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      Rep. Max Rose Moves Toward Entering New York City Mayor’s Race

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRep. Max Rose Moves Toward Entering New York City Mayor’s RaceThe Staten Island Democrat, coming off a re-election loss, filed paperwork indicating that he is set to enter an already crowded field.Mr. Rose, who is finishing his single term in Congress, attracted attention for a six-second ad in which he called Mayor Bill de Blasio “the worst mayor in the history of New York City.”Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesDec. 10, 2020, 9:11 p.m. ETRepresentative Max Rose, the Staten Island Democrat who was soundly defeated last month in his bid for a second term, signaled on Thursday that he plans to enter an already crowded field in the 2021 mayor’s race in New York City.The evidence of Mr. Rose’s intentions came in a bare-bones filing with the city’s Campaign Finance Board indicating that he had formed a mayoral campaign committee.Neither Mr. Rose nor anyone associated with him returned calls seeking comment on the filing. But the congressman did post a cryptic message on Twitter at around 7:30 p.m. that appeared to telegraph an imminent announcement.He cited Taylor Swift, who announced on Thursday that a new album was forthcoming, saying that the singer was “not the only one previewing news tonight.”“Stay tuned NYC!” he added.The social media tease notwithstanding, Mr. Rose’s filing brought him a significant step closer to vying to become the next mayor of a city that is facing huge challenges caused by the pandemic and the financial crisis it touched off.Several of his congressional allies had suggested they expected him to join the race after losing his re-election bid to Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican member of the State Assembly, in a district that encompasses parts of South Brooklyn in addition to Staten Island — the city’s most conservative congressional district.Ms. Malliotakis, who has been resolute in her support for President Trump throughout his term and re-election campaign, claimed 53 percent of the vote to Mr. Rose’s 47 percent. And although The Associated Press did not declare her the winner until Dec. 1, Mr. Rose had conceded defeat two weeks earlier.Mr. Rose had been far more reluctant himself to criticize Mr. Trump than many of his Democratic colleagues. In April, he went so far as to say that it would be all right with him if the president won re-election if it was because he had reined in the pandemic. He also initially opposed the move to impeach Mr. Trump, but ultimately voted for impeachment.In a nod to the district’s conservative tilt, Mr. Rose, who won election in 2018 by a margin similar to the one he lost by this year, effectively ran his centrist campaign against two opponents: Ms. Malliotakis and Mayor Bill de Blasio.He did not waste words in criticizing Mr. de Blasio, referring to his fellow Democrat in a memorable six-second ad as “the worst mayor in the history of New York City.”Mr. Rose also attended a June demonstration on Staten Island to protest the police killing of George Floyd. Ms. Malliotakis made his participation in the event a focal point in the campaign as she sought to cast him as supporting calls to “defund the police” in a district that is home to many law enforcement officers.He said he had taken part in the protest as a gesture of unity, and stood by his decision to do so on election night even as defeat loomed.Mr. Rose, 34, is among several well-known Democrats who have been rumored to be considering joining a field that already includes more than a dozen candidates, with nearly half viewed as potentially serious contenders.Others who may be set to enter the fray include Andrew Yang, a technology entrepreneur who ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination this year, and Christine Quinn, the former City Council speaker, who placed third in the Democratic mayoral primary in 2013.It is unclear how Mr. Rose’s political persona would play in the mayoral campaign. His positions were on the liberal side for his district but might not be liberal enough to win over a plurality of mainstream Democrats in a citywide primary.On the flip side, several leading candidates are already battling for those voters, and Mr. Rose, a U.S. Army veteran who served in Afghanistan, might appeal to more conservative voters who consider law and order a priority at a time when homicides and shootings are rising in the city.One quality that he would bring to a race that will most likely be expensive is a proven ability to raise money: He collected, and spent, more than $9 million for his re-election campaign, federal campaign finance filings show.Mr. Rose’s filing came amid a flurry of activity in the race, arriving the same day that another Democratic mayoral hopeful, Kathryn Garcia, the city’s former sanitation commissioner, formally announced her candidacy, and two days after Shaun Donovan, a former top housing official in the Obama administration, did the same.They and the other contenders are competing to lead a city that is in the midst of one of its most wrenching and consequential periods in recent history.The coronavirus, which has already been linked to the deaths of more than 24,000 residents, is surging again. On Staten Island, emergency hospital beds were added in November to handle a spike in virus cases.Katie Glueck contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Lawsuit Seeks to Halt Debut of Ranked-Choice Voting in New York

