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      How Maya Wiley or Kathryn Garcia Could Beat Eric Adams

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      Under ranked-choice voting, it is mathematically possible for the second- and third-place finishers in Tuesday’s Democratic primary to overtake the front-runner — but it will be tough. It was the city’s first mayoral race using ranked-choice voting, and there was no incumbent running.After the first round of vote tallying, a relatively conservative male Democrat with a long history in elected office led the pack by nine percentage points, with two female candidates ranked second and third.In the end, the second-place finisher came from behind to score a narrow victory.It happened in Oakland, Calif., in 2010. Whether it can happen in New York City in 2021 is a question that has taken on great urgency.With partial results in on Wednesday afternoon, Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, has 32 percent of first-place votes. He leads Maya Wiley, a former City Hall counsel, by 9 points, and Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner, by 12 points.Because Mr. Adams has almost no chance of garnering more than 50 percent of first-place votes, the ranked-choice playoff process will begin. It is a series of rounds in which the candidate with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated and those votes are transferred to whomever the voter listed in the next slot, until only two candidates remain — at which point the leader wins.Ms. Wiley’s supporters hope that she can close the gap by picking up enough votes from voters who preferred her to Mr. Adams but did not rank her first. Ms. Garcia’s supporters are hoping for something similar.But both candidates face steep challenges to overcoming Mr. Adams’s commanding lead. Here is a brief explainer:Can Wiley or Garcia still win?Mathematically, yes. Ms. Wiley could win if she makes it to the final round and is ranked ahead of Mr. Adams on around 60 percent of all ballots where neither is ranked first. Ms. Garcia’s threshold in the same situation is a few points higher.What’s the likelihood of that?Low. Mr. Adams would have to be enormously unpopular among voters who did not rank him first, and one of the few polls done late in the race showed broader support for him than for Ms. Wiley or Ms. Garcia.The poll of 800 likely Democratic voters, conducted by Citizen Data and FairVote, a national organization that promotes ranked-choice voting, found that Mr. Adams was the only candidate in the race who was a top-three choice of more than half the voters.Kathryn Garcia campaigning on the Upper West Side on Tuesday. She was trailing Eric Adams in first-place votes by 12 points on Wednesday afternoon.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesThe poll tracks fairly closely with the actual first-round results reported so far: It showed Mr. Adams with 32 percent and Ms. Wiley and Ms. Garcia both with 18 percent. It was conducted before the race’s chaotic final weekend, when Mr. Adams was criticized for asserting that Ms. Garcia and Andrew Yang, a former presidential candidate, were trying to weaken Black candidates by campaigning together.That episode may have damaged Mr. Adams and helped Ms. Garcia, but not much, said Rob Richie, FairVote’s president. “My assumption is that the last three days didn’t change the fundamentals enough to actually change the outcome,” he said.To give a sense of Mr. Adams’s strength, in a final-round matchup between Mr. Adams and Ms. Wiley based on the voter rankings in the FairVote poll, Ms. Wiley inherited 47 percent of Ms. Garcia’s first-place voters and Mr. Adams inherited 35 percent, but he still beat her by more than 10 points. In a similar matchup between Mr. Adams and Ms. Garcia, she inherited more than 60 percent of Ms. Wiley’s first-place votes but still lost.Nevertheless, an undaunted Ms. Wiley said on Wednesday that she expected to significantly outpace Mr. Adams in collecting second- and third-choice votes and said she had no plan to concede, “because I’m winning.”How often does a trailing candidate in a ranked-choice election end up winning?Very rarely. In 128 ranked-choice races in the United States since 2004 where there was no first-round winner, there have been only three occasions where someone trailing by more than eight points after the first round ended up the victor, according to FairVote.No one trailing by 10 points has ever won, though in the 2018 San Francisco mayoral race, Mark Leno very nearly came from 12 points down to overtake London Breed. Ms. Breed wound up winning by less than a percentage point.What happened in the 2010 Oakland mayoral race?Don Perata, the former head of the California State Senate, led his more progressive opponents Jean Quan by 8.7 percentage points and Rebecca Kaplan by 12.2 points after the first round. But in the elimination rounds, Ms. Quan ended up with 68 percent of the votes from ballots that listed neither her nor Mr. Perata first, and she narrowly defeated him.There was a big difference, though, between that race and the New York race: Ms. Quan and Ms. Kaplan cross-endorsed each other and co-led an “anybody but Don” attack on Mr. Perata.