Tuesday 3.44: Tuesday's Brief Guide To City Politics
Early voting has begun in the NYC Mayoral Primaries, and I want to say first that if you’re a registered democrat in New York and you have any questions about ranked choice voting, I strongly recommend that you just wing it on election day. The election cycle has been, somehow, boring despite the fact the presence of Andrew Yang, who is an idiot, Eric Adams, who may have hastily and hilariously furnished a basement apartment in an effort to validate his residence, and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa, who developed CTE getting his fat head slammed between train doors in the 70s, and is clinically insane.
That said, here’s a rundown of some of the candidates, in no particular order, and until I get bored.
Eric Adams
A former cop who wants to keep schools open year round (boo!) and may or may not live primarily in New Jersey, which for some reason matters. He’s cagey in way that suggests we’ll get a good scandal out of him at some point.
Maya Wiley
De Blasio 2.0, excelt her motorcade will block traffic outside the Brooklyn Brainery and she’ll get snippy with reporters about it: “Excuse me, this is my time to develop my practice of art through botanical line drawing.”
Andrew Yang
What joke can I make that he hasn’t already made himself? Last time we heard from the guy he was saying he’d never leave NYC except to go to Albany. Or Israel. His plan for cops dealing with mentally ill people was to warn them once, then throw them in jail. 100% just making it up as he goes along.
Kathryn Garcia
Strikes me as the apocryphal ur-republican that the “moderate” corners of the national republican party is always lionizing. I’m voting for her because I’m pretty sure she’s owed enough favors that she can just start building bike lanes wherever she wants, and she seems disaffected enough to do it.
Ray Maguire
A Brooklyn College Poli-Sci kid showed up at my door recently asking me to vote for this former Citibank chief, who a bunch of Wall Street ghouls got to run as the next Bloomberg. Fuck this guy. He’ll probably shirk the kid on his intern credits when he gets washed.
Scott Stringer
I can’t think of a politician I’m less interested in. Seems like a really annoying neighbor. The kind of nerd whose desperation became a thirst for power, who categorizes the world in terms of winners and losers. Wouldn’t trust him to feed my goldfish.
Shaun Donovan
One of the last vestiges of Obama prestige. One of the guys who thought you could buy a place in Brooklyn for less than $100K. Can’t argue that some of the policies aren’t nice on paper, but come on man. We all know where you Obama guys stand when the rubber hits the road.
Dianne Morales
I’m still perplexed by what happened to her campaign, which started unionizing with just a couple weeks to the election. She laid off a bunch of people, and there might have been a creepy dude heading a lot of things? I don’t know. It’s sort of in tune with an empowered, ambitious Left that’s still figuring out—often awkwardly and painfully—what it wants its class politics to be and do.
Alright. I’m probably leaving some people out. Whatever. You should vote, don’t get me wrong, ranked choice is great (I’m going Garcia, Morales, Wiley), voting in New York is pretty easy, and for fuck’s sake we can’t actually let Yang litter our streets with Lime scooters. But that said, I’m mostly with Carl on this one: