John Lamparski/NurPhoto via AP
Adding to the challenge is confusion over ranked choice voting, which may also redound to Yang’s benefit.
Just eight weeks remain before New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, and while strange and unpredictable things could still happen, every indication is that the first place finisher will be Andrew Yang. The founder of a lapsed staffing agency for Ivy Leaguers in midsized American cities turned longshot presidential candidate enjoys a healthy lead in virtually all the published polling, and though he continues to commit the sort of gaffes that have proved deadly for New York mayoral candidates in the past, Yang seems to brush them off with relative ease. It’s not over, but his vote share, between 22 percent and 32 percent according to various polls, makes for a nontrivial advantage.
What it means for New York City that a candidate who’s a pro-business technocrat with a handful of risible ideas about TikTok and cryptocurrency is in the lead has been a tantalizing question for centrist pundits in particular. Does New York City, despite sporting a substantial and recently-elected left-wing delegation in both the state legislature and the House of Representatives, have some latent conservative strain now coming to the fore? Or does the power of name recognition simply overwhelm all other political considerations in one of the most politically organized cities in the country?
A better question might be, in a city full of progressive organizations and labor unions, are those left-wing forces prepared to overcome the Andrew Yang phenomenon?
Adding to the confusion is the introduction of ranked choice voting, which New York City will feature for the first time in June’s contest. Not only is there a muddled field, with at least three progressive candidates and seven (or more, depending on who you ask) contenders, but the race will also be decided in a fashion new to New York. That, among other things, makes the tried and true electoral strategies that progressive political organizations have leaned on in previous races somewhat moot, and may well tilt the playing field even further in Yang’s direction. If progressives are serious about mounting a bid for the city’s top job, they’re going to have to come together to stop Yang, and be damned quick about it.
Whether these groups will acknowledge the need to play defense against Andrew Yang and issue a negative endorsement in an attempt to keep him from becoming the Democratic nominee appears unlikely.
New Yorkers aren’t the first American urbanites to adopt ranked choice. Some other major American cities have switched to it, San Francisco among them. And that city’s 2018 mayoral contest may be the best analog for New York’s current race. There, a crowded field with multiple progressive candidates ended up losing out to a pro-business moderate with name recognition, London Breed. (Breed was the acting mayor at the time, appointed upon the death of mayor Ed Lee.) But the loss was narrow, after progressive candidates Jane Kim and Mark Leno pulled off a relatively unprecedented move and co-endorsed each other, thereby effectively running in the race’s final weeks just against Breed.
According to Emily Lee, director of San Francisco Rising, a city based progressive politics group, the 2018 mayoral race led to some outside-the-box strategic thinking. Before Leno and Kim issued their mutual endorsement, San Francisco Rising had cut ads endorsing them both. “In the 14 years I’ve worked in San Francisco politics, it was the first time we’ve done an independent expenditure campaign that was a dual endorsement,” said Lee. “The mayor’s race in 2018 was the first really strategic use of ranked choice voting I’ve seen, where unions and political groups were very consciously advocating for a one and two.”
Crucial to that effort was the unity adopted by progressive groups, Democratic clubs, and labor organizations, which all moved quickly to embrace the strategy of boosting the two progressive candidates in either order, and so prevent votes from leaking to Breed—playing both offense and defense. Eventually, Kim and Leno made their alliance official in the race’s final month, which was almost a month later than those left-wing groups launched their co-endorsement messaging strategy. It was almost but not quite enough to turn the race against the frontrunner Breed.
We’re now at a similar stage in the New York mayor’s race, with some 60 days to go until election day. But similar unity among progressive groups and labor unions on strategy, ranking, and even which candidates could conceivably win remains largely absent. Endorsements have just begun to trickle in from various progressive groups; nonprofit executive Dianne Morales, City Comptroller Scott Stringer, and former DeBlasio aide and MSNBC commentator Maya Wiley are the three variously anointed candidates. The New York Working Families Party, for instance, has endorsed Stringer first, Morales second, and Wiley third. Jewish Vote, the political action arm of Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, endorsed Morales first, and co-endorsed Stringer and Wiley for an equal second place.
SF Rising has been advising some of the New York progressive groups on strategy, including Jewish Vote. But the question of how to balance the preferences of members, based on group polling, with a strategic process that might deliver the most favorable outcome remains a challenge. “We’re framing this endorsement as a unity ticket; we want the left to unite around these candidates” said Sophie Ellman-Golan, director of strategic communications at JFREJ. “We’ve been fairly explicit that we do not want to see a Yang or [Brooklyn Borough President Eric] Adams mayorship.”
But unions aren’t on the same page. Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union, New York City’s largest union, endorsed Maya Wiley in February, but declined to produce a ranking with second and third choice candidates. Local 32BJ of SEIU, arguably the city’s second most powerful union, endorsed Adams, a former police officer, while also declining to put forward a second and third choice. District Council 37 of AFSCME, the city’s largest public sector union, also endorsed just Adams; ditto the Hotel Trades Council.
So, while the unions have largely managed to align their endorsements in city council races, they went their own way in the mayoral election. The fact that many unions exclusively endorsed Adams, who doesn’t make the top three for any progressive groups and whom many progressive groups oppose, while none of the unions embraced any version of the progressives’ top three lists, or even had a top two list of their own, gives some sense of why Yang, with backing from the New York business world and a campaign largely run by Michael Bloomberg–affiliated lobbyists, has managed to pull ahead.
Playing defense against a breakaway candidate or pushing a unity ticket requires the kind of movement and organizational vision and solidarity that takes time to develop, and time is a commodity there’s not much left of in the mayoral race. “It takes longer to line up this strategy, it takes everyone to buy in,” said Lee of SF Rising. ”We started talking about it in late March [three months before election day], and started trying to line up the different stakeholders. It’s harder for progressives to win if there isn’t early and committed consensus.”
Whether these groups will acknowledge the need to play defense against Andrew Yang and issue a negative endorsement in an attempt to keep him from becoming the Democratic nominee appears unlikely. In conversations with both progressive and labor groups, none indicated that they intend to make a negative endorsement to slow Yang’s ascent. (San Francisco Rising, too, declined to formally come out against London Breed’s candidacy).
Adding to the challenge is confusion over ranked choice voting, which may also redound to Yang’s benefit. So far, many unions and community groups have expended considerable resources just to inform and instruct members about the process, which has drained time and energy away from talking about candidates. According to a recent survey, 46 percent of African American likely voters have heard nothing about ranked-choice voting, along with 38 percent of likely Latino voters. That’s a failure of the Board of Elections, and New York has been criticized for a lack of clarity on how the system works, a shortcoming that community groups are now being forced to compensate for themselves. Uncertainty around how that process works may well depress turnout; there’s concern among progressives, too, that Yang’s name recognition may result in his getting a second or third place mention even on ballots where the top choice is a progressive.
New York City mayoral races can change drastically in the final days. Bill de Blasio’s electoral history is a testament to that fact, as de Blasio trailed in the polls until the 2013 primary race’s final days. But 2013 also lacked a candidate with a national profile like Yang’s, fresh off of a spirited run on the presidential reality television circuit, as Alex Pareene noted in The New Republic.
The victor in June’s primary, after the instant run-off feature of the ranked choice system determines the winner, will take on the winner of the Republican primary in November, where the Democrat (actually, any Democrat) will almost certainly triumph. Right now, it looks possible and perhaps probable that progressives will get shut out of the general election altogether, in no small part because of their lack of coordination.