“It was really cooperative campaigning between two people who were more on the left,” said Jason McDaniel, an associate professor of political science at San Francisco State University. “It was specifically about going against the perceived establishment candidate.”Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley formed no such alliance. During the campaign, Ms. Garcia seemed open to coalitions with other candidates and explored the possibility of working with Ms. Wiley, in addition to Mr. Yang.Ms. Wiley said she was invited to campaign with Ms. Garcia and Mr. Yang, but declined because of misgivings about Mr. Yang’s comments at the final debate about people with mental illness.What about the ballots that have yet to be tallied?As of Wednesday afternoon, the in-person votes from about 3 percent of election scanning machines had not been counted yet. Neither had tens of thousands of absentee ballots — a maximum of about 220,000.But they would have to overwhelmingly favor one candidate to swing the election, and unlike last fall’s Trump-Biden contest, there are no signs of that.The absentee ballots are widely thought to favor Ms. Garcia over Ms. Wiley because absentee voters tend to be older and Ms. Garcia had an older base, but only moderately.What about ‘exhausted ballots’?Those are ballots where every candidate ranked by the voter gets eliminated and thus the ballot no longer directly affects the outcome. The more exhausted ballots there are, the harder it is for a second-place candidate to catch the front-runner. In a race like this one, where there were many viable candidates and voters new to the ranked-choice system might be unwilling to rank a full slate, the possibility of exhausted ballots is high.How sure can we be about any of this?We can’t. We don’t know yet where voters ranked anyone other than their first-choice candidate. We don’t know how many ballots are outstanding, let alone how the candidates are ranked on them. That is why the official winner is likely not to be announced until the week of July 12.Anne Barnard, Nate Cohn, Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Charlie Smart contributed reporting. More

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      How India Walton Pulled It Off in the Buffalo Mayoral Primary

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      Ms. Walton, 38, a democratic socialist who has never held political office, defeated Byron Brown, a four-term incumbent.India B. Walton knew her bid to unseat the entrenched 16-year mayor of Buffalo was a long shot.A registered nurse and community activist, Ms. Walton’s life was defined by hardship: a teenage single mother at the age of 14, a high school dropout, resident of a group home and a victim of domestic violence.A self-described democratic socialist, Ms. Walton, 38, has never held political office, and she was challenging Mayor Byron Brown, 62, who was seeking a fifth term, had served as chair of the state Democratic Party and was once was mentioned as a candidate for lieutenant governor. Few people thought she could win. Mr. Brown mostly tried to ignore her campaign.But on Tuesday, Ms. Walton defeated Mr. Brown in the city’s Democratic primary, making it almost certain that she will become not only the first woman elected mayor in New York State’s second-largest city, but also the first socialist at the helm of a large American city in decades.Her upset on Wednesday shocked Buffalo and the nation’s Democratic establishment as most of the political world was more intensely focused on the initial results of the still-undecided mayoral primary in New York City. Her win underscored the energy of the party’s left wing as yet another longtime incumbent in the state fell to a progressive challenger, echoing the congressional wins of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman.If Ms. Walton wins in the general election in November — a likely result in a city that leans heavily Democratic — she would join the growing ranks of Black female mayors elected to lead other major U.S. cities, including Lori Lightfoot in Chicago, Kim Janey in Boston and London Breed in San Francisco.“I don’t think reality has completely sunk in yet,” Ms. Walton said on Wednesday in a phone interview shortly after receiving a congratulatory call from Senator Chuck Schumer of New York.“I’m India from down the way, little poor Black girl who, statistically speaking, shouldn’t have amounted to much, yet here I am,” she added. “This is proof that Black women and women belong everywhere in positions of power and positions of leadership, and I’m just super-excited.”Ms. Walton, whose campaign was backed by the Working Families Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, said she preferred not to get caught up in the semantics of labels — describing her ideology as focused on “putting people first.”The last time a socialist was the mayor of a large American city was 1960, when Frank P. Zeidler stepped down as Milwaukee’s mayor. And it was more than a century ago when a socialist won a mayoral race in New York: In 1911, George R. Lunn, of the Socialist Party of America, was