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[Want to get New York Today by email? Here’s the sign-up.]It’s Tuesday. Weather: Watch out for showers and thunderstorms most of the day. The temperature will fall from the mid-70s in the morning to the mid-60s by evening. More
Voters on Tuesday will participate in the city’s first mayoral election using ranked-choice voting, a system that may delay the declaration of a winner until mid-July.When the New York City mayoral primary campaign began, the city was steeped in grave uncertainty about its future. Candidates laid out radically different visions for how they would guide a still-shuttered metropolis out of overlapping crises around public health, the economy and racial injustice. More
New Yorkers are using a new voting system citywide for the first time, but in interviews, many seemed characteristically unfazed: “It’s real easy if people just learn how to read.”A New York City mayoral race that began over Zoom during the height of the pandemic came down to street campaigning in its final hours on Monday, with as many as half a million voters preparing to cast ballots when polls open on Tuesday. More
The party’s growing irrelevance in urban and suburban areas comes at a considerable cost, sidelining conservatives in centers of innovation and economic might.When Jerry Sanders finished his second term as mayor of San Diego in 2012, he was the most prominent Republican city executive in the country. A former police chief close to the business community, Mr. Sanders appeared to be a political role model for other would-be Republican mayors, a moderate who worked with the Obama administration on urban policy and endorsed gay marriage at a pivotal moment. More
Last week I wrote about why I thought Eric Adams is very marginally preferable to Andrew Yang in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary. Yang is likable, and I can see why people have gravitated to his sunny vision of a vibrant, business-friendly city. But electing a totally inexperienced mayor buoyed by hedge fund billionaires and singularly focused on public order seems potentially calamitous. Not because public order isn’t important — everyone wants a safe city — but because it has to be balanced with a commitment to justice. More
On the eve of Tuesday’s primary, the top candidates for mayor of New York City issued their sharpest criticism of the campaign.On the final full day of New York City’s mayoral primary campaign, the leading Democratic candidate, Eric Adams, called a top rival a “liar” and a “fraud.” More
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.” More
This is the first time New Yorkers have been able to vote early in a mayoral primary, and experts said the turnout was pretty good.According to the city’s Board of Elections, 191,197 New Yorkers came to the polls during the early voting period, which began June 12 and ended on Sunday.“It was slow and steady,” said Bruce Gyory, a veteran Democratic strategist who has closely studied the city’s electorate. “It wasn’t like the presidential election with lines around the corner.”The city could be on track to see more than 800,000 Democrats vote in the mayoral primary — more than in the last competitive race in 2013, Mr. Gyory said. That includes early voting, absentee ballots and those who vote in person on Primary Day.The city’s Board of Elections has received about 220,000 requests for absentee ballots, and in a closely fought race like this one, those votes could make a difference. As of Monday, more than 82,000 people had filled out and returned their absentee ballots.If 300,000 Democrats vote early or by absentee ballot, then 500,000 voters on Primary Day would bring the total past 800,000 voters. Any figure above 850,000 would be considered a “healthy turnout” and one million would be impressive, Mr. Gyory said.“My own sense is I think it’s going to cross 850,000,” he said, though he noted that he was watching weather forecasts for rain on Tuesday, which could hinder turnout.If turnout is high, that could help someone like Andrew Yang, the 2020 presidential candidate, who is courting new and disengaged voters. One of Mr. Yang’s campaign managers, Chris Coffey, said he was pleased by signs of higher turnout in neighborhoods like Sunset Park, in Brooklyn, where turnout has historically been low.“We’ve seen lots of irregular voters showing up and lots of neighborhoods showing up in large numbers that don’t usually show up,” Mr. Coffey said. More
