Cautious Optimism For Likely Future Mayor Eric Adams
/In the 2019 off-year election here in New York City, there was almost no reason to bother to vote. There were no elections on the ballot for any significant political office, whether federal, state, or local. But they took the occasion to put to the voters five propositions to amend the New York City Charter. One of those propositions provided for replacement of then-current voting procedures with a complicated “ranked choice voting” (RCV) system. Nobody can remember what the other four Charter amendment propositions were about. (Go here if you are curious.)
Previously, the system provided for runoff elections. In a multi-party race, if the leading candidate received more than 40% of the vote, that candidate would win outright; but if no candidate crossed that threshold, there would be a runoff between the leading two candidates. Multi-party races are unfortunately common in New York City, because we don’t have an effective two-party system as exists at the federal level. The Republicans are often non-competitive, and therefore, most elections are determined by the Democratic Party primary. To enter the Democratic primary for Mayor, you only need to collect a big 2,750 signatures from registered voters. And thus we can find ourselves with large numbers of candidates in the primaries. Indeed, nearly every seat with no incumbent running for re-election draws a large field. And since all City offices now have limits of two terms for office-holders, there are many, many open seats for every City election. As an illustration, with current Mayor de Blasio term limited, his seat is open, and the recent primary on June 22 had some thirteen candidates for Mayor in the Democratic race.
Throughout New York City in the recent election, voters had to contend with multiple races with five or ten or even more candidates running. In my own district, besides the race for Mayor, there was a race for City Comptroller, one for Manhattan District Attorney, and another one for City Councilman. All had large fields for voters to learn about and then rank.
The newly-proposed system in 2019 seemed overly complicated to me, and I didn’t see what was wrong with the occasional runoff. But RCV was pitched as a form of “instant runoff.” It won with about a 3-1 majority.
Now we have just had our first experience with the new system. The primaries were held on June 22. Since then it’s been two-plus weeks of the Perils of Pauline (including an admission by the Board of Elections that the initially-reported results included some 100,000+ test ballots that had not been eliminated before tallying actual votes). Just yesterday (July 7), the second-ranked candidate for Mayor (Kathryn Garcia) finally conceded. So we now finally know that the Democratic candidate for Mayor will be Eric Adams.
Remarkably, Adams was the closest thing to a “conservative” candidate in the race. As an example, he won the endorsement of the New York Post. The election was very much dominated by the issue of crime, with the rates of murders and of gun violence up dramatically during the mayoralty of de Blasio, most of that in the past two years. Adams explicitly made himself the law and order candidate. Actually, that wasn’t too difficult, because several of his more progressive opponents advocated for some form of defunding or “repurposing” of the policing function, even in the face of the big crime spike. Given that Adams served as a policeman himself for some 22 years (retiring as a Captain), he has a good deal of credibility in this area.
So far so good. But beyond the one area of crime, it’s difficult to tell where Adams may be headed. The best place to look for his campaign stands is this list of “Eric Adams’ 100+ Steps Forward For NYC.” There is some reason for optimism here. After 8 years of de Blasio’s blowout spending and giving the progressives everything they wanted, Adams actually talks (modestly) about reining back the cost and burden of City government, at least a little. For example:
“SAVE $1.5B AND AVOID LAYOFFS BY SIMPLY NOT HIRING ANYONE NEW FOR TWO YEARS”
“MANDATE EFFICIENCY”
“REIN IN HOSPITAL COSTS”
“SLASH THE RED TAPE”
“ELIMINATE THE FEES FOR STARTING (OR RE-STARTING) A SMALL BUSINESS”
OK, it’s a start. But there’s also plenty in here about new initiatives on crazy progressive stuff that will just throw more taxpayer money down the drain. A few examples:
“RETURN TO URBAN AGRICULTURE”. There’s a reason why nobody invests private capital in building a farm in the Bronx. (Hint: the land is way too expensive.)
“PROVIDE EVERY PARENT WHO NEEDS IT WITH CHILDCARE”. Doesn’t every parent “need” childcare?
“MOVE FROM CRADLE-TO-CAREER TO PRENATAL-TO-CAREER”.
“MAKE NEW YORK CITY THE WIND POWER HUB OF THE EASTERN SEABOARD”. Oh, please. To his credit, Adams does not make wild “climate” promises (a la de Blasio) like making the City “carbon free” in some short number of years. Most of the “climate”-related stuff in this dossier is small beer, like, for example, buying more electric buses.
If you are looking for the plan to rein in the wildly excessive New York City spending on K-12 education (well over double the national average per student) or on Medicaid, you will not find that here.
And of course there’s the obligatory plan for an increased tax on “ultra-millionaires.” Here the proposed tax will be “temporary” for two years, and will only apply on income over $5 million. As we all know, that’s not the way any temporary ultra-millionaire tax has ever worked in history.
The summary is that this guy is much, much less bad than what we could have gotten. Most of his proposals are fairly vague, and it’s hard to know which of them will be implemented and which will fall by the wayside. If he really does pay some attention to efficiency in City government and to public safety, he might actually bring the City back from the brink where it currently finds itself.