With Progressive Rivals in Trouble, Can Maya Wiley Consolidate The Left in Mayor's Race?
Maya Wiley with supporters (photo: Wiley campaign)
Moderate candidates Eric Adams and Andrew Yang have been leading in the Democratic mayoral primary while two prominent progressives, Dianne Morales and Scott Stringer, have stumbled. Some progressive groups and activists are now placing their hopes in Maya Wiley to consolidate undecided left-leaning voters and disaffected Morales and Stringer supporters as they seek to ensure that someone who shares their values and vision becomes the next mayor of New York City.
A recent poll by Fontas Advisors and Core Decision Analytics placed Adams, the two-term Brooklyn borough president, at the front of the race with 13% of the vote, with former Democratic presidential candidate Yang tied in second place with former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia, also generally and relatively speaking a moderate, with 8% of the vote. Wiley, former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, was at 5%. Though the poll found 50% of voters were undecided, it also looked at whether those voters leaned towards specific candidates. Of those, about half picked a preference after which support for Adams increased to 18%, Yang to 13%, and Garcia to 11%. Wiley and Morales both got 9%. In another recent survey, the surging Garcia was ahead for the first time in any of the limited public polling available, with Adams second and Yang third.
The more progressive candidates in the race are struggling. Late last month, Stringer, the two-term city comptroller, was accused of sexual assault and harassment by a former campaign volunteer from his 2001 run for public advocate. He denied the allegations but his campaign lost several prominent supporters, some of whom have yet to decide whether they will back another candidate, and he saw a rash of negative media attention, though he has added multiple new labor union endorsements in recent weeks.
Morales, a former nonprofit executive running furthest to the left in the race, got an apparent boost from Stringer’s scandal and had been gaining momentum that also accompanied Wiley’s struggles to break out. But this past week, Morales’ campaign imploded amid allegations of mistreatment of staffers, lack of pay and health insurance for campaign workers, overworking volunteers, and poor management and union-busting by the candidate herself. Many have indicated that Morales, whose historic progressive bona fides have been challenged over her past support for Governor Andrew Cuomo and charter schools, was not living up to the stated values of her campaign platform. And that campaign crisis came after revelations that Morales had years ago gone along when being extorted by a crooked city employee who asked for a bribe from her to address a water bill, then she subsequently lied repeatedly to city investigators.
With both the Stringer and Morales campaigns in crisis of varying degrees and their potential paths to victory in the primary looking additionally daunting, it leaves Wiley, a civil rights attorney and former chair of the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) dealing with police misconduct, as the progressive candidate looking least tarnished and perhaps most capable of cobbling together the votes needed to eke out a victory in the June 22 primary, which will be decided with ranked-choice voting for the first time.
Wiley herself made that assertion on Friday, when asked by a reporter about Stringer’s and Morales’ struggling campaigns during a door-knocking stop in central Brooklyn. “I'm focused on winning on June 22 and becoming the first woman mayor of the city, and I am the progressive and the only progressive in this race that can win it,” she said.
Wiley has previously said that Morales would be her own second choice on the ranked-choice ballot, but did not address a question from a reporter about whether she had chosen another candidate. Months ago, Morales had named Wiley as her number two, but then changed her answer to undecided. Shaun Donovan, former federal housing secretary under President Obama, has also been vying for progressive votes, but he has struggled in the scattered polling. Donovan has repeatedly named Wiley as his second choice.
Despite his troubles, Stringer has insisted he can still prevail in the primary that he has been preparing for over the course of a lifetime in New York politics. Stringer has consistently polled better than Wiley and has far more money to spend down the stretch of the campaign. His campaign has repeatedly argued he is “the progressive candidate who has the support—built up over decades of service—along with the resources behind him to win this race,” as his campaign communications director, Tyrone Stevens, tweeted earlier this month.
Stringer has been campaigning aggressively in recent weeks, including rolling out new policy plans and adding labor endorsements, even as many question whether he can break into communities of color as he had planned before losing a number of endorsers who were supposed to help him in that effort. Wiley is now surely hoping that some of those endorsers head her way.
Only winning progressive votes will not be enough for victory in the primary, but for any of the more progressive candidates to win, they will need significant first-place backing from progressives while also appealing to more moderate voters, particularly voters of color.
Some progressive elected officials, activists, and groups have been reevaluating how to approach the primary as the race has tightened; Yang, Adams, and Garcia all appear toward the front of the pack; and the Stringer and Morales scandals have unfolded.
“I think coalescing around the strongest progressive left in the race makes a lot of sense. I recommend putting Maya Wiley at the top of the ballot at this point,” said Shannon Stagman, who is co-lead organizer of Empire State Indivisible, a progressive activist group, but was not speaking on behalf of the group, which has endorsed both Wiley and Morales. “I also think it's important to make strong decisions about who not to rank. I personally, as a progressive, do not think that voters who want a progressive in office should rank Andrew Yang or Eric Adams anywhere on their ballot," Stagman added.