Adams Attacks Garcia as Poll Shows They Lead Mayoral Field

With early voting underway, the candidates are making their final cases to voters, and they are attacking their closest rivals.

NY TIMES



Kathryn Garcia is running second to Eric Adams in a new poll.Credit...Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times


By Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Jeffery C. Mays
June 14, 2021Updated 8:24 p.m. ET


The front-runner in the race for mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, took aim at his rival Kathryn Garcia on Monday as the campaign entered its final week and a new poll showed that the two candidates were the leading contenders.

Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, clearly sees Ms. Garcia as a threat: He held a news conference with sanitation workers on Monday to draw attention to allegations that women and minority workers at the city agency received unequal pay. Ms. Garcia ran the Sanitation Department until last year, when she resigned to run for mayor.

Ms. Garcia, for her part, declared the mayoral contest a two-person race and defended her record.

“I guess the mudslinging has started,” she said at a senior center in Manhattan. “So I guess he knows that we’re in a two-person race.”


She said she had left the Department of Sanitation more equitable than she had found it.

“I increased the number of chiefs and leaders in the department who are people of color by 50 percent,” she said.




ImageMr. Adams leads with 24 percent support, according to the latest poll.Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times


Early voting began in New York City over the weekend ahead of the primary election on June 22.

In the poll, conducted by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, Mr. Adams had 24 percent support, followed by Ms. Garcia with 17 percent and Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, with 15 percent. Andrew Yang, a 2020 presidential candidate who had once been considered the front-runner, fell to fourth place with 13 percent.

Under the city’s new ranked-choice voting system, Mr. Adams would win with 56 percent after 12 rounds, while Ms. Garcia was second with 44 percent. The poll was conducted between June 3 and June 9 and had a margin of error of 3.8 percent.

At Mr. Adams’s news conference, held near a sanitation enforcement facility on Flushing Avenue in Queens, he criticized Ms. Garcia’s management of the city’s sanitation system and stood with employees from the department who criticized her for pay equity issues.

“I’m not throwing dirt on anyone,” Mr. Adams said. “We are running to be the chief executive of this city, and the question must be asked of those of us who have previous experience in government, previous experience in other professions, are you going to run the city the way you have actually carried out your actions in your other profession?”


Mr. Adams also criticized Ms. Garcia’s leadership of the New York City Housing Authority, the city’s public housing agency.

“If you’re a New Yorker that states you are pleased with how NYCHA has been run over the years, then she’s the type of manager you want,” he said. “If you believe you are pleased with the cleanliness of our city, then she’s the type of manager that you want.”

Philip Seelig, an attorney for the Sanitation Department enforcement agents, filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in February and plans to file a class-action lawsuit. The agents, who are mostly women and nonwhite, receive less pay and lower pension benefits than the mostly white and male sanitation police, Mr. Seelig said.

“She can’t turn a blind eye to what happened in her agency when she was running it, and she can’t expect to be a better mayor than she was a lousy commissioner,” he said.


Earlier Monday, Ms. Garcia visited a senior center on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Asked how she would frame the choice for voters between herself and Mr. Adams, Ms. Garcia cast herself as a seasoned public servant rather than a politician and implied that Mr. Adams owed payback for political favors.

“This is about experience: When you look at the borough president, he runs a hundred-person shop,” she said. “I run a 10,000-person shop and deliver services every day to New Yorkers.”

“He’s been making deals and getting favors,” she added. “You know, I’ve just been serving the city and showing up.”


Later in the day, Ms. Garcia, who is vying to become New York City’s first female mayor, commented on the poll as she greeted shop owners on Avenue P in the Midwood section of Brooklyn.

“This confirms it,” she said. “We’re in it to win it, and it’s time for a woman.”

Ms. Wiley, who has gained momentum after endorsements from progressive groups and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, voted on Monday at Erasmus Hall High School in Flatbush, Brooklyn, with her longtime partner, Harlan Mandel.


“I’ve never run for public office before,” she added, “and to go in and walk into the high school where my partner’s father went to school and to see my name on the ballot is an experience that is very hard to describe. And it was very moving.”

