Eric Adams will be the Democratic nominee for mayor, after narrowly defeating Kathryn Garcia on Tuesday in the first citywide ranked-choice election. The result was apparent following a new tally of votes released by the New York City Board of Elections that included the vast majority of outstanding absentee ballots.
Below are the latest developments in the race.
Adams declares victory
With a small but potentially insurmountable lead, Adams released a statement on Tuesday declaring victory in the Democratic primary:
While there are still some very small amounts of votes to be counted, the results are clear: an historic, diverse, five-borough coalition led by working-class New Yorkers has led us to victory in the Democratic primary for Mayor of New York City. Now we must focus on winning in November so that we can deliver on the promise of this great city for those who are struggling, who are underserved, and who are committed to a safe, fair, affordable future for all New Yorkers.
He was not alone in his prognosis: The AP has also called the race for him.
Absentee ballots are in — and they’re good news for Adams
The results from nearly 126,000 absentee ballots in the NYC mayoral race were released Tuesday, dropping Eric Adams’s lead over Kathryn Garcia from 14,755 votes to just 8,426. While the ballots were expected “midafternoon,” according to a Board of Elections spokeswoman, they were released just after 6:30 p.m.
The BOE also notes that there are around 4,000 outstanding ballots that need to be cured before they are added to the tally.
Former Congressman Vito Fossella wins GOP primary for Staten Island borough president
Down prior to the return of absentee ballots, former Representative Vito Fossella pulled off an upset victory for the Republican primary for Staten Island borough president, besting council member Steven Matteo by just under 300 votes:
While representing New York’s 13th Congressional District, Fossella was arrested in 2008 for a DUI in Virginia, after which it emerged that he had a second family.
Counting the absentees
On Friday, the New York Times offered a check-in on the process, which began on Monday:
Ms. Garcia, who beat Mr. Adams in Manhattan in the in-person vote tally, also showed strength in absentee ballots from the borough, according to a preliminary count of unofficial results obtained by The New York Times. She was the first choice on 9,043 ballots of 23,739 ballots counted as of Thursday night, or about 38 percent. She was the second or third choice on another 7,187 ballots. Mr. Adams was the first choice on 2,999 absentee ballots from Manhattan, or about 13 percent, and the second or third choice on another 5,304. Manhattan was the only borough he did not win in the in-person tally.
Adds analyst Ryan Matsumoto:
Intelligencer’s David Freedlander reported Friday:
The Adams campaign has remained confident that once the absentee votes are counted, Adams will be declared the winner. His rivals suspect that part of the reason he spent the days after the election acting like a mayor-in-waiting was to lay the groundwork for a claim that the election was stolen from him should Garcia (or, less likely, Wiley) somehow beat him in the absentees and set himself up as a foil to the eventual winner, much as Giuliani spent the years after his first run for the mayoralty as a counterpoint to the man who defeated him, David Dinkins.
The numbers as they stand Wednesday
The updated ranked choice election results provided by the BOE show that after nine rounds, Eric Adams leads with 51.1 percent of the vote over Kathryn Garcia’s 48.9 percent. In the penultimate round, Garcia bested Maya Wiley by just 347 votes.
Trump invokes 2020, Adams pushes back
Donald Trump is comparing the current mess in the New York mayoral election to last year’s presidential election, invoking the debunked falsehood that the 2020 contest was stolen from him.
In a statement, the aggrieved ex-president said, “Just like in the 2020 Presidential Election, it was announced overnight in New York City that vast irregularities and mistakes were made and that Eric Adams, despite an almost insurmountable lead, may not win the race.”
Trump added that the primary election should be re-done “the old-fashioned way,” though it was unclear what that meant.
Adams, who has not always fostered confidence in the electoral system, back on the former president’s words, tweeting, “As always, Trump gets it wrong. Yesterday, the results released by the BOE had discrepancies which are being addressed. There were NO similar issues in November. Neither of these elections were a hoax or a scam.”
