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      How Andrew Yang Went from Front-Runner to Fourth Place

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      For months, Andrew Yang seemed like he was exactly what New York City was looking for in a mayor.He was relentlessly positive at a time when the city, still locked down during the pandemic, was somber. While other candidates were stuck in a loop of online mayoral forums, he seized attention by holding in-person events, capitalizing on his star power as a 2020 presidential candidate.He leapt to the top of polls, drawing the affection of wealthy donors and envy from the race’s more established candidates. But as the race’s sudden front-runner, Mr. Yang began to draw more scrutiny from the news media and his rivals, and bit by bit, he lost ground.Eric Adams was the first to pass him, and others would follow. By primary night, Mr. Yang was the first candidate to concede, far back in fourth place.His collapse was a result of an accumulation of factors: self-inflicted wounds, a perception that he was out of his depth, and the city’s changing environment.The pall that had fallen over New York had started to lift: Mr. Yang had campaigned on reopening the city, but the city had reopened without him. And now New Yorkers seemed far more worried about crime, an ideal scenario for Mr. Adams, a former police captain and the current Brooklyn borough president.Mr. Yang tried to change his message and tone, but the shift was too late and seemed to alienate some of his core followers.In the early stages of the mayoral campaign, Mr. Yang held far more in-person events than his rivals.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesIn interviews with campaign staffers and surrogates, supporters and opponents, the diagnoses of Mr. Yang’s electoral maladies span the spectrum: He fumbled once it became clear that celebrity alone could not carry the day; he did not try hard enough to reach Black and Latino voters. His campaign was too media-driven, yet he never fully relinquished his Twitter account to more responsible hands. He failed to master the city’s intricacies, and did not turn on-the-ground energy into votes.“When you’re out in the streets and in the communities, and people are literally shouting at him, ‘I’m going to vote for you,’ what’s the step two?” asked Grace Meng, a congresswoman from Queens who endorsed Mr. Yang. “Step-one level of excitement isn’t enough.”In the initial stages of his campaign, it seemed like Mr. Yang was everywhere. While the rest of the field held virtual forums and fund-raisers, he was on the streets, touring Flushing, Queens, and Brownsville in Brooklyn, and visiting Hwa Yuan, a 54-year-old Chinatown restaurant struggling to survive the pandemic. He sat for interviews with Wolf Blitzer and “The View,” and won big-name endorsements from Representative Ritchie Torres of the Bronx, and Martin Luther King III.Mr. Yang, who declined to be interviewed for this article, vowed to deliver $2,000 a year in guaranteed cash to the city’s 500,000 poorest New Yorkers. It was far from the universal basic income plan that drove his presidential campaign, and he never clearly explained how he would pay for it, but it still forced some of his rivals to respond with cash relief plans of their own.At campaign events like the reopening of Coney Island, Mr. Yang was relentlessly positive.James Estrin/The New York TimesHe had to quarantine when a campaign staffer got Covid, and then isolate again when he got it himself. He suffered through a kidney stone. But little seemed like it could stop him, not even a series of gaffes.He suggested that New York should put a casino on Governors Island, a green respite in the harbor where casinos are illegal. He released a video of a local “bodega” that seemed to suggest to social media critics that he did not know what a bodega was. He incited the left when he suggested he would crack down on street vendors — many of them undocumented workers with few other options at their disposal.Mr. Yang, 46, also withstood ridicule after telling The New York Times how he spent much of the pandemic in his second home upstate. He noted the challenges of fulfilling his obligations as a CNN commentator from his apartment in Manhattan, explaining, “Can you imagine trying to have two kids on virtual school in a two-bedroom apartment, and then trying to do work yourself?” Many New Yorkers had no trouble imagining that at all.“I think we took a lot of cannons for a long time, some of it justifiable,” said Chris Coffey, one of Mr. Yang’s two campaign managers, who was speaking by phone from Governors Island, where the Yang campaign was having a postelection picnic whose location was intentionally ironic (and where there were in fact cannons). “It’s hard to know what causes the ship to eventually take on water. I still think most of it is the race just changed.”Mr. Yang’s nonstop campaign schedule did come to a halt when he had to isolate after testing positive for Covid-19. Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesTwo weeks in particular stood out to campaign supporters as the turning point in Mr. Yang’s fortunes. On May 10, Mr. Yang sent out a tweet that was drafted by a Jewish adviser, and vetted by Mr. Coffey. At the time, the Israeli army and Hamas were exchanging fire, a dramatic ratcheting up of tensions that killed civilians on both sides, but particularly Palestinians.“I’m standing with the people of Israel who are coming under bombardment attacks, and condemn the Hamas terrorists,” Mr. Yang said. “The people of NYC will always stand with our brothers and sisters in Israel who face down terrorism and persevere.”Nothing about the tweet was out of step with how New York politicians typically talk about Israel. The city is home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, and Mr. Adams had made a similar statement. But Mr. Yang has nearly two million Twitter followers, and his tweet drew attention from all sides.Mr. Yang received unwanted praise from Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Stephen Miller, the Trump adviser, and unwanted condemnation from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who said that Mr. Yang’s remarks, followed by his plan to attend a Muslim event in Queens, were “utterly shameful.”The episode led the campaign to tighten its process for reviewing urgent policy tweets, Mr. Coffey said, requiring that all of them get approval from both him and Sasha Neha Ahuja, Mr. Yang’s other campaign manager.On May 19, Mr. Yang demonstrated ignorance about the debt load of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, whose subway and bus system he had proposed to take over from the state. The next day, he failed to understand a question about a controversial law that protected police disciplinary records; hours earlier, he had proposed creating homeless shelters for victims of domestic violence, even though New York City has operated such shelters for years.In the race’s last stages, Mr. Yang campaigned alongside Kathryn Garcia, and encouraged his followers to rank her second.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesIn retrospect, rival campaign aides said that Mr. Yang erred from the beginning by not expressing more humility and a hunger to learn the New York City political ropes from those who know them.Peter Brown, the chief strategist for Kathryn Garcia’s campaign, said he disagreed with the Yang campaign’s decision to release internal polling that at times conjured a sense of the near-inevitability of victory. Instead, Mr. Brown suggested that it would have been wiser to release a memo minimizing expectations, portraying Mr. Yang as an overachieving underdog who was going to have to work hard.Micah Lasher, the campaign manager for the city comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, made a similar point, and harkened back to Hillary Clinton’s run for the Senate.“Hillary Clinton came in 2000 and demonstrated a surprising humility and interest in learning, and there was a version of that that Yang could have done,” Mr. Lasher said. “Instead, they did the opposite: ‘We’re here, we are big, we are going to win.’ That was the beginning and end of their game plan.”By the end of the campaign, Mr. Yang’s camp had shifted yet again — the preternaturally upbeat Mr. Yang turned negative.Mr. Yang used a recent spate of anti-Asian attacks to push for more public safety measures, including getting people with untreated mental illness off the streets.Andrew Seng for The New York TimesAfter he spent months publicly asking Ms. Garcia to serve as his deputy in City Hall, her poll numbers rose and he started attacking her record as sanitation commissioner. He routinely suggested Mr. Adams lacked a moral compass. And he futilely tried to outflank Mr. Adams on crime.“Yes, mentally ill people have rights, but you know who else have rights? We do: the people and families of the city,” Mr. Yang said at the final debate. “We have the right to walk the street and not fear for our safety because a mentally ill person is going to lash out at us.”Mr. Yang was speaking from some personal experience. As an Asian American man, he was a member of a community that had been victim to a spike in hate crimes, some of them committed by New Yorkers with histories of mental illness. Polls had found that economic recovery and moving beyond Covid were no longer top of mind for voters, and Mr. Yang was diverging from his original message.“Our core issues faded not just from first to second, but to third,” said Eric Soufer, a senior adviser to the Yang campaign. “You can’t keep running a campaign based on the same thing, when the fundamentals change like that.”But some campaign staff members acknowledged that they became disillusioned by some of Mr. Yang’s shift in positions, and how they did not comport with the man who promised to be the anti-poverty mayor, who vowed to institute guaranteed income for poor New Yorkers and help establish a public bank.As the primary night results were released, Mr. Yang became the first mayoral candidate to concede.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times“At the end, there wasn’t a clear, cogent argument of what he stood for that resonated,” said Ron Kim, a Queens assemblyman who endorsed Mr. Yang. “If I could go back, I would have encouraged him to stick with what he was known for, which was being an innovator, a person who can deliver out-of-the-box thinking on solutions for economic growth and jobs.”In the race’s last stages, Mr. Yang threw his support to Ms. Garcia, encouraging his supporters to rank her second. Though they campaigned together, she did not ask the same of her supporters; she said she had hoped to piggyback on Mr. Yang’s popularity in certain sectors of the city.Mr. Yang did perform well with heavily Asian communities in Queens like Elmhurst and Flushing, as well as in heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn, like Borough Park. He did not do nearly as well in Manhattan, his home borough, where he garnered 10 percent of the in-person vote; Ms. Garcia captured the most votes in that borough.“There were some tensions within the team where people would say, ‘Well, you can’t out-cop the cop,’” Mr. Yang said in an episode of his podcast that aired Monday.“For me,” he added, “both common sense and the numbers indicated that crime was going to be the number one issue.”And despite being the self-described ideas candidate, Mr. Yang did not have enough of them to entice voters.“As the person who was getting most of the attention, the race became a referendum on him,” said Stu Loeser, who advised the campaign of Ray McGuire, the former Citigroup executive. “And he proved himself to be a callow, unsubstantial, often dimwitted person.” More

