'A Very Tough April and May': What's Gone Wrong for Andrew Yang's Mayoral Campaign?
Andrew Yang (photo: @AndrewYang)
Andrew Yang, the entrepreneur and former Democratic presidential candidate, seemed to be dominating this year’s mayoral race, with early poll numbers showing him well ahead of the other candidates running in this month’s primary. But the honeymoon period for his campaign ended, with personal and policy gaffes and experience gaps possibly catching up with him as more voters tuned into the race. Several polls released Monday, three days into early voting and just over a week before primary day, show Yang slipping toward the middle of the pack and raised questions about whether he was more of a flash in the pan built on high name recognition and likeability from his presidential bid but unable to make a convincing case to enough New Yorkers that he should lead city government.
Yang’s late entry into the race did not seem to hinder his campaign as he proceeded to quickly raise millions of dollars from thousands of New Yorkers and tapping into his national network, even setting a record for most individual contributions to a mayoral campaign. He had ample notoriety built from his unlikely and over-performing presidential run, a deep donor base, and a knack for earned media that helped him eclipse the more conventional candidates in the race including sitting elected officials like Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams and Comptroller Scott Stringer. He lacked any experience in government and had never even voted in a mayoral election before, but was nonetheless out-running former de Blasio administration officials Maya Wiley and Kathryn Garcia, and former Bloomberg and Obama cabinet member Shaun Donovan.
It was clear from early polls that Yang was well known by New York City voters. In the first “Pulse of the Primary” poll by Fontas Advisors and Core Decision Analytics, released February 10, a massive 84% of likely Democratic primary voters said they had heard of Yang. The next closest was Stringer, who has been in city or state government for decades, with 66% name recognition, followed by Adams, previously a state senator and NYPD captain, at 60%. But, for much of the race, a significant number of voters have remained undecided even when Yang has held the lead. In that poll, he came in first place with 28%, while Adams was second with 17% and Stringer was third with 13% -- the undecideds were 19%.
For months, Yang maintained his position near the top. The Yang campaign, in early May, released an internal poll showing him in the lead with 21% of the vote and Stringer in second place with 15%. “Andrew Yang continues to poll well across all boroughs and demographics, but our unique base of Asian, Orthodox Jewish, and Latino voters, along with Staten Island Democrats, is coming into focus as the race enters the last six weeks,” Chris Coffey, a Yang co-campaign manager said in a statement at the time. “When you put those voters together, our campaign starts in a great place, while the resonance of Andrew's message with voters beyond traditional ideological or demographic breakdowns only strengthens our standing. When New Yorkers see Andrew on the streets or in the press, they know that hope is on the way."
For months Yang appeared to be cruising, credited for tapping into the city’s “zeitgeist” around reopening and recovery, a hopeful future. Even while being attacked left and right, he was upbeat and energetic, refusing to hit back at critics while his campaign trumpeted the fact that he was running on an exclusively positive message. Some talked about his mayoralty as a near inevitability, though while Yang, Coffey, and others with the campaign did try to play up that narrative, they also at times cautioned against any premature presumptions.
Signs started to shift in late April, accelerating through May.
On May 5, Politico New York reported that Adams was in first place in a poll by GQR, a Washington D.C.-based firm, overtaking Yang for the first time. In the poll, which was commissioned by City Council Speaker Corey Johnson's comptroller campaign, Adams received 21% of the vote and Yang was at 18%.
In the third Pulse of the Primary poll released May 26, which had Adams in first place with 13%, Yang and Garcia tied for second place with 8% while 50% of voters were undecided (when “leaners” were taken into account it was Adams 18%, Yang 13%, and Garcia 11%). And in an NY1/Ipsos poll released last week, Yang was in second place with 16% of first-choice votes, after Adams’ 22% while 16% were undecided.
But in the three latest polls in the race released on Monday, Yang has since fallen further behind. In a Marist poll, Adams was in the front of the pack with 24% of first-choice votes; Garcia came in second with 17%; Wiley in third with 15%; and Yang was in fourth with 13%.
In a Data for Progress poll, again Adams led with 26%. Wiley surged to second with 20% and Yang came in third with 16%. Garcia was just behind him with 14%.
And finally, in a Manhattan Institute poll, Adams was also first with 24% of first-choice votes, Garcia was second with 22% and Wiley was in third with 20%. Yang came in fourth place with 14%.
