A Post-Mortem On The Tumultuous New York City Mayoral Race

Progressives looked to cut their losses and form late alliances to block neoliberal frontrunner and former NYPD Captain, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, from becoming New York City’s next mayor. Their efforts proved too little, too late.

The contentious Democratic Primary for the New York City Mayoral race finally came to a close on Tuesday after months of roller-coaster polling, rescinded endorsements, harsh battles between campaigns, and downright incompetence by the New York City Board of Elections during the city’s first implementation of their newly minted ranked-choice voting system.

So much has changed even in the past month that my previous coverage of this race was rendered outdated almost immediately after publication, once campaign workers for Dianne Morales came forward to allege employee abuse and anti-union activities being used by campaign leadership against campaign workers and volunteers. Aside from these revelations, more questions about Morales’ progressive bonafides came to light (some of which I covered here), including her inability to admit that she likely voted for Andrew Cuomo in 2018’s Democratic Primary for Governor of New York, while most other members of New York’s left coalesced behind progressive challenger Cynthia Nixon. The developments within the Morales campaign led to an abandoning of her campaign by left-leaning orgs such as the Working Families Party, as well as many rank-and-file DSA members whose own organization chose to not weigh in on the mayoral race, instead focusing on winnable city council races.

For the organized left-wing of New York City, the mayoral race has been, for the aforementioned reasons and many more, a largely fruitless project from the get-go. The opportunity cost of throwing organizational weight behind a decent candidate (as some would later do with MSNBC legal analyst and former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, Maya Wiley), was not worth diverting the limited campaign resources available to grassroots organizations such as DSA, Sunrise Movement, and others, when there were down-ballot races in play.