De Blasio weighs in on BOE’s “flaws”
De Blasio released a statement Wednesday morning, calling out what he considers to be the “fundamental structural flaws” of the Board of Elections.
“There must be an immediate, complete recanvass of the BOE’s vote count and a clear explanation of what went wrong,” de Blasio said. “The record number of voters who turned out this election deserve nothing less.”
The mayor is pushing for a “structural rebuild” of the Board of Elections, advocating for the state legislature to professionalize the board, remove party affiliation, and make it accountable to the city’s elected officials.
Candidates respond to the crisis
After the Board of Elections admitted its mistake, several of the leading candidates responded with frustration and calls for patience. Eric Adams’s campaign released a statement saying that the error was “unfortunate” and that it is “critical that New Yorkers are confident in their electoral system,” particularly in the first ranked-choice primary. They also thanked the BOE for its “transparency and their acknowledgement of their error.”
Kathryn Garcia was more critical of the development:
New Yorkers want free and fair elections, which is why we overwhelmingly voted to enact ranked choice voting. The BOE’s release of incorrect ranked choice votes is deeply troubling and requires a much more transparent and complete explanation. Every ranked choice and absentee vote must be counted accurately so that all New Yorkers have faith in our democracy and our government. I am confident that every candidate will accept the final results and support whomever the voters have elected.
And Maya Wiley, who remains in close third — at least according to Tuesday’s data — was more excoriating, noting the history of problems at the BOE:
This error by the Board of Elections is not just failure to count votes properly today, it is the result of generations of failures that have gone unaddressed. Sadly it is impossible to be surprised. Last summer BOE mishandled tens of thousands of mail in ballots during the June 2020 primary. It has also been prone to complaints of patronage. Today, we have once again seen the mismanagement that has resulted in a lack of confidence in results, not because there is a flaw in our election laws, but because those who implement it have failed too many times.
Add the election to BOE’s greatest hits
The Board of Elections is having some issues
Amid the confusion on Tuesday evening, it appears that the New York City Board of Elections could not be bothered with a press conference to answer the many questions swirling in the wake of the new count. A tweet was all they could muster:
This is not the first mess at the BOE, as the New York Times noted in a report last October:
Already this year, the New York City Board of Elections failed to mail out many absentee ballots until the day before the primary, disenfranchising voters, and sent erroneous general election ballot packages to many other residents, spreading confusion …
New York is the only state in the country with local election boards whose staffers are chosen almost entirely by Democratic and Republican Party bosses, and the board in New York City illustrates the pitfalls. In recent years, the board has made increasingly high-profile blunders, from mistakenly purging 200,000 people from rolls ahead of the 2016 election to forcing some voters to wait in four-hour lines in 2018.
Adams says there are ‘serious questions’ about the new tally
The Adams campaign said in a statement that the “vote total just released by the Board of Elections is 100,000-plus more than the total announced on election night,” adding that they have asked the board to “explain such a massive increase and other irregularities.”
Garcia urges patience, but says she’s prepared to mount legal challenges
During a press conference following Tuesday’s good news for her campaign, Garcia stressed patience as the ranked-choice voting process continues. “We are incredibly hopeful about the 124,000 absentee ballots out there, many of them came from the electoral districts I did well in,” she said. The preliminary results showing her surviving until the end against Adams mean “I was a consensus candidate across the board,” she quipped. While stressing the need to be patient and respect the process, Garcia said she was prepared to mount legal challenges to “protect every vote cast.”
Which way will absentee ballots break?
The election’s final result almost certainly hinges on more than 124,000 absentee ballots whose ranked-choice votes were not included in the latest tally reported by the Board of Elections. (The ballots had until Tuesday to arrive at a BOE office to be counted.) It’s not yet clear which of the final candidates has the most to gain from the tranche, but that hasn’t stopped speculation focused on which districts returned the most absentee ballots.
