Buffalo Mayor Declares Victory in Write-in Campaign Against AOC-Backed Democratic Socialist

Four-term Buffalo, New York, Mayor Byron Brown declared victory Tuesday evening in a stunning write-in campaign over a socialist, India Walton, who defeated him in the Democratic Party primary in June.

Local NBC affiliate WGRZ reported: “With 97 percent of the precincts reporting Tuesday night, write-in candidates have nearly 33,900 votes, or 59 percent. The results do not say who received those write-in votes, but Brown has waged an aggressive write-in campaign since he lost the Democratic Party primary back in June.”

Brown called his apparent victory, which would see him govern for a fifth term, “one of the greatest comeback stories in our history.”

In June, the Associated Press reported that Walton was “on track” to become the city’s next mayor — as well as the first socialist mayor and the first female mayor.

That did not sit well with traditional Democrats, some of whom were stunned into action by the primary.

Fellow “democratic socialist” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) came to Buffalo to campaign for Walton, and warned fellow Democrats to line up behind the party’s official nominee: “Any Democrat right now that is trying to establish a precedent of not uniting behind the party’s nominee is playing a dangerous game,” she said.

But Byron mounted an ambitious effort to convince voters to “write down Byron Brown.”

The write-in campaign is a rare victory for the tactic — so rare that the last significant race in which it succeeded was in the 2010 U.S. Senate race in Alaska, when Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) used it to defeat a Tea Party-backed candidate who had won the Republican primary.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.