NYC Mayor/2021 Megathread

[Kamala's side hoe]

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/06/22/nyregion/nyc-primary-election/some-progressives-and-climate-activists-bet-on-council-contests-not-the-mayors-race

Some progressives and climate activists bet on council contests, not the mayor’s race.

“Rank Crystal Hudson No. 1 for City Council.”

“Rank Michael Hollingsworth No. 1 for City Council.”

That was the refrain outside a polling station in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, where two leading candidates for a seat on New York’s lawmaking body are in a fierce fight. Both are running as progressives. Both embrace core liberal planks like the Green New Deal.

On a Primary Day that has the current mayor, at least, expecting disappointment for left-leaning Democrats, some of the most fired-up progressives are not even focused on the mayoral race. They are betting on council races, where they believe they can make their biggest gains.

They also say they have found that climate and environmental justice — key priorities that never rose to the top of the mayor’s race — work better as retail politics in local districts where they can be connected to specific neighborhood problems like pollution from power plants.

“The climate crisis is a winning talking point in a local municipal election,” Stylianos Karolidis, a climate activist with the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, said as he knocked on doors in Astoria, his home neighborhood, with Tiffany Cabán, who is favored to win the Council seat in the Queens district. “It’s incredibly exciting to be proving that.”

Ms. Cabán is one of six candidates D.S.A. is running for Council seats. All of them, including Mr. Hollingsworth, snagged the coveted approval of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“We’re opposing a new power plant in the neighborhood, because we already have high asthma rates here,” Ms. Cabán told a voter through a cracked door.

Canvassers for Jo Anne Simon, a State Assembly member running for Brooklyn borough president, have emphasized her sponsorship of a “public power” bill to authorize projects like an alternative to private utilities that charge consumers to build new infrastructure that remains reliant on fossil fuels.

And although Mr. Hollingsworth has focused mainly on housing, volunteers campaigning for him on Tuesday said he had also won support from residents fighting a pipeline through North Brooklyn and a tower that would overshadow the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

“You ask them how they’re doing, and they say, ‘Man, I just got this insane ConEd bill,’” said James Thacher, a volunteer. “And then you start talking about municipally-owned renewable energy.”

Wiley appears to be safely in second place. This is probably the best possible outcome for AOC and the progressives, they can take credit for her better than expected showing without having to deal with any fallout from what would have likely been her disastrous term as Mayor.

[Kamala's side hoe]

5 political boroughs of NYC:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-5-political-boroughs-of-new-york-city/

TBH this primary's results proved that their analysis was garbage.

I thought the results vindicated their analysis, aside from possibly underestimating Adams in The True-Blue Bronx.

Thought this was interesting: https://www.theuprising.info/p/yang-presidential-campaign-advisers

The ex-adviser also said the Tusk team sidelined one of Yang’s most high profile surrogates, stand-up comedy megastar Dave Chappelle. “Dave Chappelle offered to do free shows,” the former adviser said.”Tusk said no. They found him too controversial.”

[Kamala's side hoe]

Lol

https://twitter.com/andrewyang/status/1410009589614104576?s=21

Yang underperformed my expectations while Wiley overperformed them. Guess the mayoral race was a wash overall, although it’ll be exciting to see RCV make a difference given how close the race looks. 

[Kamala's side hoe]

Damn… this feels like a repeat of the 2020 primaries, where my arguments in favor of my first choice against the Online Left’s preferred candidate(s) ended up applying better to the conservative square establishment candidate.

But hey, RCV is becoming more of a thing IRL!

https://mobile.twitter.com/Noah__Goldberg/status/1404553439317835781?

[Kamala's side hoe]

He’s going to be an awful mayor, maybe even worse than the current moron. RIP New York City.
https://twitter.com/brooklynpaper/status/1412423279244197905?s=21

Context

Their rezoning vision has the backing of Borough President Adams and local Councilmember Laurie Cumbo. In a letter announcing his advisory disapproval of thef rezoning, Adams cited concerns about the project’s density.

“Borough President Adams generally supports the applicant’s proposal to increase density along wide commercial streets in the M-Crown district,” the letter says. “However, he acknowledges that the project represents a large jump in density from what is permitted in the underlying district.”

The development site is currently a McDonald’s with a surface-level parking lot and drive-thru, at the corner of two exceptionally wide streets, and across the street from parts of the Pacific Park megadevelopment. Several other parcels along largely undeveloped Atlantic Avenue are seeking rezonings to allow for residential development. Many observers expected that whatever decision is ultimately made on the Atlantic-Vanderbilt site will become a model for those developments.

Adams’ ruling also includes recommendations that the project be limited to 145 feet, and commit to a deeper level of affordability under the city’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing program than currently proposed.

While Adams’ opinion is simply advisory, he is considered a front-runner in last month’s mayoral race, with absentee ballots being tabulated this month — which would give him significant authority over decisions on rezonings across the Five Boroughs.   

Cumbo, as the city council member for that area, has more influence over the proposal. Her office has signaled she will support the community board’s decision as well.

