NYC Mayor/2021 Megathread

[President Johnson]

While I wasn't thrilled about Adams in the first place, I have to admit what he said on Morning Joe today actually isn't bad. He talks about being for police reform and support good law enforcement members at the same time. I think this could actually be a winning message for Democrats across the board, although the party by a large majority never supported the "defund the police" nonsense.

Also, Adams promised to name a woman the city's police commissioner, which would be the first in city history.

[Lief 🗽]

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

[Crane]

He’s going to be an awful mayor, maybe even worse than the current moron. RIP New York City.

LOL

[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.

[Donerail]

That context doesn't make it better, as he is now the Mayor (rather than the relatively powerless borough president) and has much more influence as a result.

[Lief 🗽]

Cumbo was corrupt as hell but at least she generally supported building housing. She’s term-limited though. Luckily the deranged DSA NIMBY running to replace her lost (he even opposed up-zoning SoHo!!) but the woman who won cannot totally be trusted either. Dark times ahead for this once great city!

[patzer]

I wonder if there's a chance of the WFP nominee Deborah Axt staying on the ballot and gaining in popularity- she seems like a good candidate who could easily win over disaffected Dems who don't like Adams- but I hear the WFP often withdraws the candidate who they initially nominated.

[Progressive Pessimist]

Looking at just the absentee votes it is true that Garcia did better than her election day vote but it also seems true that she got a smaller share of Yang and then Wiley second preference votes than election day votes which mostly canceled out most of her relative edge in absentee votes.

Looks like the Yang endorsement really sealed the deal for her getting as far as she did.

They probably should have made their alliance earlier though.

[Lognog]

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

The NYC mayor that lives in Jersey is a NIMBY'er? colored me shocked

[Dr Oz Lost Party!]

Looks like the next mayor of NYC is a KHiver lol.

https://twitter.com/people4kam/status/1414393532828188673?s=20

[Grumpier Than Thou]

Looks like the next mayor of NYC is a KHiver lol.

https://twitter.com/people4kam/status/1414393532828188673?s=20

CANCELLED

[emailking]

Looks like the next mayor of NYC is a KHiver lol.

https://twitter.com/people4kam/status/1414393532828188673?s=20

Good.

[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.
  
  

[pikachu]

^The above take’s a bit negative on the left/liberal showing imo. Fundamentally, Garcia and Wiley were weak candidates on paper compared to Adams, who had way more institutionally support and relationships with minority voters compared to the other two making their first run for public office. Yes, the media wanted Garcia to win, and yes, the left coalesced around Wiley, but Garcia had nothing else going for her vis-a-vis institutional support and the Wiley consolidation happened very late. That they came so close to beating Adams in the first place is impressive. A somewhat stronger left-liberal candidate (a Scott Stringer type w no scandals or competent Yang?) likely wins.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

Bernie Sanders and even AOC have been far more reliable allies than than Kyrsten Sinema and Kurt Schrader.  The idea that working with the left is a waste of everyone's time is laughable.  Are some of them just attention-seeking ***holes who just want to whine on Twitter?  Sure, but why judge an important part of your coalition by the worst it has to offer?  And in any case, the left is a part of the current Democratic coalition for better or worse just like suburbanites are.  If Democrats want to get anything done and not get curb-stomped in the midterms, then they've gotta work together, period.  That's true for the leftists, moderates, and everyone in between.

[GeneralMacArthur]

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

Yang cozied up to Jimmy Dore, the Chapo guys, Briahna Joy Gray, and other tentpoles of the terminally online left, and NYC leftists still hated him with a burning passion.  Far more passion than the actual centrist Dem who won.

It just goes to show that the worst thing you can be to a leftist isn't someone who disagrees with them 50% of the time, it's someone who disagrees with them 1% of the time.  Because the way they demonstrate that they are "the most left" is by drawing a big fat line between themselves and their closest ally.  That's why any attempt to form a leftist organization will inevitably devolve into a bunch of splinter organizations, each trying to be the purest, and each trying to prove their purity by ruthlessly attacking all the others for the supposed impurities.

[Badger]

So where did adamsvictory Coalition come from? The only electoral Maps I've seen show the results with five contenders still in the race, where Adams was leading all the boroughs except Manhattan where Garcia was ahead. It was a very close final-round obviously. Where did Adams construct his winning coalition to win the final round against what in a normal election year would have been a splintered left-wing? Black voters, strong home field advantage in Brooklyn oh, and....? I heard he had some reasonable support of some Orthodox groups, but you would think that plus African American votes, unless he was winning by Obama level margins, wouldn't have been enough to squeak out 50% plus one in the fight round. Did he do well in non-black and Orthodox portions of Brooklyn? How did the Latino vote ultimately go, at least in the final rounds?