Mr. Yang held an event in front of City Hall on Monday to announce he had been endorsed by the Captains Endowment Association, the union that represents police captains. Mr. Adams is a former police captain, and Mr. Yang said it was significant that those who had worked with Mr. Adams for years chose Mr. Yang instead.

“This to me should tell New Yorkers all that they need to know about Eric Adams and his leadership,” Mr. Yang said.

Mr. Yang said it was important for the mayor to have a relationship with the police, in contrast to Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has struggled to get along with officers.

This city needs the police,” Mr. Yang said, adding that he would also rebuild trust between the police and communities of color.

New York City mayoral race increasingly dominated by crime concerns

 

YAHOO

The New York City mayoral election is still unsettled as it enters the final stretch before the crucial Democratic primary, with new polls and a big endorsement over the weekend roiling a contest in which rising crime is increasingly the top issue.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., shook up the race on Saturday with an endorsement of Maya Wiley, a progressive activist and former chair of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which conducts oversight of the New York Police Department, the largest police force in the country.

It will be a few days until any polling bounce for Wiley can be measured. But it’s not clear how much of an impact the AOC endorsement will make. It may be blunted by the fact that polling continues to show that violent crime is the top issue for most Democratic voters, who can begin early voting Saturday, June 12, ahead of the June 22 primary date.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. (Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Given New York City’s heavily Democratic tilt, the winner of the June primary will be the overwhelming favorite to become the next mayor.

Wiley has proposed cutting $1 billion from the NYPD budget a year after current Mayor Bill de Blasio reduced the police budget by that very same amount. She also recently released an ad that accused police of reacting too violently during last summer’s racial justice protests.

“They [police] ran into peaceful protesters, beat others to the ground, and New York’s leaders defended it. As mayor, I’ll be in charge, and I’ll get it done. Because it is time the NYPD sees us as people who deserve to breathe,” Wiley says in the ad.

Yet a new poll from NY1 and Ipsos showed that crime and public safety are now the No. 1 concern for voters, at 46 percent. Crime has now replaced COVID-19 as their highest priority over the last month.

The NY1/Ipsos poll also showed that 72 percent of voters believe that the NYPD should put more officers on the street to deal with concerns about crime, compared with just 20 percent who disagree. Shootings and robberies were up in May this year compared with a year ago, after a sharp uptick last summer in which shootings more than doubled.

According to NYPD statistics, homicides were up 23 percent from last year through May 23. There has also been a trend of violent attacks this year on members of the Asian American and Jewish communities.

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams — a former captain in the NYPD — is the clear beneficiary of New Yorkers’ renewed concerns about crime. Adams has said he would increase the NYPD presence in the city and increase its budget, and has forcefully rejected the “defund the police” slogan pushed by progressive activists. Adams, who is Black, blamed “young, white, affluent people” for pushing the anti-police slogan, and said the Black community did not support it. 

New York City mayoral candidate Eric Adams. (Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

Adams has also said he supports police reform and that he does not want to be endorsed by the city’s police union. At the same time, he has touted his support from the police union in previous races, and earlier this year said he would carry a gun as mayor in lieu of a protective detail — statements he has since sought to walk back.

In the NY1/Ipsos survey, 33 percent of likely voters view Adams as the best candidate to handle the crime issue. No other candidate even comes close, with Adams leading every other candidate in the field by at least 20 points when it comes to public safety.

On Saturday, after AOC endorsed Wiley, Adams released a blistering statement criticizing both women.

“Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Maya Wiley want to slash the police department budget and shrink the police force at a time when Black and brown babies are being shot in our streets, hate crimes are terrorizing Asian and Jewish communities and innocent New Yorkers are being stabbed and shot on their way to work,” Adams said. “They are putting slogans and politics in front of public safety and would endanger the lives of New Yorkers.”

Wiley shot back on Sunday: “It sounded like the kind of talking points that is actually going to send us backward into the discrimination, humiliation and trauma that was not smart policing — it was unconstitutional policing,” she said of Adams’s remarks. “A smart policing is a policing focused on the job of policing, but that includes recognizing the balance that is the investment in our community-based organizations.

“When I am mayor, we will not follow a law that tells us that we have to choose between safety and having our rights,” Wiley said.

