By the end of election night, Zohran Mamdani led Aravella Simotas by 589 votes in last year’s Democratic primary to represent Astoria, Queens, in the New York State Assembly. Nearly eight thousand votes had already been tabulated from the early and in-person returns, but an equal number of mail-in ballots were still outstanding. Simotas would need to win them by about 8 points to hang on to the seat she’d held for close to a decade. Team Zohran was cautiously optimistic that such a turnaround was unlikely, but they’d been burned by absentee ballots before. And when the vote count finally resumed a month later, it seemed like it was happening all over again.

The proceedings kicked off with two precincts that Simotas won 69 to 31 percent on election night, netting her 65 votes. After the mail-in ballots were tallied, she’d won them 74 to 26 percent and netted a whopping 221 votes. As each ballot was opened, Team Zohran observers recorded the result in a Google sheet so those working from home could follow along, their despair mounting with every new cell populated. Their Slack channel, normally bustling with good cheer, fell silent with grief. As the numbers grew more dire, Zohran posted the music video for “Sugar, We’re Goin Down” by Fall Out Boy, a grim reminder that not only were they losers, they were geriatric millennials to boot.

But this self-pity was premature. The two precincts the count had started with were wholly composed of the Queensview apartment complex, a sprawling network of co-op buildings packed with prosperous homeowners and pro-machine sympathies. The remaining ballots weren’t nearly as hostile, and Zohran prevailed in the end by a margin of 424 votes. One year later, Queensview again expressed its displeasure with Astoria’s political transformation when it voted against Tiffany Cabán by 25 points in her campaign for the overlapping city council seat.