NEW YORK: The Berserk End of the Campaign.
The big story of the race’s final days was the alignment of Yang and Garcia, designed to keep the news on both of them but also to hurt Adams on at least two fronts.
First, they hoped to hold his numbers down in the initial round of balloting. An Ipsos poll from Monday had Adams at 28 percent, which is roughly in line with where other public and private polls put him. The key in a multi-candidate ranked-choice election is to keep the front-runner below 35 percent or so on the first count — anything higher than that, and he is likely to be ranked second or third on enough ballots to push him over the 50 percent threshold required to declare victory. The margin between Adams and whoever is second or third matters less than keeping the front-runner in the low 30s or less. And so while the bulk of the attention was focused on Yang enthusiastically endorsing Garcia for No. 2, keeping Adams lower-ranked on as many ballots as possible, or off of them altogether, gives Yang an advantage too.
Second, Adams’s rivals hoped that the alliance would bait Adams into calling the gambit a racist attack against him, potentially turning off some of the conservative white voters who, while supportive of Adams’s law-and-order platform, may be wary of someone willing to play up charges of racism.
This primary is a real test of whether New Yorkers are ready to reject De Blasio’s city-destroying progressivism.