Yang and his campaign have sought to refute that he is losing momentum. “Our numbers show that this is anyone's race right now, and they also show that we're growing. We’re peaking at the right time,” he said at a news conference on Tuesday, though it is unclear what evidence tells him he is peaking given that his own internal polling, when released, has shown a tightening race, which his campaign has acknowledged in past briefings.
Yang has shown signs acknowledging his slip, turning from a “happy warrior” on the campaign trail to someone launching acerbic attacks on Adams and sharp words toward other candidates, including Garcia, who Yang had previously only said very positive things about. Yang’s changed demeanor was on full display Wednesday night during the final televised debate of the primary as he repeatedly attempted to knock Adams down.
His campaign has noted that a significant number of early votes have come from new voters, who haven’t cast a ballot in previous mayoral or even federal elections. Yang has said that his path to victory relies on expanding the electorate. “A lot of those new voters are showing up because they want change,” he said Tuesday. “They know that politics as usual is not working. They want a mayor who’s going to deliver real change. So we're very excited about where we are in this race right now.”
What the electorate will actually look like is not easy to predict, though the pollsters, including from the Yang campaign, have made estimates based on recent and longer-term city voting history.
“It was always going to be a very close race,” said Chris Coffey, a Yang co-campaign manager, in a phone interview. He also noted that the campaign’s internal numbers on early voting are positive. “We think we're winning in early voting based on who has voted, and identify them as Yang voters as they have been for a long time,” he said. “We think we're winning in early voting. Does that mean we're gonna win the entire election? I don’t know. But I don't at all accept that we are where Marist has us.”
Coffey, a veteran of Bloomberg mayoral campaigns and City Hall who is now at Tusk Strategies, pointed out that the Marist poll, which was conducted between June 3 and 9, didn’t fully account for the days of negative headlines for Adams, who faced questions about his residency in the city and a number of other issues.
Political observers, however, say that Yang’s campaign is missing the mark on the issues and that his flaws as a candidate have begun to overshadow his strengths.
[READ: Andrew Yang's Strengths and Weaknesses as He Runs for Mayor]
In a previous interview, Bruce Gyory, a veteran Democratic strategist with the firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP, pointed to the many instances where Yang displayed a failed grasp of city policy and gaffes he has made on the campaign trail. “Yang has had a very tough April and May. And I think that the narrative of the knowledge gap is really hurting,” he said.
In mid-April, Yang landed in hot water after a video posted on Twitter showed him laughing off a question from a comedian about choking women during sex. His explanation that he was just being “friendly” left a lot to be desired by his detractors. On policy, he has made several blunders. He has repeatedly called for the implementation of policies that already exist – for instance, dedicated homeless shelters for domestic violence victims. He proposed putting a casino on Governors Island, which is legally impermissible. He proposed municipal control of the city’s subways and buses, but had almost no details to offer.
Yang’s pitch as a successful entrepreneur also wasn’t as impressive under the microscope. He has repeatedly touted his nonprofit Venture for America, aimed at recruiting young college graduates for startups in underserved communities across the country. He has claimed that VFA has created nearly 5,000 jobs so far, while a New York Times analysis showed it was closer to 150. The central work experience Yang cites as making him qualified to lead the city is running and growing a small business, a Manhattan-based business school test prep company that he led before taking a large buyout and then launching Venture for America.
As Gyory noted in a June 9 column in Empire Report, the editorial boards of the New York Times and the New York Daily News “raked Yang over the coals both implicitly and explicitly” when they endorsed Garcia’s mayoral campaign. “Consequently, when the editorial board endorsements powered the rise of Kathryn Garcia, tied to the knowledge gap narrative surrounding Yang, it blocked Yang’s ability to consolidate the white vote, which was essential to his campaign’s strategic success,” Gyory wrote.
Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran political consultant, said the race has become defined by two issues: crime and disorder, in the wake of an increase in violent crimes and high-profile instances of gun violence such as a shooting incident in Times Square in May.
The candidates who have most benefited from that shift in the race, Sheinkopf said, are Adams and Garcia. Adams, a former police officer, has from the start been running on a platform of public safety and tackling crime while Garcia has long been known for her management in times of crisis. “The problem is that Andrew Yang looked great as an idea,” he said, but Yang “didn't deal with the fact of life as people in the city see them, or more importantly, as high propensity voters see them.”
On public safety, Yang’s platform and positions are, in fact, quite similar to Adams. But his lack of relevant experience raises questions about his ability to bring those ideas to bear, especially relative to Adams, though the captains union that Adams belongs to endorsed Yang earlier this week, a pick-up Yang has tried to use to bludgeon Adams in the race’s final week.
