Virginia Maloney Wins Handily in District 4 Council Race

Virginia Maloney will be the City Council member for Manhattan’s District 4, a swath representing both parts of Midtown East and the Upper East Side, after winning a landslide 70 percent of the vote as the Democratic nominee.

She’ll be replacing the term-limited Keith Powers, who was the close runner-up in the Democratic primary for Manhattan Borough President, behind now-elected Brad Hoylman-Sigal.

Maloney defeated Republican candidate Debra Schwartzben, a Turning Point USA influencer who goes by Debra Lea, and the independent candidate Kyle Athayde.

Schwartzben pulled in 26.9 percent of the vote, which is roughly the amount of votes that conservative candidates have won in previous election cycles against Powers, in 2021 and 2022. Athayde got 4 percent of the vote. Interestingly, Schwartzben had stopped actively campaigning for the seat by early last month.

Maloney has not provided a take on whether she supports Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic who was just elected mayor, although the New York Times indicates that her district heavily voted for his opponent Andrew Cuomo. She had made no pre-election-day endorsement.

Maloney is Carolyn Maloney’s daughter, meaning that her win resurrects a local political dynasty of sorts. The elder Maloney represented the East Side of Manhattan in the US House of Representatives until 2022, when a contentious redistricting pitted her against her across-the-park colleague Jerrold Nadler in a Democratic primary, which Nadler won.

Before that, however, she occupied the very City Council seat that her daughter has now ascended to.

According to her campaign platform, Maloney—who holds a BA in Public Policy from Princeton, an MBA from Harvard, and a master’s in Public Administration from MIT—intends to make New York an “accountable, accessible, and affordable place.”

She’ll be leaving a job as a product manager at Meta, the parent company of Facebook, although she has been fairly heavily involved in local Democratic politics, namely by serving on the executive board of the Lexington Democratic Club; she also led Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s free public WiFi initiative.

At a spirited watch party at the bar Stout on East 41st Street, supporters and volunteers alike gathered around Maloney to watch her victory speech. She told Our Town that she was “excited to get to work for a safer and more affordable city . . . that work starts in January!”

Our Town also caught up to Keith Powers, her predecessor, who made an appearance. “I couldn’t think of anybody better to continue the work that I’ve done and the work that our community has done, and understands what the challenges are in this moment,” he said.

Brendan McGrath, a CitiBank worker who had devoted 100 hours to canvassing and collecting signatures for Maloney, told Our Town that he had met her back in January. He called her “well-connected, smart, and driven.” His friend Alex Randall-Kittredge called her the “future of the Democratic Party.”

Maloney began her speech by describing the intense emotions that come alongside victory: “In a moment like this, you don’t really remember what you said, you only remember what you felt. What I feel is immense gratitude toward everyone in this room, toward all the faces that have been out campaigning on street corners with me, and most of all, toward the voters of District 4.

“Needless to say, it is a difficult time to be entering into public service and public life,” she said. “Our federal government is still shut down. Agencies are being gutted, and expertise is dismissed in favor of chaos and spectacle. Across the country, people are losing faith—in government, in institutions, and even in one another.

”Even here at home, our own city feels divided,” she added. “But here in District 4, we choose to focus on the future.” She vowed to be a representative who delivers a government “competent in how it's run, practical in how it delivers, and grounded in the kind of pragmatism that rebuilds trust.”