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      New York Mayor’s Race in Chaos After Elections Board Pulls Back Results

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      The extraordinary sequence of events seeded further confusion about the outcome, and threw the closely watched Democratic primary contest into a new period of uncertainty.The New York City mayor’s race plunged into chaos on Tuesday night when the city Board of Elections released a new tally of votes in the Democratic mayoral primary, and then removed the tabulations from its website after citing a “discrepancy.”The results released earlier in the day had suggested that the race between Eric Adams and his two closest rivals had tightened significantly.But just a few hours after releasing the preliminary results, the elections board issued a cryptic tweet revealing a “discrepancy” in the report, saying that it was working with its “technical staff to identify where the discrepancy occurred.”By Tuesday evening, the tabulations had been taken down, replaced by a new advisory that the ranked-choice results would be available “starting on June 30.”Then, around 10:30 p.m., the board finally released a statement, explaining that it had failed to remove sample ballot images used to test its ranked-choice voting software. When the board ran the program, it counted “both test and election night results, producing approximately 135,000 additional records,” the statement said. The ranked-choice numbers, it said, would be tabulated again.The extraordinary sequence of events seeded further confusion about the outcome, and threw the closely watched contest into a new period of uncertainty at a consequential moment for the city.For the Board of Elections, which has long been plagued by dysfunction and nepotism, this was its first try at implementing ranked-choice voting on a citywide scale, and skeptics had expressed doubts about the board’s ability to pull off the process despite its successful use in other cities.Under ranked-choice voting, voters can list up to five candidates on their ballots in preferential order. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of first-choice votes in the first round, the winner is decided by a process of elimination: As the lower-polling candidates are eliminated, their votes are reallocated to whichever candidate those voters ranked next, and the process continues until there is a winner.The Board of Elections released preliminary, unofficial ranked-choice tabulations on Tuesday afternoon, showing that Mr. Adams — who had held a significant advantage on primary night — was narrowly ahead of Kathryn Garcia in the ballots cast in person during early voting or on Primary Day. Maya D. Wiley, who came in second place in the initial vote count, was close behind in third place.A few hours later, the board disclosed its unspecified discrepancy, and it was not at all clear Tuesday night how accurate the most recent tally was, or if it was accurate at all.The results may well be scrambled again: Even after the Board of Elections sorts through the preliminary tally, it must count around 124,000 Democratic absentee ballots. Once they are tabulated, the board will take the new total that includes them and run a new set of ranked-choice elimination rounds, with a final result not expected until mid-July.New York Primary Election ResultsSee full results and maps from the New York City mayoral race and other primaries.Some Democrats, bracing for an acrimonious new chapter in the race, are concerned that the incremental release of results by the Board of Elections — and the discovery of a possible error — may stir distrust of ranked-choice voting and sow divisions along racial and class lines when the outcome is ultimately announced.In a tweet on Tuesday evening, Mr. Adams sought to project assuredness.“Earlier today, the Board of Elections released a ranked choice voting simulation based on last week’s election results that they have since acknowledged include ‘discrepancies,’” Mr. Adams wrote. “We are waiting for an explanation and still confident in our lead.”If elected, Mr. Adams would be the city’s second Black mayor, after David N. Dinkins. Some of Mr. Adams’s supporters have already cast the ranked-choice process as an attempt to disenfranchise voters of color, an argument that intensified among some backers on Tuesday afternoon as the race had appeared to tighten, and is virtually certain to escalate should he lose his primary night lead to Ms. Garcia, who is white.Surrogates for Mr. Adams have suggested without evidence that an apparent ranked-choice alliance between Ms. Garcia and another rival, Andrew Yang, could amount to an attempt to suppress the votes of Black and Latino New Yorkers; Mr. Adams himself claimed that the alliance was aimed at preventing a “person of color” from winning the race.In the final days of the race, Ms. Garcia and Mr. Yang campaigned together across the city, especially in neighborhoods that are home to sizable Asian American communities, and appeared together on campaign literature.To advocates of ranked-choice voting, the round-by-round shuffling of outcomes is part of the process of electing a candidate with broad appeal. Mr. Adams has said that he would accept the results of the election, even as he and his allies have long been critical of ranked-choice voting.But if Ms. Garcia or Ms. Wiley were to prevail, the process — which was approved by voters in a 2019 ballot measure — would likely attract fresh scrutiny, with some of Mr. Adams’s backers and others already urging a new referendum on it. By Tuesday night, though, it was the Board of Elections that was attracting ire from seemingly all corners.Betsy Gotbaum, the city’s former public advocate who now runs Citizens Union, a good-government group, said “the entire country is watching” the Board of Elections. “New Yorkers deserve elections, and election administrators, that they can have the utmost faith in,” Ms. Gotbaum added.Kathryn Garcia, one of Mr. Adams’s chief rivals, said it was important to ensure “that New York City’s voices are heard.”Hilary Swift for The New York TimesWhile it is difficult, it is not unheard-of for a trailing candidate in a ranked-choice election to eventually win the race through later rounds of voting — that happened in Oakland, Calif., in 2010, and nearly occurred in San Francisco in 2018.The winner of New York’s Democratic primary, who is almost certain to become the city’s next mayor, will face Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, who won the Republican primary.According to the now-withdrawn tabulation released Tuesday, Ms. Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, nearly made it to the final round. She finished closely behind Ms. Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner, before being eliminated in the penultimate round of the preliminary exercise.After the count of in-person ballots last week, Ms. Garcia had trailed Ms. Wiley by about 2.6 percentage points. Asked if she had been in touch with Ms. Wiley’s team, Ms. Garcia suggested there had been staff-level conversations.“The campaigns have been speaking to each other,” Ms. Garcia said in a phone call on Tuesday afternoon, saying the two candidates had not yet spoken directly. “Hopefully we don’t have to step in with attorneys. But it is about really ensuring that New York City’s voices are heard.”Maya Wiley, another top contender, renewed her call to “count every vote.”Hilary Swift for The New York TimesMs. Wiley ran well to the left of Ms. Garcia on a number of vital policy matters, including around policing and on some education questions. Either candidate would be the first woman elected mayor of New York, and Ms. Wiley would be the city’s first Black female mayor.“I said on election night, we must allow the democratic process to continue and count every vote so that New Yorkers have faith in our democracy and government,” Ms. Wiley said in a statement on Tuesday. “And we must all support its results.”Mr. Adams, a former police captain and a relative moderate on several key issues, was a non-starter for many progressive voters who may have preferred Ms. Garcia and her focus on competence over any especially ideological message.But early results suggested that Mr. Adams had significant strength among working-class voters of color, and some traction among white voters with moderate views.City Councilman I. Daneek Miller, an Adams supporter who is pressing for a new referendum on ranked-choice voting, suggested in a text message on Tuesday that the system had opened the door to “an attempt to eliminate the candidate of moderate working people and traditionally marginalized communities,” as he implicitly criticized the Yang-Garcia alliance.“It is incumbent on us now to address the issue of ranked voting and how it is being weaponized against a wide portion of the public,” said Mr. Miller, the co-chair of the Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus on the City Council.Other close observers of the election separately expressed discomfort with the decision to release a ranked-choice tally without accounting for absentee ballots.“There is real danger that voters will come to believe a set of facts about the race that will be disproven when all votes are in,” said Ben Greenfield, a senior survey data analyst at Change Research, which conducted polling for a pro-Garcia PAC. “The risk is that this could take a system that’s already new and confusing and increase people’s sense of mistrust.”Dana Rubinstein, Jeffery C. Mays, Anne Barnard, Andy Newman and Mihir Zaveri contributed reporting. More

