But it’s not a certainty because of the complicated process. Sources say that the new ranked-order voting system will not permit an official result until mid-July.
Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels and a conservative talk show host, won the GOP nomination in a landslide.
If I had been eligible to vote in the Democratic Primary, I would have voted for Eric Adams, with my second choice being Yang. Shootings and other crimes are way up in NYC over the last 8 years and as much of a critic of the NYPD as Adams was as cop (founding 100 Black Men in Law Enforcement) as a former captain he can’t help but have a better understanding of what it will take to get a handle on crime. If he can do that without breeding more resentment in minority communities he will be a very good, potentially great mayor. I’m hoping for an Ed Koch style “liberal with sanity” though I expect to be disappointed in that regard.
As it happens, I could have voted for Adams yesterday because when I went to vote in the GOP primary, they gave me a Democratic ballot by mistake. But I exchanged it for the right one. I hadn’t actually planned to vote in that primary until yesterday morning. I didn’t particularly like either Curtis Sliwa or Fernando Mateo. Interestingly, even though there were only two candidates I was still asked to pick a second and third choice for the ranked choice ballot. But yesterday morning I was convinced to vote by a Mateo campaign commercial in which Mateo described Sliwa as a Never Trumper. “That’s good enough for me” I thought. So I went out in the rain to vote for Sliwa.
There are Republicans in NYC? Seriously! 😛
btw Rudy Dem to moderate Rep ~ Bloomy Dem to Indy to moderate Rep to Indy to whatever lol ~ iow their coats are easily turned er whatever it takes to get elected, eh.
Also nowadays Nixon could probably be considered a moderate Dem except for violating the U.S. Constitution every which way but loose! 😮
Digressing.
Yielding back the balance of my time …
Ed Koch served 3 terms as mayor before losing the Democratic primary to David Dinkins in 1989. Rudy Giuliani, well known then as the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, ran as a Republican and came very close to winning. Dinkins was a very nice man but a terrible mayor. When there was an epidemic of “swirling” (where a group of boys surround a girl ripping off her bathing suit and sexually assaulting her) in city pools, Dinkins had a plan to stop it. It was a public relations campaign called “Don’t Diss Your Sis.” With crime way up, Giuliani won the 1993 election (barely). He assigned police officers to city pools and I never heard about any more swirling.
One of the keys to Giuliani’s success was an alliance with the leader of the Liberal Party. New York State allows a candidate to appear on multiple ballot lines. As a result, Republicans often appear as the nominee of the GOP, the Conservative Party, and the Right to Life Party. But Giuliani was the nominee of the GOP and the Liberal Party. There were people in NYC whose arm would probably fall off if they had ever tried to vote for a Republican. But those people could vote for the Liberal Party nominee instead.
Mark Green, a very liberal fellow, was almost certainly going to succeed Giuliani, but there was a problem with the primary, September 11th. It was rescheduled and Green won the Democratic nomination while moderate Democrat/extremely rich guy Mike Bloomberg won the GOP nomination. Without 9/11 Bloomberg would almost certainly have lost. Afterwards, Green had no chance. Bloomberg could never have won a Democratic primary, but he was elected as Republican 3 times leading to something no one would have believed 20 years earlier. The GOP won 5 straight NYC mayoral elections. 8 years ago, there was a very crowded field of candidates for the Democratic nomination. A lot of people, myself included, believe Bill De Blasio pulled ahead and won because of a commercial featuring his then teenage, still biracial, son Dante. To damn with faint praise, I think he was a better mayor than David Dinkins.
Thanks, Michael. That was genuinely educational to a Midwesterner like me.
You are welcome. I find myself reminiscing quite a bit these days. Probably comes from being retired. But I have an interesting (to me) story from the 1993 election.
I grew up in the Woodlawn section of the Bronx, a primarily Irish & Italian neighborhood. On a per capita basis, Giuliani probably got more votes there then anywhere else in the Bronx. I volunteered on election day to hand out Giuliani literature near the polls. The Dinkins campaign didn’t even have anyone doing that there. But there was a 3rd candidate in the 1993 race, the Conservative Party/Right to Life Party nominee George Marlin. While I was handing out literature, a man I had never met started scolding me. He told me that he knew my mother, that the lesser of two evils was still evil, and that I should be ashamed of myself. Marlin had no chance to win, but there was concern he could get enough votes to keep Giuliani from winning. That morning I had been sitting in the neighborhood Giuliani campaign office waiting for the local manager to arrive with the literature. While I was there a friend of my mother came in. She was an extremely religious Catholic woman and vehemently pro life. Her husband, a plumber, had been the Right to Life candidate for Elliot Engel’s congressional seat several elections in a row. She was also an artist and she told us she had painted 3 wooden campaign signs for George Marlin. She told us that she had chained them to telephone poles but someone had stolen them. She was so upset she was trembling. We told her we hadn’t taken them and she said she was glad because she didn’t want to think we had. A few minutes after she left the manager arrived with the literature. Someone told him about the lady’s visit and he said “Oh yeah, I have them in my car.” Given the wonderful, honest, ethical man we know him to be today, it is shocking his campaign would do such a thing. Marlin got less than 16,000 votes, but Giuliani only won by 53,000.