[Kamala's side hoe]

https://americandreaming.substack.com/p/the-lessons-of-new-york-citys-mayoral

The ‘Own Goals’ of the Media and the Left

The NY media wanted Kathryn Garcia to be mayor. NYC’s left wanted Maya Wiley. The candidate who least aligned with either group, who was most hostile to each, and who was the most corrupt, was Eric Adams. Neither Garcia nor Wiley won, and Adams did. And both the press and the left helped this happen. They both functioned as useful idiots and de facto campaign volunteers for Eric Adams.

For the media’s part, they simply couldn’t help themselves. Yang was the most sensational candidate in the field by a mile. Yang brought views and clicks, and the press, driven by monetary incentives, mined the anti-Yang beat for all it was worth, to the virtual exclusion of critically covering any other candidate. Some journalists will have the decency to show a little shame and remorse over this affair. Not that it will stop them from doing the same thing next time, and the time after that. The incentives that drive the press produce an effect indistinguishable from a formic hive mind whose queen demands profit maximization, achieved within woke parameters. It’s a deeply broken system. They wanted Garcia to win. But they wanted money, clicks, and professional prestige much, much more.

Of the activist left, whose behavior fed into the same result, albeit for more emotional and ideological reasons, no such introspection can be expected. They are incapable of it. As the preliminary results rolled in on election night, Adams had taken an imposing lead, never to be surmounted even when the absentee ballots were later counted. It also became clear that Andrew Yang had been resoundingly defeated. That night, and the day after, leftists took to their phones and keyboards in an orgy of jubilation reminiscent of Return of the Jedi. While they preferred Wiley, they appear to have been animated by a disproportionate blinding hatred of Andrew Yang above all else. To them, the defeat of Yang was victory enough. They barely seemed to care that the least progressive, most anti-left candidate won, and that their efforts, otherwise directed, might have enabled a different result — namely, Kathryn Garcia. It’s time to start the conversation: should “online leftism” be added to the DSM?

Takeaways

• Trust the Polls.
  
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  Confidence in political polling took a hit with the 2016 victory of Donald Trump. Ever since, every underdog campaign has drawn hope from the prospect that, like in 2016, the polls may be wrong for them, too. There are a number of methodological issues with how polling is conducted. And yet, upon closer examination, polling gets it right in the vast majority of cases. Where polling legitimately struggles is for Democrat-vs-Republican presidential polls at the state level. That remains an ongoing concern in the polling community. But national polling and intra-party primary polling remain highly accurate. The 2021 NYC mayoral primaries demonstrated polling’s accuracy yet again.
  
  
• Ranked-Choice Voting Works.
  
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  New York City’s use of ranked-choice voting is one of the biggest implementations of it so far in the US. Ranked-choice voting (RCV) is where voters can rank a number of candidates, indicating their first, second, third, etc. choices. If no candidate gets over 50 percent, it goes to the next round, where the lowest performing candidates are eliminated, and their voters’ second choice votes are transferred to their respective candidates. This process is continued, round after round, until one candidate has over 50 percent. RCV is a more democratic, more representative, superior way to vote — where you can vote your true preference (say, a long shot you really like), while also voting for your favorite candidates among the top-tier so that you’ll have a say in determining the final outcome.
  
  But RCV does take a little getting used to, and in NYC, it did not realize its full potential. Voters could rank up to five candidates in this election, but 15 percent of ballots were exhausted by the final round — meaning that those voters’ ballots were no longer active, either because they ranked fewer than the five candidates allowable, or because they ranked five, but none of them were Adams or Garcia. As a general rule, ranking two of the top three polling candidates ensures that your vote will not be exhausted. Additionally, too few influential endorsers announced their RCV endorsements (i.e. who they endorse as their second choice, third choice, etc.) until the very end, when it would hardly reach anyone and when many people had already voted. As RCV becomes more widely adopted — as it should — voters will become more familiar with this process. Even so, and notwithstanding the NYC Board of Elections’ buffooneries in getting the results out, this election shows that RCV works.
  
  
• Leftists Are Not Reliable Allies.
  
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  If a candidate is not themselves a dyed in the wool leftist, or a cause does not fully align with leftist orthodoxy, any effort or time spent trying to make common cause with the leftmost 10 percent of society is a fruitless waste of time. Leftists are incapable of pragmatism, compromise, tolerating differences, and doing the work required to form effective, sustainable coalitions. They’re more interested in tearing things down than in ever building anything — and given what they believe, that’s probably for the best. Democrats need to factor this in to all their strategies from the get-go.
  
  
• The Press Continues to Decay.
  
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  It’s hard to imagine that very many people who followed this race were satisfied with how it was covered in the press. Unfortunately, this isn’t an aberration. The media seems to keep dropping the ball when it comes to providing accurate, evenly distributed, fair coverage. Trust in the press as an institution has fallen over the years, and they have largely brought it on themselves. The public bears responsibility, too — we are, after all, providing the clicks and revenue that drive these pernicious incentives.
  
  
• Where Does Yang Go From Here?
  
