Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo speaks at the New York City District Council of Carpenters while campaigning for mayor of New York City, Sunday, March 2, 2025. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
By Harry Siegel | harrysiegel@gmail.com
PUBLISHED: April 26, 2025 at 5:00 PM EDT
There’s a fresh glimpse of a silver lining in another slow-motion catastrophe of an election where circumstances and a relative handful of voters are again poised to decide on the city’s future with millions of other people here along for the ride.
Let’s start with the dark clouds:
The historically unpopular mayor, a Democrat who cut a crooked deal with President Trump, lied for months about how he was committed to running for reelection as a member of his party until announcing on the last possible day that, actually, he’d try to win a second term as an independent. (But Eric Adams is hardly running so far, while using his public office as a de facto campaign operation).
The Democratic candidate dominating the polls is doing his damndest to coast on name recognition and avoid engaging with the public, the press or the other candidates while racking up endorsements from many of the same institutional players who demanded he resign as governor not even four years ago because of his bad behavior toward women who worked for him. (And while Andrew Cuomo now prefers to say he was pushed out, he did resign).
A socialist with compelling presence and posters and promises but limited accomplishments, experience or credibility has broken out to lead the crowded pack of challengers as they’re all running short on time to close what remains a vast gap in the polls between them and Cuomo ahead of the primary in June. (Zohran Mamdani might want to talk with Dianne Morales or Andrew Yang about what can happen to surging candidates with dubious credentials when the klieg lights stay on them).
It’s a bizarre race where Cuomo and Adams are laying low while their challengers are running a gauntlet of candidate forums and interviews and appearances while laying out ambitious proposals for more housing, more cops, free buses, rent freezes, universal 3-K and afterschool and more as if the Trump administration wasn’t already punishing the city and state even before pushing a federal budget slashing slash huge new holes into already tattered social safety nets.
Voters will have their say soon in this clown-car election, first Democrats in June’s closed, ranked-choice primaries and then everyone in November’s general election.
Remember: Bill de Blasio effectively won eight years in City Hall on the basis of a quarter million primary votes in the 2013 primary. Eric Adams won his seat at the table by eking out a win in 2021 by a margin of 7,000 votes.
Now Adams has convened a commission to consider changes to the City Charter for voters to decide on in November. He’s doing so in part to block the City Council, which is well to his left largely because of how low-turnout primary elections have outsized influence on how the city is run, from offering its own ballot proposals.
The mayor’s commissioners are reportedly considering city election changes, including moving the city’s elections to even years and creating open ranked-choice primaries with the top candidates then competing in a ranked-choice general election.
Those are both fine ideas, with open primaries in particular being an overdue fix to New York’s deeply flawed democracy that too many voters are checked out of and effectively disenfranchised from.
As the Daily News Editorial Board explained it:
Under RCV as it now works, voters can put candidates first, second, third and so on rather than picking just one candidate. That doesn’t make support for a candidate zero sum; it also means that a voter could express support for a candidate who may not have a realistic chance of victory without throwing his or her ballot away.
The problem is that, in service of the political parties, ranked-choice is only operative in primaries, which remain closed. That means some slice of the city’s 3,081,389 active Democratic Party members who come out to vote in the mayoral primary — it was 26.5% in 2021, a relatively high number — choose the top Democratic contender for mayor, who then faces off in November against a Republican and any independent who might happen to get on the ballot.
In a city where Democrats are two-thirds of registered voters, that makes the general election a foregone conclusion.
That’s no way to run a democracy. A chance to vote for open elections would be a reason for every voter to show up this November, so that their votes matter in future Novembers.
Siegel (harrysiegel@gmail.com) is an editor at The City, a host of the FAQ NYC podcast and a columnist for the Daily News.
Let’s start with the dark clouds:
The historically unpopular mayor, a Democrat who cut a crooked deal with President Trump, lied for months about how he was committed to running for reelection as a member of his party until announcing on the last possible day that, actually, he’d try to win a second term as an independent. (But Eric Adams is hardly running so far, while using his public office as a de facto campaign operation).
The Democratic candidate dominating the polls is doing his damndest to coast on name recognition and avoid engaging with the public, the press or the other candidates while racking up endorsements from many of the same institutional players who demanded he resign as governor not even four years ago because of his bad behavior toward women who worked for him. (And while Andrew Cuomo now prefers to say he was pushed out, he did resign).
A socialist with compelling presence and posters and promises but limited accomplishments, experience or credibility has broken out to lead the crowded pack of challengers as they’re all running short on time to close what remains a vast gap in the polls between them and Cuomo ahead of the primary in June. (Zohran Mamdani might want to talk with Dianne Morales or Andrew Yang about what can happen to surging candidates with dubious credentials when the klieg lights stay on them).
It’s a bizarre race where Cuomo and Adams are laying low while their challengers are running a gauntlet of candidate forums and interviews and appearances while laying out ambitious proposals for more housing, more cops, free buses, rent freezes, universal 3-K and afterschool and more as if the Trump administration wasn’t already punishing the city and state even before pushing a federal budget slashing slash huge new holes into already tattered social safety nets.
Voters will have their say soon in this clown-car election, first Democrats in June’s closed, ranked-choice primaries and then everyone in November’s general election.
Remember: Bill de Blasio effectively won eight years in City Hall on the basis of a quarter million primary votes in the 2013 primary. Eric Adams won his seat at the table by eking out a win in 2021 by a margin of 7,000 votes.
Now Adams has convened a commission to consider changes to the City Charter for voters to decide on in November. He’s doing so in part to block the City Council, which is well to his left largely because of how low-turnout primary elections have outsized influence on how the city is run, from offering its own ballot proposals.
The mayor’s commissioners are reportedly considering city election changes, including moving the city’s elections to even years and creating open ranked-choice primaries with the top candidates then competing in a ranked-choice general election.
Those are both fine ideas, with open primaries in particular being an overdue fix to New York’s deeply flawed democracy that too many voters are checked out of and effectively disenfranchised from.
As the Daily News Editorial Board explained it:
Under RCV as it now works, voters can put candidates first, second, third and so on rather than picking just one candidate. That doesn’t make support for a candidate zero sum; it also means that a voter could express support for a candidate who may not have a realistic chance of victory without throwing his or her ballot away.
The problem is that, in service of the political parties, ranked-choice is only operative in primaries, which remain closed. That means some slice of the city’s 3,081,389 active Democratic Party members who come out to vote in the mayoral primary — it was 26.5% in 2021, a relatively high number — choose the top Democratic contender for mayor, who then faces off in November against a Republican and any independent who might happen to get on the ballot.
In a city where Democrats are two-thirds of registered voters, that makes the general election a foregone conclusion.
That’s no way to run a democracy. A chance to vote for open elections would be a reason for every voter to show up this November, so that their votes matter in future Novembers.
Siegel (harrysiegel@gmail.com) is an editor at The City, a host of the FAQ NYC podcast and a columnist for the Daily News.
