A NYC Primary Precap
It’s primary election day today in New York. If you live in NYC and haven’t voted already, make sure to do so! Polls close at 9pm. Given the City’s partisan lean, the primary is really the election that matters most. Here is my quick run-down of what I am paying attention to in New York.
First, a note. There will be no definitive results from any of these races for weeks. New York is transitioning to a ranked-choice-voting (“RCV”) method of conducting elections, and the actual tabulation of results will not take place until mid-July. This is frustrating, but understandable. Because the City is using RCV, the final tabulation cannot take place until after all valid ballots have been received (because candidates may be eliminated in different orders if only a subset of ballots are counted). Absentee ballots can be received until up to a week after election day (they only count though, if they are postmarked by election day), and then there is a week in which voters who cast absentee ballots with an error have an opportunity to correct that error so they aren’t disenfranchised. As a result, the official counting won’t take place for weeks. On election night elections officials are planning to release preliminary first-choice counts, which should at least give observers some indication of the likely results in some races. The City is planning on releasing an initial RCV tabulation on June 29, but in my mind this will be a huge mistake and could lead to massive confusion in the unlikely event that the final RCV results differ from the preliminary results.
In any event, here are the races I am watching this election.
Mayor:
The marquee race in New York City is the Democratic primary for mayor. None of the candidates are particularly inspiring.
Eric Adams, Brooklyn’s borough president, is viewed as the clear favorite. He is awful. He has previously described himself as a conservative Republican, is blatantly corrupt, wants to increase police spending, is skeptical of efforts to increase taxes on the wealthy, and is receiving tons of support from big-moneyed financial interests. When confronted with his own record, Adams invariably lies, or tries to portray good-faith criticism as racism. Adams would be an abject disaster as a mayor, and would also represent a retrenchment of the New York City political machines.
Adams has led in virtually every poll to date, but, because of RCV, there is a chance that another candidate could overtake Adams as voters’ first choices get eliminated and their votes reallocated to other candidates (assuming the polling is accurate and Adams is in fact leading among first-choice votes). Adams and his allies have repeatedly attacked RCV and are engaging in a very Trumpian tactic of preemptively alleging that the election results will be illegitimate if Adams wins a plurality of first-choice votes but ends up losing as the RCV process plays out.
The main threats to Adams are Maya Wiley, Kathryn Garcia, and Andrew Yang. Garcia and Yang are both centrists who have advocated for increasing police funding and they support charter schools. Garcia, who received the coveted New York Times endorsement, is the better of the two, and has a good transportation platform. She had a strong tenure as sanitation commissioner and ran the City’s COVID meals program, and is perceived as a highly competent centrist technocrat. Yang’s campaign is being run by a conservative lobbying organization and longtime ally of Michael Bloomberg. They have effectively cross-endorsed one another for RCV purposes (Yang has told his supporters to vote for Garcia as #2; Garcia hasn’t been quite so explicit, but has appeared on campaign stops with Yang). Adams’s supporters have (outrageously) labeled this alliance as voter suppression and an attempt to disenfranchise Black voters. Wiley is the left-most of the candidates and has the endorsement of several progressive elected officials, though given their timing (very late in the process, only when it became clear that Wiley was the only left-of-center candidate with a chance of stopping the three far more conservative front-runners) these endorsements appear pretty tepid. She has also received endorsements from several machine-affiliated politicians (most notably Hakeem Jeffries), and has in turn endorsed several machine-backed city council candidates over more progressive options (including in my own district).
There are several other candidates, but none are serious threats to win. Scott Stringer looked potentially formidable early in the process as a possible standard-bearer for progressives, but his campaign was undone by allegations of sexual harassment. He should have dropped out and endorsed Wiley, but stayed in the race. Dianne Morales tried to run as a leftist, but failed to get much traction, even on the left, due to her lack of any real history in left political organizing, her history as a charter school advocate, and her abjectly awful campaign management. Shaun Donovan was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in President Obama’s cabinet, but was laughably uninspiring and has become the butt of numerous jokes during this campaign because the only person who seems to be supporting him in a meaningful way is his wealthy father. Last but not least in this cohort of also-rans is Ray McGuire, a Wall Street executive who never really caught on, perhaps because there were so many other candidates in the race who ranged from non-threatening to outright-friendly to big financial interests. No other candidates are expected to get more than 1% of the initial vote.
