Ron Adar/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP Images
New York City mayoral candidate Maya Wiley speaks at a press conference outside a polling location at Campos Plaza Community Center, June 12, 2021, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
The New York Times declared Maya Wiley the “left-wing standard-bearer in the New York City mayor’s race” after she was endorsed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) on June 5. “If we don’t come together as a movement, we will get a New York City built by and for billionaires, and we need a city for and by working people,” said Ocasio-Cortez at the endorsement rally. “So we will vote for Maya No. 1.”
As could be expected given AOC’s sky-high profile, Wiley’s campaign immediately received a massive boost. Other progressives on the local and national political scene subsequently announced their own endorsements: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), and New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, among others.
The first poll conducted post-endorsement by Emerson College and PIX-11 suggested that Wiley had leapfrogged Andrew Yang and Kathryn Garcia to take second place, behind Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams.
Regular viewers of MSNBC will be familiar with Wiley, as she was a paid contributor and analyst during the Trump era. She was also Bill de Blasio’s lead legal counsel during his first two and a half years as mayor, and served as the chair of the NYC Civilian Complaint Review Board, a police oversight body, from July 2016 until August 2017. She has been a public-policy professor at the New School since 2016.
As the Times pointed out, Wiley’s sudden ascension in the New York City mayor’s race was not inevitable. Until recently, she had consistently polled in the single digits, and struggled to compete in the so-called “progressive lane” with Comptroller Scott Stringer and nonprofit CEO Dianne Morales.
Stringer’s candidacy, however, fell apart after he was accused of sexual assault in April and a second time more recently. Morales has not recovered after she union-busted her own campaign staff and stories of general campaign workplace toxicity came to light. As much as the AOC endorsement, Wiley can credit her rise to attrition among progressive rivals.
Until recently, Wiley consistently polled in the single digits, and struggled to compete in the so-called “progressive lane.”
Wiley hopes to rebuild and reimagine the five boroughs through big public spending and reform. According to her campaign, her $10 billion “New Deal New York” plan will create 100,000 jobs through infrastructure repairs and enhancements, while earmarking $3 billion for climate infrastructure. Wiley also promises to provide “guaranteed affordable rent” and eviction protections for impoverished tenants; bolster the New York City public-school system; and support paid care workers and unpaid caregivers.
Wiley also has a “Universal Health Coverage Plan,” though she seems to implicitly acknowledge that, in her mind, health care is a state and federal issue and there’s only so much she could do as mayor. Her NYC Health Insurance Plan is more of a stopgap option contracted out to a private affiliate, which would be free to residents making under $25,000 a year. Anyone above that would pay a “sliding-scale premium” capped at 10 percent of income. Bill Hammond of the right-wing Empire Center think tank praised the plan in Politico, calling it “mainstream,” and seemed genuinely excited about its modest but undeniable “copays and premiums and deductibles.”
One can see why Wiley’s willingness to use government money to solve long-standing challenges might hold some appeal for left-leaning voters—especially considering the lack of better alternatives. One reason it likely took Wiley so long to gain traction in this race is that the strengths of her campaign have been on the periphery of the race; the main focus instead has been about the NYPD and so-called policing reform.
The common—although unproven—media narrative is that front-runners Eric Adams, Kathryn Garcia, and Andrew Yang, all of whom have committed to police budget increases and proudly advertise themselves as being “tough on crime,” are more in step with voters than Wiley, who is calling for a $1 billion budget decrease. Wiley is seeking to shift that money to other areas, such as public education and funding of “low-income caregivers.”
Wiley says she will remove the controversial NYPD Vice Squad, an institution that has come under fire for corruption and abuse, and take the NYPD out of mental-health crisis management, traffic enforcement, school safety, and immigration enforcement. She would also like to conduct a full audit of the overall police department, “to assess how funding is currently distributed and make additional necessary cuts,” and freeze NYPD cadet classes for two years. And she would renegotiate the contract between the city and the powerful Police Benevolent Society union.
Given the power of the NYPD and its backers, Wiley has experienced heavy criticism for these proposals, especially as her stature has grown. “Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Maya Wiley want to slash the police department budget and shrink the police force at a time when Black and brown babies are being shot in our streets,” said Eric Adams, the favorite candidate of the right-wing New York Post and of Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. “Wiley is a police-hater,” stated the New York Post editorial board on Sunday. “She’s vowed to slash the NYPD’s budget because ‘trauma’ from dealing with cops is a bigger problem than crime.”
Wiley has faced recent scrutiny for her involvement in two conflict-of-interest scandals while serving as Bill de Blasio’s chief counsel.
But those who worked for Wiley at the Civilian Complaint Review Board take issue with the perception that their former boss is a renegade radical capable of meaningful reform. Last week, the Daily News published an op-ed by several NYC-CCRB alumni. The authors—John Teufel, John DeBary, Debra Cleaver, and Sheena Otto—wrote that they found Wiley to be “irredeemably flawed” and “functionally toothless,” and that her tenure was marred by “dysfunction, political intrigue and a refusal to challenge the NYPD.”
There’s also the sticky matter of her role in the Bill de Blasio administration during his first term. Any association with De Blasio is a political liability at this point. Wiley has faced recent scrutiny for her involvement in two conflict-of-interest scandals while serving as De Blasio’s chief counsel from early 2014 through mid-2016. One involved De Blasio using the mayor’s office to fundraise for a private, political nonprofit organization; the other was about off-the-record meetings De Blasio held with private donors about city-related matters. In both cases, Wiley has been viewed by some as an enabler and cynical maneuverer, rather than a responsible whistleblower.
“All I did was give advice that one gives a client and that client makes a decision,” Wiley explained during a televised debate last week.
“You were up front and center in two corruption scandals of City Hall,” responded Scott Stringer. “You allowed unfettered access to lobbyists and consultants. And then there was a whole issue of the investigation of the pay-to-play … the redaction and the cover-up was probably worse than the potential crime.”
It is worth noting that Wiley’s campaign staff is largely made up of former De Blasio aides.
Progressive voters may be willing to overlook the flaws in Wiley’s record next week—if they are aware of them in the first place—when considering the right-leaning alternatives. Wiley is not short on interesting and ambitious ideas, and there is hope she could implement various meaningful public-spending campaigns. However, some of her plans fall short of what progressives feel is needed. And given her association with De Blasio and his staff, on top of the criticism from former Civilian Complaint Review Board employees, there are reasonable concerns about her ability to lead functionally.
If progressives do lose the mayor’s race, there will be inevitable crowing that their agenda is unpopular, or that the failure to back a consensus candidate blew a winnable opportunity. It could be that the crop of democratic socialists who have won consistently throughout the city in the past two election cycles were not quite ready to take on a mayoral campaign, and the progressives who did were too compromised or not talented enough to succeed. The future of New York City could come down to an accident of timing for the left.
