Today, Explained - Mare of New York

Episode Date: June 9, 2021

New York City is picking a new mayor with a new election system. What could go wrong? Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. New York City is shopping for a new mayor. And I know what you're thinking, right? Like, why should I care? Yeah, no, that's a great question. I mean, obviously, like, you know, here in New York, we're a little self-interested and self-involved, so we think everybody should care, but they really shouldn't. David Friedlander writes about New York politics for New York Magazine, and apparently he thinks you're right. You shouldn't

care. There goes our show for the day. But maybe they should in this case, because, thank God. You know, one thing is that these New York City mayoral races, they tend to kind of get reconceptualized after the fact as is telling this larger national story. For example, in 2013, when Bill de Blasio was elected, it was largely seen as a way for the American political left to kind of show its teeth. We understand that making big change isn't easy. And there are those who have said our ambition for this city is too bold. Well, let me say this. We are New Yorkers.

He was running as an unabashed progressive. And his win sort of heralded this new progressive movement that was sort of shaking up the Democratic Party. And that really turned out to be correct. You know, two years later, Bernie Sanders announced he was running for president. He did a lot better than anyone thought. You know, now the left is this, like, really legitimate force in the Democratic Party and in American politics. I certainly would not have had an opportunity to run as a Democrat.

In 2001, when Mike Bloomberg was elected, it was really read as the sort of post-9-11 moment, where even in sort of like liberal corners of the United States, Republicans were kind of on the march. The Republicans asked me, and I agreed with their fiscal conservatism in the city, and they believe in good government. And it's an opportunity to get to the public. And then, of course, he was elected in 2001. In 2002, Republicans held seats in the Senate and in the House. In the midterm, it's one of the few times the sort of out party hasn't made any gains in a midterm. Eight years before that, in 1993, Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor of New York. And that was really read as a kind of end of a certain kind of, you know, urban, democratic, big city liberalism.

Mayor has to be a proponent for much tougher laws against street criminals, violent criminals, and drug dealers. City of New York is, unfortunately, just about the best place to commit a crime because you get more benefits, more breaks, more opportunities from this system than you do anywhere else. And then we never heard from him again. Yeah, that was the end of Rudy Giuliani, which is ironic. Put down your crumb. She's 15. She there's just, you know, there's so much that sort of comes through New York,

you know, the coronavirus most recently. There's also just so much media attention here, so much sort of commerce and business kind of has to come through the city that it ends up being a kind of almost like national platform in a way that being mayor of L.A., Chicago, Houston, I think just sort of isn't. Well, let's talk about the people who are running for this, you know, second most important job in the country, second toughest job in the country. Who are they? I know everyone knows one of them, but who else is up there? Well, currently, the polling leader is Eric Adams, who is the Brooklyn Borough President. Sometimes when you're in a dark place, you're not buried, you're just planted. The question is, what are we going to do

with the fruits of our harvest? I was a state senator before that and was a police officer in the transit system before that. And he is a African American moderate who's running on a sort of tough on crime platform that also running kind of against, I think, the kind of ascendant left, both in the city, you know, and in the country in a way. I mean, he's somebody who never got sort of taken in by the defund the police movement or anything like that. So he's a Democrat, but he's not quite a lefty. Yeah, I mean, he's a Democrat for sure. But but he's sort of carved out a space that's really like against what, you know, you would sort of call the very online left. I don't even frankly think he has a TikTok account as far as I can tell.

I assume your TikTok dig was about Andrew Yang. My TikTok dig was about TikTok. But Andrew Yang is like, he's running as the extremely online candidate. When I hear the term Yang Gang, I think of all the incredible people who I met on the trail and have supported me in the campaign. So I love the Yang Gang and it's impossible for me not to then love the term Yang Gang. It seems to be that if he can achieve a sort of level of internet fame, then he will be elected mayor of New York. And for a long time, that seemed like a really good bet. He was leading in the polls through most of the race until very recently.