A New York Post analysis found districts that backed Adams during in-person voting “have returned more absentee ballots than the districts that backed” Garcia, Wiley, or Yang. Garcia would need to win more than half of absentee ballots to surpass Adams in the end, which is “doable” according to Ryan Matsumoto, a journalist who highlighted on Twitter how absentee ballots came disproportionally from the Garcia stronghold of Manhattan.
Wiley: I’m not out
Despite preliminary results showing her eliminated before reaching the end, Wiley stood by the ranked-choice system. “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,” she said in a statement. “And we must all support its results.” And as Gotham Gazette editor Ben Max notes, the second-to-last round is quite close between Garcia and Wiley:
As if this couldn’t get crazier
The last woman standing?
124,000 absentee ballots still need to be counted
The city Board of Elections reported Sunday that 124,033 absentee ballots remain to be counted in the Democratic mayoral primary, including more than 39,000 ballots in Manhattan, where front-runner Adams did not win. That means a potentially rich harvest for both Wiley and Garcia, who got the most first-ranked votes in Manhattan and still have a chance to win.
Not so fast on the “defund” takeaways
Intelligencer’s Zak Cheney-Rice pours some water on the idea that Eric Adams’s likely win in the mayoral primary is some kind of death knell for “defund the police”:
Adams’s success probably has less to do with his stance on defunding the police, which almost none of his opponents supported either, than with being a skilled and opportunistic politician who performed well for the same reasons that most opportunistic politicians do. As for what this race reveals about the viability of defunding as a political proposal, it’s hard to say when its primary feature was its absence. We’re left with what we’ve known all along: Politicians tend to avoid unpopular stances, and activists tend to embrace them despite their unpopularity.
This may very well be a revelation to some aspiring progressive champion seeking higher office and will cause them to rethink putting “defund the police” at the center of their future vote-getting strategies. But the more practical lesson of Adams’s triumph is that it’s still useful to be the guy willing to say whatever it takes to accrue power and influence.
Read the rest of Zak’s response here.
Yang filed ballot suit, then withdrew it
The City reported Thursday evening that the Yang campaign had filed a preemptive lawsuit that named the 12 other Democratic candidates that ran against him. Yang, who is currently running in fourth place, officially conceded the race on Election Night. The suit, which was filed June 18, is intended to preserve the campaign’s right to “correct any errors” in the canvassing of election returns.
In series of tweets, candidate Aaron Foldenauer reported being served by the campaign Thursday, saying, “The purported reason for the suit is for the Yang campaign to reserve its rights to contest the results in the event of a close election. Given Andrew Yang’s disappointing finish, this lawsuit isn’t worth the paper it is printed on!!”
Chris Coffey, co-campaign manager for Yang, tweeted in response to Foldenauer, “It’s a standard practice for protecting absentees and we are withdrawing. Calm down.”
Curtis Sliwa reaches across the aisle
Sliwa, the official Republican nominee and the founder of the vigilante group the Guardian Angels, has made an appeal to the founder of the Yang Gang. “I’m welcoming you,” Sliwa said in a video encouraging Andrew Yang — who conceded on Wednesday night — to campaign with him and rally his supporters to vote Republican in November. “First and foremost, we’re populists, and we’re not politicians,” he said of the similarities between the two. Sliwa also took a stab at Adams, noting the many times the Democratic front-runner made fun of Yang in the primary.
The era of liberal peace is over
Ross Barkan examines the state of play between incoming progressives and a potential Adams administration:
All of this makes for a dynamic radically different from the last time there was such turnover in the five boroughs: 2013. Back then, Bill de Blasio rode to power as a popular progressive with a biracial family and was fawned over as an antidote to Michael Bloomberg’s 12 years of oligarch-like rule. De Blasio, of course, would become deeply disliked across swaths of the city, especially in white neighborhoods, but it is easy to forget how compelling his victory once was and how his mandate was perceived within government. De Blasio was able, in effect, to pick the speaker of the City Council, Melissa Mark-Viverito, and enjoy a brief period of comity with the other citywide elected officials of the time, such as Comptroller Scott Stringer and Public Advocate Letitia James. All of them were center-left Democrats who did not differ much in ideology. James even sang de Blasio’s name, literally, at one campaign stop.
