The day after Mayor Bill de Blasio won re-election in one of the lowest-turnout elections in city history, he tried mightily to claim he had a mandate.

It was clearly top of mind when he opened a press conference at City Hall Wednesday afternoon. "Yesterday, the people of New York City delivered a message loud and clear," he said. "And they delivered a mandate. It's a mandate for fairness."

De Blasio made the case that three quarters of a million New Yorkers support his plans for expanding childhood education, focusing on police and community relations and expanding affordable housing. 

But that comes to roughly 8.5 percent of New York City's 8.5 million residents. Fewer than 24 percent of active registered voters showed up at the polls. Tabloid newspapers made fun of his re-election. The New York Post read, "Stuck with the Bill;" The Daily News said, "Him Again."

When WNYC's city hall reporter Brigid Bergin asked the mayor about low voter turnout, he brushed it aside.

"An election is an election," he said. "People decide they want to participate. The state has broken electoral laws. That is a generic, painful, wrong reality. It has to be fixed. But it does not negate the million plus people who came out to vote and they gave a very clear mandate."

De Blasio reiterated his plans to roll out an early education program for 3-year-olds across the city. He also said he wants to ensure all students are reading at grade level by third grade — an ambitious and risky goal for anyone to announce.

While the mayor celebrated his victory, others in his party are still in limbo. The race for the 30th City Council district in Queens was still undecided. With 100 percent of machine votes counted, but none of the absentee or affidavit ballots, incumbent Democrat Elizabeth Crowley trailed Robert Holden by just 133 votes. (Holden ran on the Republican line though he is a registered Democrat.) 

"It's a small margin," WNYC's Bergin said, "but it's also a tough gap to close through the paper ballots."

Mapping the results from the 30th district and the mayor's race shows that Holden did best in the same areas where Republican mayoral candidate Nicole Malliotakis did well. Voter turnout was 10 percentage points higher in those districts, indicating that Malliotakis and Holden supporters may have been more motivated to get out to the polls - both in the council district and citywide.