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      What to Expect as Early Ranked-Choice Results Are Released in New York

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      Absentee ballots won’t be included, but data to be released Tuesday could signal the way vote totals will shift as the field is officially winnowed.New Yorkers will get one step closer on Tuesday to learning who their next mayor is likely to be.Because an initial count of ballots showed that none of the Democratic candidates got more than 50 percent of the first-choice votes cast by those who voted in person last Tuesday or during the early voting period, the city’s new ranked-choice system has kicked in.Voters could rank up to five candidates in the mayor’s race, and the Democratic nominee, who is almost certain to be next mayor, will now be decided through a process of elimination that begins on Tuesday.Here’s what you need to know:How will the ranked-choice system play out on Tuesday?The city’s Board of Elections is set to reveal the first, preliminary round of ranked-choice results, which will give a fuller, if still incomplete, picture of how the vote totals are shaking out.Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, led Maya D. Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, by 9.4 percentage points after first-choice votes were counted, and he was ahead of Kathryn Garcia, a former city sanitation commissioner, by about 12 percentage points.A winner will not be certified on Tuesday, in part because tens of thousands of absentee ballots will not be included in the preliminary tally. It is also difficult, but mathematically possible, for either Ms. Wiley or Ms. Garcia to catch Mr. Adams.The elimination rounds work like this: The candidate with the least first-choice votes is eliminated. Those votes are then reallocated to the candidates whom his or her voters ranked second. The candidate in last place after that reallocation is then eliminated, with their votes reallocated to second choices, and so on, until two candidates remain. The one with the most votes is the winner.Voters casting their ballots on Primary Day at a public school in Upper Manhattan. An initial ranked-choice tally to be released on Tuesday could indicate which candidates had the broadest appeal.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesAre the elimination-round results final?Not yet.What will happen on Tuesday is essentially an exercise: It will show only who would win based on votes that have already been tallied — that is, who would win if, hypothetically, there were no absentee ballots. Later, after absentee ballots have been counted, the board will take the new total that includes them and run a new set of elimination rounds — the real ones, for the final result.The initial ranked-choice tally may still offer an important snapshot of which candidates had the broadest appeal, as well as insight into how voters grouped, or excluded, certain candidates.As of Monday, there were around 124,000 outstanding Democratic absentee ballots that had not been counted, and more might still trickle in until the deadline on Tuesday.On July 6, there will be a fresh round of results that is expected to include some absentee ballots, and a more complete set of results is expected the following week.What other ranked-choice voting results will be released on Tuesday?The tally will include results for all races in which ranked-choice voting was used, including mayor, comptroller and City Council.In the Democratic primary for comptroller, Brad Lander, a councilman from Brooklyn, leads Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker, by almost 9 percentage points. Mr. Lander has said he looks forward to seeing the tabulation process play out.“Democracy is worth waiting for and we’re looking forward to seeing the ranked vote tabulation tomorrow,” Mr. Lander said.Jumaane Williams has been declared the winner in the public advocate primary.No winner has been declared in the six competitive primaries — five Democratic, one Republican — for borough president, but several candidates received close to, or more than, 40 percent of first-choice votes. Dozens of Democratic City Council primary races also remain undecided.Kathryn Garcia’s campaign expects to gain ground when absentee ballots are counted.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesMaya Wiley trailed Mr. Adams by 9.4 percentage points after the first tally of votes.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesDoes Eric Adams have an insurmountable lead?In most ranked-choice elections in the United States, whoever wins the most first-place votes ends up the final winner. But it is not unprecedented for a candidate trailing in first-place votes after an initial tally to get enough second- and third-place votes to surmount the gap.In a 2018 congressional race in Maine, a Democrat, Jared Golden, defeated a Republican front-runner after votes for independent candidates were reallocated to him. And in a mayoral race in Oakland in 2010, the front-running incumbent lost after the elimination rounds reallocated votes to the eventual winner, Jean Quan.In any case, the New York City mayor’s race is not over. A range of political observers say the final difference between the top two finishers will likely be closer than Mr. Adams’s 9-point lead after the first round of counting.The campaigns of Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley have been busy with calculators, maps of voter-turnout results and various polls hinting at what share of other candidates’ votes will go to each of them and to Mr. Adams.The data, they have said, suggests the race is tighter than it looks after the initial ballot tally, and that one of them could still win.A new study by the group Data For Progress suggests that Ms. Garcia can still beat Mr. Adams, and that the gap between him and Ms. Wiley could be within the study’s margin of error.The study sought to combine voters’ professed ranking patterns with their actual first-choice votes: Pollsters asked 601 likely voters on Primary Day how they planned to rank, or had ranked, candidates and then weighted the results to the first-place votes counted so far.Ms. Garcia’s campaign, according to a memo shared last week, expects her to gain considerable ground in the absentee ballot count, because those ballots have been received in higher numbers in districts where she beat both Mr. Adams and Ms. Wiley — districts where in-person turnout was also very high.Campaign advisers for Ms. Wiley last week mapped out how she could prevail in the elimination rounds. Their path to victory, essentially, requires Ms. Garcia to get many of Andrew Yang’s second-choice votes, and Ms. Wiley to get many of Ms. Garcia’s.As Ms. Wiley’s advisers saw it: The top three rivals and Mr. Yang would split the lower-ranking candidates’ votes, with Ms. Wiley picking up a large share from Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller. Once Mr. Yang is eliminated, Ms. Wiley would get few of his votes, but Ms. Garcia, they believed, would get many, especially in the heavily Asian American districts where she campaigned with Mr. Yang in the final days. If Ms. Wiley then led Ms. Garcia, she might inherit enough of her votes to take the lead.The conclusion, as one Wiley adviser, Jon Paul Lupo, put it, was that “we’re in a nail-biter.”So when will we know the results of the mayor’s race?The Board of Elections is confident that it will be able to certify the results of the entire election, including ranked-choice voting contests and non-ranked contests like races for district attorney and judges, starting the week of July 12.Under changes to election rules that were passed last year, voters are allowed to “cure” or correct errors with mail-in ballot envelopes that might prevent their ballots from being counted. The deadline for receiving cured ballots is July 9.After the board receives those ballots, they will run the ranked-choice voting software again the week of July 12. The results will be used to create the official report for certification.The Associated Press will be closely watching the results that the board releases, said David Scott, the organization’s vice president and managing editor.“Our standard is the same as in any election,” he said in an interview. “We will call it when we are confident the trailing candidates can’t catch up.” More

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      Time to Get Some Ranked-Choice Voting Results