That era is long gone — Jumaane Williams will never sing for Adams. AOC has the Twitter perch to flay the new mayor as much as anyone, if she so chooses. In 2013, the idea of admitted socialists winning office was laughable. Now they are serving in city, state, and federal offices. Adams can argue he is speaking for the true New York, the blue-collar outer boroughs. While he once told me he would be a mayor for everyone, “socialists” and “communists,” deep down Adams knows he has a base to tend to and that everyone else will only mean so much.
All of this could lead to open warfare. Adams is emboldened, rightfully so. He will interpret his win as a mandate and act accordingly. The left, in its own down-ballot triumphs, will find every reason to fight back and frustrate whatever it is Adams has planned, such as expanding charter schools or boosting stop and frisk.
Adams: “I am the face of the new Democratic Party.”
During a Thursday press conference outside Brooklyn Borough Hall, Eric Adams reiterated that he will accept the eventual results of the election — while imparting lessons from what he clearly views as an eventual victory.
“Whatever the results are, we’re going to respect them,” Adams said. “Whomever is the mayor of the city of New York, I’m going to work with them. I think all of the candidates have something to offer.”
He also called himself a “supporter” of ranked-choice voting and that he believes that education about the process is crucial.
He also made it clear that he believes his standing in the race sends a message about what voters are looking for.
“I am the face of the new Democratic Party. Look at me and you’re seeing the future of the Democratic Party,” Adams said. “If the Democratic Party fails to recognize what we did here in New York, they’re going to have a problem in the midterm elections and they’re going to have a problem in the presidential elections.”
America doesn’t want “fancy candidates,” Adams went on, but rather people with “calluses on their hands” who are “blue-collar people that understand a blue-collar country.”
Adams says he has yet to speak to Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is believed to be a supporter of his, or Governor Andrew Cuomo.
Adams stands by contentious comments from final days of race
After Kathryn Garcia and Andrew Yang formed a late alliance last week, Eric Adams and his campaign surrogates accused them of a racially motivated plot to deny him the mayoralty, with Adams likening the arrangement to Jim Crow. On Thursday, Adams — not known for backtracking or striking an apologetic stone — stuck by those remarks.
What’s next for Wiley and Garcia?
New York contributor David Freedlander lays out the potential paths that Wiley and Garcia’s supporters see for their candidates and the one Adams himself might prefer:
A ten-point margin is a very difficult one for either Wiley or Garcia to close, but their supporters remained hopeful that Adams’s actions over the final days of the race — in which he blasted ranked-choice voting, accused his rivals of racism for ganging up against him, and said that announcing an early result would cast a pall of suspicion around the vote count — would lead many voters to leave him off their ballots altogether.
At this point, game theory suggests that Wiley has the best odds — still very slim — of catching Adams. The logic for that is as follows:
The race will eventually come down two candidates, almost certainly Adams and either Wiley or Garcia. If Garcia edges above Wiley and Wiley drops out of contention, Wiley’s share of the vote will likely be split between Garcia and Adams — meaning Adams’s current lead would probably hold. If Wiley maintains her current lead over Garcia, Garcia will be forced to drop out, and Garcia’s vote is expected to tilt more heavily toward Wiley, giving her a stronger chance to catch Adams.
Wiley: “We know we can win”
Wiley addressed supporters and the media outside the Parkside Avenue subway station in Brooklyn on Wednesday afternoon, and despite Wiley being nearly ten points behind Adams, she said that she “absolutely” sees a path to victory. “Fifty percent of the votes are going to be recounted. The way that folks ranked their No. 2 and their No. 3 votes are gonna count. We’ve known all along that we have strong support in the top rankings. So, we’re excited about the possibility here,” she said. “We know we can win. The voters will decide. We’re gonna wait patiently.”
