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Thread: Andrew Yang

  1. #1

    Default Andrew Yang

    The 'tech dude' who built his reputation as one of the marginal non-politician candidates during the 2020 Democratic primaries decided to run for mayor of New York (to succeed Bill de Blasio after this year). He's enjoyed a lead in polling from the beginning but now, less than 7 weeks from the Democratic primary election, it could be said he's running neck-and-neck with Eric Adams, a conservative Democrat and a veteran of the state party.

    (There is a debate today at 7 PM EDT between the 8 leading Democratic candidates, if anyone cares.)


    Yang projects a dorky and affable persona, but this remarkable profile brings him across as something like a calculating anime character, and a politician who blends Bloomberg with de Blasio, for better or worse.

    From the moment Andrew Yang sat down in the back corner of a dark restaurant in the Bronx — brow knitted, wearing an overcoat and scarf that would stay on for the whole lunch — he was not the same cheerful New York City mayoral candidate of our popular conception, the one who cheeses for photos and tweets things like “It’s Friday!” when it’s Friday or shouts “Yankee Stadium!” while standing in front of Yankee Stadium. Politicians are always a little different behind the scenes, their ambition harder to conceal in close quarters, but the man sitting across from me was particularly unfamiliar. Since entering the race in January, Yang has pitched himself as the happy warrior for the Everyman, an energetic presence promising to lead New York out of its grim recent past. While other candidates have emphasized the city’s need for an experienced and empathic crisis manager, Yang has acted like a constant human joy machine.

    But today, he was serious, even a little crabby. Gone was the man who wants to bring TikTok Hype Houses to New York; he was replaced by a bristly high achiever, albeit one who has a habit of punctuating somber statements with outbursts of giggles. I asked him, Did other people ever note this difference?

    “I really appreciate the line of inquiry,” Yang said. (He actually seemed mildly offended by it.) “I think people underestimate what a disciplined operator [1] I am.”

    “Anyone who’s an operator sees me and this campaign and says, ‘Oh, I get it, Andrew Yang’s an operator,’ ” he continued. “And then if you put a businessperson next to me for ten minutes — or, I’m guessing, the vast majority of people who also are operators — they get it. Like, we speak the same language.”Yang, 46, seemed to be saying he wasn’t just the goofy, smart guy from the 2020 presidential-debate stage who wore a MATH pin that made some fellow Asian Americans cringe. Yang — he of Phillips Exeter, Brown, Columbia, white-shoe law, start-up wealth [2], godfatherdom to Teddy Roosevelt’s direct descendant — could hang with the city’s power brokers.

    He also appeared eager to reflect the value systems of those places of power: Yang, who calls himself the anti-poverty candidate based largely on his proposal for annual $2,000 direct payments to the poorest New Yorkers, said he envisioned himself spending his first six months in office luring back the city’s elite by calling the many Masters of the Universe who have recently decamped to Florida.

    “ ‘Like, what are the issues that drove you out? What were the decisions?’ And then be like, okay, here are, like, the things that drove people away. If we resolve them, can we get them back?” he had told me previously. “It’s a pretty tight community, so if the mayor is calling people asking these questions and trying to get them back, I think there are a lot of people who would be thrilled about it.”

    He slurped black spaghetti, continuing to sketch out his ambitions for the early days of his mayoralty. Aside from working the phones, his plans were vague. He was fuzzy about how exactly he would be able to wrest more control from Albany over the subways: “I haven’t had those conversations.” He said he thinks the MTA board should be altered to give the city more power, which sounds simple enough but, close up, is an incredibly complicated political proposition. One concrete move Yang knows he wants to make is to hire Kathryn Garcia [3], the former head of the Department of Sanitation and one of his rivals in the race. “What I appreciate about Kathryn is that she’s an operator,” he told me. He’s big on the idea that he would hire the right people to do the job, just like Michael Bloomberg did.

    Yang said he calls Garcia at least once a week to say, “Hey, Kathryn, we’re gonna need you.”
    (It’s true he calls a lot, according to her campaign. “Makes her crazy,” said Christine Quinn [4] of the implications that Garcia should be Yang’s No. 2. Quinn was the front-runner in the 2013 mayor’s race until Bill de Blasio overtook her in the final weeks.)

