It was the final weeks of the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City and seemingly out of nowhere, Kathryn Garcia began to rise from a crowded field of 13.
She drew voters with her no-nonsense style, proven management skills in city government and moderate political views. She almost won that primary, in 2021, finishing second to Eric Adams by roughly 7,200 votes. He went on to become mayor.
This year’s Democratic mayoral primary seems just as unwieldy, with nine major candidates, including a former governor, two recent city comptrollers, the City Council speaker and three state lawmakers — but not Ms. Garcia.
Her supporters, while not a traditional voting bloc, still coalesced in the late stages to nearly elevate Ms. Garcia to City Hall. Where will those voters go this time?
Interviews with more than a dozen voters who said they backed Ms. Garcia four years ago revealed a split: Some support former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s candidacy, some had mixed feelings about him and many were looking for a better alternative.
Kate McDonough, a writer who lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan — a neighborhood that Ms. Garcia easily won — voted for her. She likes Brad Lander, the current city comptroller, though she could not recall his name.
As she left the grocery store Zabar’s on a recent afternoon, Ms. McDonough expressed concern about Mr. Cuomo, who resigned as governor in 2021 after a series of sexual harassment allegations that he has denied. She said he seemed “meanspirited” and questioned whether he had lived in the city “for more than two minutes.”
“Why can’t we just have a good manager who loves New York?” she said.
Ms. Garcia was viewed as just that. She was a successful leader of the city’s Sanitation Department who was tapped to create an emergency food network during the coronavirus pandemic, and had leadership positions at the city’s environmental and public housing agencies.
Many of the candidates this year hold or have held public office, but few boast the hands-on experience that Ms. Garcia had. Mr. Cuomo seems to come the closest, having led the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development under the Clinton administration, and served as attorney general and governor of New York.
Mr. Cuomo is fond of reciting a list of accomplishments, including raising the minimum wage and opening the Second Avenue subway. But his record also includes sexual harassment complaints by 11 women; investigations into his handling of nursing homes during the pandemic and allegations of concealing the number of nursing home residents who died from Covid; and a vindictive management style.
Some of Ms. Garcia’s supporters on the Upper West Side were ready to give Mr. Cuomo a second chance. Ellen Friedman, a retired architect, said she watched his daily coronavirus pandemic briefings and thought he had the “best grasp” of the issues.
“He’s a doer,” she said. “He gets things done. We all screw up.”
Ms. Garcia now serves as director of operations under Gov. Kathy Hochul, and declined to comment on the race.
Many candidates are courting her voters. Mr. Cuomo has highlighted his infrastructure projects, including rebuilding LaGuardia Airport. Mr. Lander, the left-leaning comptroller, has moved to the center to broaden his appeal; he once called for reducing the police budget and now wants to hire hundreds of officers.
Matt Wing, a former top adviser to Ms. Garcia, recently joined the campaign of Adrienne Adams, the City Council speaker. Mr. Wing, who is a former aide to Mr. Cuomo and is divorced from a top Cuomo adviser, Melissa DeRosa, said that Ms. Adams was in a strong position to win over Ms. Garcia’s supporters.
“Garcia voters wanted competence without the political drama — someone focused on running the city well, not on themselves,” he said.
If Mr. Cuomo, who has a sizable lead in polls, gets enough of the roughly 400,000 votes Ms. Garcia won in the 2021 primary, his victory seems assured. He is expected to benefit from Mr. Adams’s decision to exit the Democratic primary and run as an independent, especially by drawing from the mayor’s base of Black and Latino voters.
Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for the Cuomo campaign, said that Mr. Cuomo would fight for every vote.
“This city is in crisis and Governor Cuomo is the only person in this race with the experience and proven record of results necessary for the job, and that’s why he has built a broad coalition of support that reflects our great city and is leading in every borough, and with every race and gender,” he said.
Liz Krueger, a state senator who represents the Upper East Side of Manhattan and endorsed Ms. Garcia in 2021, said that Ms. Garcia’s campaign message was even more important after the tumultuous first term of Mr. Adams, who was indicted on federal corruption charges that were dropped under pressure from the Trump administration.
“I still think people want competence,” she said. “I’m concerned that they may think that Andrew Cuomo offers that.”
Ms. Kreuger argued that Mr. Cuomo brought chaos to state government and had a poor record on the mental health crisis and public housing. She said she supports Mr. Lander, who “loves to get into the weeds on issues” and “surrounds himself with smart people.”
Others view Mr. Cuomo’s record more warmly. Betsy Gotbaum, a former city public advocate who until recently led Citizens Union, a good government group that backed Ms. Garcia in 2021, said that Mr. Cuomo had the most experience and appears to have learned from his brief period in exile.
“Andrew has proven that he can manage and get things done and boy, is that important,” she said.
Some of Ms. Garcia’s supporters lamented that The New York Times, which gave her its editorial-page endorsement in 2021, does not plan to formally back a candidate this year. They worry that it could be harder for a competent candidate with low name recognition to stand out in a large field without an endorsement.
Many of the civic groups who endorsed Ms. Garcia, including the New York League of Conservation Voters, are weighing whom to back.
Eric McClure, executive director of the street safety group StreetsPAC, which endorsed Ms. Garcia, said that Mr. Cuomo did not have a strong record on public transit, but many other candidates did.
Mr. Lander “checks a lot of the technocrat boxes,” Mr. McClure said, and Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist state lawmaker who is second in polls, was running the “most joyful and exciting” campaign.
The city’s ranked-choice voting system, which allows voters to list five candidates on their ballots in order of preference, played an important role in Ms. Garcia’s performance in 2021. She forged an alliance with another candidate, Andrew Yang, and wound up getting many of his votes after he was eliminated in an earlier vote-counting round.
Several candidates this year are considering forming similar alliances to defeat Mr. Cuomo. The left-leaning Working Families Party has endorsed four candidates — Mr. Lander, Ms. Adams, Mr. Mamdani and State Senator Zellnor Myrie — and for a progressive candidate to defeat Mr. Cuomo, they would likely need a large number of Garcia voters to rank them. Another candidate, Scott Stringer, a former city comptroller, is also vying for Garcia supporters.
Many business leaders have lined up behind Mr. Cuomo and donated to his campaign. Kathryn Wylde, the president of the Partnership for New York City, a major business group, said that her members had met with several candidates and that none had yet emerged as the natural successor to Ms. Garcia.
Ms. Wylde said that having a “technocrat city manager mayor” like Ms. Garcia was “attractive to the business community in a political environment that they feel is chaotic and unfriendly.”
Some Garcia voters on the Upper West Side said they were reluctant to vote for Mr. Cuomo. Joe Giordano, a retired artist, said that competence was important to him, but Mr. Cuomo was not the answer.
“I think he has too much baggage,” he said. “I don’t think I want to see him every day.”
Molly Pollak, a retired teacher, said she used to like Mr. Cuomo, but now she was “not so sure.” So far, none of the other candidates have “said anything that makes me think they can do the job effectively.”
For Ms. Pollak, the most important issue is standing up to President Trump. She said she admired elected officials who were challenging him.
“I want a person with that kind of guts,” she said.
Emma G. Fitzsimmons is the City Hall bureau chief for The Times, covering Mayor Eric Adams and his administration.
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