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      [Want to get New York Today by email? Here’s the sign-up.]It’s Tuesday. Weather: Sunny early, then cloudier in the afternoon, with scattered thunderstorms. High in the mid-90s, but because of the humidity it will seem like 100 or more. Alternate-side parking: In effect until Sunday (Independence Day). Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesPrimary Day may have been one week ago. But many races across the city — including the Democratic primary for mayor — are not finished because of ranked-choice voting. Today, elections officials are expected to reveal the first, preliminary round of ranked-choice results, bringing New Yorkers one step closer to knowing who is most likely to become mayor, among other races.[Eric Adams received the most first-choice in-person votes last week. It is difficult, but mathematically possible, for two other candidates to catch up to him.]What happens today?Elections officials will run through the ranked-choice ballots for all votes cast in person on Primary Day and during early voting, offering a fuller (but incomplete) picture of how votes are adding up.A process of elimination will take place that works like this: The candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated. Those votes are then reallocated to the candidates whom his or her voters ranked second. The candidate in last place after that is then eliminated, with the votes reallocated to each voter’s next choice, and so on, until two candidates remain. The candidate with the most votes would be the winner.In the Democratic race for mayor, Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, led Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, by 9.4 percentage points after first-choice votes were counted. Mr. Adams was ahead of Kathryn Garcia, a former city sanitation commissioner, by about 12 points.After running through the ranked-choice votes, those numbers might change.What happens next?The results to be announced on Tuesday won’t be final, in part because tens of thousands of absentee ballots will not be included.The results will show only who would win if there were no absentee ballots. Later, after absentee ballots have been counted, elections officials will run a new set of elimination rounds for the final result, which may take at least two more weeks.As of Monday, there were around 124,000 outstanding Democratic absentee ballots that had not been counted, and more might trickle in before the deadline today.From The TimesLawmakers Sue N.Y.P.D., Saying They Were Beaten With Bicycles at ProtestPolice Officers Will ‘Flood’ Times Square After Another Bystander Is ShotTrump’s Lawyers Make Late Bid to Fend Off Charges Against His BusinessNew York and New Jersey Need an $11B Tunnel. Will Biden Make It Happen?Liquor Laws Once Targeted Gay Bars. Now, One State Is Apologizing.Want more news? Check out our full coverage.The Mini Crossword: Here is today’s puzzle.What we’re readingIn last week’s citywide primary election, voter turnout fell in some areas that were hard-hit by Covid-19. [The City]Several people were arrested when police officers clashed with people celebrating Pride in Washington Square Park. [Gothamist]A police officer was injured after being shot with a BB gun on Staten Island, officials said. [N.Y. Post]And finally: A vibrant Pride weekend The Times’s Julia Carmel writes:New York’s Pride celebrations and protests came back with a vengeance over the weekend, after a muted celebration last year because of the pandemic.Tens of thousands of people took over the streets of Greenwich Village on Sunday, starting impromptu dance parties and embracing the freedom of being together again.Ahlasia Hunter, 23, who was attending her first Pride, danced and cheered from atop a traffic barricade on Sunday afternoon.“Bro, the energy is amazing,” Ms. Hunter said. “If you don’t have a bucket list, you need to start a bucket list — you’ve got to come to Pride.”Last year, as people were encouraged to stay home because of the pandemic, the Pride March, which was celebrating its 50th anniversary, was reduced to a procession of several dozen people with no in-person audience.Though the final weekend of June usually boasts hundreds of Pride events and draws millions of visitors to New York, the largest Pride event in 2020 was the second annual Queer Liberation March — an event that has drawn support for being an anti-police and anti-corporate alternative to more commercial gatherings.Pride also arrived last year during the Black Lives Matter marches and demonstrations that followed the murder of George Floyd. The groundswell prompted popular events like the Dyke March to redirect supporters to Black-led marches and rallies.This year, though the Pride March was virtual once again, thousands of people streamed down Fifth Avenue on Saturday for the Dyke March, while the Queer Liberation March, held for the third time, brought thousands more to the streets on Sunday afternoon.“I’ve been stuck inside for the past year,” said Amaris Cook, 19, who traveled from Springfield, Mass., to attend the Queer Liberation March. “It’s just great to be out again and see other people.”It’s Tuesday — dance in the streets.Metropolitan Diary: Spare tissue Dear Diary:My wife and I were on an escalator at the Port Authority Terminal, on our way home from the theater. I asked my wife, who was two steps ahead of me, if she had a tissue.She said yes and that she would give me one when we reached the top.Suddenly, a hand holding a small pack of tissues reached over my shoulder. I turned to see a woman standing behind me with a smile on her face.“Here you go,” she said, “and keep the package.”— Stuart SchwartzNew 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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      The Mike Pence Saga Tells Us More Than We Want to Know

