Bill Thompson, the UFT’s endorsed candidate for mayor, vowed on Sept. 10 to stay in the race until all the absentee and affidavit ballots are counted after coming in second in the Democratic Primary.

“Every vote needs to be counted and heard,” Thompson said in a late-evening speech at a midtown hotel where his supporters had gathered. 

Thompson went to court on Sept. 11 to ask for court supervision of the vote-counting process.

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, also backed by the UFT, beat Eliot Spitzer in the primary for city comptroller by a vote of 52 percent to Spitzer’s 48 percent.

The Democratic Primary was the culmination of an all-out push by UFT members on behalf of the union’s candidates in the 54 campaigns in which the UFT was involved. UFT President Michael Mulgrew said that the UFT phone banks contacted every UFT member who lives in New York City and is a registered Democrat twice. In all, members participating in the UFT phone banks made hundreds of thousands of calls since late July. UFT members also turned out in large numbers for rallies and other campaign events and did door-knocking in targeted neighborhoods in the weeks leading up to the vote.

On Primary Day itself, UFT members fanned out to polling places across the city before and after school, where they handed out literature and buttons in blue-and- white Thompson for Mayor T-shirts. 

UFT President Michael Mulgrew was among a group of UFT members who leafleted the Whitehall Terminal as commuters headed for the Staten Island ferry in the late afternoon.