“How does Yang become a player as someone who has no experience in those areas? He's not a destroyer of disorder ([like] Garcia). He's not a person who understands crime. He has never experienced anything like that ([like] Adams),” Sheinkopf said.
“You have a guy with no experience, who's a rich guy by his own definition, who is a little bit too glib facing real problems that are not glib and not funny, that are not necessarily resolvable by someone that people don't know or who doesn't have the requisite skills in any way shape or form,” Sheinkopf added.
Yang also tried to make economic recovery and school reopenings central to his campaign message, but as much as those issues have found apparent resonance both will be well underway before the next mayor takes office. And he has failed to build support among certain demographics. Yang has the backing of many Asian-Americans and Orthodox Jews, who represent relatively narrow but important slices of the electorate, and seems to have some measure of support among Latinos, though none is a monolith. As the polling has shown, Black voters, crucial in de Blasio’s victory in 2013 and almost essential to any winning Democratic primary campaign, are solidly behind Adams. White voters are leaning towards Garcia. Younger voters have preferred Morales, and almost every other group prefers Adams.
To progressive activists, the electorate seems to be catching up with what they have known all along. “People knew who he was early on when he launched. He had great name recognition, he had a lotta press. But the more press attention there was, the more clear it was he just isn't prepared for the job,” said Gabe Tobias of Our City PAC, which is promoting progressive candidates in this year’s election and decidedly anti-Yang.
Tobias said Yang’s lack of a clear ideology, which he has boasted of as a sign of independence, doesn’t attract voters. “They were trying to both somehow be appealing to the right wing of the Democratic Party and the left wing of the party. That's just not anything that makes sense,” he said.
“Progressives actually woke up to the fact that he wasn't proposing really progressive things,” Tobias said.
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
Maya Wiley's School Choice
Maya Wiley (photo: @mayawiley)
Maya Wiley is seeking the Democratic nomination for mayor as one of the leading progressives in the race, leaning heavily on her accolades as a civil rights attorney. Her education platform includes a number of the most aggressive and embattled proposals to integrate the city’s deeply segregated schools and she has said her position is forged by her own experience going to a segregated elementary school. But as she has sought the progressive mantle and pledged decisive action toward racial equality, Wiley has not emphasized school desegregation as a central campaign promise. Nor does she always highlight it even when discussing her approach to education, despite having focused extensively on the issue in recent years as the leader of a city task force, the School Diversity Advisory Group.
"I've been talking about it constantly on the campaign trail. I said explicitly, I'm a civil rights lawyer but I'm also a Black woman that went to a segregated, over-crowded, underfunded elementary school when I was a child," Wiley said Tuesday in response to a Gotham Gazette inquiry at a campaign stop outside the Brooklyn Public Library and referring to her upbringing near Washington, D.C. "So I've been very clear, no discriminatory admission practices, period."
But indicative of where Wiley has placed desegregating the city’s schools in her campaign pitch, she did not discuss her integration plans further and quickly went on to describe her plan to decrease class sizes by hiring 2,500 more teachers and inject "trauma-informed care" in schools, the two education proposals she touts most often. She took an almost identical tack when asked at the debate the next evening whether she would prioritize desegregation over improving schools, though she also refuted the premise of the question and said both must be done.
"You want to bring violence down and send graduation rates up?" she continued Tuesday, in response to the question about her campaign messaging around school desegregation. "I'll tell you the solution, it's trauma-informed care in our schools and we're going to invest in that too. And I have been saying it across this campaign trail."
As indicated by her several television ads and campaign trail stump remarks, Wiley has focused her central campaign pitch on the issues of police reform and accountability and economic equity.
From 2017 to 2019, Wiley was co-chair of the School Diversity Advisory Group (SDAG), a panel with with education experts and representatives of student and parent advocacy groups and civil rights organizations appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio to study the stark racial segregation in New York City's school system. Her education platform now includes many of the integrationist recommendations the group offered in two extensive reports and de Blasio has left by the wayside, but education advocates and political observers agree promoting them may not be a winning political strategy.
"It's a really thorny subject because a lot of progressive Democratic voters believe in school integration in theory but not necessarily in practice," said Dr. Christina Greer, a political scientist at Fordham University, in an interview.