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyLawsuit Seeks to Halt Debut of Ranked-Choice Voting in New YorkThe new system was approved by voters in 2019, but critics, including at least one top mayoral candidate, fear that it may disenfranchise minority voters.Under the new system being challenged in court, when New York City voters go to the polls for next year’s mayoral primary, they would be allowed to choose as many as five candidates, ranked in order of preference.Credit…Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesDana Rubinstein and Dec. 9, 2020Updated 9:03 a.m. ETNext year was supposed to be when New York City would revolutionize how voters choose their mayor — not merely selecting one candidate, but picking as many as five and ranking them in order of preference.New York’s take-no-prisoners political landscape was to be remade: Candidates would most likely be more collegial and would be obliged to reach out to voters beyond their bases in the hope that other candidates’ supporters would list them as a second or third choice. Runoff elections, often expensive and with limited turnout, would be eliminated.But just as the city is poised to implement the ranked-choice voting system, opposition is mounting. Black elected officials have raised objections, arguing that absent substantial voter education, the system will effectively disenfranchise voters of color.At least one leading Black mayoral candidate — Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, who once supported the system — now says it’s being rushed and suggested that New York should emulate Minneapolis, which took years to slowly implement ranked choice.Critics also question whether it makes sense for the city’s problem-prone Board of Elections to roll out such a complicated system during a once-in-a-century pandemic.Now that opposition has coalesced into a court challenge.Six New York City Council members filed suit in State Supreme Court in Manhattan late Tuesday night against New York City, its Board of Elections and its Campaign Finance Board, contending that the city and the two boards had violated the law by failing to adequately explain the software that will be used tabulate the votes and by failing to conduct a sufficient public education campaign to familiarize voters with the new system.The suit seeks to prohibit the city from starting the new system in a February special election, a race that was poised to be a trial run for the June Democratic mayoral primary, which will use the same system and is likely to determine the city’s next mayor.“The board does not comment on pending litigation,” said Valerie Vazquez, a spokeswoman for the elections board. “However, as we have previously stated we will be ready to implement ranked-choice voting just as we successfully implemented a new voting system in 2010 and launched early voting in 2019.”The litigants include the two leaders of the Council’s Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus, who, with their colleagues, criticized the new system during a contentious City Council hearing on Monday.“They say all throughout the country that ranked-choice voting is working well for communities of color,” Laurie A. Cumbo, a Black Democratic councilwoman from Brooklyn, and one of the litigants, said during the hearing on Monday. “Well, New York City is a totally different city.”New York City voters approved ranked-choice voting in 2019. Under the new system, if a candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes, that candidate wins outright. If no candidate wins a majority, the last-place winner is eliminated. The second-choice votes of those who had favored the last-place candidate would be counted instead. The process continues until there is a winner.Among the mayoral candidates who already seemed to be factoring the new voting system into their campaign strategies was Shaun Donovan, the former Obama administration cabinet member who formally announced his run on Tuesday. An “electability” slide show circulated on his behalf argued that “Shaun’s broad appeal makes him a natural second and third choice for voters, even when they are already committed to another candidate.”Good-government groups say that the new system enhances democracy.“This reform will foster more positive, issue-focused campaigns, give voters more choice, ensure that elected officials are accountable to a broader spectrum of their constituents and avoid costly, time consuming and unnecessary runoff elections,” Betsy Gotbaum, executive director of Citizens Union, said in a recent statement.But critics of the system argue that without adequate public education, the system confuses voters and thus disenfranchises them. They also contend that the voting system targets a party system heavily populated by leaders of color.Kirsten John Foy, president of the activism group Arc of Justice, said he was exploring a lawsuit with Hazel N. Dukes, the president of the New York State chapter of the NAACP, arguing that Black and other minority voters would be disenfranchised by ranked choice voting.“Some progressive white folks got together in a room and thought this would be good, but it’s not good for our community,” Ms. Dukes said. “The voters did vote, so we can’t overturn that, but we want a stay because there’s been no education about this in our community.”Mr. Foy also questioned the motives of those leading the effort to enact ranked-choice voting.“The primary argument for ranked-choice voting is that it expands access to elected office for Black and brown officials, but we don’t have that problem,” said Mr. Foy, who listed a string of positions from state attorney general to borough presidents that are held by Black and Latino elected officials. “This is a solution in search of a problem.”Ranked-choice voting has a long and complicated history in the United States.“There was a period over 100 years ago when it was in use in some cities,” but it fell out of favor around World War II, according to David C. Kimball, a political-science professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.In the past two decades, it has gained traction in places including San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., and in Maine.The research on its impact on voter turnout is, however, mixed, he said, and voter education is a must, as American voters are accustomed to voting for just one candidate, not five.“I don’t know quite how to put this politely, but the New York City elections board has trouble tying its shoes, metaphorically speaking,” Professor Kimball said. “So asking them to roll out new voting rules in a matter of months is a big ask.”Emma G. Fitzsimmons contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      5 Highlights of New York Mayor’s Race, as Spike Lee Weighs In

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story5 Highlights of New York Mayor’s Race, as Spike Lee Weighs InRay McGuire grabbed attention with a campaign launch video, as New Yorkers get to know the candidates who have not run for office before.Ray McGuire in his launch video announcing his candidacy for mayor.Credit…Ray McGuire for Mayor, Inc. By More

