By: Ilana Siyance
What was expected to be a very close election, ended up with a strong lead by Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams.
Tuesday’s hotly contested Democratic Primary left Adams with an impressive lead. As reported by the NY Post, his first place position was based on his stance on public safety and crime. His anti-crime message was favored by a wide range of voters in working- and middle-class neighborhoods throughout the city. As per the Posts’ interviews, he garnered support from voters of varying races and ethnicities all across Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, northern Manhattan and Staten Island, which has a large civil service population including police and firefighters.
Adams got 32 percent of the total 800,000 votes cast in the first citywide ranked choice voting election, as per unofficial Board of Elections results. He leads by approximately 10-points, with Maya Wiley, a former legal counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, in second place with 22 percent of the vote, and former city Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia in third place with 19 percent. Andrew Yang, once considered a frontrunner, was a more distant fourth with just 11.65 percent of the votes.
Voters said they chose Adams because of his tough-on-crime message, as their priorities for the city shifted towards safety, due to the recent spike in violence in NYC. “Adams seems to have strong character. Public safety is a paramount with all that is going on. Not even the rich areas are safe right now,” said Juan Ortiz, 36, a real estate broker. “He’s a retired cop. When Adams talks, he sounds sincere,” said another voter, who said she was touched by Adams’ life story, in particular when he described being beat up by the cops as a child and then joined the NYPD to help make a difference. “He’s there because he was part of the police system… He knows how to structure it in a better way where the people respect the police and at the same time the police see they need to respect the community,” said Brima Sylla, a teacher from Staten Island.
Though Adams has a strong lead, due to the new rank-choice system, the numbers are still being crunched. The candidates with the fewest voters are cast aside and their voters’ second, third, fourth and fifth choices are transferred to the standing candidates. The winner needs to garner over 50 percent of the ranked-choice votes. The elections board still has to count another 100,000 absentee and mail-in ballots, add them to the ranked choice tally and only then declare an official victor.
