Gage Skidmore

Mitch McConnell, who here appears to be surrendering his musket to an unruly crowd at the CPAC convention, is now the Senate majority leader. November 8 will determine whether he has to surrender that title as well.

The countdown clocks. The maps with all those pretty colors. The endless stream of BREAKING NEWS alerts for events that are not even close to breaking news. Election Night might be second to the Superbowl on the list of televised cultural rituals in the United States when it comes to over-the-top graphics and public drunkenness, but its stakes are higher. (Well, usually.)

Election 2016 has been cast in unusually apocalyptic terms, and perhaps rightly so. But once the votes are counted the questions will become more granular: Who will be able to get what done for whom, and when. And those nitty-gritty policy issues are what has received unusually short shrift during this year’s race.

For New York City, a haven for immigrants with huge infrastructure needs, a terrorist target on its back and a public-housing system that has been starved of federal resources for better than a decade, those issues are especially nitty and gritty. In the audio below, Ben Max of Gotham Gazette and I hash out what we think are the races and questions that matter for New York on Election Night.