New York City will likely pick its next mayor five months from now, but how many New Yorkers know that? Thanks to the whims of nineteenth-century reformers, the city tucks its mayoral elections into the odd years that follow Presidential elections; this practice has been a drag on turnout for more than a century. The winner of the Democratic Party primary, which takes place in June, will be expected to win easily come November—making the battle for control of the country’s largest city a bit anticlimactic. And, with the coronavirus pandemic raging, the effort to distribute the vaccine sputtering, and Donald Trump fomenting violent insurrection on his way out of the White House, the mayoral race has, up to now, felt like an undercard.
The race resists categorization by the sheer size of the field. According to the New York City Campaign Finance Board, more than thirty-five people have filed paperwork to run. Among them are the city comptroller, Scott Stringer; the Brooklyn borough president, Eric Adams; the former City Hall official Maya Wiley; the Brooklyn rapper Paperboy Prince; an accountant named Quanda Francis; and seven people whom Curbed recently described as having released “very little information about themselves.” At least another half-dozen people bring serious work or government experience to the primary race, including the former Obama Cabinet official Shaun Donovan, the City Council member Carlos Menchaca, the former nonprofit executive Dianne Morales, and the former city sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia.
With in-person campaigning limited by the pandemic, the race has, for the most part, been restricted to modestly attended Zoom events, dutiful coverage in the local press, and the invisible-to-the-public back-and-forth between candidates and activist and interest groups. In September, 2020, on the day that Stringer, the highest-ranking citywide official in the race, announced his candidacy, he took a small pack of reporters with him to Jackson Heights, where he ordered shrimp arepas from a food truck. “That’s how we announce,” he said, after taking an enthusiastic bite. In December, Ray McGuire, a longtime Citibank executive, entered the race by releasing a video, narrated by Spike Lee, that featured him jogging alone through a deserted Times Square and other parts of New York. Before he formally announced his candidacy, on January 13th, Andrew Yang, the businessman who proved a surprisingly effective campaigner during a long-shot bid for the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination, was spotted in Coney Island, a crew in tow, looking into cameras and saying, “I’m Andrew Yang, and I’m running for mayor of New York City.”
How the field got so big is itself a complicated story. The city’s generous public financing of elections, which provides as many as eight public dollars for every private dollar that candidates raise on their own, has lowered the bar for mounting a credible run. Ranked-choice voting, which will be used in New York for the first time this year, means that candidates who are unable to win even a plurality of first-choice votes might see a path to victory in being a popular second choice. A relative absence of notable names—the City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, the former congressman Max Rose, and the public advocate Jumaane Williams are among those who have chosen not to run—may have encouraged lower-profile figures to enter the race. And there’s a widespread sense that running has no downside—that any attention may advance an issue or boost a career, and that you never know who might catch fire. Yang is the clearest example of this phenomenon: he rode the 2020 Presidential primaries to prominence, even though, in the end, he didn’t attract many votes. “The candidacies become platforms for personalities and careers with much lower stakes than previously,” Alyssa Katz, a deputy editor at the local news Web site The City, told me. “As long as you don’t mind losing.”
If the candidates are trying to use the race as a platform, they’re generally not doing a notable job of it—with a few exceptions. (Stringer, a longtime city-government figure, surprised many by announcing early endorsements from the city’s new crop of democratic-socialist politicians. Adams, a pugnacious former cop, has run as a law-enforcement expert who can talk about both the brutality he suffered as a kid at the hands of the N.Y.P.D. and why he resists calls to defund the police now. Yang has been hammered by the local press for spending most of the pandemic in his weekend home in the Hudson Valley—but he has also attracted quite a lot of press just by entering the race.) Even the reporters paid to watch and write stories about the candidates say that they’re having trouble teasing out clear contrasts. “Folks are struggling, early on, to articulate a really good case for themselves,” Ben Max, the executive editor of the Gotham Gazette, said. “I do see some contrast, but you have to look pretty closely to see it. We’re still waiting for people to fully define themselves. And it’s going to get late early here.”
No one seems to know how to take up the legacy of Bill de Blasio. It’s a truism in New York City politics that every mayor is a kind of response to the mayor who preceded him. De Blasio brought the city universal pre-kindergarten and a fifteen-dollar minimum wage, but he also developed a reputation for talking a bigger game than he played and hating his job. Even those Democratic candidates who have worked for him—perhaps especially those candidates—have been careful not to embrace him; his sputtering 2020 Presidential campaign only cemented his place as a figure of mockery in the Democratic Party. At the same time, almost all of them are competing for the progressive mantle that propelled him to City Hall, in 2013. Many of the current candidates have presented themselves as low-profile technocrats who could make good on the progressive promises, such as housing affordability and police reform, that de Blasio supported but struggled to fulfill.
The next mayor will face budget cuts and other decisions that were unthinkable before last March, and no one knows what the next five months will bring, much less what the city will look like when the next mayor takes office, a year from now. The whole race may turn on how the candidates respond to the few moments in the coming months when the race breaks through the noise of the rest of the news. “That might only be two or three moments, honestly,” Eric Phillips, a former press secretary at City Hall, said. “Which may not be the best way to run a race to be the leader of a city of eight and half million people.”
Is it good for voters, and the city, to have so many people running? The answer depends on whom you ask. “I think the circus is, in some ways, not a great thing, because it’s not actually sharpening the fundamental debate and choices that people should be thinking about,” Alicia Glen, a former deputy mayor in the de Blasio administration, said. “It’s not actually presenting the voters with clear choices. It’s muddying the waters.” Nick Rizzo, a former Brooklyn Democratic Party district leader who has been involved with insurgent leftist campaigns in the city in recent years, had another view. “This is a healthy sign,” Rizzo said, of the size of the field. New York has “traditionally had among the hardest ballot-access laws in the country.” More is more in politics, Rizzo and others believe: candidates influence one another, and popular policy ideas end up bouncing around.
The giant field is also as diverse as any in the city’s history. New York has had a hundred and nine mayors; all but one have been white men. Where the current candidates contrast the most is in the ways that they have incorporated their identities and personal histories into their political pitches. McGuire is the first Black candidate ever to offer himself as the candidate of the business élite. Yang is best known for popularizing universal basic income, but many observers are waiting to see if he attracts the enthusiasm of the city’s Asian-American communities. I asked Glen, who has been seen in the past as a potential candidate, whether she believed the chance to elect the first woman mayor might motivate a significant number of voters in the city. “N.Y.C. voters don’t seem to give a shit about gender,” she said, bluntly. “It is, to me, one of the most upsetting and perplexing things—that women have not coalesced here.”
For now, a spring primary in a distracted year doesn’t bode well for voter enthusiasm on any issue, or for generating much of a mandate for the next mayor. “I’m pretty worried about what the turnout is going to look like in June,” Max, of the Gotham Gazette, said. “One of the things I’ve always found confounding is why so many more people vote in a Presidential primary in New York City than a mayoral primary.”
