The ‘Big Apple ‘ seems to be on track to getting its first Asian American Mayor….
His star power coming off a national presidential campaign isn’t hurting him at all….
Everybody’s ganging up on Andrew Yang.
The New York City mayor’s race has grown more vicious in recent weeks — and the favorite target is Yang, who has come under attack for everything from his basic income and tax plans to his employment history and his second home upstate.
The aggressive hits on Yang reflect his status as front runner in recent polls, as the more established politicians who are now trailing him in the Democratic primary race scramble to take him down a notch and make an impression with the roughly half of voters who remain undecided.
New Yorkers will, for the first time, choose a new mayoral candidate in the June primary using ranked-choice voting — a system that allows voters to rank up to five candidates in order of preference, and which proponents predicted would cut down on negative campaigning.
But lately, the race has looked more like what Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams predicted over a year ago, when he declared, “Trust me, It’s going to be a dirty campaign.”…
…
So far, neither the hits from his rivals nor a series of early missteps by Yang himself show evidence of halting his momentum. But with scarce public polling in the race and a large share of voters not yet tuned in, the contest remains very much up for grabs. Around the same time in the 2013 mayoral election, current Mayor Bill de Blasio was polling in fourth place.
With that in mind, Yang’s rivals are trying to define him as an out of touch neophyte with little knowledge of the city’s inner workings, while the frontrunner goes for the image of cheerleader-in-chief, rooting for the city’s comeback from the Covid-19 crisis….
…
Yang’s pitch to New York City voters is not so dissimilar from his pitch to the broader American public in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary: big ideas, backed with data. He wants the city government to establish a basic income for the half a million New Yorkers living in deep poverty. He wants to create a public-banking network. He wants to transform New York into a hub for cryptocurrencies, and build casinos, and convert hotels into affordable housing. Put the white papers and campaign pronouncements together, and a picture emerges of a hypermodern municipal paradise devoted to social democracy and human flourishing.
The picture of how these big ideas would be funded and implemented is fuzzier. Yang has managed a tech nonprofit, a tutoring business, and a campaign and a half. But he has never held elected office, nor has he led a bureaucracy—let alone one with the scale and political fractiousness of New York’s. He has also committed, if softly, to cutting taxes.
Still, the call to move forward has caught on with New York City voters battered by a recession that has decimated restaurants, bars, theaters, museums, and hotels; traumatized by a virus that has killed 30,000 residents; and only just beginning to emerge from a year of shutdowns and social distancing. Given the horrors of the past year, many of these voters have lost what patience they had for incremental progress and technocratic small ball. Yang is going big. He has a deep campaign war chest and better name recognition than any other candidate in the crowded race. While it remains competitive—Eric Adams, Brooklyn’s borough president, and Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, have significant support—as of mid-March, Yang led the field by a 13-point margin….
image…Politico
Yang Update in NYC…
Lakshya Jain
@lxeagle17
Weirdly, Yang is almost like a Democratic Donald Trump *in terms of electorate appeal* in that both of them seem to have an incredibly strong draw with infrequent, low-propensity voters.
Quote Tweet
Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
· 17h
Now, turnout tends to be low in local races in NYC, so ordinarily, politically-active progressives would represent a higher share of the “likely voter” electorate. But for various reasons, Yang holds appeal to voters who don’t ordinarily turn out in local races.
Show this thread
Considering that John Lindsay, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg and Bill deBlasio have all attempted to go from NYC mayor to the White House and failed miserably I hope Yang doesn’t plan another presidential run if he succeeds at this endeavor.
By coming down from National media Yang has a much better name recognition in the Big Apple….
But if read in on him?
He is NOT much of a progressive….
Ur list of past NYC Mayors features mostly GOPer’s….
Some might be surprised at that truism….
Of those 4 NYC mayors I listed 3 were elected to that office as Republicans. But only 1 sought the GOP presidential bid.
The rest ran as Democrats.
I actually researched this for Wikipedia’s “List of Mayors of New York City.”
It’s incredibly unusual for any former or current Mayor to win any elective office at all, the last one being the unelected)Ardolph Kline [acting mayor, Sept.-Dec. 1913], who was elected to an open seat in Congress during the Harding wave of 1920 only to lose re-election in 1922.
One might think since both Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt were governors of New York, one or both of them (certifiable New Yorkers by activity, although living respectively in Oyster Bay and Hyde Park, N.Y.) must also have been Mayor. But the closest that ever came to happening was at the dawn of T.R.’s political career, when he was drafted as the no-hope Republican alternative in the 1886 mayoral election against Henry George (reform labor) and Abram Hewitt (Democrat).
In fact, the last New York mayor to win election to Governor was John T. Hoffman, elected Governor in 1868.
Since the people rather than the legislature began electing U.S. Senators (and probably long before that), no serving or past Mayor of New York has been elected to the Senate.
Yup on GOP and NYC…..
Ironically enough, from Bloomberg News (which has absorbed BusinessWeek):
Quick: When is the last time a sitting mayor was nominated for president by a major party?
If you said DeWitt Clinton in 1812, you nailed it. The New York City mayor lost to incumbent James Madison, becoming the first and last politician to vie for the White House directly from City Hall. Fellow New York City mayor John Lindsay tried in 1972, but bowed out early in the primaries. In 2008, another NYC mayor, Rudy Giuliani, had a similarly early exit (though his run was several years after he’d left office). In fact, the only president to have ever been a mayor of a major city, Grover Cleveland of Buffalo, was New York governor in between. (Calvin Coolidge briefly served as mayor of the town of Northampton, Massachusetts.*) Throughout American history, the road to the White House has not proceeded down an urban boulevard. Most presidents are drawn from the Senate or governorships, but today just six senators and five governors was ever a mayor.
It’s a curious phenomenon. If all politics is indeed local, you’d expect former mayors to advance to higher elective offices across the country. You’d think it would be especially true for Democratic-held offices, since the party has had a firm lock on the urban electorate for decades. But mayors tend not to move on to higher offices. For all of the talk of “city power” and “new localism” among leading urbanist thinkers, the truth is this underrepresentation hurts cities….
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-18/why-mayors-never-get-to-be-president
Dianne Feinstein was Mayor of the City and County of San Francisco, succeeding (as President of the Board of Supervisors when Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated in 1978) and then winning election in her own right.
Some mayors do get elected to the House (from urban districts rather than a whole state), e.g. Cong. David Cicilline (former Mayor of Providence, R.I.)