NYC Mayor/2021 Megathread

[Tintrlvr]

For what it's worth, turnout was relatively high (above 25%), the highest for a mayoral primary in a long time. Which matches my prediction that Garcia would do best with low turnout and Adams would do better the higher turnout was, within reason. High turnout probably helped Wiley a bit as well (and if we had started to get into very high turnout, above 30% or higher, it would have helped Wiley more and Adams less).

[Tintrlvr]

I've only been passively following this race, but I've seen some references to Yang support among Orthodox Jewish communities. Is there a backstory here that I missed?

Ultra-Orthodox specifically. Yang supported the city largely letting them run their yeshivas without any educational content in exchange for their support. Other candidates (except Adams) were more mixed or ignored the issue (because they know the yeshivas should be required to teach subjects like math, English and history morally and are actually required to do so under the law but don't want to anger the ultra-Orthodox).

I do wonder if, had Yang been elected, he would have simply stabbed them in the back and started cracking down on yeshivas that don't teach basic subjects. Doesn't seem entirely impossible.

[Tintrlvr]

I've only been passively following this race, but I've seen some references to Yang support among Orthodox Jewish communities. Is there a backstory here that I missed?

Ultra-Orthodox specifically. Yang supported the city largely letting them run their yeshivas without any educational content. Other candidates (except Adams) were more mixed or ignored the issue (because they know the yeshivas should be required to teach subjects like math, English and history morally and are actually required to do so under the law but don't want to anger the ultra-Orthodox).

Adams beat Yang in many Orthodox communities. Another example of people holding on to assumptions from a few months ago and not noticing the reality on the ground.

Adams won in Orthodox areas (where yeshivas are not relevant as a topic as regular-way Orthodox yeshivas teach basic subjects to competence) but not ultra-Orthodox areas. Yang won all of the ultra-Orthodox communities with truly dominant figures (70-80% of the vote) except the Crown Heights one, which has long ties to Adams.

[Tintrlvr]

I've only been passively following this race, but I've seen some references to Yang support among Orthodox Jewish communities. Is there a backstory here that I missed?

Ultra-Orthodox specifically. Yang supported the city largely letting them run their yeshivas without any educational content. Other candidates (except Adams) were more mixed or ignored the issue (because they know the yeshivas should be required to teach subjects like math, English and history morally and are actually required to do so under the law but don't want to anger the ultra-Orthodox).

Adams beat Yang in many Orthodox communities. Another example of people holding on to assumptions from a few months ago and not noticing the reality on the ground.

Adams won in Orthodox but not ultra-Orthodox areas. Yang won all of the ultra-Orthodox communities except the Crown Heights one, which has long ties to Adams.

Adams won Far Rock, Midwood, Flatbush, Kew Gardens, 1/3rd of Satmar Wburg.

Midwood and Flatbush are Orthodox but not ultra-Orthodox areas so prove my point. Yang won Kew Gardens Hills (the ultra-Orthodox enclave; Kew Gardens proper is not very Orthodox at all), though not by a huge margin and there seems to have been a divide where some precincts did vote Adams, generally was close in every precinct. Agree Adams won the ultra-Orthodox enclave in Far Rockaway, which is pretty small. Adams didn't win any precincts in the Satmar parts of Williamsburg, though he did get some votes (much less than 1/3 - more like 20%). I wasn't contending that Adams didn't win any ultra-Orthodox votes, just that he was the clear minority vote-getter among ultra-Orthodox.

[Tintrlvr]

How many mail/absentee ballots are out? Interesting to see how those come down, b/c I'd assume they'd be better for Garcia/Wiley than Adams.

87K already-returned & 150K outstanding, none of which have yet to be counted.

So we've got a decent sized amount left, which could lower Adams back into the 20s, and boost Garcia into the 20s. At least that's what I'm hoping.

I think that will happen. See breakdown below of the absentee ballots by county. Manhattan is well overrepresented (more returns than any other borough, and more requests than Brooklyn, though fewer than Queens) and the Bronx in particular is very underrepresented.

https://www.vote.nyc/sites/default/files/pdf/absentee_reports/PE2021/CityWide_Recap_BoroughsAndParties_asof_June21_2021.pdf

[Tintrlvr]

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.

[Tintrlvr]

Bloomberg News report that of the absentee ballots returned to the Board of Elections by Tuesday, 46% came from state Assembly districts that Adams won, followed by 31% from districts Garcia won.

Welp, it was a fun ride.

Well, Adams won 37 ADs (56.9%) while Garcia just 25% of them. Regarding votes, ADs that Adams won represent 50.2% of the vote while ADs that Garcia won represent 25% of the vote. That suggest that the absentee ballots could improve Garcia's result.