    [1] "Operator" usually has two usages. The first is similar to the sense of "fixer"; the second has been popularized post-War-on-Terror in reference to special operations forces (cf. commando).
    [2] Yang's net worth only starts at $1 million though, placing him in the petite bourgeoisie
    [3] Garcia is one of Yang's competitors in the primary, who received the New York Times' endorsement this week.
    [4] Former City Council speaker


    The profile leaves me with a higher regard for Yang's cunning, potentially intelligence, but less regard for his wisdom and values.
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  2. #2
    Stranger in a strange land Moderator Hooahguy's Avatar
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    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    I dont have a horse in the NYC mayoral race, but I gotta say that profile is very interesting and while I dont watch enough anime to get the reference, I do kinda now see how he might be a blend of Bloomberg with de Blasio. Though I still think his UBI plan is trash.
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  3. #3
    Senior Member Senior Member ReluctantSamurai's Avatar
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    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    Judging by his recent comments on the situation in Gaza, Yang isn't too worried about the Lebanese vote in NYC...
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  4. #4
    Stranger in a strange land Moderator Hooahguy's Avatar
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    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    Quote Originally Posted by ReluctantSamurai View Post
    Judging by his recent comments on the situation in Gaza, Yang isn't too worried about the Lebanese vote in NYC...
    Well considering that nearly 10% of New Yorkers are Jewish, I'd say it was a smart move.
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  5. #5
    Senior Member Senior Member ReluctantSamurai's Avatar
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    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    I'd say it was a smart move
    Then he should change his party status to Republican. That kind of BS is more suited to that ilk....
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  6. #6

    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    My first choice in the race had a dubious proposal last night:

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    End the practice of health inspections without warning of food service establishments, because they're too burdensome. Inspection should instead be scheduled, because restaurants have nothing to hide and no one really gets sick from food eaten out in New York anyway.


    But she's in single digits anyway.

    Yang is for the most part an uncomfortably-conservative candidate, an ideological centrist, so the fact that he and Adams (on the traditional conservative flank of the party) seem to have together at least half the first-order preferences of the base suggests a conservative mood in the electorate.

    I'd rather have him than Adams though, since Yang is less conservative, and his contradistinctive (to Adams) lack of attachment to the New York party infrastructure should make him easier to turf out for bad performance, in 2025, even as it promises to reduce his governing effectiveness.

    Quote Originally Posted by ReluctantSamurai View Post
    Judging by his recent comments on the situation in Gaza, Yang isn't too worried about the Lebanese vote in NYC...
    I wouldn't say so. Yang has from time to time bragged about building support with Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, and overall the size of the Jewish voting bloc in New York is probably 10, 20, 30 times that of Lebanese New Yorkers. Not to mention that Lebanese-Americans will tend to be more indifferent about Palestinians given their ethnic makeup and domestic priorities. Yang knows how to pander, I think.

    For example, this quote from Yang:

    Yang makes a point of ignoring progressive social media, where he’s frequently derided as either a neoliberal menace or a clueless tourist. “One of the big numbers that informs me is that approximately 11 percent of New York City Democratic voters get their news from Twitter,” he said, referring to a figure from his campaign’s internal polling. “If you pay attention to social media you’re going to get a particular look at New Yorkers that is going to be representative of frankly a relatively small percentage of New York voters.”


    Quote Originally Posted by Hooahguy View Post
    Well considering that nearly 10% of New Yorkers are Jewish, I'd say it was a smart move.
    Even more, and the center of gravity of Jewish New York today is Orthodox and/or post-Soviet (although, and I'm pretty ignorant of this doctrinal stuff, some subset of Hasidics "don't believe" in Israel).
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  7. #7
    Senior Member Senior Member ReluctantSamurai's Avatar
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    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    Andrew Yang tweet from 10 May:

    I'm standing with the people of Israel who are coming under bombardment attacks, and condemn the Hamas terrorists. The people of NYC will always stand with our brothers and sisters in Israel who face down terrorism and persevere.
    Several things here:

    1) Andrew Yang is an incredibly ignorant individual, completely unaware of who the aggressor here is---not likely, IMO, but I know little of the man.

    2) Andrew Yang is behaving like a typical corporate politician in that he's willing to say anything that fits with which way the wind is blowing---more likely, IMO.

    I'm not a resident of NYC, so I couldn't care less about who becomes mayor. Having said that, if #2 above is the case, I would hate to see how he behaves as NYC Mayor if a large moneyed entity (be it government or corporation) that sets itself upon a weak minority within the city. Does he stand up for the "oppressed" or does he stand with the money?