elected mayor of Schenectady, according to Bruce Gyory, a Democratic political consultant.While rare, socialist mayors are not unheard-of: Bernie Sanders took office in 1981 as mayor of Burlington, Vt., a city one-sixth the size of Buffalo, before being elected to Congress nearly a decade later.Ms. Walton ran an unabashedly progressive campaign in a Democratic city of about 250,000 people — about 37 percent of them Black — that had elected mostly white men as mayors for nearly two centuries. (Mr. Brown became the city’s first Black mayor in 2006.)She said she supported implementing rent control protections. She pledged to declare Buffalo a sanctuary city for undocumented immigrants. And she vowed to reform the city’s Police Department, arguing in favor of an independent civilian oversight board and changing the way police officers respond to mental health calls.“Our police budget is as high as it’s ever been, and crime is also up, so something is not working,” she said.There were a number of factors that both Ms. Walton’s supporters and critics agree helped catapult her to victory: Turnout among Democratic voters in Buffalo was very low, about 20 percent, and Ms. Walton raised money and organized effectively to build a multiracial coalition, including Black voters that would have typically voted for Mr. Brown.Mr. Brown’s actions suggested that he did not take Ms. Walton’s challenge seriously. He refused to debate her — “Maybe he believed pretending I didn’t exist was going to make the race go away,” Ms. Walton said — and he did not campaign vigorously, failing to fund-raise as aggressively as he had in previous primaries or spend on ad buys until late in the race.“I think it was almost a perfect storm that was working against the mayor in this case, but it was brought about by his nonchalance in this race,” said Len Lenihan, the former Erie County Democratic chairman.On Wednesday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who controls the state’s Democratic Party and is a longtime ally of Mr. Brown — he picked him to chair the state party in 2016 — seemed to agree with that analysis.“His campaign strategy, as I understand it, was to avoid engaging in a campaign,” Mr. Cuomo said during a Manhattan news conference, adding, “We’ve seen that movie before.”The Associated Press called the race on Wednesday after all the in-person votes had been counted and Ms. Walton led by seven percentage points. Mr. Brown refused to immediately concede on Tuesday night, saying absentee ballots still needed to be counted; his campaign did not make him available for an interview on Wednesday.But Jeremy Zellner, the chairman of the Erie County Democratic Party, said he had spoken to Mr. Brown on Wednesday and that the mayor may be considering a write-in campaign in the November general election. Mr. Zellner, however, said he informed Mr. Brown that he had pledged his support to Ms. Walton.Under Mr. Brown, Buffalo, in western New York, has undergone a resurgence in recent years with the construction of major projects in the downtown area. But the city’s poverty rate is more than twice the national average, and its unemployment rate, while improving, has not fully recovered to prepandemic levels.Indeed, there was a sense among some residents who voted for Ms. Walton that low-income communities were not reaping the benefits of downtown development.“Buffalo is super-stagnant,” said Anthony Henry, 29, a musician and student. “We try to talk like there’s a lot of progress going on, with recent developments along the waterfront, but nothing has moved.”That stagnation included Mr. Brown, some voters said. “I’m a firm believer that people shouldn’t be in power too long, we need to have fluidity in government,” said George Olmsted, 59, a middle-school teacher. “A lot of people throw this word ‘socialism’ out there like a weapon, but hello, we have Social Security, we have public-funded education in America.”Upstate New York has large swaths of rural and conservative areas, but many of its cities are reliable Democratic strongholds with large minority communities that left-wing activists see as fertile ground to replicate the upsets they have staged downstate. So far, democratic socialists have picked up seats in the House, the State Legislature and the New York City Council, but Ms. Walton’s win would mark the first time a D.S.A.-backed candidate won a citywide election in New York.Ms. Walton’s win was also buttressed by extensive support from the Working Families Party, which had previously endorsed Mr. Brown. The party helped her campaign set up an online fund-raising operation, a large field program with hundreds of volunteers and a text message and phone bank operation that made 19,000 calls on the night before the election — in a contest where fewer than 25,000 voters cast ballots.She proved to be a formidable fund-raiser, garnering more than $150,000 in campaign contributions, a respectable haul for a first-time candidate who had little name recognition at the beginning of the race.Charlie Blaettler, the elections director at the statewide Working Families Party, said that Ms. Walton’s deep relationships in the community made her the right candidate to run against an entrenched incumbent.