MANHATTAN (CN) --- New York City voters face a crowded ballot of Democratic mayoral hopefuls in the Big Apple’s first ranked choice primary election on Tuesday, which will replace the outgoing term-limited mayor Bill de Blasio.
The final day of voting in the city’s primary election is Tuesday, with the top Democrat in the overwhelmingly Democratic city nearly certain to win the November general election and succeed de Blasio, who has held the office since 2014.
Brooklyn borough president Eric Adams, a Black former New York Police Department captain, has risen to the top of most polls as the tangled issues of public safety, police reform and inequality in a post-Covid-19 city have dominated recent mayoral debates.
The latest polls show Adams, a moderate Democrat who co-founded a leadership group for Black officers, as the apparent frontrunner in the Democratic primary, getting ranked as the first choice by nearly one quarter of likely voters.
According to a final PIX11/NewsNation/Emerson College poll, former City Hall counsel Maya Wiley and former city Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia are closing the gap for second place behind Adams at 18% and 17%, respectively.
Wiley, a former counsel to Hizzoner de Blasio and legal analyst at MSNBC, has been amassing support among progressive groups, recently winning the backing from favorites of the left, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, and New York City rock band The Strokes.
Entrepreneur and erstwhile 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who never voted in previous elections, trails behind in fourth place at 14%, according to recent polls.
“Being the mayor of New York is hard,” senior municipal employee Chas Carey told Courthouse News on Friday. “You have to project soft power to ensure your voice is heard on things you have no hard power over, like the subway and taxes. You have to be a cheerleader for the city with tourists, businesses, commuters, and locals.”
“You have to say yes to a lot of time-consuming events and then spend the rest of your limited hours actually governing, or trusting your deputies to govern effectively for you,” Carey said, speaking solely in his personal capacity and not on behalf of the city. “You have to carefully confront intransigent and powerful interests, like police unions and real estate developers.”
“You have to balance the complex views of vocal and competing constituents, like those who want the NYPD reduced or abolished and those who want continued or increased police presence in their neighborhoods,” he added.
“The city is becoming increasingly unaffordable to its residents, and they’ll curse your name every time their rent goes up. As a reward for your hard work, you get to go on the radio every week to get yelled at by ferret people,” said Carey, referring to de Blasio’s recurring appearances on the weekly “Ask The Mayor” call-in segment on WNYC’s morning news program, The Brian Lehrer Show.
The 2021 mayoral election will be the city’s first to use ranked choice voting, with voters ranking up to five candidates in order of preference instead of casting a ballot for just one.
Also known as instant-runoff voting, if no single candidate gets 50% of the first-place votes, multiple rounds of ranked choice tabulation begin and the candidate in last place is eliminated.
Ballots cast for that eliminated candidate would then be allotted to the second-ranked choices of those voters. Remaining votes are then re-tallied and the last place candidate is dropped again. The runoff process repeats until just two candidates remain, and the name with more votes wins.
Voters can pick as many or as few candidates they choose, including just a single preferred candidate.
Official tallying might take several weeks because of state laws regarding the tabulation of mail-in votes, not the ranked choice method.
New York City voted overwhelmingly in favor of ranked-choice voting in elections in 2019, passing by ballot measure with over 73% approval.
Early voting in the city’s party primaries is already underway, beginning on Saturday, June 12 and running through Sunday, June 20.
Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner polling in third place, was endorsed by the New York Times editorial board. A relative centrist in the race, Garcia made a point during the leading contenders’ heated final debate to distance herself from progressive candidates who support calls to the defund the police, which gained prominence during last summer’s civil rights reckoning and demonstrations.
“These are complicated times, and several of my opponents are using hashtags, #DefundthePolice,” she said on Tuesday, when asked for the worst idea she had heard from another candidate. “I just don’t think that’s the right approach. You need to sit down and really think through these things.”
The 2021 ballot also includes current NYC Comptroller Scott Stringer, former Citigroup executive Ray McGuire, Barrack Obama’s housing secretary Shaun Donovan, and former non-profit organizer Dianne Morales.
Adams’ rivals have recently seized on an unusual controversy stemming from reporting earlier this month that alleged the Brooklyn Borough President does not actually live in New York City and instead hangs his hat in New Jersey when he isn’t spending nights in his Borough Hall office.
Recent polling found that the uproar over Adams’ primary residence makes no difference to a majority (51%) of Democratic primary voters on their voting decision. Nearly a third of voters polled did indicate that the residency issue made them less likely to vote for Adams.
Morales was seen as an early contender for progressive leftist Democrat voters until her campaign was derailed by a rocky internal staff dispute that imploded her campaign’s momentum.
The youngest candidate out of thirteen contenders on the 2021 ticket is a 28-year-old far-left progressive Brooklyn rapper known as Paper Boy Love Prince, who advocates for Universal Basic Income, Medicare for All, and “Spreading Love.”
A distinctive, Bushwick-based radical progressive candidate --- who often wears a gold turban and colorful silk robes with Nintendo Gameboy hung from a gold chain --- Paper Boy was a ubiquitous and exuberant presence at Black Lives Matter demonstrations around the city last year following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.
The Republican primary features Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels anti-crime group, against Fernando Mateo, a Dominican-American restaurant owner and advocate for taxi drivers.
The general election will take place Tuesday, November 2.
Follow Josh Russell on Twitter
Follow @jruss_jruss
Subscribe to Closing Arguments
Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.
