New Yorkers Vote in Primary for Post Pandemic Mayor

New Yorkers emerging from more than a year of pandemic misery will cast ballots Tuesday for a new mayor who will determine the city’s path to recovery. Voters will choose from a wide-ranging field that includes an ex-cop, a failed presidential candidate, a Wall Street executive and several former city bureaucrats.

The Democratic primary is garnering most of the attention, given that the winner of that contest will likely prevail in November against the Republican nominee in the overwhelmingly Democratic city.

The campaign has centered on a clash between two vastly different approaches to a recovery -- those who want to improve the mechanics of government as residents emerge from lockdown and fill streets, office buildings and restaurants, and those who say the city must keep its focus on ending inequality, echoing the theme that got term-limited Mayor Bill de Blasio elected in 2013.

Recent polls show four leading Democratic candidates: Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, former city Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, former presidential contender Andrew Yang, and civil rights lawyer Maya Wiley.

Adams, Garcia and Yang have all promised more police to stem a wave of violent crime as well as cleaner streets, support for arts and culture, and the return of New York as a tourism magnet.

Wiley, who won the backing of nationally known progressives such as Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is resurrecting de Blasio’s vows to fight inequality and over-aggressive policing. While she’s lacked a signature issue like de Blasio had with universal pre-kindergarten and an end to stop-and-frisk, she’s advocated cutting police budgets.

The slate of candidates is the city’s most diverse and could produce New York’s first female or Asian mayor. The city has had 109 male leaders and only one -- David Dinkins -- was Black.

The city is also experimenting with ranked choice balloting for the mayor’s race, as well as elections for city council members, borough presidents and city comptroller. Voters will select just one candidate for Manhattan district attorney, a state election.

The city’s ranked-choice system permits voters to choose their top five preferences in order, instead of just one. If the voter’s first choice fails to win the top position, the second-place vote gets counted in a process continuing until two candidates remain, and one prevails with a majority.

The first round of voting, to be counted Tuesday, will reveal only who took an early lead. The results of subsequent rounds of counting, which will await absentee ballots that come in later, will be released periodically. The final winner will be announced as late as July 12, said Board of Elections spokeswoman Valerie Vazquez-Diaz.

Early voting ended Sunday, with 191,197 New Yorkers completing ballots over nine days, including 65,516 in Brooklyn and 60,649 in Manhattan, according to the city Board of Elections. That pales in comparison to the 1.1 million New Yorkers who voted early in the 2020 presidential election, but represents 28% of the roughly 700,000 New Yorkers who voted in the 2013 primaries, before early voting was an option.

Republicans are choosing between Curtis Sliwa, founder of the red beret-wearing Guardian Angels, a volunteer crime-prevention group, and restaurateur Fernando Mateo.

The primary elections for mayor are typically held in September, less than two months before the November general election.

“If this were the September primaries as it has always been before, we would be having a different vibe,” said Rob Richie, chief executive of FairVote, a group that advocates for ranked-choice elections. “There would have been more time for engagement and maybe a little more time to define the race.”

Adding to the unpredictability is an exceptionally large field of candidates fueled by an expanded public campaign financing system that has helped keep lower-ranked candidates afloat. Aside from the four leading candidates, those financed by well over $1 million in public and private campaign donations include city Comptroller Scott Stringer and former city housing commissioner Shaun Donovan. Former Citigroup executive Ray McGuire didn’t accept public funds.