They’re tired of Mayor Eric Adams. They’re warming up to Andrew M. Cuomo. They know little of the 10 other major candidates vying to be New York City’s next mayor.
And ranked-choice voting has only furthered their confusion.
This year’s mayoral race, once thought to be a rubber-stamp re-election of a Democratic incumbent, has become a convoluted, unruly affair. Many New Yorkers across ages, races and boroughs lack a clear sense of the city’s political direction and how they might vote to change it — a sentiment underlined by the roughly 15 percent of voters in recent surveys who said they were undecided, and in interviews with nearly two dozen voters.
Paul Ramirez, a Bronx native and a member of the borough’s Community Board 6, is baffled by the ranked-choice ballot process, which allows voters to select up to five candidates in their order of preference. The system, which debuted in the 2021 mayoral primary, helped Mr. Adams win the Democratic ballot line that year.
“I’m actively engaged and I like to consider myself a civic-minded nerd, right?” said Mr. Ramirez, a co-owner of the Bronx Beer Hall and a registered Democrat. “If I’m that way and I’m not as familiar, then I would imagine that a lot of New Yorkers aren’t.”
Leslie Foster, a retiree from the Bronx and a lifelong Democrat, also said she would need more information.
“You set your mind on one specific candidate and then they tell you, ‘Oh, well, then you can put up to such-and-such amount of people,’ and then you may not know about these other people,” said Ms. Foster, 69. In the last mayoral primary, she said, she looked at the crowded field of candidates and “did my research on all of them.”
“I have time on my hands,” she added.
Some groups are holding training sessions for voters to understand the mechanics of ranked-choice voting. The city’s Campaign Finance Board will issue voter guides and increase its social media messaging about the election in the weeks before voting begins for the June 24 primary. The board also plans to send mailers to voters with information about ranked-choice voting and the city’s matching funds program.
Amid the confusion, progressive groups are hoping to use ranked-choice voting as an opportunity to flex their political power as they educate voters.
A coalition of left-leaning groups and organizers has encouraged New Yorkers not to include Mr. Adams or Mr. Cuomo in their rankings, naming its campaign with the acronym DREAM (“Don’t Rank Eric or Andrew for Mayor”). Now that Mr. Adams is no longer in the Democratic primary (he said he would run as an independent in the general election in November), the coalition has kept the acronym but changed the wording to “Don’t Rank Evil Andrew for Mayor.” The campaign has the support of a handful of mayoral candidates.
In 2021, “you had some people who didn’t want Adams just rank him because they thought that was what you had to do,” said Lawrence Wang, an organizer with the group. The goal, he added, is to emphasize voters’ option not to rank Mr. Cuomo at all — an effort that organizers hope will “help align the Democratic progressive wing” in the process.
The Working Families Party is also trying to use ranked-choice voting to help put a preferred candidate in office, endorsing four candidates and requiring them to collaborate with one another. The party is taking steps to run a candidate under its ballot line in the general election.
Proponents of ranked-choice voting say the system can ultimately give rise to more broadly popular candidates. But it also takes time for voters to understand and become accustomed to the format. Deb Otis, the research and policy director for FairVote, a good-government organization that has worked to advance ranked-choice voting in more than 60 jurisdictions, said that some voter confusion is common at this stage in the campaign, when few people are paying close attention to the primary field.
“It is complicated to decide who to vote for, whether you’re picking one or ranking up to five,” she said. “Voters are being hit with a lot of information right now.”
In recent interviews, some voters expressed doubts about the system’s efficacy, and suggested that Mr. Adams’s victory had been aided by confusion over the new balloting procedure.
“I don’t really know if it’s a good thing or not,” said Estare Weiser, 79, an undecided Democratic voter on the Upper West Side. “Would Adams have gotten in if there hadn’t been a ranked system? I don’t know. We didn’t get the best candidate, for sure.”
This electoral static coincides with New Yorkers’ dimmest-ever view of the city and its leadership. In polls and focus groups, many have expressed fear and frustration over what they see as a lack of progress on public safety and affordability — two issues dominating the mayoral primary.
The malaise was laid bare in a March 5 Quinnipiac survey that showed Mr. Adams with a record-low approval rating of 20 percent, a likely factor in his decision to skip the Democratic primary. Nearly three-fourths of voters surveyed said they were dissatisfied with the direction of the city. A subsequent focus group study by the firm SocialSphere found similar results, with nearly two-thirds of respondents saying they felt the mayor’s administration did not listen to the concerns of New Yorkers.
“People feel kind of burned,” said John Della Volpe, a veteran pollster who conducted the focus group study. Voters, he said, feel that the city’s leadership has “other interests that supersede the interests of everyday New Yorkers.”
The tumult in Washington, D.C., has also distracted and clouded voters’ thinking ahead of the Democratic mayoral primary. Mr. Adams, through his perceived cooperation with the White House’s immigration policies and coziness with far-right figures, has also fueled voters’ ire.
With Mr. Adams now running as an independent, it is unclear where his primary supporters will go. His voting base of older Black voters has eroded and many have thrown their support behind Mr. Cuomo. Some of those voters may be less likely to rank five candidates, opting instead to support the one or two they are most familiar with.
Jackie Glenn, 69, a lifelong New York resident who is Black and a former Adams supporter, is among those now putting her hopes in Mr. Cuomo.
“So far, he’s the best candidate we have,” she said, adding that she valued his political experience and trusted him to “put New York back on track.” She was so encouraged by his candidacy, she said, that she and a few friends had discussed volunteering for his campaign.
Asked who she might consider ranking second or third, Ms. Glenn said she did not know of any candidates other than Mr. Adams and Mr. Cuomo and was not sure whether she would rank any others. Mr. Cuomo is unlikely to cross-endorse his opponents, unlike the progressives in the race.
Nine Democrats are seeking to unseat Mr. Adams, including Mr. Cuomo, the former governor who leads the primary field in nearly every survey of the race. Few campaigns have begun to invest in large-scale advertising to grow their support bases, and televised candidate debates — which typically kick-start interest in the race — have not yet been scheduled.
Voters, then, are largely left beholden to name recognition, or must rely on social media outreach or a chance encounter with one of the candidates on the street to form impressions.
Several candidates have millions of dollars still to spend in campaign funds, including Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist state assemblyman who has risen in the polls through a mix of social media savvy and a focus on affordability.
Still, Mr. Cuomo, who has widespread name recognition and the baked-in memory of his contentious Covid-19 briefings, seems favored to maintain his polling lead through raw political math. He has strong support among older moderates and Black voters — two of the city’s most reliable and consistent voting blocs, which have especially outsize influence in a historically low-turnout primary whose voters skew older and more conservative.
But one of the greatest challenges that the former governor and the rest of the field will have to overcome is the dejection that more New Yorkers are feeling, not only about the election itself but also about the options they have.
“Who will stand up to people like Trump and stand up for American values: freedom, loyalty, independence, justice?” said Chris Gulhaugen, 70, a registered Democrat who lives in Manhattan. “New York, being one of the biggest cities in the world, deserves a mayor who stands for those kinds of values.”
Maya King is a Times reporter covering New York politics.
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