Right - no one thinks absentees will put Garcia ahead of Adams. Just that the margin will close a bit, which matters a lot to the RCV analysis. Being down by 11% is nearly insurmountable. Being down by, say, 8% is possible to come back from though still not especially likely. And the Bloomberg News analysis supports the conclusion that absentees will close the margin a bit.

[Tintrlvr]

Data For Progress, the pollster that more or less nailed the most important elections last week (mayor, comptroller and Manhattan DA) created an RCV simulation using election-day results.

https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2021/6/28/dfp-ranked-choice-simulations

Kathryn Garcia defeats Eric Adams 54-46 on the final ballot
Eric Adams defeated Maya Wiley 52-48 on the final ballot

Very interesting - have to wonder how many of Yang's voters will rank Garcia higher than Wiley. I feel like that's ultimately going to decide what happens.

Yeah, DFP has Garcia dominating among Yang voters, winning about 60% against both Adams and wiley. I guess we'll see tomorrow night!

We'll find out, I guess. Would be really bittersweet if Garcia looks like she would win the final round but gets pipped by Wiley in the second-to-last round, as I think DFP have the two exactly tied in the second-to-last round. I suspect DFP is overstating Yang transfers to Garcia, though - she should be dominant with Asian Yang voters but I have to imagine the ultra-Orthodox Yang vote transfers mostly to Adams, and DFP may just not have enough ultra-Orthodox voters in their sample.

On the other hand, they seem to have started with the election night results, without absentees, but Garcia should be a little higher (and Adams in particular a bit lower) once absentees are counted.

So, after all is said and done, how public will the ballots be? Will there be an enumeration of each set of rankings, or is that held private? Seems like it should be public information, but I can't find anything either way.

They're going to release all of the tabulations at the same time. Each round will be public, but they won't be releasing tabulations round-by-round.

Seems like a classic case of trying to have your cake and eat it too.  Want to adopt RCV so a winner has to get 50% but you want every ballot to also count, so you have to wait days for any ballot postmarked on time to arrive rather than making sure people hit a certain cutoff point in the mail so their ballot is received.

Ridiculous how long it is taking to count all of this and declare a winner.

It's a stupid state law that has nothing to do with RCV that prevents them from counting absentee ballots yet, for what it's worth.

You probably should have all of your ballots in to run RCV calculations in case it changes results in an earlier round in a way that affects the final result (in particular, see the DFP calculations that suggest that Garcia and Wiley will be almost exactly tied in the second-to-last round -- imagine the chaos if they report Adams would win a top two vs. Wiley and then a week later have to say, wait, actually Garcia beats Wiley to the top two and wins against Adams), but that shouldn't prevent release of first-round results.

[Tintrlvr]

Data For Progress, the pollster that more or less nailed the most important elections last week (mayor, comptroller and Manhattan DA) created an RCV simulation using election-day results.

https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2021/6/28/dfp-ranked-choice-simulations

Kathryn Garcia defeats Eric Adams 54-46 on the final ballot
Eric Adams defeated Maya Wiley 52-48 on the final ballot

Very interesting - have to wonder how many of Yang's voters will rank Garcia higher than Wiley. I feel like that's ultimately going to decide what happens.

Yeah, DFP has Garcia dominating among Yang voters, winning about 60% against both Adams and wiley. I guess we'll see tomorrow night!

If this actually happens (Garcia overtaking Adams in the final round from 3rd place in the initial count), it will be "Stop the Steal" on steroids, rivaling the Florida 2000 level of controversy.

How? That’s how RCV works. Nothing fraudulent about it.

Of course. But people don't think past the headlines and Adams has a interest in raising distrust in the process - see the posts before polls closed last week for examples of this.

Difference is that no one feels so strongly in favor of Adams (especially against Garcia; some might feel so strongly against Wiley) that they would actually do anything for him, and if Adams started appearing with true national Republicans on the issue, he'd instantly lose many of his voters' support.

[Tintrlvr]

I did the math, and Garcia needs to win 56.4% of the remaining ballots to defeat Adams in the final round.

How likely is that? I hope she wins because she's better than Adams.

I think it's likely. She won 48.9% of the non-absentee vote. Based on geography, she should do around 10-15 points better with absentees than with non-absentees. There will be some ballot exhaustion, so not every one of the 123,000 absentee ballots will count in the final round (though probably less ballot exhaustion than in-person votes because absentee voters are quite sophisticated in New York and there will be fewer progressive-or-bust absentee votes). But not certain, and the final RCV count should be within 5,000 votes either way - maybe even within 1,000, i.e., close enough for a chaotic recount to plausibly change the result.

[Tintrlvr]

If there is a bunch of uncounted ballots in the Bronx doesn't that likely mean Adams wins?

