Mark Serrano

Thank you for the opportunity to prove myself worthy of your trust.

There are many who thought this day would never come.

Who feared that we would be condemned only to a future of less.

With every election consigning us simply to more of the same.

And there are others who see politics today as too cruel for the flame of hope to still burn.

New York, we have answered those fears.

Hope is a decision that tens of thousands of New Yorkers made day after day, volunteer shift after volunteer shift, despite attack ad after attack ad.

More than a million of us stood in our churches, in gymnasiums, in community centers, as we filled in the ledger of democracy.

And while we cast our ballots alone, we chose hope together.

We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible.

Tonight we have stepped out from the old into the new.

Central to that vision will be the most ambitious agenda to tackle the cost of living crisis that this city has seen since the days of Fiorella LaGuardia.

We will work tirelessly to make lights shine again in the hallways of NYCHA developments where they have long flickered.

Safety and justice will go hand in hand as we work with police officers to reduce crime and create a department of community safety that tackles the mental health crisis and homelessness crises head on.

Excellence will become the expectation across government, not the exception.

In this new age we make for ourselves, we will refuse to allow those who traffic in division and hate to pit us against one another.

We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve and no concern too small for it to care about.

They want the people to fight amongst ourselves so that we remain distracted from the work of remaking a long broken system.

We will put an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks.

After all, the conventional wisdom would tell you that I am far from the perfect candidate.