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Hello and welcome to Represent NYC on Manhattan Neighborhood Network. I'm Ben Max, executive editor of Goth Musette and your host. Today we're discussing the results of the 2021 New York City elections and what comes next with two expert special guests, Dr. Christina Greer, who's a political science professor at Fordham University, and Harry Siegel, a senior editor at the Daily Beast and a columnist at the Daily News. Christina and Harry also co host the podcast faqnyc, which is great and I've had the honor of joining a few times as a guest FAQ nyc. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you both for being here. We have results in almost every race for all the seats in city government that were on the ballot, but for a couple of City council seats as we speak. We know Eric Adams will be the next mayor of New York City. We know Brad Lander will be the next city Comptroller. Jumani Williams was reelected as public advocate. And we know the five borough presidents and almost all of the next 51 city council members. We also know that Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, will be the next Manhattan District Attorney, while Democrat Eric Gonzalez won another term as the Brooklyn DA in the two district attorney elections that were on the ballot this year. We know that in New York City, turnout was at about 20% of eligible voters, another shockingly but not surprisingly low showing at the polls for municipal elections. And it appears that 3 of 5 state constitutional amendment proposals were voted down by New Yorkers across the state and they would have altered the redistricting process, expanding voting rights. Those are the ones that got voted down, while two of the five passed, including the addition of a right to clean air, water, and a healthful environment being added to the state constitution. So for more on what happened, what it all means, and what comes next, Dr. Greer, Harry Siegel, let's dive in. We'll get to Mayor Elect Eric Adams in a minute and what we're expecting from him, what we're watching for in the coming weeks and months and years. But first, big picture takeaways from the 2021 New York City elections. One or two things that you're sitting with that you've been thinking about mulling over. Big takeaways here. Christina, why don't we start with you? What are a couple of things that you've been thinking about since we got these unofficial election night results and you're looking at what's in front of us here in New York City?
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C
Well, I mean, obviously it was a big night for Alvin Bragg, but also Harlem in So many ways, the black political center seems to have shifted to Brooklyn. Jumani Williams and Tish James and Eric Adams, who I know we'll talk about in a moment. But it seems as though Alvin Bragg and with Brian Benjamin becoming the new lieutenant governor, the. Those two have kind of revitalized Harlem as a political force yet again, even though it seems like it was going a little dormant. And so had Alvin Bragg not won the primary and obviously been successful in the general, I'm really curious as to what Harlem politics would look like. So this is maybe a projection for down the line, but maybe in a few years, a few cycles, when we're talking about black politics, maybe Harlem will get back in the mix as one of the main players. As far as the city Council, you know, obviously some folks were reelected. We've got some newbies. We've got some people who were formerly elected. So we're now back again. And so the fight over the new city council speaker, which doesn't have anything to do with voters, we know that that's a vote between the 51 sitting city council members, but that's something that'll be fascinating to watch, whether or not the new city council speaker will be a foil to Eric Adams or someone who will be in lockstep with Eric Adams as well. And then, you know, obviously, no real surprises, I think, with, you know, borough presidents and DAs, particularly largely because so many of our elections, the action was in the primary, where very few people bothered to turn out, which, you know, Harry and I have talked about this informally, but it does raise a question as to maybe we want to think about a different primary system. We've got closed primaries, but so much of the action took place in June when people weren't really thinking about these elections. Maybe we want to have maybe nonpartisan primaries so we can actually hear these electeds and challengers and incumbents really make a case for New Yorkers not just ending in June, but all the way through elections in November.
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Harry, I was going to prompt you with that later in the show, but that's your music, But I don't know if you want to jump in on that or some other highlights.
