take great strength from those
who have labored mightily for the cause of freedom in America, who
refused to accept that government could not meet what moments of crisis
demanded from it. When the power of the people overwhelms the influence
of the powerful, there is no crisis that government cannot meet.
It was government that enacted a New Deal to lift a generation out of
poverty, to create beautiful public goods, and establish the right to
unionize and collectively bargain.
My friends, the era of government that deems an issue too small or a
crisis too big must come to an end. Because we need a government that is
every bit as ambitious as our adversaries. A government strong enough
to refuse the realities we will not accept and forge the future we know
we deserve.
A government that refuses to accept one in four New Yorkers living in
poverty, that refuses to accept more than 150,000 public school
students being homeless, that refuses to accept that two union salaries
are not enough to put down a mortgage in this city, and a government
that refuses to accept you being priced out of the very city you help to
build every single day.
Time and again, our nation has teetered on the precipice of
hopelessness. Now is one of those times. But in each of these moments,
working people have reached into the darkness and reshaped our
democracy.
No longer will we allow the Republican Party to be the one of ambition.
No longer will we have to open a history book to read about Democrats leading with big ideas.
My friends, the world is changing. It’s not a question of whether that change will come. It’s a question of who will change it.
We have an opportunity before us that few have ever received and even
fewer have seized. It’s the opportunity to show the world what it means
to win freedom. It is the opportunity to live up to the legacy left by
those who came before.
We do not get to determine the scale of a crisis. Our choice is how we respond.
Let us win a city hall that works for those straining to buy
groceries, not those straining to buy our democracy. And let us look
forward to January 1, when the hard work of governing will begin.
Those in power would like to describe our policy commitments as if
they are illusions that will evaporate as soon as we approach city hall.
Let us show them instead that they are invocations of the future that
we will win.
And let us prove to each and every New Yorker that a politics of
expansion does not just mean imagination. It insists upon fulfillment.
We can make city hall a place where New Yorkers come to expect the
future, not just failure.
But we are not there yet. Just as Andrew Cuomo’s victory in the
primary was thought to be inevitable, the same narrative has started to
form around us today. When you read the articles that tell a
postelection story of triumph while we are amidst early voting, when you
see the odds that have our chances of victory in the nineties, know
this: you are reading the same things that Andrew Cuomo read when he
went to sleep each night in June, believing that his victory was
promised. We cannot allow complacency to infiltrate this movement.
So over these nine final days, I ask for only one thing from each of you: more.
I know you are tired, and for that I recommend some Adeni Chai. And still, I ask for more.
I know the attacks have intensified, that a warm bed is more inviting
than a six-floor walk-up. That another evening spent knocking doors
after a long workday feels daunting. And still, I ask for more. I ask
for more because that is the only way that we win a future of more.
So if you are able, I urge you, my friends: stand up. If you have knocked a door, turn your flashlight on. [crowd begins turning phone flashlights on]
If you will knock a door, turn your flashlight on. If you have more to
give, turn your flashlight on. Together, let us make a light bright
enough to banish any darkness.
Over these final nine days and the months and years that follow, the
powers that be will throw everything in their arsenal against us. They
will spend millions more dollars. They will attack us from every
conceivable angle. But we will not bend. We will not flinch. We will
triumph over the oligarchs, and we will return dignity to our lives.
Nearly eighty-nine years ago to the day, FDR spoke before a crowd of
thousands at Madison Square Garden. He said, “I should like to have it
said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and
of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my
second administration that in it, these forces met their master.”
My friends, I should like to have it said of our campaign that in it
the forces of selfishness and lust for power met their match. And I
should like to have it said of our city hall that in it these forces met
their master.
New York, our work has only just begun. On November 4, we set ourselves free.