I can live with Wiley or Garcia (Wiley would be the better of the two). Yang would be bad, but still leaps and bounds better than Adams. Unfortunately, pretty much all publicly available polling suggests that Adams is the favorite. How positions two through four shake out is extremely muddled. If I had to guess, I’d predict that Garcia ends up in the final two, with Yang being the first of the four main contenders eliminated.
City Council:
The second-most interesting race on the ballot is for city council. Due to term limits, there are a significant number of open seats on the ballot, and left organizations put their efforts this election cycle into the city council races, as opposed to other citywide offices, so many of these races are the best tests of the local left’s power.
Perhaps the most high profile city council race is my own (Brooklyn — CD35). Here, a DSA-supported candidate, affordable housing advocate Michael Hollingsworth, is running against Crystal Hudson, who is running on a progressive platform, but is supported by all of the usual Brooklyn machine players (to be fair, she also has won endorsements from several progressive organizations). Hudson used to work in the office of the current city council member, Laurie Cumbo, who is now so reviled that every single one of the candidates in the race — including Hudson — disavowed her. Hudson’s attempts to distance herself have been less than convincing to many though. Cumbo’s most important and ardent supporters have aligned behind Hudson virtually uniformly, and there have been suspicions throughout the election season that Cumbo has been working behind the scenes on Hudson’s behalf. Cumbo’s support of Hudson has become more public in recent weeks, and Hudson’s conspicuous absence from high-profile grassroots organizing efforts to prevent construction of high-rise luxury apartment towers that threaten the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens’ access to sunlight (an existential issue for a garden) calls into question her sincerity on land use and rezoning issues. Indeed, one of the reasons Cumbo is so reviled in the district is that in the most recent city council race, in 2017, the biggest issue in the campaign was a controversial proposed rezoning that would have given away public land to wealthy luxury condo developers. The proposal provoked vehement opposition, and during the campaign, Cumbo publicly vowed to stop the project — ultimately winning re-election on the back of her promise. Then, a week after she won re-election, Cumbo betrayed her constituents by switching her position and approving the rezoning plan.
Tellingly, billionaire predatory developers clearly see Hollingsworth as the bigger threat to their agenda, and by implication, see Hudson as more friendly to their interests. Hollingsworth is one of seven city council candidates who have been subject to tens of thousands of dollars of (sometimes racially-tinged) attacks from Trump-supporting billionaire developer Stephen Ross, which accuse him of being a socialist and wanting to defund the police, among other things. Still, in this district, it’s hard to tell whether these allegations will have their intended effect — the district, after all, recently elected two avowed socialists to the state legislature.
The other six races that Ross has targeted are also worthy of attention. Three of his targets have been endorsed by the DSA: Alexa Aviles (CD38 — Brooklyn), Jaslin Kaur (CD23 — Queens), and Adolfo Abreu (CD14 — Bronx). The other three are Christopher Marte (CD01 — Manhattan), Moumita Ahmed (CD24 — Queens), and John Choe (CD20 — Queens). The DSA has also endorsed public defender Tiffany Caban (CD22 — Queens) and Brandon West (CD39 — Brooklyn), though there is another very good progressive on the ballot in CD39, (Shahana Hanif). There are good candidates running competitive races in other districts too, though I am less familiar with the races the further they stray from where I live in Central Brooklyn. Some candidates I like from these areas include Elizabeth Adams and Lincoln Restler (both in CD33 — Brooklyn), 21-year-old Black Lives Matter protest leader Chi Osse (CD36 — Brooklyn), Sandy Nurse (CD37 — Brooklyn), and Rita Joseph (CD40 — Brooklyn). I am also keeping my eye on Arthur Schwartz (CD03 — Manhattan), who notoriously delayed efforts to add bike lanes and bus lanes in the West Village, but somehow has still racked up several progressive endorsements in his bid for city council. I hope he loses.
Finally, another interesting city council race is taking place in CD42 in South Brooklyn between state assemblymember Charles Barron and Nikki Lucas. Barron is as left as elected officials come, but has been hostile to the DSA (it’s complicated, but his criticism has merit and unlike other left-leaning candidates who are hostile to the DSA, Barron’s hostility does not seem to have dampened the DSA community’s support of him). His challenger, Lucas, is a protege of Hakeem Jeffries, and would represent a significant win for the Brooklyn machine. I want Barron to win.
