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      Eric Adams Promises to ‘Show America How to Run a City’

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      Mr. Adams, who is leading in the mayoral primary, laid out a middle road between progressive and conservative approaches to policing.Two days after Eric Adams emerged as the likely Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, he made it clear that he would revamp New York’s approach to dealing with crime and suggested that other big cities and the national Democratic Party would be wise to follow suit.Speaking in the tones of a mayor-elect, Mr. Adams laid out a middle road between progressives and conservatives: Fight racism in policing, but step back from a progressive movement that has seen cities slash police budgets, ban police chokeholds and allow more people charged with crimes to be released without bail.On gun control, he called for changing the national focus from assault rifles — which capture attention for their use in mass shootings, especially in suburban schools — to handguns. They are the main weapons in shootings in cities from New York to Atlanta and Detroit, he said, but because most of the victims, like most of the shooters, are “Black and brown, we’ve decided it’s not an issue.”“If the Democratic Party fails to recognize what we did here in New York, they’re going to have a problem in the midterm elections, and they’re going to have a problem in the presidential election,” Mr. Adams said at a news conference outside Brooklyn Borough Hall.Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, holds a commanding lead in the race for the Democratic nomination; after a count of most ballots cast in person, he had nearly 32 percent of first-place votes. He led Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, by nine points, and Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner, by 12 points.The final outcome awaits the city’s new system of ranked-choice voting, where voters select as many as five candidates in order of preference. Thousands of votes will be shifted among the candidates before a final winner is declared. Tens of thousands of absentee ballots must also be counted, and the entire process may take until July 12.But Mr. Adams spent Thursday on a semi-victory lap, taking a bike ride across Brooklyn and using a series of television interviews to lay out his vision for New York and beyond.“I am the face of the new Democratic Party,” he said to cheers from several Black civil servants who were on the way to work in Downtown Brooklyn, and to friendly horn toots from a passing city bus. “I’m going to show America how to run a city.”Much of Mr. Adams’s campaign has been centered on public safety, and he continued to focus on that theme on Thursday.He said he planned to choose a woman as police commissioner, adding that he had already talked to three candidates. He said he would judge candidates by “character” and by their willingness to “create new incentives” for precinct commanders, to promote not based on how many arrests they make, but “how many crimes they prevent.”He urged people to consider what he called “shades of gray” on several contentious policing issues, including a policy change last year in New York that barred judges, in most cases, from requiring cash bail payments. That let more people charged with crimes go free until trial.The current police commissioner, Dermot F. Shea, has blamed the city’s spike in violent crime on that shift, without concrete evidence. Mr. Adams said on MSNBC that while some judges have kept people needlessly behind bars, “too many people are being released that are dangerous.”With a first-time firearms-possession arrest, he said, there may be a way to “put this person on the right pathway” without jail, but someone with several such arrests needs to do prison time, he said.Mr. Adams, a former police captain, also took a nuanced position on police chokeholds; a City Council bill banning the use of the practice was recently overturned in State Supreme Court because the wording of the legislation was vague, the court found.He said that he was opposed to the use of chokeholds because of cases of people being killed by police using the tactic. But he said the City Council bill banning the practice was “not realistic” because it did not take into account the times when an officer might be “fighting for life and death” or to protect civilians.“I know what it is to try to wrestle a knife out of someone’s hand,” said Mr. Adams, adding that he was in favor of revising the law.Even as he rejected some progressive-branded policies, Mr. Adams also embraced some ideas popular with the young, multiracial constituency that supported candidates like Ms. Wiley and Dianne Morales and their call for using strategies outside policing, like improving mental health and social services, to prevent crimes.“We need to change the ecosystem of public safety,” he said, with layered strategies of “prevention, a long-term plan and an intervention” to deal with the current spike in crime. He made it clear that he believed that he could marry the two ideals of safety and ensuring social justice.“America is saying, we want to have justice, and safety, and end inequality,” he said. Mr. Adams acknowledged that that message alone was not enough to win the votes of a majority of New Yorkers; even though he held a significant lead, nearly 70 percent of voters ranked other candidates as their first choice. Still, in four of the city’s five boroughs, he collected the most in-person votes, trailing Ms. Garcia only in Manhattan.Mr. Adams said the discrepancy showed that voters in wealthier, whiter districts saw the public safety crisis through a different lens.“It’s unfortunate that I think a numerical minority that live, basically, they live in safe spaces, don’t understand what’s happening in this city,” Mr. Adams said. If elected mayor, Mr. Adams will no doubt face challenges from the City Council, which is facing a complete overhaul next year: All 51 seats are up for election, and a new officeholder is guaranteed in 32 of them. The turnover is expected to shift the Council, which already favored more aggressive policing reform, even more to the left. “It’s not going to be a repeat of the Giuliani years,” said Susan Kang, an associate professor of political science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “The City Council is not going to just say whatever you say.”The mayoral race is not over. Both Ms. Wiley and Ms. Garcia believe they have paths to victory. Ms. Garcia’s campaign shared a memo saying they expected her to cut into Mr. Adams’s lead after the absentee ballots — slightly more than 100,000 had been received from Democratic voters — are counted. Many of those received by the Board of Elections have come from areas like Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where Ms. Garcia did well.Ms. Wiley’s advisers said they expect her to outperform Mr. Adams and Ms. Garcia in second- and third-choice votes. All three candidates have said that they support ranked-choice voting and will respect the outcome, including Mr. Adams, who has retreated from his and allies’ earlier suggestion that his rivals’ ranked-choice campaign tactics were an effort to suppress Black and Latino votes. More

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      What Did New York’s Primaries Mean for Progressives? It’s Complicated.

