Eight is more than enough - A deep dive into NYC's mess of a mayor's race
It’s all coming up mayor’s race this week, as we’re in the homestretch here. On FAQ NYC, we ran down the (terrible) second debate talked with the (excellent) Katie Honan of the Wall Street Journal. And I went on Bring the Payne for a deep dive with Joel Payne into all eight candidates and how this race is, and ain’t, like 2013.
Finally, here’s my spread for the Daily News about why progressives are on the cusp of losing city hall, which I had to rewrite an hour after filing Friday after a second Stringer accuser emerged and then again on Saturday after Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Wiley but I think the argument holds.
Eight is more than enough: New York has too many candidates and a muddle of a mayoral race - New York Daily News
As the size of New York City’s press corps keeps shrinking, the size of its mayoral field keeps growing, and we appear to be staggering toward a second straight almost accidental mayor. Hey, what could go wrong?
As the size of New York City’s press corps keeps shrinking, the size of its mayoral field keeps growing, and we appear to be staggering toward a second straight almost accidental mayor. Hey, what could go wrong?
There have been a record eight candidates at the two official debates so far, which is way too many and means that they all talk in 45-second soundbites, with no time for following up. Even as the Democratic primary will functionally decide the next mayor here, the local Democratic Party is a hollowed-out shell with no power to cull the field. Meanwhile, a very generous campaign finance system that doubles as an employment act for political consultants along with a new ranked-choice voting system for primaries means none of those eight candidates have any reason to go away, so the race has stayed too crowded to make much sense as New Yorkers finally start tuning in with less than three weeks to go before the first June primary since 1973.
All of the candidates except for sure losers Shaun Donovan and Ray McGuire — whose impressive careers didn’t end up matching the moment, and whose contempt for one another has been one of the fun sideshows of the campaign — have hoarded their cash to bombard us with ads over the homestretch we’re in now. Maybe that will change things in what’s been a remarkably stable race, with Andrew Yang and Eric Adams on top of the polls since January with Kathryn Garcia joining them there after winning the endorsements of The News and the Times. Notably, all three have stressed public safety more than police reform.
The last time there was an open race for mayor, there were five major candidates — which was already too many — vying to replace Mike Bloomberg after his “emergency” third term. Speaker and Bloomberg ally Christine Quinn was way ahead in the polls until Anthony Weiner tried to revive his political career by jumping in, and her numbers plummeted as his shot up with an assist from an independent expenditure backing de Blasio and attacking her. (Then the public advocate, de Blasio was the only candidate to have significant outside money deployed on his behalf in a harbinger of the pay-to-play ethos he’d bring to City Hall and that’s carried over into the race to replace him there, where seven of the eight candidates have at least one outside PAC spending on their behalf.)
Quinn never recovered and former Controller Bill Thompson, the third centrist in the field, failed to capitalize when Weiner melted down again.
Because the Campaign Finance Board made the arguably racist decision to pull all of Controller John Liu’s matching funds upon finding that bundlers had been making straw donations (with some of them falsely attributed to Chinese-speaking New Yorkers), de Blasio had a big lane to himself on the left, and he surged in the campaign’s final weeks and ended up with 280,000 votes — or just enough to avoid a runoff and put him on a glide path to power in a city of more than 8 million people.
Eight years and a trillion dollars of city spending later, it’s decision time again, at least for registered Democrats, and things look nearly as haphazard but this time the cookie may be crumbling in favor of one of the moderate candidates in what’s too often felt like a race about nothing as exemplified by the rise of one of those moderates, Yang, who’s never so much as voted for a mayor in 25 years living here (not counting the months he and his family spent in their second home in the Hudson Valley during the worst of the pandemic) but wants New Yorkers to elect him as one.
He’s an excellent candidate and salesman, but New Yorkers can do better than someone offering his previous apathy and ongoing ignorance as virtues by arguing that the people actually involved in city governance have done such a bad job that, as Trump once put it to Black voters, “it can’t get any worse.”
It can! And it well might on the watch of a guy offering that Bloombergian spin but without Bloomberg’s business accomplishments or fortune that helped him govern as a first-time public servant starting at the top here.
And that’s not to mention the sometimes cultish tone of Yang’s swarming online followers, convinced that their guy is delivering the undeniable truth and that it’s only us monsters in the press supposedly in thrall to the corrupt powers-that-be who are keeping it from the people. Like the old joke about the Jew who only read the Nazi papers — “I read our papers, and they’re coming for us and there’s not much time left; I read Der Stürmer and we control the banks, the movies, the world” — Yang Gangers may be the only ones left who think the press has that power.
One sign it does not is that Yang has been at or near the top of the polls since the moment he jumped into the race, because of the name recognition he earned with his presidential run, because his appearances have dominated coverage of the race as attention begets attention have been melting down.
One reason for that meltdown is that centering their campaigns around police reform, which seemed like a smart political strategy during the protests last summer, has not played out as planned amid a plague year that also saw a dramatic rise in gun violence.