    And he's now walking back his statement:

    https://www.politico.com/states/new-...-tweet-1381442

    I would not vote for him....
    Last edited by ReluctantSamurai; 05-15-2021 at 03:29.
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  8. #8
    Stranger in a strange land Moderator Hooahguy's Avatar
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    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
    some subset of Hasidics "don't believe" in Israel).
    Contrary to public belief its a very tiny subset.

    I think Yang learned one of the lessons of 2020- twitter is not the electorate.
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  9. #9
    Senior Member Senior Member ReluctantSamurai's Avatar
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    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    At least Yang knows something about housing prices in NYC...which can't be said about Donovan and Mcguire:

    https://nymag.com/intelligencer/arti...-question.html

    Last edited by ReluctantSamurai; 05-16-2021 at 17:21.
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  10. #10
    Stranger in a strange land Moderator Hooahguy's Avatar
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    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    I know this thread is focused on Yang's campaign, but Dianne Morales' campaign seems to be kind of a trainwreck as a bunch of her staffers march on her offices after a unionization attempt that got squashed by her campaign. Yeesh.
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  11. #11

    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    We'll see if the old adage that New York mayors "come from nowhere and go nowhere" holds up.

    The leading candidate is the conservative machine politician Adams, followed closely by Yang and Garcia, a seasoned bureaucrat, in a tie. Will be interesting to see how the polling has done modeling the ranked choice element, an unprecedented complication for most American polling.
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  12. #12
    Member Member Xantan's Avatar
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    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    Speaking of this, John Oliver has covered him on the segment this week.


  13. #13

    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    Man, what a weird mayoral race. Initially Yang was #1 on name recognition, then the establishment conservative Adams steadily rose to overmatch him, then the establishment progressive Stringer was knocked down by sexual misconduct allegations, which along with the NYT's endorsement put Garcia in second place, then AOC endorsed Wiley a couple weeks ago and shot her into second place from the single-digit doldrums. But for up to two months Adams has been the presumptive frontrunner. Serious 2020 Democratic presidential primary vibes. Or maybe this is just what a crowded, divided field inevitably looks like.

    Last 8 polls (mean)
    Adams 23
    Garcia 16
    Wiley 17.5
    Yang 14

    Of the 6 polls this month with ranked choice simulations, one is an Adams-leaning tie against Garcia plus two are Garcia-leaning ties (all with Wiley in third place), and in the remainder Adams beats Yang, Garcia, and Wiley, respectively, by landslides (with still Wiley in third place when not facing off against Adams). Ranked choice polling doesn't have much precedent in this country, and New York City local primaries notoriously involve <10% of the electorate, so it will be interesting to observe how accurate they prove in the final stretch.

    Note that if any candidates were to choose to drop out now, by our election policy they would remain on the ballot IIRC.


    Most provocative statement of the last debate came from Yang:

    ...We need to rebuild the stock of psych beds so that there's some place to bring them and - make sure that if they are in supportive housing, they're being monitored so that they take their meds. Yes, mentally ill people have rights, but you know who else have rights? We do - the people and families of the city. We have the right to walk the street and not fear for our safety because a mentally-ill person is going to lash out at us.
    Sounds personal, yikes. Anyway, it's looking unlikely now that Yang can even reach third place.

    Meanwhile...





    OT Scary fact: Brazil is now half Catholic, one-third Evangelical. It will likely be majority Evangelical by the mid-century.
    Last edited by Montmorency; 06-19-2021 at 18:10.
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  14. #14
    Stranger in a strange land Moderator Hooahguy's Avatar
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    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    Monty, what do you make of this article?

    The NYC Mayor’s Race Is a Warning for Progressives

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    Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the most prominent progressive politicians in the country, warned last week that her hometown is at high risk of having a decidedly moderate mayor. Standing in New York’s City Hall Park to deliver a last-minute endorsement of Maya Wiley, a civil-rights lawyer who’d previously struggled to crack the top tier, Ocasio-Cortez urged the left to come together. “We have the candidates in the field, and it’s time for us to make a choice,” she said. “We cannot afford to sit on the sidelines. We can’t afford to not engage because of what could have been. We engage in the world that we have.”

    The forces driving a likely moderate outcome in the June 22 Democratic primary are varied; many are specific to New York and to this election. But the race also contains major warning signs for progressives across the country. If the left loses out in the city arguably leading the socialist revival in the United States, it will be, at least in part, because of dramatic infighting fueled by rigid positions on sexual and social-justice politics, as well as the generalized failure to unify behind one candidate alluded to by Ocasio-Cortez.