New York City mayoral candidate Maya Wiley. (Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

Sumathy Kumar, co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of New York City, told Yahoo News that while DSA-NYC is not endorsing a candidate in the mayor’s race, “I understand the impulse to unite behind a progressive candidate.”

“It’s definitely scary to see so much right-wing rhetoric take over the debate, especially in regard to policing and public safety,” Kumar said. “It’s really concerning that people like Eric Adams are using scare tactics to try to win an election and pour more resources into a violent institution such as the NYPD.”

However, polling in the mayor’s race has consistently shown the three most progressive candidates — Wiley, city Comptroller Scott Stringer and Dianne Morales, an Afro-Latina former nonprofit executive — with only about 30 percent of the vote combined. The leading moderate candidates — Adams, entrepreneur Andrew Yang and former city Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia — tend to attract between 40 and 50 percent combined.

The NY1 poll had Adams leading the rest of the Democratic field with 22 percent of the vote overall, followed by Yang with 16 percent and Garcia with 15 percent. Stringer came in fourth with 10 percent, followed by Wiley with 9 percent and Morales at 5 percent. Former Citigroup executive Ray McGuire and former HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan rounded out the pack with 4 and 3 percent, respectively.

The poll of 906 likely Democratic voters was conducted from May 17 to May 31, before AOC’s endorsement. The survey also took place before news broke that Stringer had been accused by a second woman of sexual misconduct.

New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang with his wife, Evelyn. (Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

But the final outcome could still be a surprise, in large part because New York is using ranked-choice voting for the first time, which requires that the winning candidate get to 50 percent. Voters will be given the option to list their top five choices by order of preference, and whoever gets the most second- and third-place votes will likely end up winning, as the candidates with the least first-place votes are eliminated and their second-choice votes get distributed.

So even if Wiley is able to consolidate the progressive voting lane and push Stringer aside, she will likely still have to win over supporters of Adams, Yang and Garcia so that they list her in their top two or three if she wants to win citywide.

Eric Adams tops field in new NYC mayoral race poll

By SHANT SHAHRIGIAN

DAILY NEWS

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams came out on top in results of a poll about Democratic mayoral candidates released Monday, even as many New Yorkers remained undecided about the contest.

He led the pack with support from 18% of likely voters in the June 22 Democratic primary, according to the survey from Emerson College and PIX11.

Adams polled at 19% in a March poll, but now has the top spot thanks to a drop in numbers for businessman Andrew Yang.

A former police officer who speaks openly about being assaulted by police officers when he was a teenager, Adams has been almost singularly focused on the rise in gun violence across the city. Where Yang is looking to capture the mood of an electorate anxious for New York to rebound from the Covid-19 pandemic, Adams is positioning himself as the candidate vowing to tackle a steady spike in crime.

Meanwhile, city Comptroller Scott Stringer gained ground — in spite of bombshell allegations of sexual misconduct from a former campaign volunteer. Stringer, who has strongly denied the April accusations from Jean Kim — who said Stringer groped her and pressured her for sex when she volunteered for his unsuccessful 2001 run for public advocate — appear to be having limited impact on voters. Just 18% found them credible. But 28% said they have not heard enough about the allegations, while another 28% said they were not credible; 27% were unsure about the matter. Stringer was tied with Yang at 15%. He did best of the eight candidates polled among white voters, seizing 24 percent, 

Undecided voters accounted for the largest group — 22.2% were yet to pick a candidate.

Yang had backing from 15% of likely voters, down from 32% in March.

New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer's pictured during a press conference in 2020. (Luiz C. Ribeiro/for New York Daily News)

Kathryn Garcia was the top pick for 8% of poll respondents, albeit the survey was held before the editorial boards of the Daily News and the New York Times gave her their respective endorsements.

She was trailed by former nonprofit executive Dianne Morales, who was chosen by 8% of respondents; former Obama big Shaun Donovan, 5%; and ex-Citigroup executive Ray McGuire and former de Blasio aide Maya Wiley, 4% each.


