The Weirdness of Eric Adams, who Wears a Gun, Brandishes Dead Rats, Maybe Lives in Jersey and Just Might Be NYC's Next Mayor
In the final days of NYC's all-important primary, I talked about the race with on CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor (here and here), on We the Fifth and at home on FAQ NYC, and wrote for the Daily Beast about frontrunner Eric Adams' wild cop energy.
And I wrote some last words on the race for the Daily News, as NYC's future begins on Tuesday:
Some scattered closing thoughts on a weird, wild primary that will set our one-party town on a track for the next decade set during a campaign in the midst of a pandemic in which the candidates have hardly been asked and have said almost nothing about how they will handle the next pandemic (or, God forbid, a resurgence of this one):
Eric Adams — who’s been a frontrunner since January while benefiting from relatively limited scrutiny as what remains of an undersized and overwhelmed press corps focused for months on Andrew Yang, and maybe also because white newsroom bosses have a tough time understanding a Black candidate appealing to Black voters — has wild cop energy.
He’s told New Yorkers to go back to Ohio, says he’ll wear a gun as mayor and maybe fire his security detail, and volunteered to teens at a mayoral forum that “All of you are lions and lions don’t care about the opinions of sheep.” He can’t quite seem to answer, or provide documents that would entirely answer, basic questions about the properties he owns or owned and where he lives now. And he has played the inside money game as an elected official with many of the same power players who anted up to sit at Bill de Blasio’s table.
Adams’ appeal as a former police officer and a dedicated police reformer seems to match the moment we’re in, but if you think the last eight years were a mess, stay tuned, as one prosecutor who nearly charged our current mayor liked to say, for lots more messes in an Adams administration.
Speaking of prosecutors, ProPublica reported last week that Tali Farhadian Weinstein — one of the leading district attorney candidates in Manhattan and the Daily News’ pick — paid virtually no federal income taxes in four of the last six years, even as she and her hedge fund manager husband have reported income as high as $107 million in 2011. Weinstein, who just poured $8 million into her own campaign, had already collected big donations from wealthy financiers based in New York, raising concerns about how aggressive she’d be in pursuing cases against white-collar criminals.
Those include an ex-New Yorker and ex-president who outgoing DA Cy Vance has been actively investigating. It’s pretty wild to think that the case against Donald Trump could be prosecuted by another super-wealthy person somehow paying an infuriatingly low tax bill.
One reason that could happen is that the DA race is a state race, which means it has sky-high limits on contributions, no ranked-choice voting and no run-off. So with eight candidates on the ballot, it will take only 30,000 votes or so (turnout is anyone’s guess) for someone to claim one of America’s most powerful prosecutorial offices in a borough where the general election is almost a formality.
Speaking of ranked-choice voting, if you haven’t voted early, I strongly recommend that you stop reading this column, visit findmypollsite.vote.nyc to find your early voting site, which is probably different than your usual election day site, and go vote on Sunday, which is your last chance to do so ahead of primary day — which looks to be a damn mess.
My sample ballot shows 13 picks for mayor (plus one box for a single write-in), with ranked-choice meaning I should fill in my top five, being sure to give each one a different number so my ballot doesn’t get tossed, followed by three picks to rank for public advocate, 10 for comptroller and 12 for Brooklyn borough president. Then there’s a surrogate court race with two candidates and a civil court race with three that are both state contests, so I only get to pick one judge for each. And finally seven ranked-choice again options for my City Council district.
It’s a lot, and it means that people are going to take a long time in the booth filling out their ballots, and you may be waiting a long time to cast yours if you vote on Tuesday.
Maya Wiley had to return her ballot and get a fresh one after mis-bubbling it while voting early.
“You have to line up the names to the numbers,” she said. “So you just have to be careful.”
It’s good advice, and necessary to maximize your power in this new system meant to do away with costly and low-turnout runoffs. My advice is not to think too hard about strategy here if you haven’t already, and simply vote for the candidates you like in the order you actually like them, being sure to bubble in other candidates all the way through five if there’s one you loathe to maximize your power to stop them.
And speaking of damn messes, the new ranking system and the state’s failure to update its election laws to correspond mean that we won’t know many of the winners on election night, or that week or maybe even this month.
Here goes nothing!
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