Marte Reelected To Represent District 1 Over Rep. Helen Qiu

It’s another win for Christopher Marte, who was reelected on Nov. 7 as councilmember for District One, which includes Battery Park City, the Financial District, Chinatown, Little Italy, the South Street Seaport, SoHo, TriBeCa, the Lower East Side, Governors Island, Ellis Island, and Liberty Island. Marte pulled in 68 percent of the votes across all 82 precincts, as opposed to Helen Qiu, who ran on the Republican, Conservative, Common Sense, and Art and Culture party lines, securing 31 percent of the total votes.

Qui, who was seeking office for the first time, turned out to be the top Republican vote getter in Manhattan’s ten city council districts. Democrats, as expected, won all ten races in the borough. Marte’s reelection by 37 percent actually marked the “closest” Manhattan race, an indication of how strongly Democratic the borough remains. Republicans did not bother to field candidates in nearly a third of the Manhattan races, including the Lower East Side won by Carlina Rivera and in northern Manhattan where Shaun Abreu in Morningside Heights/Washington Heights and Yusef Salaam in Harlem and East Harlem swept to victory, each scoring over 90 percent of votes cast.

With 93 percent of the vote tallied as of press time in the first council district, Marte secured 8,555 votes of the 12,486 cast compared to Qiu, who received 3,931 combined votes, according to unofficial results from the Board of Elections, which said there were also 120 write-in votes. Per ebroadsheet.com, Qiu appears to have performed the best in seven precincts clustered around the Manhattan Bridge and along the East River waterfront close to the Williamsburg Bridge, where she snagged 56 percent of the total 938 votes recorded. She ran on a platform that called for amending the city’s sanctuary laws, getting tougher on crime especially in subways and urged a stop to relaxing laws around prostitution and that made her the top Republican vote getter among the ten city council races in Manhattan.

Marte is a native of the Lower East Side and previously worked in finance as a legal researcher and neighborhood activist at the Bowery Mission and at NYCHA community gardens. He decided to jump into politics when his father had to shut down his bodega because of rising rents. He first ran for office in 2017, marginally losing to then-Council member Margaret Chin by 200 votes. Four years later, he ran again and won. He also had to go through a primary in June this year, where he dominated the field with 62 percent of the vote in a four-person race.

After his second general election win, the Democrat shared a thank you post on Instagram with a photo of his volunteer team, saying, “After a long day talking to voters, dispatching volunteers, tending to the inevitable things that go wrong, one of the best parts of Election Day is coming together at the end of it. It’s like a family reunion, but only some of us are related. But what unites us is just as strong. We will never stop fighting for the people of Lower Manhattan, we will take on the hardest battles, and time and again, we will prove it’s not just about winning but winning the right way.”

Qiu also shared a statement following her loss, “Thank you to all my voters, friends, supporters, and donors who voted for change, safety, and common sense,” she wrote on X ( formerly known as Twitter) “ Together with you, Helen Qiu, New York’s faithful and competent servant flipped four D1 precincts, and tied 2. These precincts—Two Bridges, Chinatown, Knickerbocker Village, and Confucius Plaza—will never go to Democrats as long as Helen Qiu is running,” she continued and reasserted, ending her tweet with “I will never stop fighting for your communities!”