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This was a really interesting general election a couple ways. First off, we had a Democrat giving control to another Democrat for the first time in New York since 1985. I believe this was also the lowest turnout election since 1985, even before you get into population growth. And that's mostly because there were no surprises. There was no chance, really, of any surprises. We're leaving Out a couple of still to be determined, like council races here. Justin Brannan is in a surprisingly close contest that isn't determined. As we record this, he thinks absentees will see him through, and this maybe hurts him in his hope to become the next speaker. But for the most part, in citywide, there were no contests. There was really no reason to show up. Democrats didn't bother. There was nobody at the polling sites. Early voting is cool, and that's a little part of that, but it's problematic. And that's why These ballot measures 13 and 4 1, being a little more controversial, because it mushed in a whole bunch of stuff together, like a lot of really good and meritorious reforms, along with basically allowing for partisan redistricting after there'd been an agreement not to have that. But they all went down. And they went down because conservatives and people outside the city pushed hard, advertised against them and made this a cause. And Democrats just sort of assumed a bunch of New York voters were going to show up, vote for the Democrats, which they did, but not enough of them, and this stuff would sort of get through on its own. And that didn't happen. This is New York City. But I do want to point to Long island for a minute where Democrats got their clocks cleaned in every competitive election and a couple of elections like Kaminsky, that people didn't expect to be competitive. And then he lost by 20 points. The head of the state Democratic Party, Jay Jacobs, is a Nassau guy and has a lot of explaining to do about what happened with these ballot initiatives, about what happened there. Obviously, there was a large red wave. I do think it would be very helpful in New York if we had some nonpartisan primary system and then a top two or even a top four general election, because then instead of having Eric Adams against clown buffoon Curtis Slua, as Adams, I think pretty fairly described him, you know, we would have had Eric Adams against Katherine Garcia or perhaps against Maya Wiley, and that would have forced a real conversation about issues and real commitments. Adams has done a wonderful job in the rhetorical space he's in where he's going to be the man, but he's not quite. He doesn't quite have the power yet and saying things that straddle a lot. So we're going to have a more decent city with fairer policing, and it's going to be a safer city. We're going to weld business again and watch out for the big guy. But all the money that comes from that is going to go to the little guy and those Things are awesome. Who could possibly disagree? I certainly don't. But he hasn't really had to say what that means or would he be held to. And consequently, in part because of the lack of a general in this overwhelmingly Democratic town, we're coming in with more questions about what this mayor is actually going to be like past entertaining, interesting, intellectually lively than we've had in a very long time. And I don't think that that's a healthy thing. So if the city is going to just be Democratic again after that 20 year interregnum with Giuliani and Bloomberg, we need to have some way to have competitive general elections, particularly because right now primaries are only open to registered Democrats and turnout is considerably lower. So it's a really small share of the city that's actually deciding these big questions about who's making the rules and who's going to be executing them for all of us.
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And that's a really good segue. Christina. To Eric Adams, the mayor elect, what has caught your ear for the three of us and at least some portion of people watching this? This is the culmination of basically a year of a mayoral campaign that really got going last fall. A very intense primary that was happening partially over zoom. And then as things were becoming more in person and the vaccine was becoming more available and shifting amid the pandemic, and then a pretty sleepy general election. But this is the culmination of a long campaign for Eric Adams. This is like a 20 year campaign to become mayor that he has told us he was plotting for a very long time, and he hasn't been shy about his ambitions. But what's caught your ear here in the final days, weeks, election night, from Eric Adams, that gives you some real indication of what he thinks his mandate is, where it sounds like he wants to really take New York City.
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C
I don't know, Ben. I mean, Eric Adams is a bit of a hologram to me right now. I just feel like once he's like a wave you're trying to pin across the sand. I'm not exactly sure. So let's just say when it comes to the vaccine mandate for city employees, right, he agreed with Mayor de Blasio that there should be a mandate, but he didn't agree with the process and said he would speak to unions. And so as you possibly emerge from COVID or not, I don't know if we have to expand it to other sectors, maybe even the private sector, how will Eric Adams deal with that when it came to education? I'm not exactly sure. Where he stands on charter schools, but we know there was lots of conversation about the specialized high schools, the gifted and talented programs. We also know that children's education, when it comes to parents and especially voters is a hot sort of third rail issue. So will Eric Adams start to back away from some of the stances he made about G and T programs or the specialized high schools? Also, as a former police officer, there's some real pros and cons to that. We know that traditionally Democratic mayors, at least the last two de Blasio and Dinkins, did not have solid relationships with the nypd. Will Eric Adams as a former police officer? No. So for a little bit more about how this paramilitary organization works or. Or will they see him as a traitor in management now that he's the mayor and trying to talk to them and tell them particular behaviors and practices that they need slash must change. And so I don't really know when it comes to the COVID response. Education, public health and policing. Eric Adams has had a long time to say sort of generalities. But as you alluded to before Ben, so much of the Democratic primary, there's eight people on stage. So even in these two hour debates and conversations that we all tuned into time and time again, none of the candidates had enough time to really go in an in depth analysis of what exactly do you plan to do with K through 12 education to keep certain parents into the city to sort of help black and Latinx students who are clearly being failed in one of the most segregated systems in the country. What do you mean that you're going to work with the NYPD unions? You knowing how the PBA and people like Pat lynch have an enormous amount of power thus far, especially working with someone like de Blasio. How are you really planning on working with a public health commissioner? Who will you choose as your public health commissioner? So those are the things that I'll be looking at and sort of curious about. I know that Eric Adams has a working relationship with Bill de Blasio. I also know that he has a solid working relationship with Mayor Bloomberg. And so how much of the Bloomberg era folks will come back and assist Eric Adams? I think there are a lot of questions as to who will he have in his inner circle in his cabinet. Will it be Republicans and progressives? It seems as though he's kind of whining and dining with lots of folks. He's not part of the political elite. Even though he's been around for several decades in varying levels of government. There's a lot of the donor class and sort of Democratic elites who aren't necessarily close to Eric Adams.