Manhattan District Attorney:
The next-most interesting race to me is the race to succeed Cy Vance, an old-school tough-on-crime prosecutor, as Manhattan’s DA. Throughout the country, reformist prosecutors seeking to stop or slow mass incarceration have won impressive victories recently, including in Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, St. Louis, Baltimore, Austin, and many other jurisdictions. And two years ago in Queens, a socialist public defender (Caban, now a city council candidate) came within 60 votes of winning the DA race. Outside of Staten Island, there is clearly an appetite for progressive prosecutors in large urban areas, including NYC.
Despite these trends, there is a real chance that Manhattan elects another tough-on-crime DA. This is because there are four reformists on the ballot and, unlike in the mayor’s race, there is no RCV in the DA election. As a result, there is a real possibility that the four reformists split the progressive vote, and a regressive prosecutor wins with a plurality. The most likely beneficiary of this dynamic is Tali Farhadian Weinstein, who has received gobs of money from financial interests, and has poured over $8 million of her own money into her campaign (she is married to an extremely wealthy hedge fund manager). She used this money to pay for racist fearmongering mailers attacking her opponents. Weinstein only registered as a Democrat in 2017, and had tried to get the Trump Administration to appoint her to a federal judgeship. Troublingly, when faced with these allegations, she baselessly accused the reporter who uncovered this information of harassing her and committing crimes, rather than addressing the substance of the reporting. This is a truly ominous sign of how Weinstein would wield her power if elected (independent of her actual policy positions). When called to account for her record, her instinct appears to be to use her authority to intimidate and attack.
The most likely candidate to defeat Weinstein is Alvin Bragg, a former federal prosecutor who is running on a progressive platform and received the endorsement of the New York Times. Two other candidates are running to his left, public defender Eliza Orlins and civil rights attorney Tahanie Aboushie, who has the support of the Working Families Party. Dan Quart is also running in the progressive lane. A fifth progressive, civil rights attorney Janos Marton, dropped out of the race months ago, in an effort to prevent a split in the prgoressive vote. The failure of other progressive candidates to follow his lead suggests that they may not actually be all that committed to reform, and are just using reformist rhetoric to further personal ambitions. If they really cared about ending mass incarceration, they would have coordinated with one another once it became clear that they risked empowering a regressive.
My preferred candidate in the race was Marton, and his choice to drop out only confirmed my perception that he was the most committed to ending mass incarceration. My preference of the remaining options is Orlins, but she should have dropped out to endorse Bragg. My prediction is that Weinstein defeats Bragg narrowly, and Orlins, Aboushie, and Quart are rightly pilloried for siphoning off enough votes from Bragg to elect Weinstein.
Other Races:
Jumaane Williams is running for re-election as Public Advocate. He will win re-election easily. The most notable thing about this race is that Williams has been viewed as potentially setting himself up for a run at the mayor’s office, but declined to do so, even though in hindsight it looks like he would have been the most viable progressive candidate in the field. Given that he also has historically had political strength among Black communities as well, he would have been a real threat to Adams. This coalition (progressive voters plus Black voters) is the coalition that elevated Bill de Blasio to the mayorship in 2013, and Williams appeared to be the only real contender who could have recreated it.
The Comptroller race is likely going to be won by either Brad Lander, who has been a very good city councilmember or Corey Johnson, the current Speaker of the city council who has been good on transit issues, but deeply disappointing on racial justice issues. I want Lander to win, but I think Johnson is the slight favorite.
There are Borough President races in each borough, but this position is basically ceremonial. IIn Brooklyn it looks like it will be a race between a more progressive candidate (Antonio Reynoso) and a machine-backed candidate (Robert Cornegy). I am pulling for Reynoso, and think he will win. In Manhattan, four candidates are vying for the position and I have no sense of how the race is likely to unfold. I have deep misgivings about one of the candidates, Brad Hoylman, who is a state senator and as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, had real power to shape the state’s judicial branch, but has been completely ineffectual in the role. One of the candidates, Lindsay Boylan, follows me on Twitter (probably because I criticized Hoylman for failing to stand up against conservative judicial appointments) so I’m probably rooting for her. I know nothing about the borough president races in the other boroughs.
There are also a few judgeships on the ballot. The only one I have any knowledge about is the race for Surrogate’s Court judge in Brooklyn. This position is apparently really important for the operation of the local machine, because it is one of the most lucrative sources of patronage. Basically, the Surrogate’s judge gets to appoint surrogates for estates, so in practice it is a really easy way to put money in the hands of political allies. In Brooklyn, one candidate (Esther Paul) is backed by the local machine and the other (Rosmarie Montalbano) is running explicitly to try to break the power of the machine. I am curious to see whether a race far downballot for an obscure position gets enough attention to challenge the machine.
