On July 29, I published an investigative report on the campaign car of Jim Walden, the now-former independent candidate for Mayor of New York City. Some people who read that article may call “foul” on my describing what I wrote as an investigative report. To be sure, the article was centered on my photographs of Mr. Walden’s campaign car, which was parked in a very open-to-the-public location in Brooklyn Heights, where Mr. Walden reportedly lives. Moreover, most of my additional commentary was inspired by my own takes on the New York City Mayoral election, not investigative reporting per se. But my attention to detail did lead to my highlighting one investigative tidbit about Mr. Walden’s car. First, I re-publish the second of two photos I used in that report:
This is what I wrote at the time:
I direct your attention to the car’s license plate. That, my fair reader, is a Connecticut license plate.
Nicholas A. Ferrell
What appeared to be Mr. Walden’s New York City mayoral campaign MINI Cooper, parked not far from where Mr. Walden reportedly lives in New York City, had a Connecticut license plate.
Now let us consider that tidbit as we read a September 11, 2025 report by Peter Senzamici for the New York Post titled Jim Walden’s name ordered to remain on NYC mayoral ballot in November despite dropping out of race. Mr. Walden withdrew from the race on September 2, which I covered in an Emu Café Social post titled Jim Walden Suspends Campaign For NYC Mayor. Mr. Walden’s withdrawal was not unexpected for reasons I discussed in my report on his campaign car – specifically that he was a near-non-entity in the polls and had attempted to get the candidates who are polling second-to-fourth, Messrs. Andrew Cuomo, Curtis Sliwa, and Eric Adams, to agree to back whoever was polling the best among them come September, an effort which was likely (in my opinion) coordinated with Mr. Cuomo. No one agreed to Mr. Walden’s plan except for Mr. Walden. But let no one say that the lack of buy-in dissuaded Mr. Walden from following through on his promise (credit for that).
The Post report covers the aftermath of Mr. Walden’s withdrawal. In light of the fact that Mr. Walden framed his withdrawal as part of an effort to defeat the presumptive front-runner, Democrat nominee Zohran Mamdani, he understandably did not want to appear on the ballot, fearing that a small number of voters may cast their votes for him despite the fact that he is no longer campaigning. Of course, Mr. Walden cannot remove himself from the ballot because he wills it. The New York City Board of Elections determined that Mr. Walden had not followed the rules for having his name removed from the ballot. Mr. Walden went to court seeking to compel the Board of Elections to remove him from the ballot. Before we go to court ourselves, I quote from the the Post report summarizing the Board of Elections’ ruling:
The BOE said election law only allows candidate names to be culled from the ballot ahead of a Sept. 19 printing deadline if they moved out of state, accepted a judicial nomination or suffered a sudden death.
Thanks to my investigative reporting, New Leaf Journal readers should be able to predict Mr. Walden’s argument before The New York Post prints it. Now for the Post’s description of Mr. Walden’s argument in Court:
Walden claimed in court Thursday that he ‘volunteered’ to move to his second home in Connecticut for the duration of the election.
In my investigative report on Mr. Walden’s campaign car, I found it curious that he did not see to it to ensure that a vehicle which appeared to serve as a mobile advertisement for his New York City mayoral campaign did not have a Connecticut plate, which could cause some message confusion among voters. I suspected the obvious, that Mr. Walden also maintains a residence in Connecticut. This second residence formed the basis of Mr. Walden’s plea to escape the confines of the November ballot. Would it succeed? The Post quoted Judge Jeffry H. Pearlman:
You should have moved to Connecticut.
We can take that as a no.
Mr. Walden could not ditch his Connecticut license plate as a candidate for Mayor. He could not “move” to Connecticut fast enough when he was no longer a candidate for Mayor. This is the story of a state-crossed lawyer-turned-politician.
Fortunately for Mr. Walden and the not Mr. Mamdani camp, of which I not subtly indicated I was a member back in July while also subtly indicating that the identity of my preferred candidate in 2025 is the same as back in 2021, Mr. Walden’s presence on the ballot is highly unlikely to materially affect the election outcome. In July, I suggested that Mr. Walden’s proposal to consolidate the field of non-Mamdani candidates was unlikely to succeed because “[i]t is unclear to me why Mr. Walden would believe that either the incumbent Mayor and now-independent candidate Eric Adams or the Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa would feel compelled to drop out of the race because a candidate flirting with 1-percent in polling wills it.” While mayoral polling was broadly poor for the Democrat Primary and I am less than convinced it is going to be much better in the general election, there has been no evidence to suggest that my July assessment of Mr. Walden’s electoral prospects were off-base. I do not anticipate that the election will be so close that a small band of voters for Walden’s zombie campaign will change the outcome, and I doubt that anyone who goes out of their way to vote for Mr. Walden’s zombie campaign would have been persuaded to vote for an electorally viable candidate in any event. For whatever it is worth, I suspect that a majority of the small number of men and women telling pollsters that they planned to vote for Mr. Walden and donors to his campaign will most likely join Mr. Walden in voting for a former New York governor who his pursuing his second attempt at a political comeback.
But this is not a political prognostication article. The real purpose of this article was to establish that I conducted bona fide investigative reporting here at The New Leaf Journal. Let no one say that our Google News Sitemap is just for show.
