 | | Andrew Yang during a campaign stop in the Bronx.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times |
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With less than two months to go until the all-important Democratic primary, the New York City mayor's race is one of the costliest and most closely watched political campaigns in the country this year. It's also one of the most uncertain. |
The businessman Andrew Yang is widely seen as the front-runner, mostly thanks to the celebrity profile that he accrued on the presidential campaign trail last year, when he mounted a quixotic run. |
But with a ranked-choice voting system in place for the first time, and most voters still relatively unengaged and unaware of the candidates involved, no one has emerged with a clear path to victory. |
"Yang is the front-runner, but a vulnerable front-runner," Doug Schoen, a political strategist and longtime adviser to former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, said in an interview. "It isn't clear to me now who will be his rival — but a rival can and may well emerge." |
On Wednesday, a major wrench flew into the campaign when Scott Stringer, the city's comptroller and the leading progressive in the race, was accused of sexual assault. Jean Kim, now a political lobbyist, said that when she was an intern for his campaign for public advocate in 2001, he kissed and groped her and pressured her to have sex with him. (Stringer denied the allegations, saying that he and Kim had had a brief, consensual relationship.) |
The blowback has been immediate and severe. The three female Democratic mayoral candidates — including Stringer's top progressive rival, Maya Wiley, a former aide to Mayor Bill de Blasio — called on Stringer to exit the race. He canceled a birthday fund-raiser that had been planned for yesterday. |
Recent surveys have found that Stringer, Yang and Eric Adams, the relatively moderate Brooklyn borough president, are the only three candidates with name recognition from a majority of likely voters. But those polls also found that half of voters hadn't yet picked a candidate, reflecting how wide open the race remains. |
Under the ranked-choice system, voters will select up to five candidates in order of preference. This could elevate a candidate who isn't everyone's first choice — but it could also hurt a candidate who is plenty of people's first choice, but not as many people's second or third choice. |
"It adds chaos," Ken Sherrill, a political scientist and chair of the Higher Education PAC, said of the new system. |
"If we don't watch out, we're going to get a mayor almost chosen by random chance," he continued, adding the caveat that over the next two months, awareness of the race may increase significantly. |
"The information flow about the campaign has been a trickle, because other issues have crowded things out," he said. "As information flow increases, interest will go up and information will go up." |
Wiley, who arguably stands to benefit the most from Stringer's embattlement, faces an uphill climb. Just 36 percent of likely voters said they were familiar with who she was, according to a Spectrum News NY1/Ipsos NYC poll conducted this month. |
For Dianne Morales, an anti-poverty organizer and nonprofit executive who is also angling for the left lane in the primary, the barriers to name recognition are even higher: She was known by only 25 percent of likely voters, according to the NY1 poll. |
Asked in that poll what their major political concerns were for the next mayor to address, voters were most likely to say stopping the spread of Covid-19, reopening businesses and confronting crime. Upward of one in three likely voters named each of those. Addressing affordable housing, racial injustice and homelessness were cited less often. |
If Stringer's star fades, it could provide an opening not only for other progressive candidates but also for some of Yang's well-funded moderate rivals, like Adams and Shaun Donovan, a former New York housing commissioner and member of President Barack Obama's cabinet. |
But as our Metro reporter Michael Wilson wrote in an article this week, the prevailing feeling for many voters right now is a lack of interest — maybe induced by exhaustion. There has been plenty of negative news coming from Albany since Gov. Andrew Cuomo was repeatedly accused of sexual misconduct in recent months. And there will be little love lost for de Blasio, the departing New York mayor, who has rarely enjoyed a positive approval rating throughout his eight-year term. |
After a high-stakes presidential election last year — which put the cap on four years of nonstop screaming headlines from Washington — and a year-plus of pandemic-related stresses, a lot of New Yorkers just aren't that tuned into their citywide election. "A seemingly large portion of New Yorkers," Michael wrote, "remain utterly disengaged." |
 | | Photographs by Erin Scott for The New York Times and Erin Schaff/The New York Times |
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Why Biden's first 100 days would make Trump jealous |
| This essay is by Matthew Walther, who serves as the editor of The Lamp, a Catholic literary journal, and is a contributing editor at The American Conservative. |
Joe Biden's inauguration, with its camp authoritarian light displays and general atmosphere of praetorian menace, was exactly the sort of swearing-in that his predecessor might have relished. Roughly a hundred days into Biden's presidency, it is hard to escape the feeling that his administration, too, could end up being one that Donald Trump will envy. |
After announcing his intention to "get tough on China," the president has kept Trump's tariffs largely in place and supplemented them with a wide-ranging "Buy American" order. Perhaps even more worthy of Trump was the new administration's refusal in March to export unused supplies of the coronavirus vaccine manufactured by AstraZeneca on the grounds that the United States needed to be "oversupplied and overprepared." Biden's sudden about-face on this issue a few weeks later was also fittingly Trumpian. |
A sort of blithe tactlessness persists. "Did you ever five years ago think every second or third ad out of five or six would be biracial couples?" is not a question one can readily imagine being asked by any American politician of standing other than Trump — or his successor, who in fact posed it to CNN's viewers in February. |
There is also the matter of immigration policy. Despite his formal reinstatement of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and other, mostly symbolic actions, such as proposing that the word "alien" be replaced with "noncitizen" in American law, Biden has presided over the sorts of barbarous spectacles at our southern border that were all too familiar during the past four years. |
This month he briefly committed his administration to maintaining Trump's parsimonious annual cap on the number of refugees the United States will accept (though in response to criticism the White House now claims that it will reconsider the issue next month). Under the terms of an obscure health statute from 1944 also favored by the Trump administration, more Haitian nationals were deported over a period of a few weeks this year than during the whole of 2020, and about 26,000 people in total appear to have been deported since his inauguration. |
Biden's suggestion, made during his primary campaign, that entering the United States illegally should no longer be treated as a criminal offense, his promise to end construction of the border wall and his pledge that not a single deportation would take place during his first hundred days in office — 'tis gone, and all is gray. |
The Ezra Klein Show: How Chuck Schumer plans to win over Trump voters |
On today's episode, Ezra spoke with Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, about how America has changed over the last 10 to 15 years, how Schumer views the extreme wings of the Republican Party, the need for big government now, and why he thinks Democrats can win over moderate Republicans. |
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| Is there anything you think we're missing? Anything you want to see more of? We'd love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. |
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