May 16, 2021: The News says: Garcia is best choice for next mayor. Kathryn Garcia has the knowledge of city government and the leadership skills needed to be the next mayor. Kathryn Garcia was the top pick for 8% of poll respondents, albeit the survey was held before the editorial boards of the Daily News and the New York Times gave her their respective endorsements. (New York Daily News)

Nearly four in 10 poll respondents said they were familiar with ranked-choice voting — the method in which voters list candidates in order of preference, instead of picking just one — which debuts in local elections this year.


An analysis of the way respondents listed candidates showed there would likely be numerous elimination rounds before a winner surfaces in the contest. Adams still came out on top in the poll.


Meanwhile, the city’s Campaign Finance Board announced Monday that the next mayoral debate will take place virtually — a repeat of the setting last week, in which candidates repeatedly yelled over one another and moderators strained to keep them in check.


A board spokesman blamed the decision on host WABC-TV, saying the decision was made “pursuant to health protocols in effect” at its studios. The health and safety of everyone involved in these complex productions, from the candidates to production staff to building workers, must come first. Our co-sponsors will follow the safety requirements in their studios,” spokesman Matt Sollars said in a statement.


The campaigns were not pleased.

DEBLASIO LEADS W/32% IN NEW POLL. SPITZER DROPS, NOW TIED W/STRINGER

N.Y. DAILY NEWS


Dante de Blasio’s Afro hairstyle — which has been the subject of fascination and admiration — became an issue after dad Bill’s New York mayoral campaign made it the focus of a new social media blitz, urging supporters to tweet the hashtag #GoWithTheFro, to build momentum for the Democrat. De Blasio already has featured son in two television ads.

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N.Y. TIMES

Frustration with New York City’s unaffordability and its aggressive police tactics is elevating Bill de Blasio, once dismissed as a left-leaning long shot, into the lead of the Democratic mayoral primary field, according to a poll by The New York Times and Siena College.

. Christine C. Quinn, the longtime front-runner in the nomination contest, is now lagging far behind Mr. de Blasio and struggling to connect with members of her own party: forty-five percent of likely Democratic voters view her unfavorably.

With 11 days remaining until the primary, the new survey shows a drastically reshaped race as a broad cross-section of voters embraces Mr. de Blasio’s candidacy. It found that 32 percent of likely Democratic voters supported Mr. de Blasio, who is the city’s elected public advocate, compared with 18 percent for William C. Thompson Jr., the former comptroller, and 17 percent for Ms. Quinn, the speaker of the City Council.

Mr. de Blasio’s campaign, fueled by a relentless focus on economic disparity and a searing critique of the Bloomberg administration, has transcended the city’s traditional demographic divisions: he is drawing higher levels of support from men and women, older and younger, than any of his rivals. He has won the backing of those who think the city is headed in the right direction and those convinced it is on the wrong track.

With so little time left in the primary, Mr. de Blasio’s commanding lead will quite likely force his Democratic rivals to recalibrate their strategies, intensify their attacks and seek to land decisive blows against him during the final televised debate next week.

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As voters prepare for a change in City Hall, the poll shows that Democrats remain deeply conflicted over the state of the city: they are evenly split over whether they approve or disapprove of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s job performance, and over whether the city is headed in the right or wrong direction.... it is [deBlasio's] liberal views on the high cost of living in the city — captured by his slogan of “a tale of two cities” — that have resonated deeply: 29 percent say Mr. de Blasio would do the best job of making the city affordable, compared with 19 percent for Mr. Thompson and 15 percent for Ms. Quinn.

 

 

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N.Y. DAILY NEWS

 

A new poll from the Quinnipiac University polling institute shows the race for city controller is now in a dead heat with Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and former Gov. Eliot Spitzer each drawing 46% of the vote— after Spitzer enjoyed a 56%-to-37% edge just two weeks ago.

Stringer’s surge followed endorsements by the city’s three daily newspapers and the start of an ad blitz against his better-known rival.
Stringer has also been campaigning heavily in black neighborhoods, apparently with some success. The poll found Spitzer’s advantage among black Democrats dwindling, from 68% support two weeks ago to just 52% now.
“The way we’ve approached the office is gaining traction with voters,” Stringer said. He defended the anonymous mailer, which shows an unflattering picture of Spitzer grinning and a picture of jail bars with hands poking out. “It’s his record and he’ll have to live with it,” Stringer said.