If you’re just tuning in to this very weird and so far suspiciously stable mayoral race — where relative moderates Andrew Yang and Eric Adams have been running one and two in a packed field since January — but aren’t yet registered to vote, the good news is that there’s still time to do so ahead of the June 22 primary, two-and-a-half months earlier than the September one we’d had until now.
If you’re already registered but not as a Democrat, however, the bad news is that it’s too late to change your party for this contest and you’ve got no real voice this year given that the closed primary will almost surely decide the next mayor.
As to the new ranked-choice voting system for New York City primaries (and special elections) getting used here for the first time in a big contest, all it means is that if your first pick is eliminated, your support moves to your second pick and so on down to your fifth one. So you can vote for the one you love without giving up your say in the one we end up with. And if there’s one you hate, filling out all five means you make sure your vote ends up with someone, anyone else if it comes to that. Bottom line: Instead of thinking about the horse race, just vote in order for the candidates you think would make the best mayors.
But because state voting laws don’t entirely accommodate the city’s system, we may not know the winner for days or even weeks, which could be the weirdest pause in an election season here since the Democratic primary scheduled for September 11, 2001, was postponed for two weeks.
Despite the city’s generous matching funds program meant to level the playing field, nearly every candidate this year also has outside groups spending on their behalf — and because banker and bottom-tier candidate Ray McGuire opted out of the program, the spending limits got raised for the other campaigns, so candidates are still busy dialing for dollars when they would otherwise be campaigning a month out from the start of early voting. (Credit where it’s due: McGuire’s hatefest with fellow bottom-tier candidate Shaun Donovan, whose dad’s put millions into the “independent” group boosting him, has been one of campaign’s more entertaining sidebars.)
Those two were among the eight candidates at the first official debate of the cycle, the most ever at one of these. Held over Zoom, the whole thing looked, depending on your generation, like the bizarro “Brady Bunch” or “Hollywood Squares.” Or maybe, to date myself a little less, MTV’s “The Real World,” as Adams updated that show’s tagline about what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real to “once candidates start getting desperate, it’s going to get really nasty.”
He said that at the end of a testy exchange with Maya Wiley, who effectively argued that the NYPD should never be stopping or frisking people as the two repeated a fight they’ve rehearsed at previous candidate forums with the expectation that most New Yorkers would be seeing it for the first time. Wiley, whose spouse has been on the receiving end of violent street crime here, had a different view in 2013, when she replied that “some folks are out there committing crimes” in response to someone arguing, much like she is now, that there should be no stops at all. At the debate, Adams replied, in the same spirit, that the police do need to make some stops for the sake of public safety.
It all felt like an old rerun, after a summer of police violence at protests about policing and a year of rapidly rising gun violence, to hear the two go back and forth about the stops and frisks that in fact began plummeting in Bloomberg’s final years and nonetheless defined the 2013 campaign to replace him. A little like how the 2003 Iraq War vote ended up defining the 2008 Democratic presidential primary.
Speaking of time warps, I don’t think New Yorkers are ready for four-and-a-half months of a general campaign in the dying days — pun ruefully intended — of de Blasio’s New York that could have Curtis Sliwa, the Guardian Angels founder and theatrically unhinged New York character who, like Al Sharpton and Donald Trump, never stopped hustling or faded away and is now trying to win the Republican nomination, trying to bait Adams, the ex-cop and former Republican who often takes his own bait, like when he boasted on my podcast last year that he’d carry a gun as mayor and drop his NYPD security detail or when he digressed at an interfaith mayoral forum to advise the teenaged moderators that “All of you are lions and lions don’t care about the opinions of sheep. They rule.” (It’s a paraphrased “Game of Thrones” line.)
Weird as things have been, they could get a lot weirder.
