The candidate trailing him by several thousand votes in the race, former federal prosecutor Tali Farhadian Weinstein, said in a statement Friday that after several days of absentee votes being counted, “it is clear we cannot overcome the vote margin.”
New York City’s Board of Election has not publicly released updates on the count of absentee ballots. As a result, The Associated Press has been unable to call a winner.
“This has been a long journey that started in Harlem,” Bragg said in a statement, referring to the Manhattan neighborhood where he grew up. “And today, that 15-year old boy who was stopped numerous times at gunpoint by the police is the Democratic nominee to be Manhattan District Attorney.”
Bragg led Farhadian Weinstein by about 3 percentage points when voting ended June 22. With a win, Bragg would be virtually guaranteed to succeed District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., who has been leading an investigation of Trump and his company and is retiring at the end of the year.
The Republican candidate in the general election will be Thomas Kenniff, a defense attorney, former prosecutor and Army Judge Advocate General.
Democrats outnumber Republicans heavily in Manhattan. A former federal prosecutor who now teaches at New York Law School, Bragg worked as a civil rights lawyer before entering government service. He currently represents the mother of Eric Garner in a judicial inquiry into his 2014 death after being placed in a police chokehold.
Bragg said he was drawn to a career in law after having a gun pointed at him six times as a youth — three times by police. In one encounter, amid the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, Bragg said an officer stuck a gun in his face and wrongly accused him of being a drug dealer as he walked to get groceries for his father.
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