The 'perfect' candidate
With nearly everyone clamoring for NYC's top spot as mayor, who gets to be cast as the "right" candidate for the city?
Happy Tuesday and Happy New Year! đ„ł
I hope you had a nice and safe celebration to ring in 2021 from the comfort of your home. With the start of the new year, I wanted to take a look at New York Cityâs own new chapter: the 2021 mayoral race. Itâs going to be an exciting election and not just because itâll be the first time New Yorkers elect a mayor through ranked-choice voting.
If you havenât kept a close eye on the mayoral race, I donât blame you. Even without the distraction of the presidential election, keeping up with the cityâs mayoral race would still be a challenge what with almost everyone and their grandmother running to replace Bill de Blasio, who will be term-limited out of the job this year.
Candidates began launching their campaigns as early as last summer. But so many people have come in and dropped out of the race that the pool of candidates has been in constant flux. For argumentâs sake, Iâve whittled down the list of current Democratic contenders to 19 candidates (yes, nineteen). This includes anyone whoâs submitted their formal papers to run in the election *and* officially launched their campaign with a public announcement.
But with an overcrowded pool of candidates comes the question: who gets proper billing as the ârightâ candidate for New York City â and who doesnât?
Among the top contenders are NYC Comptroller Scott Stringer, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, former Counsel to the Mayor Maya Wiley, former NYC Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, and City Council Member Carlos Menchaca. If I went through them all Iâd run out of space so if youâre interested to learn more about some of the other candidates, Curbed has a pretty exhaustive guide that features 34 possible Democratic and Republican contenders.
With the presidential election finally out of the way, itâll be interesting to see how New Yorkers respond to the crowded pool of candidates which has a diverse range of individuals in terms of personalities and ideologies, from a nonbinary Brooklyn rapper to yet another white billionaire.
One candidate in particular was pretty quickly rebuked by a few political observers.
When word got out that former presidential candidate Andrew Yang was considering a bid for NYC mayor, one editor from a local publication remarked online that Yangâs candidacy for president âmade a lot more sense than Andrew Yang running for mayor, and it didnât make that much sense.â
Another journalist publicly replied, in response to news about Yangâs candidacy, that Yang should âspend a few years learning about how to run the massive constituency you want to represent and then run.â
The bloated pool of mayoral candidates has turned narrating every tidbit about the election into a favorite pastime among political observers so snipes like this arenât out of the ordinary.
But I donât recall folks commenting against an individualâs possible bid for mayor so cynically as they have about Yang (despite hints that heâs likely running for mayor, with photos of him filming what looks suspiciously like a campaign ad, he has not made a formal announcement yet).
Wanting someone seasoned to fill the spot for NYC mayor is a very valid point! As a New Yorker, I would like to have someone who is not the butt of every groundhog joke running this ship. But should it be disqualifying if a person doesnât have specific experience in government? I used to think that people who run for public office should have past experience in public office, too. But Iâve learned that is not a realistic expectation, especially if weâre looking for systemic change in government.
If you look at the local legislative bodies in every city and state in the U.S., even in this year of our Lord Savior Rihanna, they will look mostly the same: white, straight, male. This is the result of the countryâs complicated history of racial and gender discrimination which is really just an indicator of a larger patriarchal society in the world, a society that has historically favored white men.
Of course, great strides have been made in recent years to change this, to make the face of Americaâs public officials representative of the diverse Americans that they serve. But this change didnât happen with women, people of color, and queer folks just waiting their turn because they werenât considered the ârightâ candidate.
A perfect example is the rise of U.S. House Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, better known by her nickname AOC. The story of AOCâs rise has been told countless times: she was working as a twenty-something bartender before her upset victory against incumbent Joe Crowley, who had held New York's 14th congressional district seat for a decade before she ousted him.
But that rags-to-Congress story leans too much into the narrative that AOC doesnât fit the usual profile of what folks expect from a candidate for elected office, nor does it give AOC the credit she deserves. Yes, she worked as a bartender. She also interned in the immigration office of former Sen. Ted Kennedy, worked at a maternity clinic while studying abroad in Niger, and has a bachelorâs degree in both international relations and economics from Boston University.
Professionally, she also worked as an educational director at the National Hispanic Institute and founded the Brook Avenue Press that produces childrenâs books for the Bronx community.