Wiley was asked if she thought that some of her endorsers, such as Representative Hakeem Jeffries, did her a disservice by ranking Adams high up on their ballots, which could potentially give him a bigger boost.
“No, I don’t think they did me a disservice because I don’t think you can do anyone a disservice by doing democracy, and that’s what ranked-choice voting is,” Wiley said.
The beef that never ends
Sliwa goes after Adams for first time
Curtis Sliwa was back out on the trail after securing the Republican nomination and took aim at his assumed future general-election opponent, Adams. New York Daily News’ Shant Shahrigian reports that Sliwa said he blames Adams, an outspoken former NYPD captain, for the end of qualified immunity for the city’s officers. In March, the City Council voted to end qualified immunity, making it easier for victims of police misconduct to pursue legal actions against officers. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, has advocated for the change as a way to bring about police reform. Sliwa said he intends to show that he is the true pro-cop candidate in the race: “There’s no doubt I’m a tough guy.”
Turnout surpasses 2013, with more to come
Mayor Bill de Blasio announced during a Wednesday morning press conference that 944,197 votes have been cast in the primary election, with more than 90,000 absentee ballots yet to be counted. This figure greatly surpasses the turnout for the last nonincumbent mayoral primary, in 2013, when about 750,000 votes were cast in both parties’ primaries. (The 2021 primary featured races other than mayor, so the comparison is not perfect.)
The Yang blame game begins
Andrew Yang, who for months was the race’s front-runner, badly underperformed expectations on Tuesday night, taking only 11.66 percent of first-place votes in the current count and conceding late in the evening. Now Yang allies who worked on his 2020 presidential campaign are blaming his poor showing on a lobbying firm closely aligned with his mayoral campaign.
The Uprising’s Hunter Walker reports that associates of the candidate claim that his mayoral bid was mismanaged by Tusk Strategies. The firm is run by Bradley Tusk, a wealth venture capitalist whom some had cast as a political Svengali, shaping a relatively blank-slate candidate around his policy preferences.
“For months, several senior staffers from the presidential campaign offered guidance to Tusk Strategies without response in regards to earned media and digital that were largely ignored,” an unnamed senior adviser from the Yang presidential campaign told Walker. “This loss is being squarely placed on this firm.”
Adams talks about Black lives and knocks rivals in freewheeling speech
Taking the stage at an Election Night party in Williamsburg, he was met by supporters chanting, “The champ is here!” Adams was his usual, idiosyncratic self, speaking sometimes in the third person and stopped just short of declaring outright victory: “New York City said our first choice is Eric Adams.”
Speaking for 40 minutes, Adams took shots at the media and his rivals, made a tribute to his late mother, and spoke in particular about the lives of Black New Yorkers, whose votes propelled him into first place. “If Black lives really matter, it can’t only be against police abuse,” said the man who was beaten by cops as a teenager and then became an officer himself. “It has to be about the violence tearing apart our communities,” he continued, talking about the need for residents to not only be free of guns and crime, but to also have affordable housing and healthy food.
Despite apparently trouncing Wiley and Yang, he couldn’t resist taking jabs at them. Adams said he has real experience fighting crime as a cop, opposed to Wiley’s “theoretical experience.” He also dunked on Yang, saying “some candidates misunderstood is that social media does not pick a candidate. People on Social Security pick a candidate.”
What happened in the other elections on Wednesday?
In the primary for Manhattan District Attorney, progressive Alvin Bragg is leading Tali Farhadian Weinstein by around 3 points. In the comptroller’s race, progressive Brad Lander is leading Corey Johnson by around 9 points. In the Bronx borough president’s race, Vanessa Gibson leads Fernando Cabrera by about 5 points. In the Manhattan borough president’s race, Mark Levine leads Brad Hoylman by about 3 points. In the race to replace Eric Adams as Brooklyn borough president, Antonio Reynoso leads Robert Cornegy by around 9 points. Outside the city, the socialist candidate India Walton has declared victory in the mayoral primary in Buffalo, though an official call has not yet been made.