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. I was hoping to pick up where we left off last week, with the New York City mayoral primary and our new ranked-choice voting system. Assuming Eric Adams holds on to his lead, what do you think his win says about the state of the city — and of the Democratic Party?Gail Collins: Bret, this is why I love conversing with you. I’ve been hearing Republicans howl about the negotiations with Joe Biden on spending, and I was dreading a discussion on that subject.Bret: Biden gets out a little over his skis with a dumb remark, publicly admits he screwed up, pledges to keep his word on a bipartisan bill. Imagine that.Gail: Well, the city election is definitely a more interesting topic and I can see why Eric Adams intrigues you. He’s a Black former police officer who ran on his crime-fighting skills. Politically he’s a moderate — by New York standards, anyway. And talking with his supporters after the vote, I did get the impression that some were most concerned with blocking off Maya Wiley, the only real leftie with a chance of winning.Of course while the left was getting bad news in New York City, regular Buffalo Democrats were discovering their longtime mayor had lost the primary to a Black female socialist. Hoping to hear a lot more discussion about India Walton as we slowly make our way through this political year.Nothing is for sure yet in the city — thanks to our new preferential voting system New Yorkers may not get the final word on who won the primary for ages. But if it’s Adams, it could send a cheerful message to people like Chuck Schumer, who’s up for re-election next year. There’s been speculation about whether Schumer might be challenged by a progressive.Bret: New system or not, I still don’t understand why it should take forever to know the results of a municipal election. But I’ll be happy if Adams holds on to his lead, for lots of reasons.One good reason to cheer an Adams victory is that it would demonstrate yet again that the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez left doesn’t represent the Democratic base. “Defund the police” is not a working-class interest.Gail: Yeah, but having unarmed, trained mediators who could respond to complaints like family fighting might get a good response.Bret: I used to think that was a good idea. Then several of our readers explained to me that family altercations are often violent and require more than a social worker.Getting back to working-class interests: Blocking Amazon and the thousands of jobs it would have brought to Queens was not pro-worker. Nor does it help the working class to deny parents who can’t afford to send their kids to Dalton the school choice they need, when it comes to getting a better education for their children.Gail: The public school issue is so important and so complicated. You want to make sure it’s always open to reform and improvement. Still, you don’t want to create a system that allows canny parents to get terrific options for their own kids while reducing public pressure for all-around quality education.But go on.Bret: My bottom line is that “democratic socialism” might be cool with pampered N.Y.U. undergrads, but it isn’t going to help people who aren’t partying in Washington Square Park. So hooray for Adams and all middle-of-the-road Democrats. In the meantime, our mutual friend Donald Trump is on the rally circuit again.Gail: Wow, I watched his speech over the weekend. I guess it was a sort of return to national politics — Trump’s been off the trail since January when his attempt to convince the world he didn’t lose the election led to a bloody riot.No violence this time. In fact, the whole thing was one big snooze.Hard to imagine him really making a comeback. But also hard to imagine who’d be coming next. Can’t really picture a President Pence.Bret: You know, I probably spend more time thinking about Mike Pence than I ought to, given my high blood pressure. He reminds me of Mr. Collins, the unctuous clergyman in “Pride and Prejudice,” who’s always bowing and scraping to the overbearing, tasteless, talentless Lady Catherine de Bourgh, while he also lords it over the Bennet family because he stands to inherit their estate. Alternatively, Pence could be a character out of Dickens, with some ridiculous name like Wackford Squeers or Mr. Pumblechook.Gail: Wow, great analogies. Plus, it is indeed possible you spend more time thinking about Mike Pence than you ought to.Bret: Here’s a guy who makes his career on the Moral Majority wing of the Republican Party, until he hitches his wagon to the most immoral man ever to win a big-ticket presidential nomination. Phyllis Schlafly deciding to elope with Larry Flynt would have made more sense. Then Pence spends four years as the most servile, toadying, obsequious, fawning, head-nodding, yes-siring, anything-you-say-boss vice president in history. He’ll do anything for Trump’s love — but not, as the singer Meat Loaf might have said, attempt to steal the presidential election in broad daylight.For this, Trump rewards Pence by throwing him to a mob, who tried to hunt him down and hang him. But even now Pence can’t get crosswise with his dark lord, so the idea of him ever taking the party in an anti-Trump direction seems like a fantasy.Gail: You have convinced me that Pence is too much of a wimp to rebel. But you can never tell — look what happened to Mitt Romney.Bret: Unlike Pence, Romney is a true Christian, with actual principles. As for Nikki Haley, I just don’t see her winning the Republican nomination. She’s just not Trumpy enough. My bet is on the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, with Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina as his vice-presidential nominee. Crazy?Gail: Oh God. What a combo. l hear there’s a “Ron Be Gone” movement in Florida. Maybe they can combine it with a “Tim, Don’t Get In.” Or just: “Not Scott.”Bret: DeSantis is a very shrewd guy. He’s made a point of staying close to Trump, personally, and he’s also been very good at baiting the media. His handling of the pandemic was better than most liberals will ever give him credit for, because, unlike Andrew “I’m-still-standing” Cuomo, he made a point of protecting nursing homes. With Scott on the ticket he could also peel off some of the Black vote, or at least make white suburban voters feel comfortable about voting for a G.O.P. ticket that progressives will inevitably attack as racist.Of course none of that will stop Trump from turning on DeSantis if he decides to run again in 2024, and I have to assume there are skeletons in the governor’s closet. In the words of the immortal Beatles song, “Everybody’s got something to hide except me and my monkey.”Gail: Right now the only thing we’re thinking about in DeSantis’s state is the terrible condo collapse near Miami. There are going to be lots of questions about how that disaster came to be, and the government’s role in ensuring public safety.Bret: It’s so heartbreaking. I have my own memories of what it’s like, from having lived through the Mexico City earthquake in 1985, which killed thousands of people and flattened a lot of buildings in the vicinity of my dad’s office. It’s hard to think of a more awful way to go.But I’d hate to see the issue politicized. Buildings collapse in cities and states run by Democrats, too, like the Hard Rock Hotel in New Orleans a couple of years ago.Gail: Good point. But you will remember DeSantis is also the guy who’s been fighting against vaccine requirements on cruise ships.Bret: Sounds like an unreasonable government restriction on private enterprise trying to make the rules for what’s allowed on their premises.By the way, I’m increasingly of the view that Medicare and health insurance companies should refuse to underwrite treatment for any non-vaccinated people who wind up getting sick. People who take unreasonable private risks shouldn’t be allowed to socialize the cost of the consequences. What do you think?Gail: When said unvaccinated people get sick they’re going to need medical care. Which, if they’re uninsured and of low income, is going to have to be taken care of by the taxpayer unless the hospitals are directed to refuse to admit the unvaccinated critically ill.Bret: True, though my scheme would only apply to anti-vaxxers who refused to get a vaccine, not those who just didn’t have access to it. It’s never going to happen, for the same reason that we’re probably not going to deny coverage for lung cancer patients because they happen to be ex-smokers. But I just wish we lived in a country where being willfully dumb was a little more costly.Gail: Make being willfully dumb a little more costly — I think you’ve got a campaign slogan, Bret. Don’t let Mike Pence get his hands on it.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

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      An Accusation Blew Up a Campaign. The Media Didn’t Know What to Do.