He would do these tweets that would seemingly like were just kind of bizarre. You know, they were, oh, this is my favorite pizza place. And it just looked like some kind of disgusting piece of pizza. He would hop on the subway and say, I can't wait to go to like, you know, we're on my way to the Bronx. And the train he would be on would be, you know, terminating in Harlem or something. And it's easy to make fun of, but we would all spend all day talking about Andrew Yang. And he sort of knocked that off a little bit. So I don't know if it was sort of strategy, but I will say some questions have been raised, I think, about his sort of knowledge of

city government, about his readiness to do the job, about his sort of sense of the gravity of the job. To be clear, I mean, he's never voted in a municipal election ever, which is a heck of a thing for someone running to be mayor. But rather than kind of answer these questions, rather than go on some kind of wonky public, you know, radio podcast where they pepper you with policy questions, he went on Showtime on Z-Way. Hi, Andrew. Hello, Z-Way. How are you? Good. How are you doing, Andrew Yang? Thank you so much for doing my show. You're an icon. Oh, thank you. You're an icon yourself. Where they asked him, like, what his favorite rap song is.

It was Jay-Z and a little bit of Nas. What's your favorite Jay-Z song? I mean, he's a New Yorker. Yes. What is my favorite Jay-Z song? It's, can I get an encore? Do you want more? He's just continuing to like go back and go back and go back on this notion of just,

if you're just kind of famous enough, you'll be able to win. Of course, another New York politician with a lot of name recognition, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who recently endorsed someone else, not Andrew Yang and not Eric Adams. Right. She endorsed Maya Wiley.

We have an option of a candidate who can center people, racial justice, economic justice, and climate justice. Who was a MSNBC commentator, a civil rights lawyer. She was also briefly a lawyer for Bill de Blasio and his administration. Rather than calling 9-1 and getting a badge and a gun, if what you need is a mental health care professional, we're going to use those resources, shift them out of the police department so that we have mental health crisis responders. AOC's endorsement came fairly late. There's two weeks to go in the election. This was supposed to be a campaign where the New York left was really ascendant, where, you know, Ocasio had

won. They had kicked out a bunch of longtime moderate state legislators. A number of Democratic Socialists of America candidates won. And folks, you know, really thought that this was sort of the left's moment in New York City. That has not happened. Some of that has not happened because it turned out that I think some of those ideas were not as popular as it seemed they could be on Twitter and in similar spaces. And some of that was just like the actual sort of left candidates kind of just completely collapsed. One such candidate, Scott Stringer, who is the sort of left candidates kind of just completely collapsed. One such candidate, Scott Stringer, who is the sort of second highest ranking city official, his campaign has collapsed over a number

of sexual harassment allegations. Another leftist candidate named Diane Morales, who is a non-profit executive, her campaign has collapsed when her campaign staff kind of revolted over some of the sort of internal workings of her office, which left Maya Wiley as the kind of standard bearer for that, you know, political faction. Okay, so you've got Adams, you've got Yang, you've got Wiley. Is there anyone else here who's, you know, a serious contender? Yeah, sure. I mean, I think Catherine Garcia, who is a former sanitation commissioner, in some ways, you know, she's kind of like the Joe Biden of the race. She's the candidate who you sort of can just kind of,

you know, start ignoring politics again if she wins. For the last 14 years, I've been New York City's go-to crisis manager. From pumping out water during Hurricane Sandy to delivering a million meals a day during the pandemic. When there's a crisis, sometimes you got to break glass to solve it. She's not wearing a kind of ideological cape. It's just about getting government to work, you know, having the streets swept, the trash picked

up, all that kind of stuff. She's sort of running under this like managerial competence banner in a way that none of the other candidates really are. What issues are most resonating with voters this time around coming out of this pandemic and after, you know, a very long time of Bill de Blasio being criticized for nearly everything he does, as far as I can tell? Mayor Bill de Blasio has now been implicated in the death of an innocent groundhog. Well, the big one, I think, is crime. Relative crime rates are, you know, low, but it has seen an alarming spike, especially in violent crime.