“This race is a testament to India as a person and the moral clarity with which she speaks,” Mr. Blaettler said. “It shows how important it is for the left to run people who are not just saying the right things, but who have been there for years, doing the work, organizing on the ground.”Ms. Walton made a name for herself as the executive director of a community land trust in a neighborhood of the low-income East Side near downtown Buffalo that has seen an influx in development, leading to a sense among African-Americans that their community was threatened by gentrification.As the middle child to a single mother, Ms. Walton looked after her younger siblings growing up. At 14, she became pregnant and went to live at a group home for young mothers for two years before moving with her young son to her own apartment.She later got married and, at 19, gave birth to twin boys who were born prematurely and had to spend six months in the hospital. That experience inspired Ms. Walton to become a nurse before becoming a community leader and organizer.“I’ve gone through a lot of challenges, from being a teen single mother to overcoming domestic violence. I believe that every challenge that I have faced in life has prepared me to be able to reach back and help someone else,” Ms. Walton said. “This campaign is really centered on the principle of lifting as we climb.”Ms. Walton is an organizer for activist groups that supported the state’s bail reforms and legalizing recreational marijuana. Last summer, she gained exposure marching against police brutality in the protests following George Floyd’s death.She ultimately decided to run, she said, because Mr. Brown had failed to implement meaningful reforms at the Buffalo Police Department and because of what she saw as his poor response to the coronavirus pandemic.“It was, like, why not?” she said. “Someone has to do it.”Michael D. Regan contributed reporting. More

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      What We Know (So Far) About New York’s Altered Political Landscape

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      As Eric Adams has moderate Democrats feeling bullish, the City Council appears to be shifting leftward.In the end, the Yang Gang went bust.Andrew Yang entered the race for New York mayor in January as the front-runner, but his happy-go-lucky, antipolitical style of campaigning left him unable to hold onto voters’ confidence. As early results came in for the Democratic primary after polls closed on Tuesday, Mr. Yang was on track to finish in a distant fourth place. He’s since conceded.Still, that doesn’t necessarily mean that New Yorkers wanted a boldly ideological candidate either — or one with a wonky political approach. Eric Adams, a longtime Brooklyn politician and a former Republican, whose docket of endorsements and donors arguably looked more similar to Mr. Yang’s than any other candidate’s did and who similarly positioned himself as a no-nonsense Everyman, held a wide lead as early returns arrived.With 83 percent of precinct results in, Mr. Adams currently has 31.7 percent of the first-choice votes. He’s far from the certain winner: New York City elections are using a ranked-choice system this year for the first time, so it’ll probably take weeks to know who will be the Democratic nominee (a.k.a., the next mayor, almost guaranteed).But Mr. Adams is in a very strong position, meaning that even as the New York City Council has drifted leftward in recent years, its voters may choose a mayor with more moderate — and in some cases, even conservative-leaning — politics.“We always say people like divided government, and if you think of the Democratic Party as a very large and diverse party, we can see an element of divided government here,” said Christina Greer, a political scientist at Fordham University and host of “FAQ NYC,” a podcast about New York City politics.Maya Wiley, the leading progressive candidate in the race and Mr. Adams’s closest runner-up, is currently at 22.3 percent — just shy of 10 points behind Mr. Adams. Many elections experts consider a 10-point divide to be the threshold beyond which it becomes virtually impossible for a candidate to overtake the leader in subsequent rounds.If Mr. Adams’s numbers hold, he will outperform his already-strong showing in pre-election polls, demonstrating that he gained momentum only in the last days of the campaign, as Mr. Yang was losing his. Many lapsed Mr. Yang supporters appear to have gone for Mr. Adams instead.