Ms. Garcia moved up to second place after the latest ranked-choice tally, but still fell one percentage point behind Eric Adams.
Kathryn Garcia, a former New York City sanitation commissioner who staged a late charge in the city’s Democratic primary, conceded on Wednesday to Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, after a count of absentee ballots left her trailing him by just 8,400 votes.
The location of her concession speech, at the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument in Central Park, was freighted with meaning.
“For 400 years, no woman has held the top seat at City Hall,” said Ms. Garcia, who in Tuesday’s tally lost by one percentage point. “This campaign has come closer than any other moment in history to breaking that glass ceiling in selecting New York City’s first female mayor. We cracked the hell out of it, and it’s ready to be broken, but we have not cracked that glass ceiling.”
Ms. Garcia ran on her reputation for managerial competence, offering herself as a counterweight to Mayor Bill de Blasio, who developed a reputation as a sometimes hapless administrator. Her candidacy gained momentum after she was endorsed by The New York Times and The Daily News; a late alliance with a rival candidate, Andrew Yang, likely helped her draw second-place votes from his supporters.
Her concession speech contrasted sharply with the sheer ebullience accompanying Mr. Adams’s Wednesday tour of the morning shows.
A plainly thrilled Mr. Adams sought to cast himself as the new voice of working-class Democrats in America, a class of voters he suggested had been neglected by the party elite for far too long.
Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly seven to one in New York City, and as the Democratic nominee, Mr. Adams will be an overwhelming favorite against the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa, in the November general election.
Mr. Adams spent almost no time on Wednesday morning addressing the November election. When asked about Mr. Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, Mr. Adams swiftly dismissed him as a single-issue candidate focused on subway crime in a city facing a multitude of complicated issues.
Instead, he directed his attention to what his win over 12 other Democratic candidates for mayor might portend for his party.
“It’s extremely exciting right now that just an everyday blue-collar worker, I like to say, is going to potentially become the mayor of the City of New York,” Mr. Adams said on CNN.
Mr. Adams repeated his argument that Democrats like him are too often ignored by a political party that focuses too much on the ideological debates that drive the conversation on Twitter.
“There’s a permanent group of people that are living in systemic poverty,” he said on CBS. “You and I, we go to the restaurant, we eat well, we take our Uber, but that’s not the reality for America and New York. And so when we turn this city around, we’re going to end those inequalities.”
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
