On Tuesday night, the polls closed and the counting began in New York City’s municipal primaries. Eric Adams, the ex-cop turned Brooklyn borough president, attracted more than thirty per cent of first-choice votes in the Democratic Party mayoral primary, with Maya Wiley and Kathryn Garcia both topping twenty per cent, and Andrew Yang trailing, with less than twelve per cent. The final results won’t be known for weeks—the city’s election officials will give absentee ballots another week to come in by mail, and then allow more time for voters to “cure” any errors or issues with their ballots—but the results were enough for Yang to concede, and for Adams to deliver a bullish speech to supporters at his primary-night party at a Williamsburg night club. “There’s going to be twos and threes and fours,” Adams said, referring to the ballot counting and sorting to come as part of the city’s new ranked-choice voting system. “But there’s something else we know: New York City said, ‘Our first choice is Eric Adams.’ ”
Until quite recently, New Yorkers had to click the right hyperlinks to even find the mayor’s race. The winter surge in COVID-19-infection numbers made in-person campaigning impossible, so the candidates—thirteen eventually qualified for the ballot in the Democratic primary, the winner of which will become the presumptive mayor-elect—spent months attending one Zoom forum after another, nodding and smiling like members of the Brady Bunch. In early May, when the pandemic receded and the weather turned, the candidates emerged, blinking, into the open air, and proceeded to spend the next six weeks running around town trying to politically strangle one another. That was the race: a long, dull beginning; a short, hostile ending; and little in between.
What the ending would look like became evident over Mother’s Day weekend. That Saturday, according to the N.Y.P.D., two brothers selling CDs in Times Square got into an argument. One pulled out a gun and started firing. He missed his brother but hit three passersby, including a four-year-old girl in a stroller. Within hours, Adams held a press conference at the scene to decry a spike in shootings that has coincided with the pandemic. The next day, Yang, who was then considered the candidate to beat, held his own press conference in Times Square. “There’s nothing more fundamental than the ability to walk in your own neighborhood with your family without fear,” Yang, who lives nearby, in Hell’s Kitchen, said. Adams saw an opening. He returned to the scene later that day to criticize Yang and embrace the mantle of the law-and-order candidate. “It should not have taken gunshots blocks from his home before he said, ‘Let me listen to what the most qualified person in this mayor’s race has been saying,’ ” Adams said, warning that the city risked returning to the high-crime days of the nineteen-eighties and nineties. “The enemy is winning, and we are waving a big white flag of surrender.”
That crime in the city over all was still at historic lows didn’t matter. The spike in shootings was real. The news was full of accounts of disturbing attacks on people of Asian and Jewish descent, and of slashings and other horrors in the subway. Polls began to show crime leapfrogging COVID-19 as the top issue on voters’ minds and Adams, correspondingly, rising in voters’ estimation.
A year ago, after the police murder of George Floyd and weeks of Black Lives Matter protests, it seemed like the city might seek a leader capable of transforming, or at least standing up to, the N.Y.P.D. Instead, during the final rounds of official debates, the candidates were asked, again and again, about “public safety.” Adams, who first gained prominence in the city, in the nineteen-nineties, as a cop willing to speak out against racist and abusive policing, staked a position as a full-throated defender of the necessity of cops on the streets. He was in his comfort zone. None of the other candidates ever figured out a way to effectively offer an alternative argument. At a time when many New Yorkers expressed wariness about taking the subway, the language of “defund the police” was deemed a political liability. “We’re in a very precarious position,” Al Sharpton, the civil-rights leader, told the Times. “People are afraid of the cops and the robbers. We have both of them that we’ve got to deal with. And anyone that cannot come up with a comprehensive plan that threads the needle of both should not be running for mayor.”
All other issues shrank in the face of the public-safety debate. Little time was given to discussion of public health, for instance, despite a pandemic that is still infecting hundreds of New Yorkers a day, or climate change, despite how little has been done to protect the city since Hurricane Sandy, in 2012. Most of the candidates’ campaign platforms contained detailed, serious policy plans on a range of issues, including housing, education, and economic development, and most of the candidates could discuss those details competently in public. But few of these details filtered out to voters. On Sunday, two days before primary day, Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner who made climate resilience a centerpiece of her campaign, shook hands with voters outside Zabar’s, on the Upper West Side, where one would expect to find many voters open to her pragmatic, get-stuff-done attitude. “A bunch of people tell her they’re voting for her,” Politico’s Erin Durkin tweeted from the scene, “though one woman vocally noted she’s for @ericadamsfornyc ‘because he’s a vegan and that’s the #1 thing you can do to save the planet.’ ”
Every candidate in the race had obvious political flaws. Yang has no government experience and seemed torn between playing the rah-rah city cheerleader and the transactional champion of the business class. Adams had long been considered a crank by many people in New York politics, and his coziness with donors and the strangeness of his personality became fodder for reporters. Garcia, whose long record in city government helped earn her the endorsement of the Times, had little to contribute to the public-safety debate and proved incapable of making the race about the issues she’s strongest on. Wiley, a former top City Hall lawyer, consolidated support from the city’s progressives, but only at the very end of the race, after splitting endorsements and public support with two other candidates, Scott Stringer and Dianne Morales, who wound up seeing their campaigns sunk by allegations of sexual misconduct and a campaign-staff revolt, respectively. Wiley’s candidacy felt like a second choice, because, for many, it was.
The new ranked-choice voting system meant that voters got to pick as many as five candidates by order of preference. Ranked-choice voting is supposed to make elections more nuanced, more civil, and less polarized. But, by primary day, the Democrats running for mayor seemed fine being sorted into the same two broad ideological groups, the moderates and the progressives, that have fought over the future of their party since the 2016 Presidential election. What the race ended up lacking was any kind of coherent public debate between these two camps. For months, campaign operatives and other political observers said that the candidates were avoiding direct confrontation with their opponents in order to preserve “broad appeal” among the electorate, the thinking being that any candidate could be the second choice of any other candidates’ voters. But no candidate in the race proved capable of straddling multiple disparate constituencies. Even Adams, who banked on support from Black voters in the outer boroughs, attracted less than a third of first-choice votes in a low-turnout, closed party primary.
Ranked-choice voting also helped explain why none of the candidates who qualified for the ballot dropped out, even after it was clear that the race was down to less than a half-dozen contenders. Shaun Donovan, a former Cabinet secretary, and Ray McGuire, a former Citigroup executive, stuck it out until the end, taking up time during the debates and, in McGuire’s case, raising so much money from his allies on Wall Street that it prompted the city’s campaign finance board to increase the spending caps for other candidates by $3.6 million.
In the end, the candidates turned nasty, anyway. Yang and Garcia agreed to campaign together in the race’s closing days, which Adams denounced as a racist plot to deny him victory. His campaign issued statements from supporters echoing that sentiment, including one from Ashley Sharpton, Al Sharpton’s daughter, calling the Yang-Garica alliance an attempt to “steal the election from us.” Not to be outdone, Yang, who never seemed to grasp why he’d gone from a well-liked Presidential long shot to a divisive mayoral contender, spent the last days of the campaign talking about people in need as eyesores. “We all see these mentally ill people on our streets and subways, and you know who else sees them? Tourists,” he said, during a radio interview. “And then they don’t come back, and they tell their friends, ‘Don’t go to New York City.’ ” The last days of the race were a frenzy of calculated and desperate gambits, and no one could say whether they even made sense on a tactical level. “I can see the logic,” Eric Phillips, a former City Hall spokesperson, told Politico, about the Yang-Garcia alliance. “On the other hand, I don’t think any of us know what we are talking about at this point.”