“We know that there’s going to be twos and threes and fours,” Mr. Adams told his supporters during a wide-ranging speech on Tuesday night. “But there’s something else we know. We know that New York City said, ‘Our first choice is Eric Adams.’”In the speech, Mr. Adams picked up on the major themes of his campaign, particularly public safety. Just a year after the City Council responded to activists by passing a budget that made major changes to police funding, Mr. Adams ran his campaign in direct opposition to the “defund” narrative.He insisted on both “prevention and intervention,” in campaign speeches, emphasizing his past as a police officer and his support for law enforcement, while also nodding to liberals’ demand for youth programs and other root-cause approaches to crime prevention. On education and business regulation, he has sounded many moderate-to-conservative notes, including robust support for charter schools. His campaign’s ties to conservative and business-friendly groups have drawn scrutiny.But Dr. Greer said that his authenticity and his direct appeals to working-class New Yorkers had seemingly gone a long way. “With eight years of Bill de Blasio and 12 years of Michael Bloomberg, I think people felt left out and ignored,” she said, making a particular note of Mr. Adams’s support outside Manhattan. “I think Adams really tapped into that effectively.”What we know, and when we’ll know morePartly in response to the coronavirus pandemic, election officials allowed any voter to request an absentee ballot in the primary, and about 220,000 New Yorkers did. The deadline for those ballots to be received at election offices isn’t until next week, and then the process of curing ballots will begin.Since election officials can’t move past tallying the first round until all ballots have been counted, there’s no way for them to release more than first-round results until July 9.From there, the complex but ruthlessly simple math of ranked-preference tallying will be executed swiftly, and the winner will be declared.Possibly working in Mr. Adams’s favor is the fact that very few other candidates banded together in strategic coalitions. The one exception is the 11th-hour pact made by Mr. Yang and Kathryn Garcia, who is currently just behind Ms. Wiley, at 19.5 percent. In the final weeks of the race, when Mr. Adams was seen as the front-runner, some progressives mounted an “anyone but Adams” campaign, but the other candidates didn’t formally get behind it. At this point, he would have to have performed dismally in second-choice tallies and lower to lose the election.Is the City Council tilting further left?Put together, Mr. Yang, Mr. Adams and Ms. Garcia — the most prominent centrist candidates — accounted for more than 60 percent of voters’ first-choice picks. Ms. Wiley, Scott Stringer and Dianne Morales, the three progressives, received a combined total of closer to 30 percent.Still, whoever enters Gracie Mansion will have to contend with a New York City Council that appears to be on a leftward trajectory. Progressives gained significant clout during Bill de Blasio’s eight years as mayor, and Tuesday’s primary may have pushed it even further in that direction.Most races remain uncalled, but an array of progressive candidates appeared to be strongly positioned as results came in. Tiffany Cabán, who narrowly lost a closely watched race in 2019 for Queens district attorney, had a wide lead in the race for a council seat that includes the Astoria neighborhood.With Corey Johnson, the speaker, barred by term limits from running for re-election, the council will vote early next year to choose its speaker, in what will be a measure of progressives’ influence under the new mayor.Other New York racesProgressives scored victories in other, slightly less-high-profile elections across the state.Brad Lander, a member of the City Council whose campaign was endorsed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Senator Bernie Sanders and other left-wing figures, earned the most first-place votes in the race for New York City comptroller.Mr. Johnson, the council speaker, whose efforts to find compromise on police reform last year left him at odds with many on the party’s left wing, is in second place. The results for that race also won’t be fully known until July 9 at the earliest.The Manhattan district attorney’s race is technically a statewide position, meaning the race did not use a ranked-choice system. Alvin Bragg — who ran on fighting mass incarceration and racism in policing — appears most likely to win outright, even though he held only a three-percentage-point lead over Tali Farhadian Weinstein, his main rival.In Buffalo, the state’s second-largest city, India Walton — a 38-year-old nurse and democratic socialist organizer — won the Democratic nomination for mayor, defeating a four-term incumbent with close ties to Gov. Andrew Cuomo.If she wins the general election, Ms. Walton would become the first self-described socialist to run a major city since 1960 (because, no, the tiny city of Burlington doesn’t count).On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      In the N.Y.C. Mayoral Race, Some Votes Cost More Than Others

