De Blasio Coasts to Re-election, as Second-Term Challenges Await

But two weeks before the election, Mr. de Blasio was battered by embarrassing court testimony from a real estate investor who had once been one of the mayor’s most generous political contributors. The man, Jona S. Rechnitz, testifying in the federal corruption trial of a labor leader, talked about trading campaign money for favors and meetings with city officials.

Mr. de Blasio dismissed the testimony as the lies of a felon — Mr. Rechnitz pleaded guilty to a conspiracy count relating to bribery and influence buying — and he seemed to skate past it.

Still, the testimony reminded voters of the state and federal investigations into the mayor’s campaign finance practices that hobbled his administration throughout 2016 and into the first part of this year.

All that dampened support from the city’s editorial boards. The Daily News made a show of not endorsing Mr. de Blasio or any other candidate, as did Crain’s New York, the business publication. The Chief-Leader, a liberal weekly read by city workers and union members, wrote that Mr. de Blasio did not have the character to continue as mayor and urged a protest vote for Mr. Albanese. The New York Post and the Staten Island Advance endorsed Ms. Malliotakis. Only The New York Times, among the city’s major dailies, endorsed Mr. de Blasio.

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In the end, the campaign could not escape the paradox of the mayor’s personality: The “tale of two cities” of his campaign four years earlier had become a tale of two ways of seeing the mayor — a man who had made good on many of his promises and yet elicited little enthusiasm.

The race was violently punctuated a week before the election when a man drove a rented pickup truck down the Hudson River Park bike lane, killing eight people and injuring a dozen, in what Mr. de Blasio quickly characterized as an act of terrorism. The carnage echoed the terror attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, which occurred on the day of the mayoral primary that year, and helped create the conditions for Mr. de Blasio’s predecessor, Michael R. Bloomberg, to be elected mayor.

But Mr. de Blasio’s reassuring response to the tragedy provided no opening for his rivals to criticize his leadership under crisis.

Ms. Malliotakis was not well known when she announced in March that she would seek the Republican nomination. Even after months of running, in what was her first citywide race, polls showed that most voters in the city — where Democrats outnumber Republicans among registered voters by more than six to one — did not know enough about her to form an opinion. She struggled to get voters’ attention and to articulate a strong positive case for her candidacy, aside from criticism of Mr. de Blasio.

“I entered this race with eyes wide open, knowing that the odds were stacked against me,” Ms. Malliotakis said after the race had been declared. “We may not have won this race but we have made our voices heard.”

Even before the results were in, Mr. de Blasio viewed the day in broad historical terms. “There’s no reason in the world we should have had 20 years of Republican mayors in New York City,” Mr. de Blasio said after voting in Brooklyn, referring to his immediate predecessors. “My hope is, starting today, if the people are with me, that we restore the idea that this is a consistent Democratic and progressive town.”

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