A borough-by-borough breakdown of voting preferences
Yang has conceded
Around 10:40 p.m., Yang took the stage at his Election Night party to end a major campaign for the second time in less than 18 months.
“You all know I am a numbers guy,” he told his supporters. “I’m someone who traffics in what’s happening by the numbers. And I am not going to be the next mayor of New York City based upon the numbers that have come in. Tonight I am conceding this race.”
When he called it quits, Yang had pulled in less than 12 percent of the vote. Not everyone at the candidate’s party was dismayed by the weak showing:
Curtis Sliwa wins Republican mayoral primary
The Associated Press has called the GOP primary for Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the vigilante group the Guardian Angels. To celebrate, he appeared onstage with Rudy Giuliani while talking about “refunding” the NYPD and “taking the handcuffs off the police and putting them on the criminals.” Sliwa defeated businessman and taxi-driver advocate Fernando Mateo. In his victory speech, he gave a shout-out to his many pets:
Can Adams hang onto his lead?
Intelligencer’s Ben Jacobs reports:
Adams’s wide lead over his closest opponent makes him the favorite to win, though he still needs to earn enough voter preferences under the ranked-choice system to reach 50 percent plus one. (The next round of voting calculations will begin on June 29.) That could be a challenge for a candidate who spent much of the final weeks of campaign courting controversy. In theory, his polarizing personality could hold him back in later rounds if voters decided not to rank him at all. This ranked-choice element was behind the alliance between Garcia and Yang, with Yang urging his supporters over the weekend to rank her second on their ballots. The result of Yang’s endorsement will be borne out in following rounds, potentially boosting Garcia into position to take on Adams.
Adams campaign kicks out New York reporter over critical article
New York contributor David Freedlander reports he was denied entry to the Adams victory party over a critical article he wrote about the candidate last week. According to Freedlander, campaign staff approached him at the door of a venue in Williamsburg hosting the Adams party and one person said, “You’re not getting in here,” before proceeding to say how the article was supposedly flawed. New York spoke with the Adams campaign prior to the publication of “The Company Eric Adams Keeps,” which quoted 30 people in New York politics — “almost all of them anonymously, citing the fear that he would soon be mayor and look to exact revenge on the mayoral front-runner’s decades in politics.” Freedlander reported on Adams’s controversial history, including his history of standing by a former lawmaker who was convicted of slashing his girlfriend and of his close connection to Frank Carone, a Democratic lawyer in Brooklyn, lobbyist, and fixer.
Evan Thies, a campaign official, told NY1 it was an “unfortunate misunderstanding; in no way did the campaign intend to do that.”
Where are the exit polls?
Unlike the 2013 primary (or the 2020 presidential race), it does not look like there will be exit polls helping to inform election watchers where the count may be going. As Larry Rosin, the president of the polling firm Edison Research, told the New York Times: “If we aren’t doing it, it’s probably no one doing it. It’s a very arcane little corner of the research world and not many people hang out in this arcane little corner.”
Ranked choice is most likely the reason for the absence, as exit polling is complicated and expensive even in traditional races.
Exit interviews with the current mayor
On Tuesday, the New York Times and Politico both published interviews with the checked-out and unpopular Bill de Blasio. When a Times reporter asked if he considered Eric Adams a progressive, the mayor said of the former Republican: “Oh, unquestionably. He was progressive long before it was fashionable.” He also diagnosed what he saw as an unorganized left flank in the city politics: “What’s clear is that the movement needs to become more of a movement — more coherent.”