And so that's really taken on as the big issue here in the final weeks. And, you know, that's really on Eric Adams' turf. And for 22 years, I wore a bulletproof vest and stood on the street corners on Eric Adams' turf. And for 22 years, I wore a bulletproof vest and stood on the street corners and protected children and families in the city of New York. Please come and join me inside my house

as I show you how simple items such as bamboo paper can be an indicator of marijuana use, or a cut-off straw can be an indicator of using cocaine. He's someone who sort of made that the most salient issue of the race and kind of hoped it would be in a funny way the most salient issue of the race. So that's the most important thing. If crime is the thing we're talking about over the next two weeks, I think Eric Adams has a tremendous advantage. Otherwise, you know, I think it's really kind of recovering from the coronavirus. I mean, this city was just sort of locked down

and really devastated by the pandemic. And so I think that how we come out of that is going to be, you know, the big question. And that includes businesses opening back up, tourists coming, schools reopening, really every piece of it. Early voting in New York's Democratic primary begins this weekend.

And because the city is so blue, the Democratic primary will almost certainly because the city is so blue. The Democratic primary will almost certainly decide who becomes mayor eventually. But of course, there's a little bit of a wrinkle here. This is going to be an election unlike any other in the history of New York City, right? Yeah, it is. It's it's it's well, it's going to be a mess. We're doing what's called ranked choice voting for the first time in the city. And what that means is that voters will not just pick one candidate. They will pick five and they will rank them in order of preference, which is confusing enough as it is.

I don't think many voters know of five candidates running. And those that do know and they're like really following it closely, I think you're going to have a hard time finding five candidates that they affirmatively like and want to be mayor. So the way it works is that you have to get over 50% of the vote. Once everyone puts down

their sort of first choice preference, the person with the lowest number, they get eliminated. The people that voted for that person second, those votes kind of get redistributed up lowest number, they get eliminated. The people that voted for that person second, those votes kind of get redistributed up the ladder, so to speak. And it just keeps on going and going with the lowest vote getter getting eliminated until someone gets over 50%. So yeah, I think we just kind of don't know how all this're going to hear from big, ranked-choice voting. Thank you. We're named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it.

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about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Today, today, explain. So have you ever taken a bunch of kids to the ice cream store and asked them what their favorite ice cream is? I promise you every single one of those kids

will not just tell you their big favorite, they'll tell you your second favorite, their third favorite, their fourth favorite. Susan Lerner might be the biggest fan of ranked choice voting in New York City. So everybody ranks naturally. The only thing that is throwing people off is that they don't think about ranking in the context of elections. When people actually see the ballot, which is straightforward, there's an aha moment. Oh, I get it. Yeah, no problem. She's the executive director of Common Cause New York and helped this rank choice thing happen. We did exit polling. There was four special elections in New York City, two in Queens in February, two in the Bronx in March. OK, we did exit polling. Ninety five percent of the people told us that the ballot was straightforward and simple to use.

Hmm. I can see that argument. I mean, I appreciate the analogy because I believe it's applicable in some situations. If you showed me four presidential candidates I've spent, you know, 24 months with, I could probably tell you my rankings. But just in the last D.C., you know, local election, I was trying to figure out who these city council members were and these, you know, at large candidates. And it was nearly impossible. I pitied anyone who didn't have as much time as I did to do it. Is it safe to assume that New Yorkers haven't done a ton of research on the third and fourth and fifth favorite candidate? Well, here's the thing, Sean. In D.C., there's no incentive for a candidate who doesn't think that you're likely to vote for them. You're not part of their base, to spend any time reaching out, talking to you. With ranked choice voting, candidates have to behave differently. Even though you might have another candidate as your first choice, you may not be part of the base

of voters that the candidate would have relied on in a traditional first-past-the-post race. Now the candidates spend more time reaching out to voters and providing that information in a ranked-choice voting election. I suppose ranked-choice voting is in the spotlight a little bit right now because of the New York mayoral election. How popular is it outside of New York in this country? We are seeing increasing numbers of cities and states who are picking up ranked choice voting.

Hi guys, it's Jen Lawrence. Over the past year, I have been working with both conservatives and progressives on nonpartisan initiatives that help make government work better for all Americans. Maine was the first state to use ranked choice voting. The people of Maine approved ranked choice voting in 2016, a simple, fair, common sense system of voting. But last year in November, Alaska's voters decided to vote in ranked choice voting, and it's on the ballot and in a number of additional cities across the country. Let's talk about timing for a second. I know early voting starts this weekend.

