I think very likely he would have won. He would have gotten the NYT endorsement instead of Garcia, which means Garcia languishes in irrelevance and gets 2% at the end. The vast majority of Garcia's vote goes to Stringer. In addition, Stringer's continued prominence in the race prevents a progressive consolidation around Wiley, so many people who voted for Wiley end up with Stringer also, and Wiley stays in the low double-digits instead of low 20s. Some Garcia voters in Staten Island and other non-Jewish white conservative enclaves splinter to other candidates, mainly Yang and Adams, but they aren't a large factor in Democratic primaries. And a small number of voters who went with Adams are equally comfortable with another establishment figure in Stringer and vote for him.
End result is something like:
Adams: 34%
Stringer: 31%
Wiley: 12%
Yang: 12%
McGuire: 3%
Morales: 2%
Garcia: 2%
Donovan: 2%
Stringer beats Adams by 3-4 points on Wiley and Yang transfers.
I doubt it. He was way back in most polls and did not have the looks/personality to catch fire with low-attention voters.
The reality of D politics in NYC (and increasingly, the nation) is that its about assembling the appropriate mix of demographics, not the platform or competence. And in NYC, that does not help a person like Stringer - note MDB had an AA wife and his ads prominently featured Dante who was well well-spoken and looked AA.
Stringer's only chance was to get lots of 2nd choice voters, but Adams seems to have done well enough with 1st choice voters for that strategy to have failed.
I disagree with this, mainly because Adams only got a little less than 32% of the vote. He will likely win in significant part of the vote exhaustion between the other candidates, not because he assembled a majority coalition. If forced to choose, which they weren't, almost certainly a majority of voters who voted would have chosen Garcia over Adams, and possibly Wiley over Adams as well (and maybe even Yang over Adams!) -- and, in this alternative universe, Stringer over Adams, too. Stringer's advantage in this scenario as compared to Garcia or Wiley is that he would have consolidated more first preferences, meaning he would be less dependent on transfers to overcome Adams. In the end, after preferences are allocated, recall that Adams is only likely to win by about 4-6 points (if Garcia ends up in the top two; I do think Wiley would probably lose by 10 or so). I think it's pretty unquestionable that Stringer would have overcome that deficit through being a bigger name, more known to establishment-leaning voters and more palatable to progressive voters.
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