Said New York public advocate, Jumaane Williams, quoted in the new Michelle Goldberg column about the New York mayoral election.
The column has a distracting title — "Only the Women Can Save Us Now"— but the real point is that the candidate Eric Adams may be laying the groundwork for arguing that the election was rigged against him, that is, against the black man.
Under the new ranked voting system, Adams could win the most first-place votes and still lose the election. He needs a majority of first-place votes to win without counting the second- and third-place votes, and he's likely to win a plurality but not a majority. So the second- and third-place votes will probably determine the outcome, and if they don't lead to his winning, he'll challenge the outcome and — he's already indicated — he'll portray it as a manifestation of structural racism.
It's not just that the ranked system is confusing, it's that Andrew Yang started campaigning with Kathryn Garcia and urging his supporters to put her in second place on their ballots. That led Adams to say, "For them to come together like they are doing in the last three days, they’re saying we can’t trust a person of color to be the mayor of the City of New York."
By "person of color," he means black. Yang is a "person of color," Goldberg points out.
Anyway, a new IPSOS poll came out today. Adams leads not just in the first-place position, but also in the second- and third-place positions. So it looks as though he'll fail to get the majority, but will still win. He's the law-and-order candidate, by the way.
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5 comments:
MJB Wolf writes:
Hi Althouse,
The pull-quote you used as a headline is something I think all the time. "It is disingenuous and dangerous to play on the very real and legitimate fears of bigotry and voter disenfranchisement by pretending it’s present where it’s not."
It drives me nuts when progressives pretend showing ID to vote is “disenfranchisement” or that a verbal slip is labeled “bigotry” and continually “pretend” racism is “present” where none exists and good people are just trying to all get along.
If only this quote would go viral and be shared far and wide and taken literally!
Dave Begley writes:
Only liberals could come up with something so dumb.
Libs can’t get over the fact that most decisions in life are binary. There are clear winners and losers.
Back in 2019, New Yorkers were asked if they wanted this, and they voted for it by a big majority, 3-1.
Was that all liberals, you think?
From the Politico article I just linked to:
"Under the system, voters will rank up to five candidates in order of preference, instead of casting a ballot for just one. If no candidate gets a majority of the vote, the last place candidate is eliminated and their votes are parceled out to the voter’s second choice, a computerized process that continues until one candidate has a majority and is declared the winner."
Oh, jeez, the reshuffling is all going to happen inside a computer, which will spit out the name of the winner. Good luck believing in that.
Temujin writes:
Funny. I was just reading yet another article on the demise of New York City and thinking to myself, I'll bet the people of New York are missing Rudy Giuliani right about now. And the unequivocal answer is an emphatic 'No!'. Rudy took over a decaying New York in his day and turned it around so much, it became that go-to city for everyone and everything. It was once again, a great city. Then he left. Bloomberg rode the wave that Rudy created and aside from overseeing table salt and soda sizes, managed to not screw it up too much. But, per my comments on one of your other posts today, we are in a time when people cannot stand things being so good. You find this far more in 'Blue' cities and states than in 'Red'. So New York went from Giuliani, then Bloomberg, to DiBlasio who is surely the most feckless and incompetent mayor that city has ever seen. And now the most striking thing you can say about New York is that their rats are the size of footballs and their population is leaving. Those who can, anyway.
The city today is a ruin, and a shadow of where it was under Rudy. And what do our 'Blue' friends who run the town want? Well...hopefully the 'law and order' candidate will win. But even if he does, how much will he do to actually correct the city? Is he a maverick or is he just another shade of Blue? And why is it that a city as large as New York has only a choice of Blue, Bluer, or Bluest to vote for? It's not much of a choice for people who want things to get better. Of course, I'm assuming they actually want things to get better.
Fouquieria writes:
Here in SF ranked choice voting was implemented a few years ago and it's been such a positive experience! Why, Chesa Boudin wouldn't have been elected DA without it!
/sarc
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