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So.
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So we're in a new era where I think there are a lot of folks who really don't know where we're going. And I really don't have a full understanding of exactly who will be his brain trust and who he'll nominate for his Cabinet. Thus far.
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As far as I can tell, Harry, the things that Eric Adams really has to do, based on his campaign and the sort of votes that he achieved and the promises he's made are bringing down gun violence while not taking the city back towards more police abuses and running the police department better than it's been run before to make a safer city, but also more fair policing. Huge promise, obviously. And then beyond that, I'm not sure what's 2, 3, 4, as you've both gotten at. There's many other promises he's made, but I don't know that he's clearly set out what his pecking order will be. What's your sense of what he has to follow through on for New Yorkers, whether they voted for him or not, to, you know, be successful in what you're watching for in these coming weeks and months before he even takes office, to ensure that he's setting himself up?
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Well, as Chrissy said, a lot of this will come down to who he hires and brings in. Of course, look past that. De Blasio came in and he had an inaugural thing on January 1st where people said, mike Bloomberg is run. Mike Bloomberg is there, has run a plantation, and we're taking the city back. And this is an outrage. He had a very specific plan with Pre K and with the tax to pay for Pre K, needed Albany to give him. He got the money for Pre K, didn't get the tax. But he pinned himself down very early on in terms of specifically what he was after and how he should be judged on that. I think Adams took that lesson and is very consciously avoiding getting pinned on almost any of this, which is why we're speculating in such broad terms about what the baselines for his administration should be. I don't think that's accidental. I'd also point, in addition to the list Christy just gave, that he's bowed where he said he supports closing Rikers. Great. He has not said, and this is happening where Rikers is such a mess that de Blasio just did an emergency order reviving solitary confinement, which you said correctly a few months ago when he ended solitary confinement was an aberration. A moral aberration, abomination and a punishment for the human soul. But now it's back. He did that on a Friday night. De Blasio, of course. So Adams has said, I'll close Rikers. He's not said, I signed on to the plan, which has generated backlash to build these new high rise prisons in every borough except Staten island to replace Reykjaviks. Without the new jails, there is no way to close Rikers. So this is him for the moment being on all sides of these things and he'll have to make his decisions. But what he's very consciously done is said, look, I'm a common sense guy, I'm a New York guy, I'm a Democrat, which by the way, hasn't always been. And I'm going to build on the prosperity we've had. I'm not going to chase away the businesses to pay those taxes, but I'm going to make sure that money is going to you. I'm going to support the police, but the police have to do right and be professional, not be messing with people, not just with stops and tamper with them, but just generally to be behaving better. And at the same time, I'm going to make sure they're wes guns. So in his victory speech, he goes from this damn right I talk to gangsters. Which is something Curtis Sliwood brought up after a Hot 97 interview. He had to a really thoughtful upriver thing about how we need to screen for dyslexia and things like that so that we're finding people who could end up becoming violent young men beforehand. And to when I come in on day one, this stuff stops and you're putting those guns down. So again, those things are all actually, I think, good and correct and thoughtful. They don't easily fit together. So rhetorically. He's done a really brilliant job of this and navigated in really complex currents and he's about to have all this power. And lastly, I just think his working assumption is that we all get stuck on narrative, get stuck on these benchmarks that politicians put out to themselves, and he's not going to trip himself up that way. He's going to be entertaining, he's going to be intelligent, he's going to be thoughtful and he's going to govern more or less like a Democrat and with some of the same people who've been around de Blasio, that he then has the freedom to operate as he'd like, basically good, meaning the economy is starting to improve again, that there's A Covid recovery narrative. Maybe this times out well for Adams. Tax revenue goes up, tourists are back, more people are working, school enrollment starts going up these levels, and then he's the guy who's cheering all that on. I think that's the hope. But if those things don't go well and we're not going to have another big burst of magic money from the feds that happened one time, it's going to be happening on Adam's watch and we'll again have a black mayor in New York for the second time, Democrat again, who's there when really hard decisions have to get made and is pinned to be the fall guy for them if we end up there.
