Name: No way to pick a leader: New York City’s mayoral election needs an upgrade
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No way to pick a leader: New York City’s mayoral election needs an upgrade

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With New York staring into the void of a massive budget hole amid skyrocketing crime and unemployment numbers, a relative handful of Democratic voters are poised in less than six months to effectively decide on the city’s next mayor and our course over the next eight years in New Yorkers are barely starting to pay attention to a race, only open to registered Democrats, that’s despite the sky-high stakes as top candidates have largely avoided direct confrontations because the primary field is so crowded that none of them see much upside to launching attacks or standing out too much in a contest where voters’ second and third choices are expected to matter this time with ranked-choice voting. It’s remarkable to look back just seven years to the end of our overwhelmingly Democratic city’s 20 continuous years of non-Democratic mayors. The Democratic Party as an institution did basically nothing but wait that out while clinging to its remaining patronage sources and petty power bases. And it’s remarkable that Rudy Giuliani and then Mike Bloomberg did almost nothing to create any alternative to the Democratic Party that would outlast their own terms in office. Advertisement Bloomberg sort of tried, with his first-term push for non-partisan primaries in which the top two candidates would then face off in general elections. Then he gave up and eventually sabotaged his own plan, which was furiously opposed by the city’s biggest unions, by putting it on the ballot in a year with no citywide contests. That meant only the most loyal Democrats showed up and nearly three-fourths of those voters rejected an idea that, according to polls, half of the city favored. It was an ugly synecdoche for how things tend to “work” here. Incidentally, that was the same year that Letitia James was elected to the City Council on the Working Families Party line, beating out Democrat Geoffrey Davis for the seat that opened up after his brother James was murdered inside the Council chambers at City Hall by an political opponent angry he had succeeded in getting him removed from the ballot. That was a rare win for the WFP’s own candidate (albeit one who later left the party on her way to being elected state attorney general as a Democrat), given that the third party is built on pulling Democrats to the left by leveraging New York State’s “fusion” system that allows candidates to run on multiple ballot lines. Advertisement Fusion — which until this year also supported the scammy Independence Party whose line Bloomberg rented and that’s made up mostly of people who accidentally joined thinking they were declaring their small-I independence — is the main reason why the city’s new ranked-choice voting system, assuming it survives a dubious legal challenge from allies of mayor candidate Eric Adams, only applies in primaries and special elections, not general elections: because a system that lets you list several candidates in order of preference doesn’t play well with one where the same candidate appears on multiple ballot lines. If that seems complicated and hard to track, it is, and that’s at least part of the point. Instead of a general election worth a damn, we’ve got a Democratic field filled with out-of-sync, out-of-tune candidates humming Leonard Cohen’s “One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong.” That’s about to include Andrew Yang, who’s being advised by Bloomberg 2013 campaign manager Bradley Tusk and was photographed last week meeting with Al Sharpton. Yang has no evident qualifications to be mayor or rationale for running but he’s betting that the name recognition from his presidential run will prove invaluable in a mayoral primary with basically no in-person electioneering and where a quarter-million votes might be enough to win the whole thing. Related Gallery Meet the Democratic candidates hoping to succeed Mayor de Blasio in 2021 With the primary moved up to June from September, it all feels more like a crapshoot than a choice for a city in crisis that will then have seven months of a presumed mayor in waiting while our current one plays out the string. That’s nuts! And it’s also a good reason that you, reader, should if you’re not already enrolled in a party. Otherwise, the pols’ party will continue without you. Albany’s new wave of Democratic reformers talked a lot about making small-D democracy great again in New York, and they’re off to an excellent start. Early in-person voting is wonderful! Automatic voter registration is an overdue idea that’s finally here! But what matters most is having a fundamentally legitimate system, rather than our current farkakte one, where more of the people who live here have a say in who runs this town and it means something when one of them says “the people have given me a mandate.” Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement

With New York staring into the void of a massive budget hole amid skyrocketing crime and unemployment numbers, a relative handful of Democratic voters are poised in less than six months to effectively decide on the city’s next mayor and our course over the next eight years in New Yorkers are barely starting to pay attention to a race, only open to registered Democrats, that’s despite the sky-high stakes as top candidates have largely avoided direct confrontations because the primary field is so crowded that none of them see much upside to launching attacks or standing out too much in a...

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Harry Siegel

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No way to pick a leader: New York City’s mayoral election needs an upgrade

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