Not even 10 minutes into Andrew Yang’s inaugural trip in his campaign van Monday morning and there was a problem. The air conditioning had given out, so the vehicle sporting Mr. Yang’s grinning face on its side had pulled over next to a gas station on Staten Island.
“We’ll be OK,” Mr. Yang said, reassuring the driver and campaign staff members who were worried about sticking to schedule on the humid morning. “Just go to the next thing.”
It was, in a way, the perfect encapsulation of his optimistic monthslong pitch to voters. New York City, facing a nexus of crises, would be OK as long as anxious voters went on to the next thing: him.
To reinforce the message, Mr. Yang, a tireless campaigner, planned to spend his last day before polls opened on Tuesday traveling to all five boroughs in a van dubbed the “Yangatron.” The nickname referred to Mr. Yang’s answer in an interview that his favorite previous New York mayor would be a “Voltron”-like amalgamation of several of them.
Mr. Yang, who has vowed to be the city’s cheerleader-in-chief if elected, posed for selfies with voters at Staten Island’s ferry terminal and gave the thumbs-up to commuters sprinting to grab the boat to Manhattan.
But in recent weeks, he has also painted a dire picture of the city’s future if one of his chief rivals, Eric Adams, wins. As the van left the gas station, Mr. Yang called the possibility of an Adams administration “deeply concerning” and criticized Mr. Adams for describing ranked-choice voting as a tool for suppressing the Black and Latino vote.
“Imagine an administration that is led by someone who cuts corners and breaks rules and is constantly under investigation and then attacks whenever he’s criticized and then invokes race as the rationale for any criticism that’s directed toward him,” Mr. Yang said, “and then you imagine hundreds of managers taking their cues from this person.”
“That kind of administration would be mired in dysfunction and questions and investigation almost from Day 1,” he added.
Mr. Yang expressed fewer concerns about other candidates. He has asked his supporters to rank Kathryn Garcia second. On Sunday, he offered positive comments about Maya Wiley. And he said at a campaign stop in Brooklyn Monday that he had ranked five candidates on his ballot and that his campaign “may have some announcements coming out” about the issue.
Mr. Yang said that, win or lose, he hoped to leave New Yorkers with the lasting message that they should not tolerate a government that failed to properly work for them.
“So many of us here in New York have just been settling for agencies and elected officials that are just barely getting by,” he said, as the campaign van cruised over the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, its air conditioning problem apparently fixed. “And we’re all just sort of slumping into it. And our politicians have become people who are just apologizing.”
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