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Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned a few things there. I mean, one of the biggest promises Eric Adams has made is to rein in the city budget, institute tighter controls on spending. What does that actually look like? He said he can do that without reducing headcount in city government. There's probably a lot of waste in the city agencies. They're probably bloated. But the execution of that is a whole nother ball game. And he's promised real time city governance modeled after the NYPD ComStat system. These are things that are the nitty gritty of running the government that all of a sudden he's going to be in charge of on January 1st that are, you know, the meat of actually running city government is going to be this enormous test for him. Christina, Harry just mentioned Eric Adams and you mentioned, you know, he's coming in after these prior two Democratic mayors of Bill de Blasio and David Dinkins. He's going to be the second black mayor of New York City. Talk a little bit about from your vantage point, the lessons from both of those mayors that he should be taking seems to be taking. And then also you've raised a couple flags about how Eric Adams as the second black mayor of New York City may be treated. The narratives around him speak a little bit about that, too, in terms of what we should all be watching for and being aware of as he takes office.
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Yeah, I mean, well, you know, comparing Eric Adams to David Dinkins is fascinating. One, he's not the first. And so there's obviously a lot of literature about being the first black elected of any city and the trials and tribulations that go on there. And their style, their governance style is quite different. Their communication style is quite different. Eric Adams, you know, is proud to say he's the first working class mayor of New York City. David Dinkins was A lawyer went to Howard University, which is one of the most elite HBCUs in the nation. And it definitely was when David Dinkins was there. And so it's a different foundation. Interestingly enough, though, both of them put together multiracial coalitions in order to win. This is not a majority black city. So when you think about David Dinkins, beautiful mosaic. Eric Adams has his 21st century version of a beautiful mosaic that he put together. It just so happened to be folks with the outer boroughs of. Unlike David Dinkins, with more of the Manhattan Upper west side, you know, Brooklyn crowd that he. That he was able to cobble together in the late 80s. When it comes to Eric Adams and Bill de Blasio, that's somewhat fascinating in the sense that Bill de Blasio was definitely an Eric Adams fan, but it wasn't as though the two of them went campaigning together. It's not like Eric Adams courted Bill de Blasio openly and said, you know, we're passing the torch. We'll essentially have a third term of Bill de Blasio if you elect me. That's something that Curtis Lewa tried to, you know, put in the voters minds. But Eric Adams walked away from that comparison in many ways. And so that's where I'm curious as far as staffing goes. Bill de Blasio, I always argued, had fantastic people around him. He just didn't listen to him. I thought some of his commissioners and, you know, people he put in various agencies were really talented individuals that just did not get the oxygen they needed to thrive and be successful. No pun intended. So Eric Adams. We know that black mayors tend to have different difficult relationships with the nypd. But realistically, very few black mayors have ever been police officers. Most have been more of the Dinkins vein, very sort of academically elite, part of a sort of black elite upper middle class characterization, how they work with white power structures within the city. We've seen it all up and down the east coast and throughout the entire country. Eric Adams is not cut from that same cloth. He's much more of a hardscrabble. I've done it on my own. I've built my own coalitions, and you guys get in where you fit in. So that's going to be an adjustment, not just for Democratic operatives, but for the press as well. They're not used to, I think, someone who's possibly as direct as Eric Adams will be. Similarly, I think that there's a class element and a race element that's intersectional when it comes to Eric Adams. And I'm not convinced that our press corps right now, many of whom are not New Yorkers, many of whom do not have a strong foundation in race and class understanding of race and class, will understand some of the nuances of how and why it is that Eric Adams will be successful at certain times or, or some of the ire that he will receive from New Yorkers. There needs to be a clearer conversation that, yes, he is still a black mayor, he may not be a black mayor, that many people are accustomed to the type of black mayor, but there's something different about being an African American who's an executive in a city that is not majority black, especially calling the shots. And so there will be times where I think that there will be coverage that is quite honestly racist, that Eric Adams will call out and say as such, but we also have to be careful where Eric Adams might also lean on that labeling at times when he needs to be called out and doesn't want to be called out. And so this is where the nuance has to come in, because there will be times that the coverage is unfair and then there's going to be times where the coverage is very fair. And we can't hide behind a racist narrative when it's not there, because I have a feeling there'll be plenty of times where it will be there and we should just use it when it's necessary, when it's real, and not when Eric Adams wants to misdirect.
