So far, turnout for local primary elections has been low. Historically, this has not been the case in challenging times.
Theoretically, a city that is known for attracting some of the smartest and most ambitious people on earth ought to have a deep bench of gifted, charismatic politicians available to run for its highest offices. But the current election cycle has reminded us, again, that New York, for some time now, has not been that place. The lure of Wall Street and tech siphon off a lot of potential talent, and then those industries do not graciously reciprocate, giving back their most attuned or socially conscious.
As compensation, we might get the deliciously viperous instead, just for the engaging fun of it, but there too the current roster is not delivering. When a high point of name calling in a televised debate is one candidate telling another that she sounds like a “press release” — a criticism that Ray McGuire leveled at Maya Wiley during the final Democratic mayoral debate on Wednesday night — it is hard not to feel nostalgic for the sizzle of the old days.
Consider the mayoral race of 1977, in the midst of the city’s fiscal crisis, which resulted in the election of Ed Koch. Then, the Democratic primary field offered Mario Cuomo — whom Koch defeated in a runoff — Bella Abzug, Herman Badillo and Percy Sutton, among others. One of the most prominent Black political and business leaders of the 20th century, Sutton had served as an intelligence officer with the Tuskegee Airmen, a Freedom Rider, a lawyer to Malcolm X, a state assemblyman and a longtime Manhattan borough president before he made this bid. No one would ever have to question his commitment to living in New York — at the age of 12 he stowed away on a passenger train from Texas and slept under a sign on 155th Street.
The 1977 race marked one of the four occasions during the past half-century that Democratic mayoral primaries in New York drew more than one million voters. No matter how much New Yorkers lay claim to liberal values, political obsession and locavore consumer habits, they do not turn out in enormous numbers for actual local elections. Early-voting and absentee ballot data for the primaries on Tuesday — which should effectively elect the next mayor, city comptroller, Manhattan district attorney and numerous members of the City Council — have not suggested a distinct surge of the kind this fraught and consequential moment would demand.
The voting swell in 1977, as well as the other instances in which the tally exceeded one million votes, also coincided with challenging and pivotal moments in the city’s history — in 1973, a period of high and rising crime; in 1989, when the city was reeling from the fallout of Black Monday and the savings and loan crisis, which left a devastating impact on the real estate market; and then in 2001, during the aftermath of Sept. 11. Each one of those moments called, just as the pandemic recovery period does, for a transformational mayor. But for various reasons, the sense of urgency that animated those races is absent now.
Jerry Skurnik, the longtime political consultant and data specialist, told me that by Tuesday, when the primary election concludes, he expected a turnout of roughly 800,000 (out of the city’s 3.7 million registered Democrats). He could be wrong, obviously, but the lack of attention and focus New Yorkers have brought to this race suggests that he most likely is not.
In an ideal world, more would have been done to persuade people just how crucial their votes are right now, to summon the best and the brightest in advertising, to call on big New York celebrities to lead a get-out-the-vote movement, something like what we saw in Georgia in advance of the January Senate runoffs. “This all should have been integrated as part of the city’s reopening,” George Arzt, another longtime political adviser (currently working with Mr. McGuire) and former press secretary in the Koch administration, told me. He proposed sloganeering along the lines of: “‘A new election, new people for the future of the city. For you, for you children for, your grandchildren — this is the beginning.’”
The mayor’s office did make an investment of $15 million in an education campaign largely targeted at the novelty of ranked-choice voting, another confusing procedural layer in a campaign season complicated by pandemic distraction and an unusual primary date, in June, rather than September. To that end, Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city’s chief democracy officer (yes, New York has a chief democracy officer), Laura Wood, introduced the “Rank Your Pizza’’ challenge, an interactive exercise meant to foster a comfort with listing things according to preference. What many of us learned from this is that the mayor who came in controversially eating pizza with a fork is leaving with a dubious affinity for green peppers over pepperoni (which took a dismal fifth place in his hierarchy).
Early voting, which began on June 12, could also have been made easier. So far, the lines have been fairly short, which may reflect the fact that, post-vaccination, many people are perfectly fine with voting on a crowded Primary Day — or it may suggest glitches in the roll out or just the ongoing sense of apathy that has distinguished this race. Although the Board of Elections was pushed to open more early voting sites, Ms. Wood told me, they are not in every instance conveniently located. Some voters in Greenwich Village, for example, are assigned to a site in Hudson Yards.
Every mayor is imperfect in his own way, and during periods of modern crisis, the city has not always elected the best person for the office. But it has managed to elect people who have left important and unforgettable imprints: Koch in the late ’70s, who helped to revive the Bronx from the ashes, building thousands of units of affordable housing; David Dinkins as the city’s first Black mayor and Michael Bloomberg in 2001, who redefined development, expanded parkland and grew the tourist industry to record-breaking numbers. What we get next is still anyone’s guess.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
