Former police officer Eric Adams close to winning NYC mayoral race as ranked-choice votes are tallied

YAHOO

Jon Ward

·Chief National Correspondent

Wed, June 23, 2021, 4:29 PM·5 min read

The result of the New York City mayoral primary will not be known for another week or two, but as expected, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams is currently in the lead.

Adams, a former NYPD captain, emerged in April as the frontrunner in public polling by emphasizing his crime-fighting credentials. His rise coincided with survey results showing that violent crime was the top concern of voters in the nation’s largest city, replacing the COVID-19 pandemic.

Given the city’s strong Democratic tilt, Adams will be the overwhelming favorite to win the general election later this year, should he emerge victorious from the primary. Republicans on Tuesday nominated talk show host Curtis Sliwa — a longtime city fixture known for his trademark red beret and his leadership of the volunteer anti-crime group the Guardian Angels — as their candidate for the November election.

New York City mayoral candidate Eric Adams at his election night party on Tuesday. (Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

For Tuesday’s primaries, the city adopted ranked-choice voting for the first time in its history, a reform that is gaining support around the country among those who want to encourage moderation and bipartisanship in politics. Under this system, voters were able to rank their top five choices for mayor — and as candidates who receive the least votes are eliminated, their supporters are reallocated based on their second, third, fourth and fifth choices.

The New York City Board of Elections, however, won’t announce the results of the reallocation until next week, and even then won’t announce the results of absentee ballots. That means it could be two weeks until the winner is declared.

Adams led the first round of voting with 31.7 percent support, followed by the civil rights lawyer Maya Wiley, with 22.3 percent. The city’s former sanitation commissioner, Kathryn Garcia, was a close third, with 19.5 percent. The entrepreneur Andrew Yang — who conceded the race Tuesday night — came in at a more distant fourth, with 11.7 percent.

In the past, the race would have gone to a runoff between Adams and Wiley because no candidate won more than 40 percent, the city’s threshold for winning outright. The last New York City runoff for mayor was held in the 2001 Democratic primary.

“We’re in a holding pattern … while the votes are counted and while we wait to see how the ranked-choice tabulations work out,” said City Councilman Brad Lander, who is leading the race for city comptroller, in a TV interview.

Voters scan completed ballots at the Church of St. Anthony of Padua polling site for the New York City mayoral primary on Tuesday. (Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Of course, if there were to have been a runoff, as there would have been in the past, it would have taken even longer to determine a winner.

The consensus among observers is that it will be hard for Wiley or Garcia to catch Adams, who dominated working-class neighborhoods in Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island. Wiley performed best in upscale portions of Brooklyn, while Garcia was most popular in Manhattan and parts of Staten Island.

Adams, Garcia and Yang were all seen as the more moderate candidates in the crowded Democratic field, with progressives rallying in recent weeks behind Wiley.

“Based on his considerable lead over the next two candidates, it would seem very unlikely he loses,” an adviser to one of the eliminated candidates told Yahoo News. “If it was 30 to 27, [it] would be very different and, yes, more fluid, but 10 points is a lot, especially when you consider how many Yang voters likely ranked Adams as a two.”

One recent poll, the Marist survey, backs that up, showing that the most common second choice of Yang voters was Adams. But it also showed that the most common second choice of Wiley voters was Garcia, and the most frequent second choice of Garcia voters was Wiley.

“Are you saying it’s girls against boys?” Garcia joked when asked about that survey result last week. But the serious point is that if enough voters listed Wiley and Garcia as their first and second choices, one of them could approach 50 percent. 

Mayoral candidates Kathryn Garcia, left, and Maya Wiley greet each other at the unveiling of a mural in New York City's Chinatown on Sunday. (Kena Betancur/Getty Images)

“Maya may have a path. It’s just really narrow,” the adviser to a defeated candidate said, adding that if enough voters for other candidates listed Wiley second, “she could make it really tight in the final round.”

Fair Vote, an election reform organization that promotes ranked-choice voting, noted that the vast majority of candidates who have led in the first round of voting in ranked-choice elections over the past 15 years have ultimately won.

The biggest surprise may have been the high turnout. There were 798,000 votes already counted as of Tuesday night, with another 90,000 absentee ballots yet to be counted, and another 130,000 absentee ballots not yet returned. Ballots that were postmarked by June 22 must be received by next Tuesday, the city Board of Elections told Yahoo News.

That means the final turnout for the Democratic primary will be close to 1 million votes, compared with only 691,000 in 2013, the last time there was an open race for mayor.

Progressives’ primary power outage: Dianne Morales, Scott Stringer and Maya Wiley are all stalled

 By HARRY SIEGEL DAILY NEWS

Maya Wiley, Scott Stringer and Dianne Morales. (New York Daily News)

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.