Sounding even more confident the morning after than she did on primary night, Maya Wiley declared Wednesday that she can pull off an upset victory over Eric Adams, the front-runner in the New York mayor’s race, despite his nearly 10-point lead.
“We have every reason to believe we can win this race,” Ms. Wiley told campaign supporters and journalists in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn.
She explained that she expects to significantly outpace Mr. Adams in collecting second- and third-choice votes, and she added: “We’re going to wait til every vote is counted, so every New Yorker counts.”
As of Wednesday afternoon, with 83 percent of votes counted, Ms. Wiley, a civil-rights lawyer and former City Hall counsel, had 22 percent to Mr. Adams’s 32 percent. Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner, was running third, with 20 percent. The rest is divided between Andrew Yang, who has already conceded, and nine other candidates.
Ms. Wiley’s advisers said she would keep calling for patience and thoroughness, “over and over,” in the coming weeks to ensure that Mr. Adams, a retired police captain and Brooklyn’s borough president, does not try to claim victory before the end of the complex counting process.
This is New York’s first citywide ballot using ranked-choice voting, which allows voters to choose up to five candidates in order of preference.
If anything, Ms. Wiley’s advisers said, hopes are rising as vote counts and turnout data trickle in. They said her strategy has long relied on second-choice votes from a wide range of New Yorkers, but she has already won more first-place votes than they said they expected.
More important, based on turnout and polling trends, they believe Ms. Wiley and Mr. Adams will be the last candidates standing, narrowly dividing the total vote.
“I think we’re in a nail-biter,” Jon Paul Lupo, a senior adviser, said as Ms. Wiley hugged supporters on a busy sidewalk outside the Parkside subway station.
That analysis explained Ms. Wiley’s answer when a reporter asked if, with 22 percent of votes in the first round, she was considering conceding.
“No,” she said with an mildly outraged laugh. “Because I’m winning.”
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
