Watching Dianne Morales’ campaign team march to her campaign office on Friday — 25 days before the primary and 15 days before the start of early voting — to publicly deliver “four core demands” they want satisfied before they’ll resume working for her, I thought about how progressives have formed a circular firing squad in the mayor’s race even as they’re poised to pick up more power down-ballot.
Morales, a richly compensated non-profit executive who’s positioned herself at the far left of the field by offering slogans and not much substance (she didn’t know what Kendra’s Law was when I asked her about it, for instance), has been less than transparent about this “beautiful mess,” as she’s framed it, or “coup,” as some of the staffers fighting to form a union, among other things, described it to journalist Hunter Walker.
In Soviet New York, your campaign campaigns against you!
Speaking of messes, Controller Scott Stringer’s mayoral campaign has been on a weird sort of political life support where his numbers haven’t collapsed but his path to victory may have since Jean Kim, a longtime lobbyist who’d volunteered on his unsuccessful 2001 public advocate bid, accused him of sexually assaulting her when she was an “intern” there and then trying to buy her silence with a promise to make her a district leader. While Stringer emphatically denied all of that and said the two had been in a casual relationship, his progressive backers fled en masse within days, before anyone had time to look into her story, which has some holes in it and she hasn’t entirely backed up.
With no other accusers emerging and organized labor and Rep. Jerry Nadler staying behind him, some of those progressives have since expressed regrets about pulling the support Stringer won in part with his politically risky bet to back the long-shot 2018 challengers who succeeded in taking down the so-called Independent Democrats who’d kept Republicans in control of the state Senate until then.
“I believe in Scott Stringer as a leader and a person and I think he would be a really good mayor,” Rep. Jamaal Bowman said when asked about his decision to dump Stringer by a member of the progressive volunteer group Indivisible, raising the question of why he’d done that and made things, well, divisible.
“I was in communication with some others who ultimately withdrew their endorsement as well,” Bowman continued, effectively answering his question by blaming progressive women for rushing to a judgment he followed.
“I am not a woman, I’ve never experienced assault before, so my North Star is people who have and that’s kind of what I leaned on…Quite frankly, I sometimes regret it because I wasn’t more patient and didn’t ask more questions and didn’t call for other things because I do like Scott and I would say, and I’m being quite frank with you, I do not want Andrew Yang as mayor…so I hope we’re able to get to a place where we can figure something out so that doesn’t happen.”
Notably, Bowman didn’t actually restore his endorsement, for whatever it would be worth at this point. Maybe he’s again waiting for women whose lead he can follow.
But for progressives concerned about blowing their shot at City Hall — to Yang, whose support has started to sag as New Yorkers finally start keying in on the contest and chafing at the idea of voting for a mayor who’s never bothered voting for a mayor himself in 25 years living here and doesn’t know that much about how the city actually functions, or to tightly wound and suspiciously transactional ex-cop and ex-Republican Eric Adams or to the highly competent and dispositionally moderate Kathryn Garcia, who’s shot up since The News and the Times endorsed her — time is running awfully short.
There’s Morales, whose campaign is publicly imploding. Stringer, who progressives have already fled from and wounded in the process. And Maya Wiley, who helped avert the police reform she says she’d fight for as mayor when she was counsel to Mayor de Blasio and then chair of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, and whose campaign has yet to catch fire even as it’s hemorrhaged money so that she has much less to spend over the homestretch than her competitors.
With the City Council poised to move even farther left, and quite possibly also the Manhattan district attorney’s office, the progressives’ circular firing squad hitting the three candidates who are calling for money and authority to be taken away from the NYPD could end up as a figurative bullet dodged for New York City, where literal bullets have flown over the last year as the number of shooting victims literally doubled.