961: Scorched Earth in NYC
In a race between "Don't Rank" campaigns, centrists shouldn't sit out
The New York City mayoral race is the first mature Ranked Choice Voting primary election to capture national political attention. New rules have changed how negative campaigning works, shifting from simple attacks on a candidate to full-fledged “Don’t Rank” campaigns.
Here’s the Wall Street Journal today:
And here is The New Yorker last week:
It is not just outside groups. Here is the New York Post editorial board on sharing an endorsement strategy with The New York Times:
In a normal political campaign, running negative ads only requires convincing voters not to use their one vote on the candidate being attacked. This is like a battle where each army meets up in a field and goes on offense to beat the other one back.
But under NYC’s system, each voter can rank up to five candidates. The goal of negative campaign messages is not just to knock the candidate down a peg, but to eliminate that candidate entirely from consideration.
RCV has made negative campaigning less like a pitched battle and more like scorched-earth warfare.
While this is the opposite of what some RCV advocates intended, I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. And it should not necessarily hurt centrists either.
But it does create an environment that must be evaluated clearly.
Like any good live case study, the NYC mayoral race will have much to teach us over the next week. And on the flip side, there will be instant reactions that need to be taken in context, especially as the media seeks to apply results of this closed primary in a blue city to the national party, and interest groups distort the results to further their own narratives.
Last week, in Mamdani & Faction, we showed how progressives spent the last four years learning the lessons of the last RCV mayoral race to out-organize centrists.
There are two other lessons.
First, Democrats keep getting hamstrung in expensive elections by flawed centrists with high name-ID. There is a false narrative out there that there is little demand for centrism, when voters demonstrate time and again that is what they want. The problem is actually low supply of centrist candidates. And so when this high voter demand meets a candidate field with one centrist with 99% name ID, you end up with Cuomo and Biden coasting past more dynamic centrist rivals to stop a socialist. The other candidates don’t get enough of a hearing because it costs so damn much to get nationwide (or NYC-wide) name ID.
Second, centrists remain outgunned online when faced with both thoughtful allies and maniacal opponents. So you get a situation like this:
National Progressive: Don’t rank Cuomo!
Crowd: Three cheers for righteousness, justice, and common sense!
National Centrist: Don’t rank Mamdani!
Crowd: Are you for abusers? And why didn’t you move to NYC, recruit a dynamic centrist challenger, and raise $100 million to challenge Cuomo? Huh? Why are you only against things?
Which, on the one hand, stinks.
And on the other hand … sure! Yes! People should support Whitney Tilson and a new generation of centrist candidates in NYC!
Two takeaways on this …
First, I have been a bit sheepishly talking to people about how it’s pretty bad that my home state junior senator, Ed Markey, is seeking another term that will leave him older than Biden would have been at the end of 2028. It’s the kind of thing where, in my home state, we really need people to do something and not just talk about it. We still have a year to work on that, and it is outside the scope of what Welcome does. But if you want to do something please let me know.
Second, just because centrists can’t do everything doesn’t mean they shouldn’t do something. And I was glad to see Third Way put out a breakdown of how insane the Democratic Socialists’ platform is. I’ve spent too many hours reading left-wing documents in recent years, but was still blown away. You can read the Third Way memo here, and below is the coverage in Politico’s Playbook about it from this morning.
EMPIRE STATE OF MIND: Centrist Democrats are sounding the alarm that a surging democratic socialist mayoral candidate in New York City’s Tuesday primary could further set back the party’s already beleaguered national brand.
Third Way, the center-left Democratic think tank, wrote in a memo Friday that they are “deeply alarmed” by Zohran Mamdani, whom they argue holds positions “that border on anti-semitism” and scan as if they were “cooked up in the offices of a Trump-aligned ad maker.”
At a time when the Democrats are searching for a way out of the wilderness, moderates in the party say that given New York City mayors’ outsized role in national politics — three of the last four have run for president — Republicans could exploit Mamdani’s positions for their gain up and down the ballot.
“We’ve seen the MAGA right’s ability and eagerness to weaponize over steps by the left,” Third Way’s executive vice president Matt Bennett tells Playbook. “If you just think about the way the Trump campaign attacked [former Vice President Kamala] Harris, the way the MAGA right has attacked Democrats generally, it is by attaching them to ideas that are outside of the mainstream. Flipping [Minnesota Gov.] Tim Walz on its head: It turns out, they made us into the weird ones, and nothing’s weirder than the stuff that’s in the DSA platform, and we just cannot hand that to the Republicans.”
The Third Way memo highlights defunding the police, closing jails, banning private healthcare and operating city-owned grocery stores as positions American voters would find beyond the pale.
961 days until the next presidential primary!