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      Progressives cheered the results in down-ballot races and in Buffalo, even as the outcome of the mayoral primary appeared less rosy.They may not win Gracie Mansion, but there’s always Buffalo. And Rochester, too.For progressives in New York State, primary elections on Tuesday night brought a number of victories, even as the biggest apple of them all — New York City’s mayoralty — may elude their grasp.Though Eric Adams amassed a sizable lead over Maya D. Wiley, his top rival, in first-choice votes, liberal candidates celebrated victories in down-ballot races in New York City and in the state’s second and third largest cities, wins that they argue demonstrate their ascendancy at the grass-roots level even as they are struggling to flex their power in Washington.In perhaps the biggest upset of the night, India B. Walton, a democratic socialist, defeated a four-term incumbent in the Democratic mayoral primary in Buffalo and cast her victory as a threat to the longtime party establishment.Ms. Walton had promised to safeguard undocumented immigrants, place a moratorium on new charter schools and cut millions from the Police Department budget by ending the role of officers in most mental health emergency calls.“This victory is ours. It is the first of many,” said Ms. Walton. “If you are in an elected office right now, you are being put on notice. We are coming.”India B. Walton delivered her victory speech after defeating the incumbent mayor of Buffalo, Byron Brown, in a Democratic primary.Robert Kirkham/The Buffalo News, via Associated PressAs New Yorkers prepare to wait weeks for final results in the mayoral primary while absentee ballots are counted and ranked-choice tabulations begin, the early returns across the city and state paint a complicated picture. They highlight voters’ embrace of a diverse slate of candidates but reflect generational divides and continued tension as Democrats navigate their identity in the post-Trump era.While the idiosyncratic politics of deeply Democratic New York City are hardly a bellwether for the nation, the results in the mayoral contest in particular point to a progressive movement still charting its way through the kinds of divisive policy issues that split the Democratic Party during last year’s presidential primary.Three of the top four candidates in the election ran on more moderate messages than Ms. Wiley, particularly around crime and policing, and were rewarded with support from a diverse coalition that spanned all five boroughs.But the early news was brighter for progressives elsewhere. Candidates backed by the Working Families Party won City Council seats in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx. Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, won more than 70 percent of the vote in his primary. Brad Lander, a council member from Park Slope, is leading in the primary for city comptroller.Jumaane Williams, the New York City public advocate, won more than 70 percent of the vote in his primary.Demetrius Freeman for The New York TimesBrad Lander, a council member who was endorsed by the Working Families Party, leads in the comptroller’s race.Elianel Clinton for The New York TimesIn the Democratic primary for Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg was ahead of Tali Farhadian Weinstein, who sank more than $8 million into her own campaign, infuriating liberals because of her spending and ties to Wall Street. Tiffany Cabán, who narrowly lost a race for Queens district attorney in 2019, is leading in a primary for a City Council seat. And Antonio Reynoso, a council member who represents Williamsburg and Bushwick and once cast himself as a “boombox for progressive values,” leads the contest for Brooklyn borough president.In Washington, progressives have found their ambitions curtailed by a razor-thin margin in the Senate and a refusal by moderate Democrats to support eliminating the filibuster.Voting rights legislation failed this week, prompting concerns from many on the left that President Biden and his administration did not mount a fierce enough push for one of their top priorities. As groups of senators draft dueling infrastructure plans, some liberals worry that the administration will jettison proposals to fight climate change and support caregiving in favor of a compromise that can draw Republican support.And, in recent weeks, liberal candidates have lost a number of competitive primary contests. In Virginia, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe defeated four rivals who ran to his left to capture the nomination. Six weeks earlier, Troy Carter, a Louisiana state senator, defeated a left-leaning rival in a special election for a congressional seat.Alvin Bragg led Tali Farhadian Weinstein in the Democratic primary for Manhattan district attorney, though a race call is not expected for days.