Giuliani has totally disgraced himself in my opinion. If he had only sold his soul to the devil, I could forgive him. But he sold his soul to Trump which was far worse. But he was a phenomenal mayor, and I am not even referring to his actions on and after 9/11. Giuliani transformed what many had called an ungovernable city. The murder rate (not counting 9/11) fell about 75%. It became possible to stop at a red light without squeegee men appearing to exhort cash from drivers. He cleared the mob out of the Fulton Fish Market. I didn’t agree with everything he did. For instance he cleared the porn theaters and adult bookstores out of Time Square. Seriously though the city is much better off with the tourism in the cleaned up neighborhood. What I actually disagreed with him about was the way he tried to trample on the 1st Amendment. For instance he tried to cut funding to a city museum that had displayed an offensive piece of art. He also tried to get the MTA to remove posters advertising a New York Magazine cover story critical of Giuliani. But the courts shut those attempts down pretty quickly.
Bloomberg could never have accomplished what Giuliani accomplished. But he kept the most effective of Giuliani’s policies in place and city life continued to improve. Most people have heard of the terrible reputation of the South Bronx. Woodlawn on the other hand was in the northernmost part of the borough. When I was 5 years old, we were living in central part of the Bronx in the house where my dad grew up. But my parents moved us to Woodlawn that year because of the fear of crime. 6 months after we moved, someone burned our old house down. Fast forward almost 50 years and I felt perfectly comfortable buying an apartment 7 blocks from where our old house once stood. I doubt I would have felt that way of Giuliani hadn’t been elected mayor in 1993. But I really hope our next mayor is better than Di Blasio because I don’t want to have to move.
I am glad to hear that Giuliani was a good man once, and did well for New York City, which was a place we Midwesterners regarded with both awe and fear. What Giuliani has done to himself is a tragedy, for him at least. I was going to say something like “some people just can’t give up the limelight”, but really, I have no clue why he did what he has done.
I’ve given a fair amount of thought to the fall of America’s mayor and I think a large part of the reason may be BECAUSE he became America’s mayor. If not for 9/11, Giuliani might have considered running for governor or senator, but I doubt he would have contemplated running outside of NY. Actually he was running for the senate against Hillary Clinton until he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. But as the social liberal he needed to be to be elected mayor, I doubt he would think he had a chance to win the GOP presidential nomination. But after 9/11, Giuliani was heaped with well deserved praise. Maybe it went to his head and he missed the limelight. Then again, as mayor of NYC, he clearly got to know Trump pretty well. Even if Giuliani had never tried to run for president, he might still have signed on as one of Trump’s lawyers. Donald Trump was (and continues to be) toxic to the GOP and the level of toxicity increased the longer he was in office. Many elected Republicans tried to thread a needle supporting the president where they agreed with him but criticizing him when they had to. Far too many failed to manage that and dishonorably continued to support Trump when they shouldn’t have. I lost respect for many if not most elected Republicans. But as Trump’s lawyer, Giuliani had to actively defend the indefensible. He did a terrible job of defending him, seemingly more interested in cable news appearances than following a sound legal strategy. I’d like to think that Giuliani was suffering from dementia or other mental illness and thus wasn’t responsible for his ethical lapses. But I think the truth is he became addicted to the spotlight and media attention and sold his soul to Trump to keep public attention focused on himself. As I said above, better he had sold his soul to the devil than Trump. I say that because much as I enjoy devil movies and TV shows, I don’t believe the devil exists. Unfortunately, I think Trump does. Maybe if he moved to LA, opened a bar, and became a consultant for the LAPD people might start to believe he was a fictional character.
I just saw that Giuliani’s NY law license has been suspended over false election claims. Something that many people would probably find hard to believe is that according to the Code of Professional Responsibility, lawyers are NEVER permitted to lie. Generally, that rule is only enforced against lawyers who lie while acting as lawyers. I took a sports and entertainment law class and I remember the professor telling us that because of that rule lawyers who also act as agents will explicitly differentiate when they are acting as a lawyer and when they are acting as an agent. I wonder if that means agents may be less than completely truthful when they talk about other pending offers? But the NY Supreme Court Appellate division found that there was “incontrovertible evidence” that Giuliani made false statements about the election while acting as part of Trump’s legal team. They suspended his license pending further proceedings so he may end up disbarred in the end. He may also face criminal charges related to his actions in Ukraine. I really hate that he brought all this on himself, but he did.