This year’s mayoral election is one of the most significant in New York City’s long history.
It’s also one of the strangest.
A generational pandemic, a rare midsummer primary, an open seat, crime and financial strife plus a new wild card, ranked-choice voting, are all at play.
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Thirteen Democrats and two Republicans — sporting highly diverse backgrounds — will square off on June 22 for a spot in the November general election. Early voting begins Saturday. That winner will replace eight-year incumbent Bill de Blasio, who cannot run again because of term limits.
“We are in a trifecta right now,” said Andrew Rein, president of the watchdog Citizens Budget Commission. “We’re going to get a new mayor. There’s uncertainty about the economy — the fiscal shape isn’t very good — and we’re certainly in this interesting era of the growing power of progressives in New York with some people potentially reacting against that.”
Voters will also pick candidates for City Council, city comptroller, public advocate and borough president. In a heavily Democratic city, the winners of that party’s primary are likely to win the general election for each position.
New York is looking to rebound from COVID-19, whose effects have ravaged its economy. State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, in his review Thursday on the city’s financial plan, said its economy and finances are recovering, largely due to unprecedented federal rescue aid for businesses and individuals, and direct federal relief to the state, city and the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the city’s subway system.
“The city needs to carefully manage the significant relief it received to aid its recovery while also maintaining flexibility as it moves toward budgetary structural balance,” DiNapoli said.
De Blasio’s $98.6 billion fiscal 2022 budget is before the City Council.
Still, violent crime has spiked and open questions include how confident and safe residents and commuters feel about returning to offices and riding the subways.
“A lot of businesses are leaving. They are going to other states,” said Anthony Figliola, vice president at think tank Empire Government Strategies. “You have a lot of folks that are remote workers. You have restaurants and small businesses that have closed up or trying to stay afloat.
“So from an economic standpoint, you have a real challenge.”
Mayoral debates have produced little deep-in-the-weeds discussion about city finances but plenty about crime and policing. The clear message is that the two interweave.
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, a former police captain and an African-American, has moved into the Democratic lead in a Spectrum News NY1/Ipsos poll conducted from May 17 to May 31, with 22% of respondents making Adams their first choice. Entrepreneur and former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who led early polling, was at 16%.
Former city sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia, considered a pragmatist and armed with endorsements from the New York Times and Daily News, is up to 15%, with the current city comptroller, Scott Stringer, beset by multiple accusations of sexual misconduct, at 10%.
While the poll’s June 7 release shows civil-rights activist Maya Wiley at 9%, it predates key endorsements Wiley has received from big-name national progressives, including U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents the Bronx and Queens in Congress, and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a former presidential candidate.
Jumaane Williams, who is seeking re-election as the city’s public advocate, also endorses her.
Front-runners are traditional targets of scrutiny and Adams of late has been fighting off questions about his residency status. Also, the early primary means more spotlight on both winners before November.
Who wins and who could force a runoff comes down to who votes, “which we don’t know yet,” said Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.
Variables include whether Yang’s young-millennial following, a spillover from his presidential run, participates in a local election. Or, Yang backers could switch to Wiley and boost the latter’s chances of forcing a runoff.
Other Democratic candidates include nonprofit executive Dianne Morales; businessman and former Citigroup executive Ray McGuire; and Shaun Donovan, Housing and Urban Development secretary under former President Obama. Rounding out the field are Aaron Foldenauer, first on the ballot by random selection; Art Chang; Paperboy Love Prince; Isaac Wright Jr.; and Joycelyn Taylor.
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The Republican mayoral primary — Democrats outnumber the GOP roughly 3 to 1 in the five boroughs — will feature Guardian Angels founder and former radio talk-show host Curtis Sliwa and Fernando Mateo, president of the New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers and a spokesman for the United Bodegas of America.
Options for voters are many due to the varied field, according to Gelinas. The candidates, she said, break from traditional machine-type mold.
“This time around, if you want a traditional machine politician, you can look at Scott Stringer,” she said. “If you want a somewhat different biography, but you still like the machine-type politician, you can look at Eric Adams.
“If you want a business person, you have Ray McGuire. If you want someone with real hands-on, non-political experience in government, you have Kathryn Garcia. You can look at Maya Wiley, really running on a racial-justice platform.
“So if you can’t find someone to like out of this field, the problem is probably with you and not with the field of candidates.”
Under ranked-choice voting — which New Yorkers approved in 2019 as part of a charter revision package — people can rank up to five candidates by order of preference: Giving voters the chance to pick more than one candidate in citywide and local races could enable someone to win without gaining the most first place votes.
The goal is to generate a winner who can claim a majority without having to go back to the polls for a runoff.
If a single candidate receives more than 50% of first-choice votes in the first round, then he or she wins. If no one exceeds 50% in the first round, the last-place finisher is eliminated. Each round will eliminate the candidate with the fewest votes. If you ranked the eliminated candidate first, your vote will go to the next highest-ranked candidate on your ballot. This process will continue until two candidates remain, and the candidate with the most votes wins.
It even produced some levity at de Blasio’s Thursday media briefing, in which he ranked the city’s best pizza toppings accordingly.
“Ranked-choice voting is a mess,” Figliola said. “This was pushed by the Working Families Party, which wanted to have a more progressive candidate have a real shot in the race.
“I think the progressives have been pushing very hard. Their strategy, in my take, is that if their candidate can be the number two choice, let’s say, they have a greater likelihood to get their foot soldiers out to vote in a second runoff election.
“We don’t know what that would look like because we’ve never had it before.”
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The raft of challenges for the next mayor will include outyear budget gaps despite a large infusion of federal rescue aid; a declining residential and commercial real-estate market; and building a rapport with business leaders who have felt sidelined during the de Blasio years.
Uncertainties regarding the work-at-home dynamic make the city’s commercial real estate exposure more acute, said Amy Laskey, managing director at Fitch Ratings.
“It has ramifications for both residential and commercial real estate and other tax revenues,” she said on a webcast sponsored by Northeast Women in Public Finance. “If you don’t need to be in your office five days a week, do you need to live in a shoebox?”
Small-business needs have surfaced during the televised mayoral debates.
“Notwithstanding some of the new, glitzy projects, most of Manhattan’s commercial real estate is not Class A, is not glitzy, is not brand new.” Laskey said. “If you’re an owner of some cruddy old commercial buildings that are not wired for current technology, it’s going to be a problem. And I think there’s a lot of real estate that is that way.
“Our real estate direction, I don’t think would really be a bad thing,” she added. “I think it’s become so unaffordable to live in the city for young people. If there’s little bit of a decline and some people are able to move into the city that could not have afforded it before, that’s probably a good thing for the city long-term.”
Speaking at the same event, Nick Samuels, a senior vice president at Moody’s Investors Service, said recovery will lag a bit.
“The city will be resilient, but like what usually happens, I think, after these downturns, there will be some reinvention into something a bit new and different, but with some of the old as well,” he said.
“We need to see how these things develop.”