      by

      Handling a delicate allegation of sexual misconduct is a lot more challenging than covering a horse race.Two days after coming in fifth in the election night count of votes for New York mayor last week, Scott Stringer was sitting in a high-polish diner in TriBeCa, drinking his second bottle of Sprite and trying to figure out what had happened.He held up his iPhone to show me a text message he had received on Election Day from one of the progressive elected officials who had endorsed him and then dropped him after a woman accused him of sexually assaulting her more than 20 years ago. In the text was a photograph of the official’s ranked-choice ballot. Mr. Stringer was ranked first.“This profile in courage,” he began, half laughing. “You can’t make this up. Who does that?”Mr. Stringer, the 61-year-old New York City comptroller, isn’t the only one trying to puzzle out what happened over a few days in April in the campaign. Mr. Stringer, a geeky fixture in Manhattan politics, had been among the leading candidates when the woman, Jean Kim, accused him of touching her without her consent in the back of taxis. Suddenly he, the media covering him, his supporters and Ms. Kim were all reckoning with big questions of truth, doubt, politics and corroboration.The allegations against Mr. Stringer did not divide a nation, as Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against Brett Kavanaugh did. Nor did his candidacy carry the kind of high national stakes that came with Tara Reade’s allegations against Joseph R. Biden Jr. last spring. But maybe for those reasons, Ms. Kim’s claim that Mr. Stringer assaulted her when she worked on his New York City public advocate campaign in 2001 offers an opportunity to ask how journalists, political actors and, most important, voters are supposed to weigh claims like Ms. Kim’s. They also raise the question of how and whether to draw a line between those claims and the ones that helped ignite the #MeToo movement.As much as the exposure of police brutality has been driven by cellphone video, the #MeToo movement was powered by investigative journalism, and courageous victims who chose to speak to reporters. The movement reached critical mass with articles by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey of The New York Times and Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker on the movie producer Harvey Weinstein, which the Pulitzer Prize committee described as “explosive” revelations of “long-suppressed allegations of coercion, brutality and victim silencing.” Those stories and other notable sets of revelations — about the financier Jeffrey Epstein, the sports doctor Larry Nassar, the singer R. Kelly, the comedian Bill Cosby — drew power from rigorous reporting that helped develop new standards for covering what had long been dismissed as “he said, she said.”Crucially, reporters honed the craft of corroboration, showing that an accuser had told a friend, a relative or a therapist at the time of the episode and that the accuser wasn’t simply relying on old memories. The reporters also looked for evidence that the accuser’s account was part of a pattern, ruling out a single misunderstanding.Those technical aspects of the stories weren’t always widely understood. But the landmark investigations were, even in this divided moment, unifying. There was no serious partisan division over any of those men’s guilt because the journalistic evidence was simply so overwhelming. But not every allegation — and not every true allegation — can meet that standard. Not every victim is able to talk about it immediately; not every bad act is part of a pattern.In the case of Mr. Stringer and Ms. Kim, observers were left simply with his claim their relationship was consensual, and hers that it wasn’t. Ms. Kim’s lawyer had circulated a news release, which didn’t mention Ms. Kim, to reporters the evening of April 27.At her news conference on April 28, Patricia Pastor, Ms. Kim’s lawyer, read a statement based on Ms. Kim’s recollection, which didn’t include contemporaneous corroboration, which Ms. Kim said didn’t exist, or a suggestion of a pattern. And the lawyer angled the statement for maximum impact: The statement referred to Ms. Kim, for instance, as an “intern,” when she had been a 30-year-old volunteer. And Ms. Pastor claimed, incorrectly, that Ms. Kim had been introduced to Mr. Stringer by Eric Schneiderman, who was forced to resign as New York’s attorney general in 2018 after a report that he had physically abused at least four women.Mr. Stringer said he had a passing, consensual relationship with Ms. Kim and was stunned by her claims that they had never had a relationship. But he said that he understood why the media picked up the story, even if it hadn’t been corroborated.“Running for mayor, every part of your life is an open book,” he said. “I didn’t begrudge anybody, including The Times, from writing about the charge. That would be silly.”And victims, of course, have no obligation to tell their stories through skeptical journalists. Ms. Pastor pointed out in an interview that “once the story was out, you still have time” to report it out and check the facts, and said she and her client didn’t object to that fact-checking. The Times’s Katie Glueck did that on May 9 and found Ms. Kim and Mr. Stringer telling very different stories in the absence of definitive evidence.Jean Kim said Mr. Stringer assaulted her when she worked on his New York City public advocate campaign in 2001. He has denied her claim.Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesBut by then, the story had jumped out of journalists’ hands and into politicians’. Mr. Stringer had painstakingly assembled a coalition of young progressives, including a cadre of state senators who had partly defined their careers by pressing to extend the statute of limitations in cases of child sexual abuse and telling their own harrowing stories. In a video call the day after Ms. Kim’s news conference, they pressed Mr. Stringer to issue a statement suggesting he and Ms. Kim might have perceived their interaction differently.When he refused, and flatly denied the allegation, 10 progressive officials withdrew their endorsement.That decision got journalists off the hook. Most were covering a simple, political story now — a collapsing campaign — and not weighing or investigating a complex #MeToo allegation.The progressive website The Intercept (which had exposed a trumped-up sexual misconduct claim against a gay Democrat in Massachusetts last year) also looked into Ms. Kim’s accusations, calling former Stringer campaign aides, and found that a series of widely reported details from Ms. Pastor’s statement — though not Ms. Kim’s core allegations — were inaccurate. A longtime New York political hand who had known both Mr. Stringer and Ms. Kim at the time, Mike McGuire, also told me he’d been waiting to talk on the record about what he saw as factual errors in Ms. Kim’s lawyer’s account, but that I was only the second reporter to call him, after Ms. Glueck. Ms. Kim, meanwhile, had been open about her motives — she wanted voters to know about the allegation.It’s easy to blame the relative lack of curiosity about the underlying story on the cliché of a hollowed-out local press corps, but that’s not really true in this case. The New York mayor’s race received rich and often ambitious coverage, as good and varied as I’ve seen at least since 2001, often from newer outlets like Politico and The City. The winner of the vote’s first round, Eric Adams, saw reporters investigate his donors and peer into his refrigerator.In an article in Columbia Journalism Review, Andrea Gabor examined coverage of the race and found that the allegations had prompted news organizations to stop covering Mr. Stringer as a top-tier candidate. She suggested that reporters “recalibrate the judgments they make on how to cover candidates such as Stringer in their wake.”In May, Mr. Stringer’s aides told me they were in talks with some former endorsers to return, as well as with the progressive movement’s biggest star, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when they learned of an allegation from another woman: that some 30 years ago, Mr. Stringer had sexually harassed her when she worked for him at a bar. The Times reported the account of the second woman, Teresa Logan, with corroboration. The next day, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Maya Wiley, who came in second after the in-person voting ended. She said that time was running out and that progressives had to unite, a suggestion that the second allegation had made up her mind.But when you get beyond the reporters gaming out winners and losers, and beyond politicians weighing endorsements, here’s the strange thing: It’s not clear there’s anything like a consensus among voters on how the decades-old allegations should have affected Mr. Stringer’s support. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, for instance, has weathered far more recent claims from his own aides. And even two of the legislators who dropped their support of Mr. Stringer told me they were still wrestling with the decision and their roles and that of the media. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez seemed to signal a similar concern when, on Election Day, she revealed that she had ranked Mr. Stringer second on her ballot.State Senator Alessandra Biaggi said that the moment had been “incredibly painful” but that she’d begun to feel that “my integrity was being compromised” by staying with Mr. Stringer. She also said that if she were a New York City voter, she would have ranked Mr. Stringer among her top choices, and wished there was space for more nuance in public conversations about sexual misconduct allegations.Yuh-Line Niou, a state assemblywoman from Manhattan, told me she thought the media had unfairly “put a lot of pressure on women who are survivors to speak up,” an experience that had been “scary and in a lot of ways violent.” She said she would have backed Mr. Stringer if he’d acknowledged that he’d harmed Ms. Kim, and added that his denial revealed that he had come from “a time when people don’t talk about what it is to be human, that you have to be perfect somehow.”“I ranked him, of course,” she said. “We didn’t have many choices.”Another progressive who had dropped Mr. Stringer, Representative Jamaal Bowman, said two weeks after Ms. Kim’s allegations became public that “I sometimes regret it because I wasn’t more patient and didn’t ask more questions.”Ms. Kim’s lawyer, Ms. Pastor, said she’d been perplexed by the pained progressives. “You ought to stick to your guns,” she said.It can be hard to separate the entangled roles of media and political actors.“The same way it’s obvious that the media didn’t make Adams rise, it should be obvious that the media didn’t make Stringer fall,” the Daily News columnist and Daily Beast senior editor Harry Siegel told me. “The decision by his lefty endorsers to almost immediately walk away, and before the press had time to vet Kim’s claim, did that. Understanding that the press — and media columnists! — like to center themselves, this is a story about the Democratic Party and its factions more than it’s one about his coverage.”Mr. Stringer said that he was resolved not to relive the campaign, but that he was worried about a progressive movement setting a standard that it can’t meet.“When I think about the future, there’s a lot of progressives who under these scenarios can’t run for office,” he said.Before he headed back out onto Church Street, I asked him what he was going to do next.“Probably just run for governor,” he said, at least half seriously. More

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      As Scott Stringer's Campaign Reeled, the Media Was Confounded