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      Raymond J. McGuire, the former Citigroup executive who mounted a long-shot and apparently unsuccessful Democratic bid for mayor, won 18,503 first-place primary votes. Early indications suggest he and his supporters paid dearly for each of them.Based on preliminary totals, Mr. McGuire’s votes cost his campaign and a so-called super PAC that supported him $910 apiece on average. The figure will probably fall as absentee votes are counted, but it is unclear by how much.Should all 207,500 of the absentee ballots that were sent to Democratic voters be returned, and should Mr. McGuire’s share of first-place votes on those ballots be the same as it was for those cast in person — 2.31 percent — the price-per-vote would drop to $723.Even without the super PAC spending, the preliminary data shows that Mr. McGuire’s votes still cost $568 apiece.A spokeswoman for Mr. McGuire’s campaign had no immediate comment.“I wouldn’t have changed anything that we did,” said Kimberly Peeler-Allen, who helped run the super PAC. “There were a lot of factors at play in this race and the majority of them we had no control over.”Mr. McGuire was not the only Democratic candidate whose robust spending yielded meager returns, according to the early data.Shaun Donovan, a former Obama administration housing secretary and budget director, claimed 17,303 first-place votes. His campaign and a super PAC that was financed mostly by his father combined to spend $630 per vote, the data shows.Even absent the super PAC, Mr. Donovan’s campaign still spent $236 a vote. (As with Mr. McGuire’s, the per-vote figures for Mr. Donovan are expected to change as absentee ballots are counted.)Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller, also had the benefit of spending by a super PAC in addition to his campaign. Combined, the data shows, they spent $313 apiece for the 40,244 first-place votes he won.Not all of the candidates fared as poorly, on a price-per-vote basis.Supporters of Andrew Yang, who contributed to his campaign and to two super PACs that backed him, ended up spending about $130 apiece on his 93,291 first-place votes, according to the preliminary totals.Supporters of Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president and the race’s leader after first-choice votes were counted, spent about $62 apiece on his 253,234 first-place votes.Supporters of Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, spent $45 on each of her 177,722 votes, through her campaign and two super PACs. Ms. Wiley placed second in first-choice votes.Kathryn Garcia, Mr. de Blasio’s former sanitation commissioner, was in third place after first-choice votes were counted. Her supporters spent $34 apiece, via her campaign and a super PAC, on the 155,812 votes that went to her.Dianne Morales, the major candidate in the field who ran furthest to the left and the only one without super PAC support, won more votes than either Mr. McGuire or Mr. Donovan and spent significantly less money: $55 on each of the 22,221 first-place votes she got.The votes of about 800,000 Democrats who voted in person had been tallied by Wednesday, but the count was not yet complete. New Yorkers requested a total of about 220,000 absentee ballots; as of Tuesday, more than 90,763 had been completed and returned. More

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      Maya Wiley Says She Won't Concede: 'I'm Winning.'

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      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.” More

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      Eric Adams Leads in the Mayor’s Race. Here’s What to Know About Him.

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      Mr. Adams, a moderate Democrat whose campaign focused on crime and public safety, has a long history in New York politics and has faced scrutiny over his ethics.Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, had a solid advantage on Wednesday in the Democratic primary for New York mayor, leading his closest competitors, Maya Wiley and Kathryn Garcia, by a sizable margin.Mr. Adams’s lead is not decisive, and the returns so far only factor in first-choice votes cast under the city’s new ranked-choice voting system. It will be some time before an official winner is declared, both because absentee ballots are still outstanding and voters’ subsequent rankings will come into play. Ms. Wiley and Ms. Garcia still have paths to victory.But many New Yorkers are looking to learn more about Mr. Adams, the candidate who currently seems best positioned to win the primary.Mr. Adams himself was already looking to City Hall as he spoke to supporters on election night. “Tonight we took a huge step forward,” he said on Tuesday, before outlining his vision of the city in a speech that was at turns buoyant and defiant.A campaign focused on crime and public safetyDuring the campaign, Mr. Adams carved out a lane as one of the more moderate candidates in the Democratic primary race. He did so in large part by drawing a contrast between his views on policing and crime, and those of left-leaning rivals like Ms. Wiley and Dianne Morales.As public safety became a major issue in the race, following a rise in violent crime in the city, Mr. Adams tried to strike a tricky balance.He trumpeted his credentials as a former police officer and said they gave him the experience needed to address a rise in violent crime, but he also billed himself as a reformer who had taken on police misconduct.