“A bunch” here means maybe 10,000 at most but possibly a lot fewer. Which would help him a bit but wouldn’t guarantee a victory. And they may have already been counted in yesterday’s totals since yesterday had 135k extra test ballots AND 7k other extra ballots (likely the missing votes).

[Tintrlvr]

As brucejoel has already announced, the BOE just released the corrected tabulations.

Adams leads 51.1% to 48.9%. So the blunder didn't change the final results.

Actually it could have changed the results, with the previous numbers slightly favoring Adams, as Garcia had to make up a bit more than 16,000 votes on absentees before but now only has to make up a little under 15,000 votes (because there are fewer total votes). That change is enough for me to say this is closer to Likely Garcia than Lean Garcia at this point.

[Tintrlvr]

New York can be dumb and stupid all on its own without us having to give credence to the latest round of "here's why our trying to steal the election was okay!"

This is the rational response. It's an apples to oranges comparison. in no way does this incident of frustrating incompetence resemble any of the vote counting in 2020 which was almost entirely flawless, minus some slow counts here and there in some places, no matter how much Republicans might want to believe otherwise. It's asinine for this blunder to in any way make anyone want to give even the slightest bit of legitimacy to our country's transformation into an autocratic state where GOP controlled legislatures can overturn election results they disagree with.

Also, it was caught almost immediately and fixed in a day, so no idea how this could be evidence of secret incompetence/fraud that changed the result of an even more high-profile election at a much larger scale.

[Tintrlvr]

Eyeballing the DFP poll (since it seems to have landed the result), the Garcia/Yang collaboration was a huge success. If my Math is right, Garcia got almost 60% of Yang's second choices in their sample (and over 70% if we exclude the exhausted ballots). I wonder what this means about his ultra-orthodox Jewish support. Either they did not monolithically have Adams as their second choice as we thought, or they in fact did but were overwhelmed by Asians having Garcia as their second choice in a similarly lopsided way.

One potential risk for Garcia in the absentee count is that most absentees were voted before her alliance with Yang, so Yang preferences may not flow to her as strongly in early absentees. Not sure if we have that info from early votes to see how transfers worked before Yang cross-endorsed.

[Tintrlvr]

If Adams loses the primary, does he wage a write in campaign?

I doubt it.  He wouldn’t want to risk electing Silwa

Even if Adams runs a write-in campaign, there's no way Silwa is elected. Silwa isn't a moderate like Giuliani was (at the time) or Bloomberg. He's a hard-right conservative that wouldn't win more than maybe Staten Island, even in a three-way race.

NYC has also changed a lot in the interim. I don't think Bloomberg could win today as a Republican, and Giuliani certainly couldn't (not modern Giuliani of course, but also not 1993 Giuliani).

Anyway, I personally doubt Adams would launch a write-in campaign - as I pointed out earlier, he's not really that popular or loved, even though he's put in the work to be the boss of a significant political machine in the city. Nor is Garcia disliked enough among the right groups for it to be viable; the story would be different if the Democratic nominee were someone like Tiffany Caban.

[Tintrlvr]

MSNBC today reported on Monring Joe that the software company that invented the software for the counting multiple times offered assistance to the Board of Elections before the ballots were counted and they were repeatedly rejected. This board is a joke.

NYTimes had an editorial yesterday calling for the BOE to be abolished and replaced. Unfortunately, it requires an amendment to the state constitution to do so, and I'm sure Cuomo would refuse because he is trash.

[Tintrlvr]

NYTimes had an editorial yesterday calling for the BOE to be abolished and replaced. Unfortunately, it requires an amendment to the state constitution to do so, and I'm sure Cuomo would refuse because he is trash.

AFAIK, Cuomo has no say on NY Constitutional Amendments. They just need to be passed by 2 successive sessions of the legislature and then voted on by the people.

Ah, didn't know that. Maybe it will happen then, but it will take a while.

[Tintrlvr]

Hoping Adams pulls it out over Garcia.

Ideally, Wiley, but fewer Garcia fans ranked her than the inverse. Stay classy, Garcia fans.

Regretting your support for a candidate because of what demographics supported them and how preferences flow is pretty absurd, especially when you consider who the opposition is.

I will still support whoever is the nominee, but I despise the gentrification of Manhattan and those downtown areas of Brooklyn. It's clear to me that Adams followed by Wiley was most popular in the real New York. If all the gentrifiers supported Garcia, there must be a reason for that, she must not be interested in fixing the housing crisis.

I'm sorry, you don't get to decide who the "real" New Yorkers are. That's completely ridiculous

I can say what I want, and I'm going to call the gentrification that has destroyed Manhattan what it is. Garcia is their candidate.

I hate to tell you, but you’re a gentrifier, and Wiley was the gentrifiers’ candidate. Garcia was the candidate of the rich people who have been in NYC all along; it’s not like Wall Street or Midtown or the Upper East Side were invented in the 1980s.