      by

      Handling a delicate allegation of sexual misconduct is a lot more challenging than covering a horse race.Two days after coming in fifth in the election night count of votes for New York mayor last week, Scott Stringer was sitting in a high-polish diner in TriBeCa, drinking his second bottle of Sprite and trying to figure out what had happened.He held up his iPhone to show me a text message he had received on Election Day from one of the progressive elected officials who had endorsed him and then dropped him after a woman accused him of sexually assaulting her more than 20 years ago. In the text was a photograph of the official’s ranked-choice ballot. Mr. Stringer was ranked first.“This profile in courage,” he began, half laughing. “You can’t make this up. Who does that?”Mr. Stringer, the 61-year-old New York City comptroller, isn’t the only one trying to puzzle out what happened over a few days in April in the campaign. Mr. Stringer, a geeky fixture in Manhattan politics, had been among the leading candidates when the woman, Jean Kim, accused him of touching her without her consent in the back of taxis. Suddenly he, the media covering him, his supporters and Ms. Kim were all reckoning with big questions of truth, doubt, politics and corroboration.The allegations against Mr. Stringer did not divide a nation, as Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against Brett Kavanaugh did. Nor did his candidacy carry the kind of high national stakes that came with Tara Reade’s allegations against Joseph R. Biden Jr. last spring. But maybe for those reasons, Ms. Kim’s claim that Mr. Stringer assaulted her when she worked on his New York City public advocate campaign in 2001 offers an opportunity to ask how journalists, political actors and, most important, voters are supposed to weigh claims like Ms. Kim’s. They also raise the question of how and whether to draw a line between those claims and the ones that helped ignite the #MeToo movement.As much as the exposure of police brutality has been driven by cellphone video, the #MeToo movement was powered by investigative journalism, and courageous victims who chose to speak to reporters. The movement reached critical mass with articles by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey of The New York Times and Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker on the movie producer Harvey Weinstein, which the Pulitzer Prize committee described as “explosive” revelations of “long-suppressed allegations of coercion, brutality and victim silencing.” Those stories and other notable sets of revelations — about the financier Jeffrey Epstein, the sports doctor Larry Nassar, the singer R. Kelly, the comedian Bill Cosby — drew power from rigorous reporting that helped develop new standards for covering what had long been dismissed as “he said, she said.”Crucially, reporters honed the craft of corroboration, showing that an accuser had told a friend, a relative or a therapist at the time of the episode and that the accuser wasn’t simply relying on old memories. The reporters also looked for evidence that the accuser’s account was part of a pattern, ruling out a single misunderstanding.Those technical aspects of the stories weren’t always widely understood. But the landmark investigations were, even in this divided moment, unifying. There was no serious partisan division over any of those men’s guilt because the journalistic evidence was simply so overwhelming. But not every allegation — and not every true allegation — can meet that standard. Not every victim is able to talk about it immediately; not every bad act is part of a pattern.In the case of Mr. Stringer and Ms. Kim, observers were left simply with his claim their relationship was consensual, and hers that it wasn’t. Ms. Kim’s lawyer had circulated a news release, which didn’t mention Ms. Kim, to reporters the evening of April 27.At her news conference on April 28, Patricia Pastor, Ms. Kim’s lawyer, read a statement based on Ms. Kim’s recollection, which didn’t include contemporaneous corroboration, which Ms. Kim said didn’t exist, or a suggestion of a pattern. And the lawyer angled the statement for maximum impact: The statement referred to Ms. Kim, for instance, as an “intern,” when she had been a 30-year-old volunteer. And Ms. Pastor claimed, incorrectly, that Ms. Kim had been introduced to Mr. Stringer by Eric Schneiderman, who was forced to resign as New York’s attorney general in 2018 after a report that he had physically abused at least four women.Mr. Stringer said he had a passing, consensual relationship with Ms. Kim and was stunned by her claims that they had never had a relationship. But he said that he understood why the media picked up the story, even if it hadn’t been corroborated.“Running for mayor, every part of your life is an open book,” he said. “I didn’t begrudge anybody, including The Times, from writing about the charge. That would be silly.”And victims, of course, have no obligation to tell their stories through skeptical journalists. Ms. Pastor pointed out in an interview that “once the story was out, you still have time” to report it out and check the facts, and said she and her client didn’t object to that fact-checking. The Times’s Katie Glueck did that on May 9 and found Ms. Kim and Mr. Stringer telling very different stories in the absence of definitive evidence.Jean Kim said Mr. Stringer assaulted her when she worked on his New York City public advocate campaign in 2001. He has denied her claim.Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesBut by then, the story had jumped out of journalists’ hands and into politicians’. Mr. Stringer had painstakingly assembled a coalition of young progressives, including a cadre of state senators who had partly defined their careers by pressing to extend the statute of limitations in cases of child sexual abuse and telling their own harrowing stories. In a video call the day after Ms. Kim’s news conference, they pressed Mr. Stringer to issue a statement suggesting he and Ms. Kim might have perceived their interaction differently.When he refused, and flatly denied the allegation, 10 progressive officials withdrew their endorsement.That decision got journalists off the hook. Most were covering a simple, political story now — a collapsing campaign — and not weighing or investigating a complex #MeToo allegation.The progressive website The Intercept (which had exposed a trumped-up sexual misconduct claim against a gay Democrat in Massachusetts last year) also looked into Ms. Kim’s accusations, calling former Stringer campaign aides, and found that a series of widely reported details from Ms. Pastor’s statement — though not Ms. Kim’s core allegations — were inaccurate. A longtime New York political hand who had known both Mr. Stringer and Ms. Kim at the time, Mike McGuire, also told me he’d been waiting to talk on the record about what he saw as factual errors in Ms. Kim’s lawyer’s account, but that I was only the second reporter to call him, after Ms. Glueck. Ms. Kim, meanwhile, had been open about her motives — she wanted voters to know about the allegation.It’s easy to blame the relative lack of curiosity about the underlying story on the cliché of a hollowed-out local press corps, but that’s not really true in this case. The New York mayor’s race received rich and often ambitious coverage, as good and varied as I’ve seen at least since 2001, often from newer outlets like Politico and The City. The winner of the vote’s first round, Eric Adams, saw reporters investigate his donors and peer into his refrigerator.In an article in Columbia Journalism Review, Andrea Gabor examined coverage of the race and found that the allegations had prompted news organizations to stop covering Mr. Stringer as a top-tier candidate. She suggested that reporters “recalibrate the judgments they make on how to cover candidates such as Stringer in their wake.”In May, Mr. Stringer’s aides told me they were in talks with some former endorsers to return, as well as with the progressive movement’s biggest star, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when they learned of an allegation from another woman: that some 30 years ago, Mr. Stringer had sexually harassed her when she worked for him at a bar. The Times reported the account of the second woman, Teresa Logan, with corroboration. The next day, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Maya Wiley, who came in second after the in-person voting ended. She said that time was running out and that progressives had to unite, a suggestion that the second allegation had made up her mind.But when you get beyond the reporters gaming out winners and losers, and beyond politicians weighing endorsements, here’s the strange thing: It’s not clear there’s anything like a consensus among voters on how the decades-old allegations should have affected Mr. Stringer’s support. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, for instance, has weathered far more recent claims from his own aides. And even two of the legislators who dropped their support of Mr. Stringer told me they were still wrestling with the decision and their roles and that of the media. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez seemed to signal a similar concern when, on Election Day, she revealed that she had ranked Mr. Stringer second on her ballot.State Senator Alessandra Biaggi said that the moment had been “incredibly painful” but that she’d begun to feel that “my integrity was being compromised” by staying with Mr. Stringer. She also said that if she were a New York City voter, she would have ranked Mr. Stringer among her top choices, and wished there was space for more nuance in public conversations about sexual misconduct allegations.Yuh-Line Niou, a state assemblywoman from Manhattan, told me she thought the media had unfairly “put a lot of pressure on women who are survivors to speak up,” an experience that had been “scary and in a lot of ways violent.” She said she would have backed Mr. Stringer if he’d acknowledged that he’d harmed Ms. Kim, and added that his denial revealed that he had come from “a time when people don’t talk about what it is to be human, that you have to be perfect somehow.”“I ranked him, of course,” she said. “We didn’t have many choices.”Another progressive who had dropped Mr. Stringer, Representative Jamaal Bowman, said two weeks after Ms. Kim’s allegations became public that “I sometimes regret it because I wasn’t more patient and didn’t ask more questions.”Ms. Kim’s lawyer, Ms. Pastor, said she’d been perplexed by the pained progressives. “You ought to stick to your guns,” she said.It can be hard to separate the entangled roles of media and political actors.“The same way it’s obvious that the media didn’t make Adams rise, it should be obvious that the media didn’t make Stringer fall,” the Daily News columnist and Daily Beast senior editor Harry Siegel told me. “The decision by his lefty endorsers to almost immediately walk away, and before the press had time to vet Kim’s claim, did that. Understanding that the press — and media columnists! — like to center themselves, this is a story about the Democratic Party and its factions more than it’s one about his coverage.”Mr. Stringer said that he was resolved not to relive the campaign, but that he was worried about a progressive movement setting a standard that it can’t meet.“When I think about the future, there’s a lot of progressives who under these scenarios can’t run for office,” he said.Before he headed back out onto Church Street, I asked him what he was going to do next.“Probably just run for governor,” he said, at least half seriously. More

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      What Does Eric Adams, Working-Class Champion, Mean for the Democrats?