“I don’t hate police departments — I hate abusive policing, and that’s what people mix up,” Mr. Adams told The New York Times. In his campaign’s closing weeks, he seemed to bet that voters would understand that distinction.But Mr. Adams, who grew up in Queens, also stressed his working-class background, calling himself a blue-collar candidate who would fight for New Yorkers struggling to make ends meet in an expensive city that had left them behind.He also counted on his ability to court working-class and older minority voters outside Manhattan. The early returns suggest those groups supported him at the polls.Mr. Adams held a news conference over the weekend at the site of a shooting in the Bronx. He has said his experience as a former police officer would help him address rising crime.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesA rise through the ranksMr. Adams spent more than 20 years as a New York City police officer before entering politics. He has said that he was motivated in part to join the force after he was beaten by the police at age 15. Mr. Adams believed that he could change the culture of policing from within.During his time in the department, Mr. Adams was a strong advocate for Black officers. Through his involvement in Black police fraternal organizations — the Grand Council of Guardians and 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, a group that he co-founded — Mr. Adams questioned his superiors publicly, speaking out against discrimination, police brutality and the department’s excessive use of stop-and-frisk tactics.The latter issue, in particular, illustrated the precarious tightrope that Mr. Adams walked during the campaign: Though he once fought the stop-and-frisk policing strategy, which was used disproportionately in New York against Black and Latino men and is reviled by the left, he has also supported its limited use.Some who knew Mr. Adams during his time as a police officer thought even then that his challenges to Police Department leadership were meant to position him for public office. As early as 1994, he had determined he wanted to be mayor, he told The New York Times.In 2006, Mr. Adams retired from policing to run for the State Senate. He won and represented parts of central Brooklyn in Albany until 2013, when he became the first Black person elected Brooklyn’s borough president.Over the years, he cultivated relationships with union leaders and other elected officials, many of whom endorsed his mayoral bid. He also built ties to wealthy donors, who boosted his campaign war chest, and to the lobbyists and party machine that helped him get out the vote on Tuesday.A complex historyMr. Adams’s time in politics also left a track record and a paper trail that made him vulnerable to attacks from his rivals over issues of transparency and ethics.His relationships with lobbyists, donors and developers have come under scrutiny throughout his career, in some cases prompting investigations.Mr. Adams has never been formally accused of misconduct, but a review by The New York Times found that he at times pushed the boundaries of ethics and campaign-finance laws.As a state senator, he was accused of “exceedingly poor judgment” by an investigator who found that he and others had improper links to a company that was trying to become the purveyor of video slot machines at Aqueduct Racetrack. Mr. Adams was the chair of the Senate’s racing and gaming committee at the time.As borough president, he started a nonprofit group that took donations from developers who sought his support for projects or zoning changes, prompting a probe into whether he violated conflict of interest regulations.Mr. Adams said in a statement that he and his campaigns had never been charged “with a serious fund-raising violation, and no contribution has ever affected my decision-making as a public official.”He also accused those questioning his ethics of holding him to a higher standard because he is Black and from a lower-income background.Whether accusations about Mr. Adams’s conduct eroded support for him remains unclear, though ranked-choice voting results to come may offer a fuller picture.But questions about his honesty reached a kind of fever pitch in the final stretch of the campaign after Politico New York reported that Mr. Adams had used conflicting addresses in public records and that he was spending nights at Borough Hall.Other candidates began to question whether Mr. Adams really lived in a townhouse in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn that he has said is his primary residence.Andrew Yang, in particular, accused Mr. Adams of living in a co-op in Fort Lee, N.J., that he owns with his partner. A report from The City found that Mr. Adams did not disclose his ownership of that co-op when he ran for State Senate in 2005.Mr. Adams dismissed the controversy about his residency as a politically motivated effort to shake him from the front-runner status he comfortably occupied in the race’s closing weeks. More

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      Map: NYC Mayoral Primary Election Results

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      New York City voters cast their ballots for mayor on Tuesday, and it became clear that the competitive Democratic race would be decided by the city’s new ranked-choice system. It is likely to be weeks before a winner is known. The map below shows the latest unofficial results for the first round of votes, which […] More