Vote Early and Often! A multiple guess test for mayor of New York

 

We are just days away from a big decision: choosing who should govern our city. Outgoing Mayor De Blasio is limited to two terms; he won’t be missed. (Michael Bloomberg did buy himself a third term, but no one else around here has a net worth of $59 billion—a tidy increase from the $25 billion with which he came into office—but I digress.)

There are more candidates than you can shake a stick at though the field has narrowed slightly with dropouts. Sadly, Jimmy McMillan of The Rent Is Too Damn High Party is not running this year despite embodying in his party’s name the one thing probably every New Yorker can agree on. (He once got 40,000 votes.)

You’d think a city of 8 million-plus people could produce at least a few high-calibre candidates from which to choose, including one or two to competently represent and defend each of the extant political tendencies and programmatic visions contending to determine the future of New York. We even have the opportunity, under ranked-choice voting, to support up to five of the candidates in descending order. Instead, many of us are having a hard time finding one whom we truly fancy.

Ranked-choice voting is a neat innovation. It forces the winner to accumulate 50%- plus 1 of the total by means of a computerized elimination of whichever candidate is in last place; that candidate’s votes are then assigned to whomever those voters chose as their No. 2. If no one reaches the magic 50% threshold, the next cellar-dweller is eliminated, and the process is repeated until someone racks up the required majority. It prevents anyone from sliding into office on, say, 18% of the votes ahead of a crowded field. We’ve had endless tutorials on how it works, and we can confidently predict that when people show up to vote, they’ll be completely befuddled and make a hash of it. Luckily, there are 10 days of early voting, which we’ll need.

The deeper problem is that the candidates don’t impress. The most famous/notorious of them is Andrew Yang whom everyone has heard of—already a huge advantage. But Yang is a disaster in a nightmare on the way to a debacle. He has shown himself to be clueless about New York and its residents, admits to never having bothered to vote here until now, has committed gaffe after embarrassing gaffe, and is thoroughly in the tank for the plutocrats who are destroying the city. He also is a billionaire—disqualifying in itself.

Another candidate comes from the banking industry: um, no.

Kathryn Garcia ran the sanitation department under De Blasio and got snow off the streets competently. Does that mean she can run the city? Who knows?

Dianne Morales has good politics and a dubious record. Her staff just went on strike, and her flip-flop on charter schools does not inspire confidence.

Maya Wiley was largely unknown before the race and staked out the “reform” or progressive position. Then she jumped all over the debatable accusations of sexual misconduct against a fellow candidate, demanding that he quit the race based on the allegations of something that occurred 18 years ago. She picked up AOC’s endorsement last week, which should help. But given the city’s sharp uptick in violent crime, her pitch to scale back the city’s insanely bloated police budget probably has only a limited constituency.

Scott Stringer is that candidate beleaguered by two accusations of impropriety, one dating from 1992. He was considered a front-runner and represented a progressive tendency; he even won the endorsement of the Working Families Party (since withdrawn). Stringer is such a classic pol that he sounds machine-generated, always ready with an answer for any policy question. With him out of the picture, the field is wide open for the favored candidates of the city’s two power centers: the Real Estate Board and the cops. I can’t help speculating that there’s a connection with the late-campaign accusations about his personal behavior. Maybe he’s a creep, but the facts of the case(s) are apparently of no general interest—for most people the accusations are enough.

Eric Adams is gleefully receiving real estate cash and must have done their bidding as Brooklyn borough president to make them so happy. But he is a former cop who drew a lot of ire from the top brass during his time there, which makes him interesting as someone who might not be intimidated by them. His record on financial probity is disturbing, but at least he’s not Yang.

Shawn Donovan, housing secretary under Obama, airs ads in which he stands next to the former prez, or, alternatively, Michelle. We are supposed to forget that 8 million people lost their homes to foreclosure under Obama’s presidency while Donovan ran the housing portfolio. Not what I would call an impressive CV.

We’re basically voting the way we would swing at a piñata: blindfolded and hoping to land a blow that results in candies for all. We really have no idea how any of them would perform in office, and maybe it doesn’t matter too much anyway. None of them will dare to challenge the entrenched powers that be unless the populace is suffering enough and up in arms enough to force them to do so. That will mean much more than the complicated levers we will pull on June 22.