The New York City mayoral race is a test case for a more inclusive and representative democracy.
New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, who is seeking to become the city’s first Black woman mayor, entered the race for the Democratic nomination relatively late. But after a surprising assist from a political rival, she qualified for public matching funds late last month, giving her campaign new momentum.
While the crowded June 24 Democratic primary has garnered national attention largely due to former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s controversial comeback bid, a silver lining has been the increased visibility of ranked-choice voting (RCV) and how it uniquely fosters collaborative campaigning and elevates women and candidates of color.
On May 18, Assembly member Zohran Mamdani, also running for mayor, urged his supporters on social media to contribute to Adams’ campaign, which led to a spike in donations just before the May 19 fundraising deadline.
In mid-June, Mamdani continued his pattern of endorsing other political progressives, announcing cross-endorsements with both Brad Lander and Michael Blake, with Lander and Mamdani doing a humorous video together. Meanwhile, the Cuomo campaign highlighted an endorsement from another active mayoral candidate, state Sen. Jennifer Ramos.
This support reflects the strategic positive campaigning encouraged by RCV campaigns, as detailed by FairVote in a recent news release on New York City’s primary. Unlike traditional “choose only one” primaries, RCV reduces the incentive for candidates to compete destructively against everyone else—an incentive that may be a reason why historically underrepresented groups like women and people of color have soared in their representation in New York City with ranked-choice voting, as RepresentWomen detailed in a major 2022 report and New Majority NYC’s Ebonie Simpson wrote about in a recent Daily News commentary. The resulting election environment is less hostile and leaves room for collaboration and coalition building that is absent in more traditional formats.
Mamdani’s public fundraising push for Adams shows how RCV fosters mutual uplift among like candidates, rather than forcing zero-sum rivalries. For Adams, who joined the race late and is working to overcome barriers many women candidates face, including skepticism about electability, this kind of cross-campaign support is critical.
In fact, Mamdani’s endorsements of Adams, Lander and Blake are distinctly strategic. Mamdani is a young political progressive, who remains an underdog for overcoming Cuomo’s comfortable lead in the polls. By uplifting other Democrats and seeking cross-endorsements, Mamdani is deliberately and transparently seeking to show he can build consensus within the party.
[Ranked-choice] voting reduces the incentive for candidates to compete destructively against everyone else—an incentive that may be a reason why historically underrepresented groups like women and people of color have soared in their representation.
The 2021 mayoral primary showed the value of coalition-building and the incentive for more positive campaigns and its weakening of the influence of money in politics. Winners in competitive RCV races usually are ranked in the top three by more than 75 percent of voters, underscoring that relationship-building and positive campaigns are important. Given that big money campaigns thrive on negative attack ads, having more money is not enough in itself to win.
In 2021 THE CITY reported, “The five men among the top eight Democratic candidates outpaced the women in garnering the support of super PACs—a.k.a. independent expenditure groups—by a margin of more than 13-to-1, an analysis by THE CITY found. And they beat the women by about 6-to-1 in private fundraising.”
Yet Maya Wiley and Kathryn Garcia ended up being second and third in first choices, and Garcia was the overwhelming preference of voters as a backup choice, reducing frontrunner Eric Adams’ lead from nearly 105,000 votes to some 7,000 votes in the final instant runoff.
Regarding Mamdani’s endorsement of Adams this year, Devyn Novikoff wrote in City & State New York:
Adams received an influx of campaign donations on the last day of the fundraising cycle after Mamdani posted a video on X on the evening of May 18 urging his supporters to contribute to her campaign. The video, which generated 830,000 views on X, coincided with the end of the latest campaign finance cycle on May 19—a critical deadline for Adams to qualify for the city’s generous public matching program after her late entry into the race. The Campaign Finance Board is expected to officially announce whether Adams qualified on Friday. The speaker accrued about $117,000 in donations on May 18 and 19, which was about 30 percent of her total fundraising since the cycle began two months prior…
Adam’s viability as a candidate was further enforced before the first mayoral debate, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced her five preferred candidates for mayor, with Mamdani as her first choice and Adams as her second choice. On the same day, The New York Times published “10 Questions with Adrienne Adams,” generating renewed interest in the Adams’ campaign.
At the local level, the number of women serving on the New York City Council has surged. In 2021, the number of women on the Council jumped from 13 to 31 on a 51-member body, with most new winners women of color under 40. In fact, women currently hold 52 percent of city council seats in jurisdictions with RCV nationwide. These gains reflect both intentional efforts to recruit and support women candidates and a voting system that rewards coalition-building and broad appeal, key strengths of many women candidates.
This trend suggests that ranked-choice voting may be playing a role in accelerating gender parity in local leadership, helping to ensure that the future of New York’s politics is more inclusive and representative.
As NYC becomes increasingly comfortable with RCV, coalition-building and collaboration have become a prominent strategy employed by candidates in primary elections. RCV is actively shaping how races unfold, paving the way for increased cooperation and collaboration. As voters head to the polls, New York’s election is becoming a real-time case study in how voting reform can foster a more representative democracy.
