1969 New York City mayoral election

The 1969 New York City mayoral election occurred on Tuesday, November 4, 1969, with incumbent Liberal Party Mayor John Lindsay elected to a second term. Lindsay defeated the Democratic candidate, New York City Comptroller Mario Procaccino, and the Republican candidate, state senator John Marchi. Lindsay received 42.36% of the vote to Procaccino's 34.79%, a Liberal victory margin of 7.57%. Marchi finished a distant third with 22.69%. In one of the most unusual primary seasons since the consolidation of greater New York, the incumbent Lindsay and former mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. lost their respective Republican and Democratic primaries. Lindsay, defeated narrowly by state senator John J. Marchi of Staten Island for the Republican nomination, gained ballot access to the general election via the Liberal Party, which had co-nominated him in 1965. Procaccino won the Democratic primary with less than 33% of the vote against four other candidates: Wagner, Bronx Borough President Herman Badillo, Congressman James H. Scheuer, and author Norman Mailer, who ran on a platform proposing secession from the state of New York. In his criticism of Lindsay, Procaccino coined the term “limousine liberal,” a political epithet for the “repellent hypocrisy of elites” who promoted social reforms and tolerated disorder while remaining untouched by its fallout thanks to their wealth, according to historian Steve Fraser. This is one of two mayoral elections where the winning candidate carried a minority of the boroughs, the other being the 2001 election. This is also one of two mayoral elections where the winning candidate was not on the Democratic or Republican ballot line, the other being the 1950 election. With Lindsay receiving 1,012,633 votes, the 1969 mayoral election was the last in which a candidate exceeded one million votes until the 2025 election, when Democrat Zohran Mamdani received at least 1,036,051 votes.