AOC may not have ârun a massive constituencyâ as that journalist suggested or served in a government agency before, but she had plenty of other experience and qualifications. Should her lack of a prior government post have stopped her from running for Congress? Imagine how different the political landscape would be today if she hadnât. (Vanity Fair did a fantastic profile on the congresswoman which you can read here.)
We know that someone with a lot of government experience isnât a guarantee theyâll do a good job, either. I mean, just look at de Blasio: he started in political campaigns straight out of college before serving as a City Council Member, then became the cityâs public advocate (which, yes, is an official title that exists) and then got elected as mayor. Yet heâs arguably among the least popular mayors in NYC history because heâs so bad at his job â and heâs been an elected official for nearly 20 years!!
When people operate on arbitrary rules about what a candidate âshouldâ be like, it only serves as a barrier for people who have historically been excluded from positions of power in government. Sometimes itâs also a sign of unconscious bias.
Going back to the case of Andrew Yang, there are valid points to be made about what makes him a good mayoral candidate â like his experience as a tech entrepreneur and the fact that he polled favorably ahead of other candidates â or what doesnât â like his tendency to âplay-upâ Asian stereotypes and his lack of ties in the cityâs politics. The point is criticizing a candidate needs to be more than just âwell, it just doesnât make sense.â
People are used to certain individuals vying for political office. And though the public has become (a little bit) more comfortable watching Latinas like AOC or Black men like Barack Obama run for public office, they are still not used to seeing an Asian person do it. Not even in NYC.
The first Asian American ever elected to New Yorkâs legislature was Jimmy Meng, the father of current Congresswoman Grace Meng, in 2004 â just 17 years ago. Today, there is still only a handful of Asian American legislators representing New York and only *two* Asian Americans out of 47 NYC Council members (the other four seats are currently unfilled).
In its roughly 300-year history, New York City has only had one mayor who wasnât a white man: Mayor David Dinkins, an African American who served a single term from 1990 through 1993.
Thanks to faithful Yang Gang-ers â the moniker for Yangâs loyal voter base that formed during his presidential run last year â itâs well-documented that Yang was often sidelined during press coverage of the candidates. His campaign only garnered widespread sympathy and attention after he announced that he was dropping out of the race, with pundits applauding him for his campaignâs âout-of-the-boxâ proposals. Yang, grateful but surprised by the outpouring of support, responded: this is great, but where were you guys before?
When the press gawked over Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigiegâs prestigious Rhodes Scholar title and multilingual abilities (he speaks Norwegian, you guys!), critics pointed out that fellow candidate U.S. Sen. Cory Booker was also a Rhodes Scholar (and bilingual, lest you forget) yet received zero lollipops for this fact. When VP-elect Kamala Harris was criticized for her tough-on-crime reputation as a prosecutor during her presidential bid, leading to the nasty slogan âKamala is a cop,â few wagged their fingers at U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, whose record as a prosecutor is pretty damning.
This unequal treatment is something that non-white candidates know all too well. Studies over the last decades show that non-white candidates often face challenges brought on by racial bias, whether from the public or the press.
People like to omit race from politics unless it gives them an excuse to criticize âpolitical correctnessâ or âidentity politics.â But in a multiracial/multiethnic society, race absolutely plays a role in politics. Racial identity can even affect campaign contributions and political influence which I wrote about for Fortune magazine.
Now, Iâm not saying that any negativity about Yangâs campaign for mayor is about race, but weâd be kidding ourselves if we think that isnât part of it. My suspicions grow when people make odd remarks about a candidate like Yang without citing specifics; OK, you think he shouldnât run, what specifically is it that makes his candidacy any less reasonable than other people in the race? Are you being just as critical toward the other candidates?
Everyone needs to unlearn their biases, including myself. These questions are a good exercise to give yourself when evaluating someone who doesnât fit the cookie-cutter image of what this nation is used to seeing in politics. When judging whoâs the best candidate for mayor, I hope New Yorkers can keep their biases in check so that some dark horse might have a fair shot.
Itâs the final day to vote for the Georgia run-off elections! đłïžđłïžđłïž Gird your loins and keep tabs on the latest updates from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution âš #SupportLocalJournalism
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Thanks for stopping by!
Natasha