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  Many are wondering if this is the end of the road for Yang’s political ambitions. After all, he has run twice and lost twice, and the stink of this loss may cling to him for years. But it’s worth noting just what he’s accomplished. Three years ago, Andrew Yang was a random citizen, and nobody knew what universal basic income was. Now, it’s widely known, and supported by 55 percent of the country. Dozens of basic income trials are being launched all across the nation. Americans received three no-strings-attached checks during the pandemic, and tens of millions of families are now receiving monthly cash payments from the expanded child tax credit — in essence a basic income for kids. None of this happens without Andrew Yang. How many elected officials have served in government for decades and haven’t made a thousandth the contribution to society? I doubt we’ve seen the last of Andrew Yang, and if his next few years are even half as successful as the past few, that’s still pretty damn good.
  
  

[Kamala's side hoe]

https://mobile.twitter.com/Grace4NY/status/1456284647781019652

Seems like Adams lost a lot of Asian ADs

Yeah I saw a map of the initial count (not counting absentee ballots) showing that Sliwa was winning some of the heavily Chinese areas in Brooklyn and Queens next to Jewish areas.

It would be a shame if Ron Kim really lost his seat though.

https://twitter.com/AsInMarx/status/1456385930617626628?
https://twitter.com/jshgdmn/status/1456279011848593410?
https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1456308684531896321?

[Kamala's side hoe]

https://mobile.twitter.com/Grace4NY/status/1456284647781019652

Seems like Adams lost a lot of Asian ADs

Big deep dive in The City about Silwa's performance among Chinese voters. Silwa got 44% of the vote in precincts where more than half of residents are Asian, which is a better performance than enclaves for every other group. Lot of focus on issues like SHSAT and crime, ofc, but there's a foregrounding of fights over homeless shelter and jail locations which remind a lot about fights over similar issues in LA's Koreatown and Irvine.

This probably still would’ve happened to some extent if Yang was the D nominee. Didn’t expect the opposition to homeless shelters, but then again I’m not a NYC area expert. Wonder if there was any effect in heavily South Asian, Korean, or Filipino areas.

[Kamala's side hoe]

https://mobile.twitter.com/Grace4NY/status/1456284647781019652

Seems like Adams lost a lot of Asian ADs

Big deep dive in The City about Silwa's performance among Chinese voters. Silwa got 44% of the vote in precincts where more than half of residents are Asian, which is a better performance than enclaves for every other group. Lot of focus on issues like SHSAT and crime, ofc, but there's a foregrounding of fights over homeless shelter and jail locations which remind a lot about fights over similar issues in LA's Koreatown and Irvine.

Progressive Dems are blaming this on "misinformation on WeChat" now are totally missing the boat. The campaign is not misinformation, it is a legitimate message against the de Blasio administration which has embraced as its official policy just about every bullet point on that Sliwa poster. It's no wonder Asians in NYC are turning against them, and if the Dem candidate were not Eric Adams, who is not progressive and has disavowed many of de Blasio's stances, on Stuyvesant HS and policing in particular, the hemorrhaging would have been even worse.

I noticed there was some Twitter pushback against some of the statements in that pro-Sliwa Chinese-language poster. The Chinese equivalent to “Racial preference, discrimination, divide America” literally contains the phrase “black people first, Asian people last”- which is itself incredibly divisive and an affront to the Asians (Chinese or otherwise) who backed Adams in the primary.

But I agree with your overall point. There was always going to be some level of pushback against the local Dems among the Chinese enclaves regardless of who was on the ballot.

[Kamala's side hoe]

https://mobile.twitter.com/Grace4NY/status/1456284647781019652

Seems like Adams lost a lot of Asian ADs

Big deep dive in The City about Silwa's performance among Chinese voters. Silwa got 44% of the vote in precincts where more than half of residents are Asian, which is a better performance than enclaves for every other group. Lot of focus on issues like SHSAT and crime, ofc, but there's a foregrounding of fights over homeless shelter and jail locations which remind a lot about fights over similar issues in LA's Koreatown and Irvine.

Progressive Dems are blaming this on "misinformation on WeChat" now are totally missing the boat. The campaign is not misinformation, it is a legitimate message against the de Blasio administration which has embraced as its official policy just about every bullet point on that Sliwa poster. It's no wonder Asians in NYC are turning against them, and if the Dem candidate were not Eric Adams, who is not progressive and has disavowed many of de Blasio's stances, on Stuyvesant HS and policing in particular, the hemorrhaging would have been even worse.

This is verifiably untrue
Lander and Williams are both over performing Adams right now

This is misleading, the mayor ballot had several progressive candidates while the other offices did not, and in the other offices the Conservative party got 6% of the votes for whatever reason. If you total up the number of votes on the left and right, all the offices would be around 70-30.

Also we were discussing Asian groups specifically and there isn't enough information on the other offices to say whether those candidates did better or worse.

Not even more than one Asian group, just the Chinatown Chinese really. Given DeBlasio’s well-known hostility towards Asians in general, I wouldn’t be surprised that Curtis would outperform downballot Rs in heavily Chinese areas at least.