BUFFALO, N.Y. (WBEN) – India Walton has acknowledged it is unlikely she will defeat Byron Brown once all the write-in votes are tallied in the Buffalo Mayoral race.
“While we anticipate that the margins will narrow, it seems unlikely that we will end up with enough votes to inaugurate a Walton administration in January,” she wrote. “I couldn’t be more proud of the campaign we ran. It wasn’t just a field program with a messaging strategy attached; it was a deeply felt love letter to the working people of our beautiful city.”
She claimed, without providing evidence, of tactics by the New York State Republican Party to pre-stamp ballots. She also was critical of high-profile democrats declining to defend her against republican attacks.
The write-in candidate defeated Walton by 18 points and more than 10,000 votes. Brown is expected to have received the overwhelming majority of write-in votes.
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Walton did not say what her steps are after the election is certified, though political analysts have said she raised her public profile and could fight for political office in the future at various levels of government.
The contest between between the two Democrats was another high-stakes matchup between the party’s center and left wings.
After losing the primary, Brown, 63, has relied on name recognition and an aggressive campaign that promoted his leadership over a city where property values and population are on the rise after decades of decline.
His campaign distributed thousands of stamps bearing his name that allowed supporters to stamp, instead of write, their votes.
Walton drove home her message with her own story as a survivor of “poverty, abuse and trauma.” She had a child as a teenager before returning to school and becoming a registered nurse.
She got endorsements from U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and from the state's two U.S. senators, but other Democrats sat on the sidelines, including Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Buffalo-area native.
Brown's supporters called Walton unqualified and said the mayor had earned a fifth term.
“The Buffalo before Byron Brown was something to behold, and not in a good way,” said Lisa Yaeger, an attorney who supported him. “He organized and he was strategic about how he implemented change in Buffalo. Some of it happened quickly. Some of it happened slowly, but it happened.”
Walton's backers said she would do more to address the needs of people who missed out on the recovery.
“A lot of the development that’s going on right now — you’ve got a lot of businesses but you don’t have the people involved," Walton supporter Akua Assapa said at a recent campaign rally. "You don’t have housing for people, affordable housing that is.”