The one candidate who’s outright embraced the “defund” slogan, Dianne Morales, is a charter-school supporter who’s racked up small donors while running a poster-thin campaign as the unlikely far-left candidate in the race. She’s currently trying to explain away her campaign staffers walking out as no big deal, just the “beautiful mess” that happens when your team grows from a couple dozen people to nearly 100, which is a pathetic excuse from someone running to lead a public workforce of more than 300,000.
Then there’s Scott Stringer, who’s avoided saying “defund” even as his controller’s office produced a plan to cut more than a billion dollars from the NYPD budget, and who’d lined up progressive backers as a sort of payback for backing insurgents’ longshot bids in 2018 and 2020 that paid off as a new generation of pols regained Democratic control of the state Senate and ousted powerful incumbents in Congress.
But those backers dropped him within two days of a woman alleging that he’d harassed her in 2001, before anyone had time to look into her claims that he’s staunchly denied and even as his mainline endorsers stood with him and his poll numbers mostly held up at least through Friday, when a second accuser emerged who told the Times that Stringer had groped her and made unwanted advances at the bar he co-owned and where she worked at as a teen in 1992 (Stringer said he had “no memory” of her and that “Uptown Local was a long-ago chapter in my life…and it was all a bit of a mess”).
Speaking of progressive “messes,” the Democratic Socialists chose to skip the mayor’s race and focus on a few Council seats while the Working Families Party, which originally had Stringer as their first pick, doesn’t seem to be doing much on behalf of Maya Wiley or Morales, now their first and second choices.
All of which suggests that the progressive wave that’s been rising in New York may be receding now, or that the organizing approach that’s succeeded in lawmakers’ districts doesn’t translate in higher-turnout citywide contests.
On Saturday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — whose early endorsement of controller candidate Brad Lander hasn’t appeared to help him move up in a crowded field, though that may be because there’s been no public polling since he went up on TV promoting her endorsement — announced just a week out from the start of early voting that Wiley is her top choice for mayor, saying that “the time has come to join together as a movement” or else “we will have a city run for billionaires and special interests.”
It’s a big get for Wiley and a big gamble for AOC, who will either prove she can be a queenmaker here or tarnish her reputation as a king-killer.
Wiley, a compelling communicator with an impressive resume who’s struggled to introduce herself and raise money as a first-time candidate, is now offering herself as “the only progressive in this race that can win it.” But time’s short for Wiley to break through like de Blasio finally did, and it’s not clear if there’s a lane this time around for a candidate whose public safety plan boils down to police reform, rather than any sort of policing.
Plus, it’s hard to run on police reform after serving as de Blasio’s lawyer and then helping to slow changes he was resisting while briefly chairing the Civilian Complaint Review Board. It’s also hard for a candidate who lives in a beautiful, affluent corner of Brooklyn, complete with a private security patrol, to offer herself as “a mom in a community where we have high rates of gun violence,” as she did at the last debate.
Meantime, three candidates stressing public safety have prospered, including Adams, the ex-cop and police reformer who’s rightly called out Yang as a Johnny Come Lately to the issue, with Yang suggesting in turn that Adams is a corrupt pol who’s prospered in a broken system. (Notably, billionaires who often back Republicans are funding PACs supporting both of their campaigns.)
Adams, who was a thorn in Ray Kelly’s side as a reformer inside the NYPD before getting into electoral politics, is at once a consummate political insider whose aggressive fundraising has been compared to de Blasio’s much-investigated operation and something of a loose rhetorical cannon. He has told new New Yorkers to “go back to Iowa,” shown off dead rats at press conferences, and boasted on my podcast about wearing a gun as mayor and maybe also firing his security detail.
He’s also someone who has been remarkably consistent over years and decades in many of his positions, and who was focused on the overuse of stop-and-frisk long before it became a hot political issue. And he’s correctly distinguished between the overuse of the tactic under Kelly, which he helped end, and the somewhat absurd idea, which Wiley has used to attack him, that all stops are fundamentally oppressive.
So I can squint a little and see Adams as the one mayor who really could reform the NYPD without damaging public safety in the process, but can also see him getting charged at some point for his dealings with donors. (Adams has chafed at that suggestion, but my view is that all these pols are testing the legal limits that are hard to line up as the Supreme Court keeps moving the goalposts that only become clear again after prosecutors try and make cases.)
And I’m sure that Adams has benefited from all the attention the national press and angry progressives have focused on Yang instead of him.
Finally, there’s Garcia, the highly competent, no-nonsense former sanitation commissioner, food czar and fill-in NYCHA chair for de Blasio and about the only person who left his administration with their reputation enhanced. She’s effectively running on Mayor LaGuardia’s old line about how “there is no Democratic or Republican way to clean the streets.”
But that’s what a mayor has commissioners to handle, like she used to, and Garcia has been running for the big job as an anti-campaign of sorts, effectively refusing to perform and not offering much rhetorical vision past competence.
Maybe that’s a formula for political success in this new ranked-choice world we’re in—and where we may not know the winner until weeks after the last votes are cast — and maybe that would make her a good mayor if so.
Here’s hoping we get luckier this time around; there’s no doubt that things could get worse.
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