"When it comes to actual implementation, i.e. can we change the composition of your child's school district or should we redraw the lines or reassess how we allocate resources? That's where the rubber hits the road and you get less support," Greer said. That conclusion is supported by a recent national survey from The Century Foundation, which found respondents were more supportive of racial and economic diversity in public schools before being asked about specific proactive approaches to achieving it, like busing. Wiley, herself, has gotten criticism for sending her children to screened public schools and elite high schools while advocating for dismantling and replacing some of those programs.
"She needs to appeal to white moderates, or at least white liberals who are afraid of talking about race and doing things related to race, and I also know she needs to appeal to Black and brown folks who want issues around civil rights and educational equity to be front and center," said Matt Gonzales, director of NYU's Integration and Innovation Initiative and a member of the SDAG when he was with NY Appleseed.
But school desegregation was not a campaign issue when de Blasio was elected in 2013, he noted, and usually isn't front-and-center in the minds of many voters. "That it's not the centerpiece of her platform is not surprising to me and it's also not off-putting in any way," Gonzales said.
"I've never felt like integration is the primary issue because people just don't understand it, they think it's something from the past, people don't actually know we have a segregated school system or city," he added.
Seventy percent of city schools are 'intensely segregated,' meaning 90% of the student body is nonwhite, according to a new study from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA using 2018 data. The problem isn't limited to New York City -- the report found the state to be the most segregated in the country for Black students and second-most for Latino students. But many of the contributing factors identified by the report -- "gifted and talented" programs and specialized high schools, a growing number of charter schools, and housing segregation -- are abundant in the city and partially within the power of the next mayor to address.
"She's not going to talk about it on the campaign trail because it's not important to most voters," said Michael Benjamin, a member of the New York Post editorial board and a former state legislator. "I guess if she's in Park Slope where they've done positive, concrete work to try to open up their schools and that's their local choice, that's fine, she can talk about it there. But when she goes to District 26 in Queens where it's predominantly Black and many of the kids aren't succeeding, telling them about wanting to integrate schools, specialized high schools and screened schools, there's nothing for them in the schools on the ground."
Wiley has maintained that she hasn't shied away from the issue and has focused on the issues that matter to the students and families in segregated school communities. "I've been clear that I'm going to hire 2,500 more teachers because one of the things we heard in SDAG rightly so from the communities that have the overcrowded and segregated classrooms is, 'no one is investing sufficiently in our kids' learning and making our schools great schools,'" she said Tuesday, adding, "we're going to bring class sizes down, I'm the only candidate that's been explicit about it."
The most contentious elements of the SDAG reports have to do with admissions practices -- a zero-sum game for many parents seeking the best placement for their children -- not class size or the "trauma-informed care" plan Wiley has described. But she has largely embraced those too, and reading her policy platform makes clear that school desegregation is a serious consideration for her.
"Maya's specific plans for desegregating New York City schools lean into the work she led on the School Diversity Advisory Group," Gonzales wrote in an email. "As a former member of the SDAG, I obviously want to see all 90+ of our recommendations fully implemented...Is this the perfect desegregation plan? No, but if implemented, these plans would be a significant down payment on desegregating NYC schools."
"She's done her homework for sure," he wrote.
The SDAG produced two sets of findings in 2019. The first, de Blasio and then-Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza lauded and accepted most of the accompanying recommendations. The second was far more controversial and de Blasio has said he would review the recommendations, though he took almost no action on them until extenuating circumstances from the pandemic forced his hand. The changes he did make, including removing some admissions screens, may be temporary depending on th next mayor.
After the reports came out, Wiley was an adamant proponent of the SDAG's work. "Right now I'm focused on the report and recommendations and improving our schools," she said in an appearance on NY1 in September 2019 when asked by host Errol Louis if she was considering running for office. "I will continue to be part of the conversation," she said when prompted by Louis.
The group suggested schools phase out and find alternatives to gifted and talented programs, specialized and exclusive tracks that often separate children at a young age and sometimes using a single test for admission. The SDAG recommended exclusionary admissions "screens" -- prerequisites based on grades, test scores, auditions, lateness, and attendance -- be eliminated for middle schools and geographic screens be dropped from high school admissions. In their place, the group said, should be universal enrichment programming so that all schools can offer accelerated and deeper learning experiences for students, helping to eliminate the 'scarcity mindset' that often accompanies selective admissions processes.
The SDAG also recommended the city adopt a Chief Integration Officer (CIO) reporting directly to the chancellor to oversee progress toward desegregation goals, one of the few suggestions from the first report that de Blasio and Carranza did not pick up.