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesIn New York, the need to count absentee ballots and a new ranked-choice voting system means the Democratic mayoral primary is unlikely to be called until mid-July. But Mr. Adams, a Black retired police captain and Brooklyn’s borough president, captured a strong lead in first-choice votes, winning every borough except Manhattan and showing particular strength in the Bronx and working-class Black neighborhoods in Brooklyn.Mr. Adams built his campaign in opposition to the “defund the police movement,” denouncing his liberal rivals for adopting left-wing slogans that he said threatened the lives of “Black and brown babies” and were being pushed by “a lot of young white affluent people.”“I’m not sure that I would necessarily chose New York City as my bellwether for the country, but there’s no doubt that Adams staked his race on a more moderate position,” said David Axelrod, a former top adviser to President Barack Obama. “There are certainly significant pockets of progressivism in metropolitan areas all over the country; it doesn’t necessarily mean that is the dominant political strain.”As results were tabulated, progressives sought to cast their second-place position as a victory of sorts, one they argued demonstrated their strength in a crowded field.Ms. Wiley, who trails Mr. Adams by about 75,000 votes, urged her supporters to “wait patiently,” arguing that she could pull out an upset victory as the counting continues.In the final weeks of the campaign, she won the backing of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Elizabeth Warren, among other progressive leaders, and liberals largely united behind her candidacy.“Progressives have coalesced around Maya Wiley as a candidate. And it is the coalescing that is the reason there is a progressive candidate in No. 2,” Ms. Wiley said, when asked by reporters to evaluate the performance of left-leaning candidates in the election.Yet some argued that progressives, faced with several candidates competing for the left-wing mantle, had failed to unite early enough around a single candidate. As the campaigns of Scott M. Stringer and Dianne Morales collapsed, the Working Families Party and other left-leaning groups rescinded endorsements and followed Ms. Ocasio-Cortez to rally behind Ms. Wiley as early voting started.“Maya managed to move a lot of voters in a relatively short period of time,” said Sochie Nnaemeka, the New York state director of the Working Families Party. “As we look to the final results in this mayor’s race, I think we feel, overall, there is real progressive ascendancy, and there’s a possibility to continue to elect more candidates with a clear anti-establishment, pro-working people viewpoint.”Some aides and allies of his rivals argue that Mr. Adams evaded the kind of scrutiny that weakened candidates like Mr. Stringer, the city comptroller who stumbled after facing two allegations of sexual misconduct, and Andrew Yang. Others pointed to a deluge of super PAC spending, which largely benefited moderate candidates, including Mr. Adams.But the strong lead Mr. Adams has in the race also renews questions about the progressive movement’s ability to connect with Black and brown voters, particularly older voters who are more conservative on social issues and policing.Mr. Adams’s working-class background enabled him to connect in a way that was more challenging for Ms. Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio and prominent analyst on MSNBC, some progressive strategists say. Mr. Adams, who barely campaigned in Manhattan, cast himself as a messenger of working-class anger and frustration with the management of the city.Rebecca Katz, a strategist who worked for Mr. Stringer, noted that parts of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s district had supported Mr. Adams, who takes a far more conservative position on the role of the police than the congresswoman.“Voters are not ideological if you look at how they’re looking at their candidates,” she said. “You can’t look at these results and say it was a referendum on ideology. This is more a story of which candidates are connecting with voters.” More

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      N.Y.C. Mayor’s Race: Could the Top 3 Change Places?