In an interview with Politico conducted last Thursday in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, de Blasio sounded more introspective. “I think I sort of once was lost and now I’m found,” he said. “I lived my authentic life a long time. I think this job tightened me too much. Or I let it tighten me. I think I’m going back to who I am. That’s also a joyous moment. It really is. This is how I want to live. This is the right way to live.” The quiet moment wouldn’t last long. Just after this self-analysis, a father playing catch with his son stopped to yell at him: “No one wants you! You’re the worst. You’re the WORST!”
Yang promises “epic celebration tonight”
BEN JACOBS: Speaking to reporters in the drizzle outside a polling place in Cobble Hill, Yang tried almost too hard to project his trademark cheer. “It’s Election Day!” he proclaimed before insisting we are “poised to win this race and have an epic celebration tonight.”
Tuesday marked the culmination of a remarkable journey for the former tech entrepreneur whose gadfly presidential campaign transformed from a total unknown to a political celebrity, to the front-runner to be mayor before fading into the middle of the pack in recent weeks.
“I’m driven by the opportunity to help as many people as possible,” he told Intelligencer. “And being able to serve in this kind of role is an incredible opportunity that’s only become possible because of the last number of years and a number of people worked very hard at supporting my presidential campaign and I hope they are excited about what I accomplish as mayor.”
Paperboy Prince stops by Astoria in decorated campaign bus
Adams gives up attacks on ranked-choice voting
BEN JACOBS: Days after picking a fight with Andrew Yang and Kathryn Garcia over their alliance — baselessly comparing it to a “poll tax” (his campaign says he was talking about how his supporters felt) — Eric Adams dropped this line of attack and shifted back to the message that had propelled him to front-runner status.
“Today is about talking to people. No more intellectual, philosophical conversations,” he told reporters during an early-afternoon campaign stop in Washington Heights. “Millions of people are behind with their rent. People are dealing with crime, uncertainly if you are employed or not, lack of rent. These are real issues. All the other stuff, those are philosophical privileged issues.”
A crowd of supporters intermittently did a call-and-response chant of “People, power” while former state senator Adam Clayton Powell IV, son of the legendary Harlem congressman, urged everyone walking by on St. Nicholas Avenue to “come meet the next mayor, Eric Adams.”
The candidate was upbeat, posing for selfies and cracking jokes with passersby. “I’m going to put my earring back in when I’m mayor,” he told one neighborhood denizen, then told a heavily tattooed man walking by, “You inspired me to get one.”
Adams literature features questionable definition of endorsements
Eric Adams’s campaign flyers are advertising people he has been “endorsed by,” including those who have endorsed him only as a second choice, such as Congressmen Ritchie Torres and Hakeem Jefferies, who are backing Andrew Yang and Maya Wiley, respectively, as their top picks.
Can de Blasio see over the privacy-booth walls?
AOC calls Adams ‘Trumpian,’ he hits back
In an interview with Hot 97, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was critical of Adams, citing his rhetoric around election that raised the specter of “hanky-panky” by opponents and called the Garcia-Yang alliance voter suppression like Jim Crow. “He’s not even clearly committing to honor the results of the election which is very Trumpian and I think it’s really unfortunate because we shouldn’t be messing with that in New York City,” she said.
The Adams campaign shot back, in a statement to a Times reporter:
AOC also revealed she ranked Stringer second after Wiley as No. 1. “Here’s the deal. This race, I think, has been really all over the place for a lot of people, to say the least. And so I do think it’s been hard for folks to rank. I personally have ranked Scott Stringer No. 2, and I think he’s also a really strong candidate from a policy perspective,” she said.
Why there could be no winner on Election Night
Intelligencer’s Nia Prater lays out the ballot counting process, which could mean we won’t know the primary results until mid-July:
After polls close at 9 p.m. on Tuesday, the BOE is expected to release unofficial preliminary results based on early and same-day voting, as they normally do. (Absentee ballots must be postmarked by June 22 and have a week to reach a BOE office.) So far, according to the BOE, 191,197 people cast ballots during the nine-day early voting period that ended Sunday.