Wiley's platform contains all of these points. She has said she would appoint a chief integration officer, eliminate the specialized high schools admissions exam (SHSAT) for the five specialized schools that don't require SHSAT by state law (while seeking to change the law through Albany), and replace discriminatory admissions practices with inclusionary ones. When asked Tuesday which admissions practices, in particular, she directed reporters to the SDAG's report. "I've been very explicit about it in that report," she said.
In lieu of the SHSAT, "it is imperative that the only skills assessed will be those taught in all middle schools, and any assessments used will be administered in school during the school day," wrote Julia Savel, Wiley's campaign spokesperson, in an email to Gotham Gazette. "The CIO will develop an algorithm to weigh these and other criteria (such as census tract or income data) that levels the playing field for students historically denied access to these schools, including those who are Black, Latinx, have disabilities, are multilingual learners and/or are economically disadvantaged." A Wiley administration would also "explore implementing a lottery based system with weights for students who meet certain eligibility criteria," she wrote.
Wiley supports eliminating many of the admissions screens outlined by SDAG, though she would keep auditions. "We will preserve our rich portfolio of talent-based schools, but will ensure that they are not assessing students for skills that can only be acquired as a result of private lessons," her website states. She would keep certain screens for special populations like immigrants and students with disabilities, consistent with the SDAG reports. Her website states she wants to simplify the application process by creating the same application procedure for all schools, including charter schools, at each grade level.
On gifted and talented, Wiley has discussed creating school-wide enrichment programs and dropping the standardized test used on the youngest learners -- in-line with SDAG recommendations -- which would have an immediate impact on segregation in elementary schools and she said could also save the city $5 million annually.
Wiley wants to convene an advisory study group pursuant to state law to review and make recommendations on school boundaries, according to her website. Redrawing district lines to promote school integration is another yet-untouched SDAG recommendation.
Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation and a member of the SDAG executive committee, believes there might be more of an appetite for an integrationist candidate coming out of the pandemic and a year of activism for racial equality. "People who may not have thought about the implications of segregation...have been newly sensitized to deep racial inequities in our system," he said in a recent phone interview.
There are unsettled questions about how the pandemic impacted both enrollment figures and “white flight” out of the city. The city has taken steps to implement some of the types of policies described in by the SDAG, largely in response to the pandemic, which made many standardized tests and other learning metrics unfeasible. Their fate and the larger admissions picture will be determined in large part by the winner of the mayoral election.
Part of the difficulty in discussing school desegregation on the campaign trail, Greer said, is that the proposals are still cursory compared to the mammoth task of institutionalizing the goal of school desegregation. "That's a heavier lift and it's a much harder question to answer. I think the plans would be way more detailed because right now they're on paper -- but we're talking teachers unions, physical locations, and we're also talking about wealthy parents whose kids are in public school that have a lot of power when it comes to changing the structure that some of them are really benefiting from."
As Wiley’s campaign has unfolded and she has released her education plan, she has become more full-throated about school desegregation policies, even if they are not at the forefront of her campaign pitch.
"I am going to stick to what is going to work to achieve the goals we set out as a task force,” Wiley said when asked in a December interview with Gotham Gazette when asked about where the SDAG recommendations would fit into her recently-launched mayoral campaign. “The only reason I'm hesitating isn't about what our recommendations were, it's that covid hit...I want to make sure that we're staying open to the innovation and in a way that does serve those goals. I'm not going to change the goals but there may be things about covid that may change how we get there and meet them."
Asked similar questions in a February interview with Gotham Gazette, before she had released her education plan, Wiley said, "The truth is we [SDAG] came up with a vision that was a ten-year vision -- it wasn't an overnight vision. It was a vision that said at its core, 'we're going to set goals but we want to create room for schools and districts and communities to figure what works to get to those goals that most represent what's happening in their communities and that the DOE should invest in it.'"
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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
@GeringerSameth @GothamGazette
Max Politics Podcast: Melissa Mark-Viverito on the 2021 Elections
Melissa Mark-Viverito (photo: William Alatriste/City Council)
June 16, 2021 - Max Politics Podcast: Melissa Mark-Viverito on the 2021 Elections
Former City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito joined the show to share her thoughts on the 2021 New York City elections, why she hasn't endorsed a mayoral candidate, and what candidates should have ben doing to appeal to Latino voters.
Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think -- we're on Twitter @TweetBenMax . You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts, under "Max & Murphy," and listen to Max & Murphy live on Wednesdays at 5 p.m. on WBAI radio, 99.5FM or wbai.org.
Read more: Max Politics Podcast: Melissa Mark-Viverito on the 2021 Elections
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