I think it all wraps up by like June 22nd or something like that. But then I heard there's like a worst case scenario that results won't be in by mid-July. Is that because of rank choice voting? Guess what, Sean? Tell me. That's not because of rank choice voting. Oh. That is because of the very generous rules

which New York State has for providing grace periods and curing periods for absentee ballots. And as we have more absentee ballots, it takes longer to get them in to be sure that the voter is eligible and to give the voter a chance to correct their mistakes if there are mistakes. It takes us longer to explain how rank choice voting works than it does for the computer to calculate the rounds. That is a perfect transition to what I want to do next with you, because we earlier today ran our own rank choice voting election on a computer and got the results very quickly. And with your help, I want to,

through this election, explain ranked choice voting. So here's the deal. Our staff and friends of our staff voted for their favorite Coney Island summer snacks. Perfect New York story. And I actually don't know the winner, but I imagine you have the candidates in front of you. I do. It's boardwalk pizza. You know what's always been there for you every day in the pandemic? That's right. It's pizza. A little pepperoni, a little Sicilian, a slice of Joe's, a famous raise, a 99 cent. You want it? You got it. We're always right around the corner. You vote for pizza, you're voting for a slice of New York. Cotton candy. I'm sweet, I'm pink, I'm blue, I'm light, I'm fluffy. Vote for cotton candy. Lobster roll. You don't want to crack my shells, just like I don't want to crack your skull. Vote for me. I'm the perfect

summer delight. Ice cream. It's a hot, humid day. You spent it baking on the beach. Who else can cool you down but me? Ice cream. And Nathan's hot dog. Listen up, New York. You're going to come out. You're going to vote hot dog number one. Make it number two, three, four, and five as well.

We got to relish this moment. We got to catch up. We're coming out of the pandemic. I love you, New York. Vote hot dog. So how does it work? I mean, so I think we had 13 people voting in it. Did the winner end up being just the majority of first choices? No, it went through four rounds.

So on round one, nobody wanted cotton candy. Cotton candy got no first place votes. No, no, no, no, no. All right. What about round two? The snack with the least votes was boardwalk pizza. Okay. And boardwalk pizza had two votes.

So you eliminate boardwalk pizza. Oh, come on. One vote transfer to lobster roll. One vote transfer to lobster roll. One vote transfer to ice cream. Yes. And we had lobster roll with three, ice cream with three votes, and Nathan's hot dogs again in the lead with five. Okay. Are we on round three now?

We're on round three. Lobster roll was eliminated. Womp womp. the votes then went to a combination of ice cream picked up one but nathan's picked up three votes to transfer and nathan was the clear winner with a total of let's see i think it's eight votes hot dog new york thank you for this honor i uh I don't know what to say. I mean, I'm relishing this moment. And oh, my God, I got to catch up with all these texts and mustard. Congratulations, Nathan. Yeah, absolutely. Not really a surprise outcome here. 80 to 90% of the time, the winner of the first round ends up being the consensus majority of

the voters. Because what we're looking to do with ranked choice voting is to be sure that the ultimate winner isn't the choice of a minority of the voters, which is what you get in a plurality, right? But is a consensus choice of the majority of the winners. So Nathan's was ahead in all of the rounds, but instead of being the winner at about 40% of the first choices, Nathan's at the end became the winner with a solid 60% of the choices. And that is just healthier for Nathans. It's also better for democracy to have your elected official build a base of broad support among the people they're representing. Susan Lerner is the executive director of Common Cause New York. I'm Sean Hotdog. This is Today Explained. Thanks to Amna Al Ice Cream,

Emily Jo's Pizza, Victoria Candyland, Lobster Colette, and Philly Cheese Miles. The show's also made by Will Reed, Afim Shapiro, Halima Shah, and Jillian Weinberger.

Facts are double-checked by Laura Bullard. Music from Breakmaster Cylinder and Noam Hassenfeld. Extra help this week from Paul Mounsey and Liz Kelly Nelson is Vox's Veep of Audio. Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Where do you listen? Is it in an app?

Does that app let you rate and review the show? Have you done it yet for this show? Why not? No further questions, Your Honor.