[Tintrlvr]

So where did adamsvictory Coalition come from? The only electoral Maps I've seen show the results with five contenders still in the race, where Adams was leading all the boroughs except Manhattan where Garcia was ahead. It was a very close final-round obviously. Where did Adams construct his winning coalition to win the final round against what in a normal election year would have been a splintered left-wing? Black voters, strong home field advantage in Brooklyn oh, and....? I heard he had some reasonable support of some Orthodox groups, but you would think that plus African American votes, unless he was winning by Obama level margins, wouldn't have been enough to squeak out 50% plus one in the fight round. Did he do well in non-black and Orthodox portions of Brooklyn? How did the Latino vote ultimately go, at least in the final rounds?

The answer is that Adams ultimately got relatively few second-preferences but was helped by many voters failing to rank either Adams or Garcia, which meant his initial lead was hard to overcome. Adams's final-round coalition was basically the same as his first-round coalition plus ultra-Orthodox Jews (who were mostly for Yang in the first round) and a somewhat random smattering of other voters; he clearly lost every demographic in transfers to Garcia except ultra-Orthodox Jews. (I think even black voters who voted for someone other than Adams in the first round preferred Garcia to Adams in later preferences; I saw a map previously of the final round that I couldn't find again where Garcia led most of the black-majority areas in the final round that Wiley had led in the first round, such as western Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy (although it is true that those areas are not now as monolithically black as they were 10 or 20 years ago and white voters would be predominantly Wiley-Garcia there).) In the end, Adams only gained about 115,000 votes through transfers while Garcia gained over 210,000, but that wasn't quite enough for Garcia to overcome her initial deficit. (However, it very likely would have been enough if all or even as little as a third to a quarter of the 140,000 voters who didn't preference either Garcia or Adams had been forced to choose.)

[Oryxslayer]

So where did adamsvictory Coalition come from? The only electoral Maps I've seen show the results with five contenders still in the race, where Adams was leading all the boroughs except Manhattan where Garcia was ahead. It was a very close final-round obviously. Where did Adams construct his winning coalition to win the final round against what in a normal election year would have been a splintered left-wing? Black voters, strong home field advantage in Brooklyn oh, and....? I heard he had some reasonable support of some Orthodox groups, but you would think that plus African American votes, unless he was winning by Obama level margins, wouldn't have been enough to squeak out 50% plus one in the fight round. Did he do well in non-black and Orthodox portions of Brooklyn? How did the Latino vote ultimately go, at least in the final rounds?

No idea is the answer to most of these questions. NYC has only realeased breakdowns of the vote counted on E-day, and that was just usual tabulation. RCV has not been broken down by borough or precinct.

However, there have been models/projections based on citywide RCV transfers. Adams won Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn on the final ballot. Adams coalition was mainly Hispanics (low turnout) and African Americans. Garcia wins whiter and affluent areas across the city. Everything else is unclear. Garcia's coalition seems to be bigger, especially in a off-year environment, but a lot of the progressive vote exhausted before the final round.

[StateBoiler]

a questionable BOE decision of not recognizing remote notary signatures.

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/working-families-party-ballot/

[The Dowager Mod]

NYC voters are going to find out some unpleasant truths about this guy.
https://twitter.com/samraskinz/status/1420145064542621701

[Suburbia]

NYC voters are going to find out some unpleasant truths about this guy.
https://twitter.com/samraskinz/status/1420145064542621701

Adams is a moderate Democrat. NYC elections should be nonpartisan like Michael Bloomberg said years ago.....

He's trying to appeal to moderate white voters

[Grumpier Than Thou]

NYC voters are going to find out some unpleasant truths about this guy.
https://twitter.com/samraskinz/status/1420145064542621701

I'm fully in favor of a primary against this guy in 2025. Someone should step up.

[Lief 🗽]

Did they ever release precinct results for the final round?

[Suburbia]

NYC voters are going to find out some unpleasant truths about this guy.
https://twitter.com/samraskinz/status/1420145064542621701

I'm fully in favor of a primary against this guy in 2025. Someone should step up.

Why? You can't stand moderate Democrats who don't want to abolish police, ICE, prisons and the military? They are plenty of moderate Democrats like Adams who will not let that happen...

NYC is not going to go to a leftwing utopia.