Bruce Gilden/Magnum, for The New York Times  Top row: John C. Liu, Sal F. Albanese, William C. Thompson Jr., Joseph J. Lhota. Middle row: Anthony D. Weiner, Christine C. Quinn, Adolfo CarriÃ³n Jr., Bill de Blasio. Bottom row: John A. Catsimatidis, Erick J. Salgado, George T. McDonald, Jack D. Hidary. More Photos »  The last honest-to-God election in New York City began on the day the World Trade Center towers fell: 9/11 was Primary Day, till the voting booths shuttered that morning. And in the dozen years since, New Yorkers have witnessed a great buckling of the political landscape: three terms of Michael Bloomberg, coming after eight years of Rudolph Giuliani. Even if you stipulate, as the G.O.P. kingmakers know, that Rudy and Mike are not real Republicans, the fact remains: the most progressive city west of Amsterdam and east of San Francisco has not elected a Democrat since 1989.  New York City stands at a crossroads. Things are good for many, but not for all. The balance between the positives and the hazards could swing either way. In the first couple of years after the Great Recession, the economyâs growth, nearly 3 percent per year, outpaced the rise in national G.D.P. In 2011, 6.6 percent of the cityâs households had income greater than $200,000 a year, while a third of the cityâs population survives on Medicaid. Manhattan has become a tech rival to Silicon Valley, and bike lanes have come to Brownsville â a Brooklyn neighborhood where 4 out of 10 residents live below the poverty line. Wall Street, Midtown and the N.Y.P.D. are happy. Crime continues to decline: only one precinct, in East New York, has more violent crime than the Upper East Side faced two decades ago. And the population is growing. For all the fears of jihad, the end of capitalism and the advent of superstorms, the years since 9/11 have witnessed the arrival of a new generation. Perhaps as many as a third of the cityâs residents did not live here a decade ago. And all those newcomers have contributed to the prize of this electoral season: the minority majority.  I followed the campaign for eight months, as the pack running for City Hall grew to a dozen. In pain and sympathy, I watched the marathon of mayoral forums â there have been more than a hundred this year alone. And Iâve seen each of the candidates up close. I watched them on the stump, listened to them go off the record, observed them endure tales of complaint. They heard about the rise in racial profiling, public-school field tests, utility rates, pushcart-vendor fees and fatal subway pushings. Theyâve debated the wisdom of punishing johns, deploying police drones and massacring rats. And theyâve vowed to wage war on post-Sandy mold, the inequality of garbage-removal services and the sufferings of Central Park carriage horses. Witnessed up close, the campaign engenders a creeping unease: the discomfort of watching an anesthetized body politic struggling to revive itself.  You feel it in the mounting groundswell of angst and aspiration: the palpable sense that, as Anthony Weiner told me, âa pressure valveâs being released.â On the rarest of occasions, the candidates might even address the issues that are unlikely to gain headlines but that will pose urgent challenges to the victor. The list is long and growing: the public-employee unions â 147 bargaining units â working without contracts and hungering for retroactive pay; the rise in city pensions and health care payouts (pension obligations are projected to be more than $8 billion a year â more than the cityâs combined operating budget for police, fire and corrections annually); the mayorâs plan to rezone East Midtown (among other things, opening up 73 blocks around Grand Central to super-skyscrapers); the first phase of the emergency measures needed to harden the city ahead of the next Sandy (projected cost: $20 billion); the mess that is public housing (approximately 400,000 New Yorkers trying to survive in 334 developments, another 225,000 in Section 8 housing and the all-but-orphaned-by-Washington New York City Housing Authority, which has a backlog of 220,000 repairs and faces $6 billion in unmet capital needs, a black hole expected to more than double in five years).  And now a great wave of change is set to break over the city. Voters must choose not only the mayor but also the comptroller, public advocate, the borough presidents and nearly half of the City Council come this fall. The campaign is a carnival, and yet in rare bright moments, it can seem a hopeful, ennobling, pluralistic spectacle. For all the pandering and patronage, you also see flickers of unfashionable civic spirit, of New Yorkers devoted to their city. As much as he loved to be the engineer in charge, Bloomberg also took the two-steps-forward-one-and-a-half-steps-back gains of the Giuliani years and recast the cityâs image: from ungovernable to improvable. The worry that hangs over the longest race for City Hall in New York history is whether any of these 11 men and 1 woman can keep that prospect alive.  A NEW DAWN FOR THE DEMOCRATS  A few days after this article went to the printer, another sexting scandal engulfed Anthony Weiner. His immediate response, in the face of a media frenzy and rivalsâ calls for him to bow out of the race, was to insist that he was still running for mayor. âItâs in our rearview mirror,â Weiner said; his online obsession was âentirely behind me.â Still, itâs impossible not to wonder if this moment marks a âYusuf,â which, as I wrote, all campaigns fear: a turning-point event that forever changes the dynamics of a race.  But Yusufs come in major and minor forms. A politicianâs online sex life, no matter how aberrant, is hard to compare with the murder of a black youth by a white mob and the unrest that followed. Whats more, timing and shock are everything: this second Weiner scandal has not come as unexpectedly or as late in the campaign; Yusuf was murdered in late August.  In the article, I outline the paths to victory for the various candidates. Weinerâs strategy, oddly enough, may remain the most unchanged; before this latest turn, those voters (a sizable number, according to the polls) who would not give him a second chance were already deemed lost. But for the other candidates at the head of the pack, the jockeying has begun anew, as they eye Weinerâs supporters. Among the strategists I polled, some for rivals and some unaligned, the consensus was that inured voters will likely shrug, collectively, at this latest scandal â perhaps crippling Weinerâs campaign, but enabling him to survive another 47 days.
If the candidates seem awkward or unsure of themselves, itâs because New York City politics has been in an airless tomb for more than a decade.