Yang has been a buffoonish candidate. He really didn’t pay enough attention to NYC politics over the years & it shows.

Thing is, a lot of people in his orbit stood to make a lot of money if he ran for office, and they knew he’d out-poll the field for a while. That explains all.

His campaign reeks of being a “consultancy effort”. It’s all good vibes and big ideas and pictures of him eating food that people might relate to. The second he wades into a policy topic it’s like he’s kicking over a gasoline can. No coherent ideology either.

My personal opinion is that we don’t have the luxury of letting anyone learn on the job, but I’m more worried that his instincts would lead to a very-broken quasi-autocratic administration that resembles a hybrid of Bloomberg/de Blasio, with the actual mayor being hands-off

How does this impact the primary in June?

Yang may not lose his voter base and may not gain on it either. Since Adams is in the same spot (for different reasons) they could lock up 40% of the total vote through 10+ rounds with lots of ballots starting to drop off at that point

The point of RCV isn’t for everyone who voted for Maya Wiley or Kathryn Garcia to see votes vaporized, but I could see a lot of informed progressives in NYC building a ranking of 5 who don’t include Yang or Adams, while those two are first ranked on a big plurality of ballots

That means that Stringer is in a decent position as long as both Yang and Adams are not polling over 25% (even better if one is down around 10-15%), and it might be huge if someone passes Stringer for a decisive 3rd place spot

But this is not how 96% of RCV ballots go.

In most cases, the candidate with the leading plurality in the first round wins after all rounds are processed. Yang’s hope has to be a late round with only Yang/Stringer/Adams left, and Stringer is somehow third because he wasn’t in many top-5’s. That would be weird.

I don’t see Yang getting to 50% with any of the second-tier candidates still in the race. Even if he has 25% of first-choice ballots, the next 25% has to be a lot of 4-6% candidates’ ballots going entirely to him. I think that’s unlikely!

But one thing I’m having a hard time seeing is Adams having a path with the competition. The race is entirely situated to the left of where Adams is. Adams’ campaign mostly consists of “it’s my turn” and a bunch of I-know-better stuff, he isn’t appealing to non-centrists at all

Yes, NYC Democrats have a conservative demographic. Yes, right-wingers are pouring in money to have city Republicans switch sides.

Even still, Adams is still on an island that may not get much bigger once spending on this race kicks into high gear.

Thing is, he’s fully presented himself to us. He’s not polling in the 20’s citywide. When is he going to pick up all those Bronx voters? How is he gonna be a top-3 on a ballot with a first-ranked Garcia, Morales, Donovan or Wiley? They’re all very different!

It’s a very weird race where we still have a lot of campaigning to do, where name ID is driving many choices at the moment, the polls are unreliable, the populace is half undecided, we haven’t had debates yet... really hard to say how it’ll shake out.

But again, this is why Yang is in the race... because people with a lot of experience in politics + a lot of cynicism believe he can outlast experienced but uninspiring candidates. And no matter what happens, they get paid.