… On June 29, the BOE will tabulate the unofficial first-round results, but no candidate is expected to reach 50 percent on the first ballot — meaning more votes will have to be counted, and ranked choices will come into effect. Also on this day, one week after Election Day, absentee, military, and provisional ballots can begin to be tabulated. (Once absentee ballots are received, the BOE will alert voters if they have any errors and allow them until July 9 to “cure” their ballot.)
After that first count, another week will go by, until July 6, when the BOE will provide an updated count with the number of received absentee ballots and give weekly updates as more come in. Final official results are expected during the week of July 12, nearly three weeks after the polls close.
Who is progressives’ best bet?
Intelligencer’s Eric Levitz explains why progressive New Yorkers should rank Andrew Yang over Eric Adams:
… I’m putting Yang fifth on my ballot and leaving Adams off it. My reasons for doing so are twofold: First, Adams is simply the more right-wing politician. And, in some cases, Adams’s conservatism is inextricable from his strong ties to certain unions and nonwhite voting blocs. The front-runner is the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association’s favorite Democratic candidate and, also, the only one in the mayor’s race who wants to expand the use of solitary confinement in the city’s jails. Yang, by contrast, has vowed to ban the practice, which mental-health experts and the United Nations deem a form of torture. And Yang also sits to Adams’s left on other criminal-justice issues, including the decriminalization of psychedelics.
Second, Yang’s newfound, formal alliance with Garcia makes his mayoralty a bit less of a black box than it was even last week. Yang had vowed to offer Garcia a top position in his administration months ago. But if Yang manages to defeat Adams — after Garcia shepherds her supporters into ranking him second — she will (almost certainly) be guaranteed exceptional influence over Yang’s policies. And while Garcia is a moderate with her share of demerits, she is also the only candidate calling for a citywide ban on single-family residential zoning — which is, more or less, a prerequisite for resolving New York’s housing crisis, itself a prerequisite for resolving a hefty percentage of the city’s largest social and economic problems.
Candidates cast their ballots
Eric Adams said he’s “feeling great” as he showed up to vote in Brooklyn this morning.
More strange claims from Adams
Throughout his campaign, the Brooklyn borough president has brought up several anecdotes he has never mentioned in public before, including his time at the Spofford Juvenile Detention Center in the Bronx; his time as a squeegee man; and the time he stopped a hate crime on the train while off-duty. The “can’t prove he did, can’t prove he didn’t” streak continued with more peculiar claims in the final days of the race:
Times passed on Stringer’s accuser
Almost two months after the comptroller was first accused of groping, the Columbia Journalism Review reported Monday on how the allegation impacted his campaign. Initially, the New York Times did not publish Jean Kim’s allegation because they were not able to corroborate her claim that Stringer groped and sexually harassed her. Although the Intercept later reported contradictions in Kim’s story, CJR spoke with several editors about how their coverage changed following the allegation:
After the initial flurry of news stories about Kim’s allegation, there was “a change in temperature across the coverage,” Alyssa Katz, deputy editor of The City, a nonprofit digital news platform, and former member of the NY Daily News editorial board, says. “You definitely saw a retreat from Stringer being covered, as if the obituary had already been written.”
… “No. We didn’t cover Stringer as much” after Kim’s initial allegations, says [NY1 host Errol Louis.] “After we chewed it over,” he says, “the consensus was that unless he can pull a rabbit out of the hat or change the narrative, Stringer’s campaign is on life support.”
… Stringer’s second accuser, however, did provide contemporaneous corroboration. Teresa Logan, who worked at a tavern co-founded by Stringer, said he had groped her and made unwanted sexual advances. At the time, Logan told her sister, Yohanna Logan, and at least one other friend, both of whom spoke with the Times, about some of the incidents. As is often the case with sexual-misconduct cases, there were “no known witnesses,” the Times reported.
This post will be repeatedly updated to include new information as it becomes available.
