This Week in Politics: The Gloves Come… On

The latest campaign video for Nicole Malliotakis shows the Republican mayoral candidate pounding a punching bag and spoiling for a fight. But the ad can be taken two ways: it's a tough sport to run as a Republican in a city where  there are five times as many registered Democrats. And the incumbent, Democrat Bill de Blasio, just trounced his competition in Tuesday's primary with 74 percent of the vote.

WNYC City Hall and Politics Reporter Brigid Bergin joins us on This Week in Politics for a look at how the general election is taking shape.

Malliotakis downplayed the significance of de Blasio's victory by highlighting the low turnout, but New York City often has a hard time bringing people to the voting booth. Plus, beneath those primary results lie even more bad news for the challenger.

"We saw, based on some of the analysis we did," Bergin told host David Furst, "that Mayor de Blasio continued to have strong support in many of the same places that he had strong support in 2013,"

According to Bergin, the core question for the Malliotakis campaign is how they will assemble a coalition of voters that can in any way compete.

Time will only tell if those gloves come in handy.