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      [Want to get New York Today by email? Here’s the sign-up.]It’s Thursday. Weather: Mostly sunny, with a high in the upper 70s. Alternate-side parking: In effect until July 4 (Independence Day). James Estrin/The New York Times and Earl Wilson/The New York TimesIt’s almost time for the ranked-choice process to play out.After Primary Day voting for Democratic candidates in the race for mayor, Eric Adams has a roughly nine-point lead over the second-place Maya Wiley, and stands about 12 points ahead of Kathryn Garcia. But with no candidate poised to reach 50 percent of first-place votes, New Yorkers’ ranked selections will come into play.The standings could still change. But overcoming Mr. Adams’s commanding lead would be tough.[Read more from my colleague Andy Newman on how the race could shake out.]Here’s what to know:Ms. Wiley and Ms. Garcia still have a path — a challenging one.If Ms. Wiley makes it to the final round of the ranked-choice playoff process and is ranked ahead of Mr. Adams on about 60 percent of all ballots where neither is ranked first, she could be victorious.Ms. Garcia would need to do the same by a few percentage points more to win.Those scenarios are not especially likely. Mr. Adams’s popularity among voters who did not rank him first would need to be particularly low, and at least one poll before Primary Day suggested that was not the case.Wait, what about the uncounted ballots?Many first-round votes still have not been tallied: in-person votes from about 15 percent of precincts and tens of thousands of absentee ballots.The ballots would need to overwhelmingly favor one contender to swing the election, but could move the candidates closer to or further from one another.A comeback has happened before.Some supporters of Ms. Wiley or Ms. Garcia cite a mayoral contest in Oakland, Calif., to justify optimism.In that city’s 2010 race, Don Perata, the former head of the California State Senate, led his opponent, Jean Quan, by 8.7 percentage points after the first round. But Ms. Quan garnered 68 percent of the votes from ballots that listed neither of the two candidates first.She narrowly won.But Ms. Quan and another progressive candidate, who finished third, had endorsed each other and rallied against ranking Mr. Perata on the ballot. Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley did not form an alliance with each other.A successful late surge is rare.In 128 ranked-choice races across the country where there was no first-round winner, a candidate trailing by more than eight points after the first round has only won three times, according to FairVote.No one trailing by 10 points has ever been victorious.More on the race for mayor:How Adams Built a Diverse Coalition That Put Him Ahead in the Mayor’s RaceBrooklyn Councilman Unites Progressives to Lead Comptroller’s Race From The TimesModest Rent Increases Approved for 2.3 Million N.Y.C. TenantsN.Y.C.’s Police Chokehold Ban Is Struck Down by CourtHow India Walton Pulled It Off in the Buffalo Mayoral PrimaryOn the Scene: A Summer Night Down the Shore in JerseyWant more news? Check out our full coverage.The Mini Crossword: Here is today’s puzzle.What we’re readingThe disgraced R&B artist R. Kelly was transferred to a jail in Brooklyn this week ahead of his federal trial in August. [Daily News]The state attorney general’s office will not bring criminal charges against officers in Nassau County who opened fire and killed a 19-year-old in 2020. [QNS]A nearly 900-pound white shark has been spotted off the coast of Long Island and the Jersey Shore over the past several days. [NBC 4 New York]And finally: No more to-go cocktailsMore than a year after Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo imposed it to help quell the coronavirus raging through the state, New York’s state of emergency will end today, the governor said.But the change comes with the loss of one popular pandemic-era practice: the executive order that had allowed bars and restaurants to sell to-go and delivery alcoholic beverages will also end after today, New York State’s Liquor Authority said on Twitter.[Read more from my colleagues Daniel E. Slotnik and Dan Levin on the change.]The state of emergency was declared on March 7, 2020, as New York City became one of the world’s hardest-hit places for Covid-19. Its end is another welcome sign of the state’s steady march back toward normalcy. The governor relaxed most of New York’s remaining virus restrictions last week.But many consumers have grown accustomed to takeout tequila and walkaway wine, and many bars and restaurants have come to rely on the business they generated.Andrew Rigie, the executive director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, said the announcement came as a shock to some of his members, who thought takeout alcohol would be allowed at least through July 5, when the current rules were set to expire.“It’s a loss of an important revenue stream that’s helping them stay afloat,” Mr. Rigie said.It’s Thursday — pour one out.Metropolitan Diary: Hot pink umbrella Dear Diary:I was returning to work from a coffee run when I got caught in the start of a rainstorm without my umbrella.When I got to the corner at 77th Street and Columbus, I just missed the light to cross. A long line of waiting cars began its procession. I stood there, getting soaked.Then the downpour over me suddenly stopped. I whirled around. An older woman standing beside me had put her hot pink umbrella over the two of us.“I can keep you dry for a little while,” she said.I thanked her, laughing a little.“Was my misery so apparent?”“Your hair was wet.”The light changed, and we crossed the street together under the shelter of her umbrella.“How far do you have to go?” she asked.“Just here,” I said, pointing to the right. “I work at the museum.”She smiled.“Well,” she said, walking off, “have a lovely day!”— Camille JettaNew York Today is published weekdays around 6 a.m. Sign up here to get it by email. You can also find it at nytoday.com. More

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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