Jim Walden is a lawyer and independent candidate for Mayor of New York City in the upcoming 2025 general election. Limited polling data indicate that Mr. Walden has roughly the same chance of being elected the 111th Mayor of New York City as I do. (One reason we only have limited polling data for Mr. Walden is because some polls do not include even him as an option.) But Mr. Walden is anything but discouraged by the electorate’s apparent lack of interest in his campaign. He is boldly making proposals to narrow the field of opponents challenging the Democratic nominee, Zohran Mamdani, in a manner which one may suspect was coordinated with fellow independent candidate Andrew Cuomo, who is in the midst of a second attempt (see the first) at a political comeback from 2021 political misfortune and has a somewhat better chance of being the next Mayor of New York City than I and Mr. Walden do. It is unclear to me why Mr. Walden would believe that either the incumbent Mayor and now-independent candidate Eric Adams or Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa would feel compelled to drop out of the race because a candidate flirting with 1-percent in polling wills it. Perhaps it is on account of my apparent ignorance that no one has solicited my services as a political consultant, but I digress.
While there is little reason to believe that Mr. Walden will surge in the polls to second place before his self-imposed deadline for dropping out in September, I cannot say that his campaign launched without fanfare. On October 24, 2024, The New York Times of all outlets published a feature report by Emma G. Fitzsimmons titled Prominent Lawyer Enters N.Y.C. Mayor’s Race Against Adams. I read the article when it was first published and came away somewhat less than convinced of Mr. Walden’s vote-attracting prospects, notwithstanding the political headwinds against Mr. Adams, the incumbent who was under indictment at that time and is now fourth place in most of the recent general election polls. But there was one passage I appreciated from the article:
Mr. Walden, 58, who lives in Brooklyn Heights…
Regular readers will know that I am partial to scenic Brooklyn Heights, New York City’s first historic district and some say America’s first suburb (it featured in festivities surrounding the 1883 opening of the Brooklyn Bridge). While I am not voting for Mr. Walden, who is undoubtedly much better credentialed as an attorney than as a politician, it is nice to see Brooklyn Heights and the broader area once again being represented on the New York City stage by someone who is not a lunatic (perhaps unduly optimistic, however). I say once again because the 2013 Republican nominee, Joe Lhota, was also a notable non-lunatic resident of Brooklyn Heights. There is one window in Brooklyn Heights that has had a Jim Walden campaign poster displayed for a while, which I will submit is certainly notable since the only other mayoral posters I have seen from Vinegar Hill through Park Slope are for Zohran Mamdani (the Democrat nominee) and Brad Lander (third-place finisher in the Democrat primary whose campaign ended up being a sort of ranked choice voting stalking horse for Mr. Mamdani). I think I may have identified Mr. Walden’s residence through the poster, but I cannot discount the possibility that there is one very passionate supporter of Mr. Walden’s campaign other than Mr. Walden himself.
With this context in mind, I present for your appreciation a photograph of the Jim Walden-mobile.
I am not in any way a car expert, but my research indicates that Mr. Walden is rolling a Mini Cooper as his campaign-mobile. The Walden car, which I photographed on July 22, 2025, was (and is, as of the publication date of this article) seemingly permanently parked on Hicks Street between Pierrepont Street (which you can see off to the right edge of the photo) and Montague Street (see approximate location). I like his care. Great shade of blue, classy gray-scale photograph of Mr. Walden, and a nice car form-factor. I did notice one peculiar thing about the car. See the next photograph:
I direct your attention to the car’s license plate. That, my fair reader, is a Connecticut license plate. Now Mr. Walden may have many reasons for having a Connecticut plate, but were he to ask me to advise his campaign, I would have to at least consider bringing up the fact that his New York City Mayor Campaign car has an out-of-state license plate. We can see why this may be confusing in the above photo. On the hood of the car we see Mr. Walden’s nifty campaign logo – a heart-shaped apple (invoking “The Big Apple”) with a Walden for Mayor banner. We have distinct New York City campaign imagery juxtaposed against a Connecticut license plate. One may naturally wonder whether Mr. Walden spends more time in New York City or Connecticut.
Of course, someone on Mr. Walden’s campaign may retort, with some justification, that questions about Connecticut are not questions at all. There were some fair, unfortunately lightly investigated questions about the extent to which current Mayor Eric Adams lived in New York City at the time of the 2021 campaign. Andrew Cuomo moved back to New York City for the first time in more than three decades immediately prior to announcing his candidacy for Mayor, and he is already threatening to follow in the footsteps of the legendary New York politician and his onetime rival for Governor, Jimmy McMillan, and take his talents to Florida (LeBron James flashbacks?) in the event he loses to Mr. Mamdani for the second time (whether Florida should understand this as a threat is an open question). Speaking of Mr. Mamdani, he is currently hiding in his native Uganda at press time, possibly to avoid interacting with people who could ask him questions about potentially touchy subjects such as his purportedly nuanced views about the Intifada. Say what one will, but there are no questions about Curtis Sliwa’s New York City citizen bona fides.
For the reasons I gently noted throughout the article, Mr. Walden will not be the next Mayor of New York City. Mr. Walden certainly knows this, which is evinced by his attempt to parlay his quixotic campaign into support for Mr. Cuomo’s campaign against Mr. Mamdani. (I will submit that I agree with many of Mr. Walden’s views regarding the stakes of the election, if not the strategic particulars.) While I doubt that anything of political consequence will emerge from the Walden campaign, let there be no doubt that his campaign has given us something of New Leaf Journal consequence. Count me as a big fan of Mr. Walden’s Brooklyn Heights-parked campaign Mini Cooper, although I must conclude with my free, unsolicited campaign advise to work on legally outfitting it with a shiny new New York license plate.