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Very interesting. Harry, your thoughts on all the above and the lessons from the Dinkins years, the lessons from the de Blasio years, and what you're seeing from Eric Adams.
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Well, Chrissy covered an awful lot there just a couple things that came to mind as she was discussing that David Nickens was a Marine and he was somebody who actually, you know, had his own coming up story, but I think very consciously wanted to present himself as a gentleman, as an elegant, patrician sort of character as he came up. And Eric Adams who's come up wants to say, you know, look at the, look at the dirt under my fingernails. And he put in 24 years as a police officer. So he has some of that. But he's been in politics for a long time and this is part of his narrative. And so it's sort of interesting. I thought about this a lot with the Cuomo, the Mario Cuomo who was like really a self made man, presented himself as incredibly elegant and patrician. And Andrew Cuomo, who grew up literally in the governor's mansion, said Ah, I'm a guy from Queens. I do cars. And, you know, it's always interesting how people present in these ways. David Dinkins also took real pains not to call things racist, generally, including things that I think pretty plainly were as mayor, because he wanted to maintain that gorgeous mosaic and it's not a majority black city. And he felt the need to modulate his messaging very carefully in ways that were concurrent with his public character. Whereas Adams has very loosely taken a number of shots in the late days of the primary campaign, and the pressure on him was highest. And then at one point, I think pretty fairly again with Curtis Sliwa, given the context of the question when he was asked, but has called several of his rivals racist already, he's accused press coverage from major outlets, including New York Magazine and the New York Times, of the same. You know, I've had conversations with people around him who press me on things that I'm pretty sure were in bounds. But do you really want to be saying that about the man who's going to be the second black mayor? And I do think that that's something he's going to have to consider. And on the one hand, I think, by the way, there's something very healthy when Curtis Lewis is backing bad cops, real bad apples, and saying, oh, there's no problem with the bigger thing. There's just one bad apple. Right. And of course, the bad apple spoils the barrel of just saying there's something that's racist, that's wrong. But taking those shots loosely, I think it's going to be very interesting to see how he handles that tonally as the leader of the whole city.
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All right, we're in our final minute here. Time flies very quickly here when we're chatting about so many different important aspects of what's going on in the city. Last thought from each of you, other than police commissioner, something, you know, naming of a police commissioner, something you're watching, you're most interested in from the mayor elect in the coming months before he takes office. Dr. Christina Greer, what's one thing you're especially looking at as we cover this these next weeks before he takes office?
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Well, as the former Brooklyn Borough President, we possibly have three Brooklynites running for governor and sitting governor, who Eric Adams right now has gotten along with quite well in external events. He will be the belle of the ball in a lot of ways, not just these next few months, but obviously when he's sworn in on January 1st. So I'm curious to see how his relationship with Tish James and Jumani Williams and Bill de Blasio as mayor elect when he's interacting with an attorney general, a public advocate and a sitting mayor sort of swirl around while also doing events with Kathy Hochul, who's the sitting governor. I think Eric Adams likes that attention.
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You just hit it. While he's the belle of the ball, what does he want to leave the ball with? What's his agenda from Albany for this coming year? Because he'll never have more leverage and it's a big moment and he's not been entirely clear on it.
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And we've seen him initially mention some potential changes to bail reform which we'll have to get into another time and speaks to some of the some of the balancing act in Eric Adams's politics and platform. Thank you very much, Dr. Christina Greer. Harry Siegel, always great talking with you, of course. Check out their podcast faqnyc. Thank you for watching Represent NYC on Manhattan Neighborhood Network. I'm Ben Max from Gotham Gazette. See you next time.
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Sam.