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      How Dinkins and Giuliani Foretold the Future of American Politics

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      I remember being at the hotel on election night in 1993 where Mayor David Dinkins and his supporters had gathered to celebrate what they hoped would be his re-election. I was a reporter for The Village Voice, and the polls had been close.But it was not to be. At a certain point in the evening, the local cable news network NY1 (just about a year old at the time) called the race for Rudy Giuliani. Shortly after, some members of the mayor’s entourage thundered past me.In the mayhem, I managed to make eye contact with Lee Jones, the mayor’s press secretary, whom I had known since he worked for Mayor Ed Koch (Mr. Dinkins kept him on). I could see he was distraught. “Well,” he said, “by and large, the coalition held. The coalition held.”That may sound like spin, but it wasn’t. We knew each other quite well. I took it that he was just trying to think of something hopeful to say — and in retrospect, he wasn’t wrong.As I’ve thought back on those years in the wake of Mr. Dinkins’s passing last week, I’m floored at the extent to which the politics of New York City foreshadowed the national politics of today. If the American polity consists of two warring camps right now, we might say that the New York of that time helped blaze that unhappy trail.The 1993 race was a rematch of their 1989 contest, when Mr. Dinkins beat Mr. Giuliani by less than 50,000 votes out of nearly two million cast. In the rematch, Mr. Giuliani won by about 53,000.Both men’s coalitions were remarkably sturdy. Even with a series of tumultuous situations — like the AIDS, heroin and crack cocaine epidemics, and dark economic times that forced Mr. Dinkins to enact severe budget cuts — two relatively marginal factors seemed to tip the election. First, Mr. Dinkins lost a few thousand mostly white voters over his too-tentative handling of a riot in the Brooklyn neighborhood Crown Heights and the boycott of two Korean-owned grocery stores by Black residents. Second, Mr. Giuliani benefited from a Staten Island secession referendum that Republicans had led the way to getting on the ballot. It goosed turnout in that borough, which benefited Mr. Giuliani (Republicans knew how to put a finger on the electoral scale even then).Mr. Dinkins’s coalition was liberal, multiracial and multiethnic. It arose and came together over the course of the 1970s and 1980s. For decades before him, New York City politics had been dominated by “the three I’s”: Italy, Ireland and Israel. For three citywide offices — mayor, comptroller and City Council president — it was often the case that one would go to an Italian, one to an Irishman (or by the 1970s, Irishwoman) and one to a Jew.In that arrangement, Black people and Latinos were junior partners, and they could not win the mayoralty because they could never coalesce around a single candidate. Meanwhile, the 1980s were happening: raging inequality and the AIDS crisis; a wave of crime and homelessness; the decade of the rise of the hedge-fund titans and Manhattan real estate celebrities (including you-know-who). In addition, Mr. Koch played increasingly to white racial backlash as the years went on. The Dinkins coalition — Black people, Latinos, gays, liberal Jews, immigrants, assorted others — was an emerging New York that was mostly not invited to the conspicuous prosperity of the ’80s enjoyed by Wall Street financiers and real estate developers. Mr. Dinkins’s most historically significant accomplishment was arguably not anything he did as mayor; it was to have assembled this coalition and, with his widely admired strategist Bill Lynch, proved to the world that it could win.The Giuliani coalition was the traditional and aging New York of wealthy Manhattan elites and white ethnic populations in other boroughs — the police and firefighters, the owners of the hardware and liquor stores in Howard Beach and Bensonhurst (the “red” parts of New York City), the pressmen at the Daily News plant, the sons and daughters of the men and women who had worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during the war.They were white. As such, they were privileged, even if it often didn’t feel that way to them. By and large they did not like the changes, like letting Black and Latino people into their unions and neighborhoods, that the emerging New York was seeking to impose on them. In Mr. Giuliani, they found their avenger.Fundamentally, those two coalitions in our largest city are now our two coalitions in the United States. And just as those two mayoral elections were close, hard-fought referendums on which New York would have power, our recent national elections have followed exactly the same pattern. Emerging America won in 2008 and 2012. Backlash prevailed narrowly in 2016. Then, a few thousand votes switched, and multiracial America won again.In some ways, I feel like I’ve been watching the same movie for 30 years. It even has some of the same stars, saying some of the same kinds of things. Of that 1989 election, Mr. Giuliani once told the journalist Jack Newfield: “They stole that election from me. They stole votes in the Black parts of Brooklyn, and in Washington Heights.”Mr. Dinkins, though a good and decent man, in the end didn’t have the political vision and will to transcend the divisions. Mr. Giuliani, like his friend President Trump, didn’t have them, either (in his case, more by choice).But these days I wonder who can transcend them. I know Joe Biden wants to, but I sure don’t get the feeling the other side wants to play along. Lee Jones was righter than he knew, not just about 1993 but also about what’s unfolded ever since: The two coalitions have not only held; they’ve metastasized. I may be watching this movie the rest of my life.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More