[Tintrlvr]

Anyway, back on track - are we expecting the full 125K to be dumped all on Tuesday 7/6?

If the BoE isn't slow on the count, then any ballot that's not facing a curing issue will be included in that count.

Thanks. Are we expected to get the updated RCV another day though I assume?

Yeah, we’re expected to get the updated RCV count at the same time that issue-less absentees are entered into the count. Theoretically, this could all be over on Tuesday 7/6, but that’d require there being no more ballots facing a curing issue of some kind, which is unrealistic.

The number of ballots still subject to curing should be quite low. Not zero, but not enough to make a difference unless the final result is within a few hundred votes at most.

[Tintrlvr]

https://twitter.com/ndhapple/status/1412467219024560133?s=20

So add a MOE of ~3,700 to whatever is released today. Reminder some mail ballots will exhaust for a variety of reasons, so there will not be 120K Adams vs Garcia votes.

ugh watch the margin be under that lmao

Given that this is New York I'm sure it will.

I think it's more likely than not that the margin after today's dump will be under 3,699 (the number of ballots under dispute). However, unless the margin after today's dump is under 500, it's highly unlikely that 3,699 ballots could change the result.

[Tintrlvr]

How are the odds now? 50-50?

PI is 72-28 Adams which makes no earthly sense because that movement wasn't based on anything real, but I digress.

I'd presume that actual odds here are still 50-50 (at worst for Garcia, 55-45 Adams; at best, Tilt Garcia).

It's *possible* that someone with inside knowledge is betting on Adams. There is, generally speaking, nothing preventing someone who works at the BOE and knows the results from betting on them before the results are made public. You can see that happening sometimes in the immediate aftermath of poll closings or shortly before results announcements - especially when results are released as a large batch. (UK by-election betting is notorious for huge last-second swings to the the party that wins before the result is announced since they release all in one go so insiders can make a big profit.) However, I do tend to agree that it's probably a thinly traded market with values based on nothing.

[Tintrlvr]

It's past 5PM ET now...

They're just out at a late Tuesday afternoon brunch.

[Tintrlvr]

Crazy theory but not that crazy since it's the BOE, but I'm thinking that they (obviously) already know what these results show - a Garcia victory - while also knowing that if they put out such results with any hint of a mistake whatsoever, then the Adams camp will cry fraud as loud as they can, leading BOE to quadruple-check literally everything just to make sure.

Thoughts?

Possible, particularly if the count is close. But it may be that the processing of the absentees is going slower than anticipated.

It feels like they must already have everything processed and they are just doing checks. My guess is that they found a mistake in their check this morning and that is what is delaying them: rechecking everything again. Doesn't say anything about the results.

I suppose it's also possible that we're in recount territory for either the last round or the second-to-last round and they want to be confident.

I doubt they have a feeling about the winner one way or another. If anything these sorts of swamp creatures would probably prefer Adams...

[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.)

[Tintrlvr]

Did they ever release precinct results for the final round?

Yes. Last Thursday (finally!)

https://rrhelections.com/index.php/2021/08/19/new-york-city-democratic-mayoral-primary-final-results-map-by-precinct-round/

Does anyone know why McGuire did well in two non-contiguous areas on the first round map, one being in (I think) NE Brooklyn in AD 39, and the other being south of that near the Brooklyn-Queens border (again, I think) in AD 54? None of the precincts he won were unpopulated ones with nominal votes. One such neighborhood I'd assume was his home, but I can't explain the strength in two neighborhoods which aren't particularly close.

AD-39 is in Central Queens; I see the precinct you are talking about. It appears to be a relatively ordinary part of Central Queens that is majority Asian with a sizeable Hispanic minority and essential no non-Hispanic white or black voters, like most of that area. McGuire does appear to have done very well in the surrounding precincts as well, although Yang won most of them. The predominant Asian group in that area would be immigrants from SE Asia; for example, there is a Thai Buddhist temple located within the precinct McGuire won, and some nearby commercial blocks are centers of the Vietnamese community in NYC.

I also see where you mean in AD-54, right on the Brooklyn-Queens border. That area is also majority Asian, with black and Hispanic minorities and essentially no non-Hispanic white voters, although there the Asian population is mainly Bangladeshi, I believe.

It seems that McGuire did particularly well with certain Southeast and South Asian communities, perhaps due to special outreach by a member of his team or some local community endorsement, and clearly those groups felt less affinity with Yang than East Asian communities did. (I can't see a difference in performance for Yang in mostly Korean vs. Chinese communities, so it seems that he did equally well with different East Asian groups.) However, this wasn't consistent, and there are other mostly Southeast or South Asian areas, particularly in Queens, where McGuire fared poorly, so it was likely based on very local community factors.