While Scott M. Stringer, the New York City comptroller, has lost crucial supporters in his drive to become mayor, other backers have stood by him.
From a distance, Scott M. Stringer’s campaign for mayor doesn’t appear to have changed much since last week, when he was accused of sexually assaulting a campaign volunteer 20 years ago.
On Monday, a union representing 24,000 school safety agents and public housing employees endorsed him. Later that night, he answered questions about hate crimes and police funding at a forum sponsored by interfaith youth. Since the allegations first surfaced, he’s been to at least four candidates’ forums, three churches, two news conferences, three subway stations and one editorial board interview.
The message at each stop is a forceful denial of the allegations from Jean Kim, a lobbyist, that he sexually assaulted her 20 years ago when he was running for public advocate. Each time, Mr. Stringer, 61, makes a statement similar to the one he gave during a television interview Tuesday: “I’m going to be the next mayor and win the Democratic primary.”
But up close, Mr. Stringer’s hopes for becoming mayor have suffered a devastating blow. Members of the progressive coalition that assembled behind him began rescinding their endorsements on Friday.
And much of the uptick in attention from the news media, like a 15-minute interview on NY1 on Tuesday morning, has focused as much on Ms. Kim’s allegations as it has on Mr. Stringer’s plans if elected mayor.
On Wednesday morning Mr. Stringer appeared on “The Brian Lehrer Show” on WNYC to discuss the city’s economic recovery from the pandemic.
Mr. Lehrer said the show was “trying to focus our candidate interviews on policy,” but immediately added that “we can’t ignore the elephant in the room of the sexual abuse and harassment allegation and your significant loss of endorsements.”
Mr. Stringer’s campaign points out that the increased media coverage gives him a chance to dispute the allegations and talk about his plans for the city.
During the interview on WNYC, Mr. Stringer, who declined to be interviewed for this article, talked about how his wife, Elyse Buxbaum, is a survivor of sexual assault. He mentioned that his mother had died of Covid-19, one of the reasons he said he wants to become mayor and help the city recover. And he said he wanted his two sons to be able to look back on this moment and understand that he strongly denies the allegations against him.
None of that has been enough to stanch the flow of progressive groups and leaders abandoning the candidate.
Sochie Nnaemeka, head of the New York State Working Families Party, said her group’s decision to drop Mr. Stringer was based in part in concern about “toxic male leadership.” The ideas of the progressive movement are now permeating city and state politics, and progressive groups have to guard their “governing values,” she said.
“It cannot be that the candidate is the sole vehicle and the only option to make people’s lives better and to make our city different,” said Ms. Nnaemeka, whose group is now endorsing both Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive, and Maya Wiley, the former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio.
While Mr. Stringer’s progressive coalition has dissolved, members of his labor coalition, including the influential United Federation of Teachers and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, have stood by him.
The U.F.T.’s most active political volunteers met on Sunday and decided to reaffirm their support for Mr. Stringer. Heading into the final weeks of the campaign, the union expects to unleash its full capabilities to help him, including phone banking, canvassing and door knocking.
The U.F.T. is also considering a donation to an independent expenditure committee that would boost Mr. Stringer’s campaign with advertisements.
“It’s a wide-open race at this point,” said Michael Mulgrew, the union’s president.
Mr. Stringer, one of the best-funded candidates in the race, continues to attract money, and he expects to have raised at least $10 million before the campaign is over. A fund-raising email said he was just over $41,000 away from receiving the maximum amount of matching public funds.
A fund-raiser on Zoom this week went on as planned. And the campaign continued to purchase ads, a long-planned, multimillion-dollar effort seen as part of a final push to fulfill Mr. Stringer’s longtime goal of becoming mayor.
Some voters received surveys from a polling firm to examine how concerned they are about the sexual harassment allegations. Mr. Stringer’s campaign declined to comment.
“I actually think Scott still has a path,” said Jonathan Westin, director of New York Communities for Change, a progressive grass-roots organizing group that rescinded its endorsement of Mr. Stringer last week. “One of the main things I’ve heard from my membership is, ‘They did this to Joe Biden, they went after him and he still prevailed’” — a reference to allegations by Tara Reade in 2020 that Mr. Biden had sexually assaulted her.
Gregory Floyd, the president of Teamsters Local 237, which announced its support for Mr. Stringer after the allegations were unveiled, said many members of his 24,000-person union may even feel a personal connection with the candidate. Among them are 5,000 school safety agents who say they have been unfairly accused of abusing students.
“They, more than anybody, understand what it is to be accused of something they didn’t do, so this resonates with them,” Mr. Floyd said.
Mr. Mulgrew said his members were also concerned about due process.
“The basic work of why unions form is about workplace rules, and allegations are a major piece of workplace rules,” he said. “Their thing when they see something like this is, what’s the due process?”
Ms. Kim has called for Mr. Stringer to resign from his current job as city comptroller and to withdraw from the mayor’s race. On Tuesday, her attorney, Patricia Pastor, filed a complaint with the New York attorney general’s office.
“Jean will participate fully” with any investigation, Ms. Pastor said in a statement. The attorney general’s office is reviewing the complaint.
Mr. Stringer has also faced criticism for the way in which he has responded to Ms. Kim’s allegations, including his characterization of their relationship as consensual — a point he repeated during the interview Wednesday on WNYC, citing an article from The Intercept that quoted anonymous sources saying that he and Ms. Kim had had a “casual” relationship. He described their relationship as “a friendship with a little more.”
Mr. Stringer said that they had remained on good terms and that she had donated to his campaign multiple times, but he said that things soured after Ms. Kim was not offered a job on his 2013 run for comptroller. The campaign accused her of working for the front-runner in the race for mayor, Andrew Yang, which Ms. Kim denies.
Ms. Wiley said last week that Mr. Stringer was “running a smear campaign.” She has called on Mr. Stringer to drop out of the mayor’s race.
Despite his significant remaining support, it’s still unclear if Mr. Stringer will be able to fully recover, said Bruce Gyory, a Democratic strategist.
“A week ago people presumed that Stringer was finished,” Mr. Gyory said. “A week later he’s back on his feet.”
New York City voters, he noted, “like someone who can take a punch and get up.”
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