      by

      Mr. Adams, who ran a campaign focused on appealing to blue-collar Black and Latino voters, said America does not want “fancy candidates.”He bluntly challenged left-wing leaders in his party over matters of policing and public safety. He campaigned heavily in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, often ignoring Manhattan neighborhoods besides Harlem and Washington Heights. And he branded himself a blue-collar candidate with a keen personal understanding of the challenges and concerns facing working-class New Yorkers of color.With his substantial early lead in the Democratic mayoral primary when votes were counted Tuesday night, Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, demonstrated the enduring power of a candidate who can connect to working- and middle-class Black and Latino voters, while also appealing to some white voters with moderate views.Mr. Adams is not yet assured of victory. But if he prevails, it would be a triumph for a campaign that focused more heavily on those constituencies than any other winning New York City mayoral candidate in recent history.As the national Democratic Party navigates debates over identity and ideology, the mayoral primary in the largest city in the United States is highlighting critical questions about which voters make up the party’s base in the Biden era, and who best speaks for them.Barely a year has passed since President Biden clinched the Democratic nomination, defeating several more progressive rivals on the strength of support from Black voters and older moderate voters across the board, and running as a blue-collar candidate himself. But Democrats are now straining to hold together a coalition that includes college-educated liberals and centrists, young left-wing activists and working-class voters of color.“America is saying, we want to have justice and safety and end inequalities,” Mr. Adams declared at a news conference on Thursday, offering his take on the party’s direction. “And we don’t want fancy candidates.”Mr. Adams’s allies and advisers say that from the start, he based his campaign strategy on connecting with working- and middle-class voters of color.“Over the last few cycles, the winners of the mayor’s race have started with a whiter, wealthier base generally, and then expanded out,” said Evan Thies, an Adams spokesman and adviser. Mr. Adams’s campaign, he said, started “with low-income, middle-income, Black, Latino, immigrant communities, and then reached into middle-income communities.”Mr. Adams would be New York’s second Black mayor, after David N. Dinkins. Mr. Dinkins, who described the city as a “gorgeous mosaic,” was more focused than Mr. Adams on trying to win over liberal white voters.Mr. Adams was the first choice of about 32 percent of New York Democrats who voted in person on Tuesday or during the early voting period. Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio and a progressive favorite, pulled in about 22 percent of that vote. Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner who touted her managerial experience, got 19.5 percent.Under the city’s new ranked-choice system, in which voters could rank up to five candidates, the Democratic nominee will now be determined through a process of elimination. Ms. Garcia or Ms. Wiley could ultimately surpass Mr. Adams, although that appears to be an uphill battle, and a final winner may not be determined for weeks.Kathryn Garcia, a former city sanitation commissioner, is in third place after the initial, Primary Day counting of votes.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesIf Mr. Adams does win, it will be partly because he had major institutional advantages.He was well financed and spent heavily on advertising. He received the support of several of the city’s most influential labor unions, which represent many Black and Latino New Yorkers. His name was also well known after years in city politics, including as a state senator.And although some of the most prominent members of New York’s congressional delegation supported Ms. Wiley as their first choice, Mr. Adams landed other important endorsements, including those of the Queens and Bronx borough presidents and Representative Adriano Espaillat, the first Dominican-American member of Congress, and a powerful figure in Washington Heights.Just as importantly, in his supporters’ eyes, Mr. Adams was perceived as having credibility on what emerged as the most consequential, and divisive, issue in the race: public safety.Mr. Adams, who experienced economic hardship as a child and has said he was once beaten by police officers, grew up to join the Police Department, rising to captain. Critics within the department saw him as something of a rabble-rouser, while many progressive voters now think his answers to complex problems too often involve an emphasis on law enforcement.But to some voters, he long ago cemented a reputation as someone who challenged misconduct from within the system, giving him authority to talk about bringing down crime.“He was in the police force, he knows what they represent,” said Gloria Dees, 63, a Brooklyn resident who voted for Mr. Adams and described being deeply concerned about both rising crime and police violence against people of color. “You have to understand something in order to make it work better.”Polls this spring showed public safety increasingly becoming the most important issue to Democratic voters amid random subway attacks, a spate of bias crimes and a spike in shootings. On the Sunday before the primary, Mr. Adams’s campaign staff said that a volunteer had been stabbed in the Bronx.“Being an ex-cop, being able to have safety and justice at the same time, was a message that resonated with folks in the Bronx,” said Assemblywoman Karines Reyes, a Democrat who represents parts of the borough and who did not endorse anyone in the race. Mr. Adams won the Bronx overwhelmingly in the first vote tally. “They’re looking for somebody to address the crime.”Voters cast ballots in the Bronx’s Mott Haven neighborhood on Primary Day. Public safety emerged as the dominant issue in the race. Desiree Rios for The New York TimesThe rate of violent crime in the city is far below where it was decades ago, but shootings have been up in some neighborhoods, and among older voters especially, there is a visceral fear of returning to the “bad old days.”Donovan Richards, the Queens borough president and a supporter of Mr. Adams, cited the recent fatal shooting of a 10-year-old boy in the Rockaways as something that hit home for many people in the area.“We’re nowhere near where we were in the ’80s or ’70s,” he said. But, he added, “when you see a shooting in front of you, no one cares about statistics.”Interviews on Thursday with voters on either side of Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway illustrated vividly Mr. Adams’s appeal and limitations. In parts of Crown Heights, the parkway was a physical dividing line, early results show, between voters who went for Ms. Wiley and those who preferred Mr. Adams.Among older, working-class voters of color who live south of the parkway, Mr. Adams held a commanding lead. “He’ll support the poor people and the Black and brown people,” said one, Janice Brathwaite, 66, who is disabled and said she had voted for Mr. Adams.“He’ll support the poor people and the Black and brown people,” Janice Brathwaite, who lives in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, said of Mr. Adams. Andrew Seng for The New York TimesMs. Brathwaite ruled out Ms. Wiley after hearing her plans for overhauling the Police Department, including a reallocation of $1 billion from the police budget to social service programs and anti-violence measures.“She is someone who is against the policeman who is protecting me, making sure nobody is shooting me,” Ms. Brathwaite said.Ms. Wiley has said there are times when armed officers are needed, but she has also argued that in some instances, mental health experts can halt crime more effectively.That approach appealed to Allison Behringer, 31, an audio journalist and podcast producer who lives north of the parkway, where Mr. Adams’s challenges were on display among some of the young professionals who live in the area.“She was the best progressive candidate,” Ms. Behringer said of Ms. Wiley, whom she ranked as her first choice. “She talked about reimagining what public safety is, that really resonated with me.”Ms. Behringer alluded to concerns about ethical issues that have been raised about Mr. Adams. He has faced scrutiny over his taxes, real estate holdings, fund-raising practices and residency.A fresh round of voting results to be released on Tuesday will provide further clarity about the race. They may show whether those issues hurt Mr. Adams among some highly engaged voters in Manhattan and elsewhere. The new results could also indicate whether Ms. Wiley or Ms. Garcia had sufficiently broad appeal to cut into his lead.As in Brooklyn, there was a clear geographic divide among voters in Manhattan: East 96th Street, with those who ranked Ms. Garcia first mostly to the south, and those who favored Mr. Adams or Ms. Wiley further uptown.Ms. Garcia, a relatively moderate technocrat who was endorsed by The New York Times’s editorial board, among others, won Manhattan handily. Like Ms. Wiley, she hopes to beat Mr. Adams by being many voters’ second choice, and with the benefit of absentee votes that have not been counted.Maya Wiley, center, ranked second in first-choice votes in the initial count of in-person ballots.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesIn Harlem one afternoon this month, Carmen Flores had just cast her early vote for Mr. Adams when she came across one of his rallies. She said she found his trajectory inspiring.“He’s coming from the bottom up,” she said, adding, “He’s been in every facet of life.”Whatever the final vote tally, Democratic strategists caution against drawing sweeping political conclusions from a post-pandemic, municipal election held in June. If Mr. Adams becomes mayor, as the Democratic nominee almost certainly will, progressive leaders can still point to signs of strength in other city races and elsewhere in the state.Asked about the mayor’s race, Waleed Shahid, a spokesman for the left-wing organization Justice Democrats, said, “fear-mongering works when crime is rising,” while noting that several left-wing candidates in the city were leading their races. He also argued that some people who supported Mr. Adams could have done so for reasons that were not ideological.“There might be some voters who voted for Eric Adams based on his policy platform,” Mr. Shahid said. “But there are probably many more voters who voted for Eric Adams based on how they felt about him. It’s often whether they identify with a candidate.”Nate Schweber contributed reporting. More