    A poll released on Monday had Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams and the former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang as the front-runners. Wiley had just 9 percent support, putting her in fifth place. A fresher survey released Wednesday had Wiley in second, just in front of Yang and behind Adams, signaling the value of Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement. Both of those polls also showed the number of people supporting three different progressive candidates is the largest bloc in the city. But, if they don’t consolidate, with just a few days left, Wiley may not have time to take the lead.

    Although Adams and Yang qualify as clear Democrats by national standards, they are bêtes noires for the city’s progressives. Adams was a registered Republican in the 1990s and has run a tough-on-crime campaign promising to be a “blue-collar mayor.” Yang has built his campaign on his business background and the language of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship. Both Yang and Adams have received donations from right-wing figures including hedge-funders and conservative think-tankers. Yang’s super PAC even scored $15,000 from the former Trump administration official Anthony Scaramucci earlier this month.

    It wasn’t supposed to be this way for the left in New York. Early on in the race, City Comptroller Scott Stringer was right alongside Adams and Yang at the top of the polls and in fundraising. Stringer had firmly positioned himself as the race’s leading progressive with the support of the city’s most prominent left-leaning lawmakers, including many of Ocasio-Cortez’s allies in Albany and Washington. His pitch to voters includes a focus on climate change and a sweeping universal affordable-housing plan.

    But just as Stringer was gaining momentum in late April, a former unpaid worker accused him of sexual misconduct. The allegation—despite several clear inconsistencies—caused him to hemorrhage progressive endorsers, many of whom have been vocal advocates for women critics of sexual harassment in the political sphere. A second woman came forward earlier this month to accuse Stringer of “sexual harassment and making unwanted advances” when she worked at a bar he operated nearly 30 years ago. Stringer vehemently denied the first accusation and dismissed the second as part of “a long-ago chapter in my life from the early 1990s” that “was all a bit of a mess.”

    The situation raises questions about asymmetrical warfare. Republicans—even evangelicals—stayed largely united behind President Donald Trump as he faced a slew of allegations of sexual assault. And New York’s Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo (another moderate villain in the state’s progressive circles), has not only declined to step aside but maintained support among many centrist allies after racking up a long list of accusers.

    A landscape where moderates and conservatives survive #MeToo scandals while progressives implode is clearly dangerous for the left. Rebecca Katz, a leading progressive consultant who is advising Stringer’s campaign, has felt deeply conflicted about the issue and suggests that the left needs introspection on this front.

    “We need to have a real conversation about what is and what is not disqualifying,” Katz told me. “Because applying inconsistent standards, depending on the politics and party involved, isn’t serving anyone.”

    If progressives do reevaluate their posture, however, change will almost certainly come too late for Stringer. The above-mentioned polls showed him in fourth and fifth place, respectively.

    And Stringer isn’t the only progressive in New York’s mayoral mix wounded by the left’s uncompromising push for purity. One would-be beneficiary of Stringer’s demise, Dianne Morales, was similarly unable to live up to progressive standards.

    Morales is a nonprofit executive and relative newcomer to electoral politics in the city. She has attracted attention in large part thanks to having the most aggressively progressive platform—and rhetorical style—of anyone in the race. Although the policy section on her campaign site is thinner than those of many rivals, Morales has unabashedly called for defunding the New York Police Department and describes her priorities as “dignity” and “solidarity.” After the first Stringer accuser came forward, Morales responded with lefty buzzwords.

    “It’s a really unfortunate moment in this race,” Morales said in an interview. “As a survivor myself, who’s got a femme-led team, many of whom are also survivors, we’ve all been triggered.”

    Although progressive language helped Morales at first, she found that same sort of language used against her when her staffers attempted to unionize, following allegations of abusive behavior, long hours, and low pay. Morales, who would be the city’s first Afro-Latina mayor, responded in part by firing four staffers involved with the effort. A Twitter account run by the organizers focused on the race and gender of the people who were ousted.

    “Black women were harmed, pass it on,” they wrote.

    Morales staffers and volunteers ultimately staged protests against their own candidate. They lit sage and incense outside her office and urged her to donate $1 million from her campaign coffers to mutual-aid groups, a decidedly unrealistic demand that would almost certainly violate city campaign-finance law. On Wednesday, Morales responded by firing more than 50 members of her team, leaving her with a skeleton crew. A campaign that was already a long shot had definitively imploded.

    Democratic strategists around the country watched the spectacle of young workers marching on their own office, and some saw it as a clear indicator of the dangers of trying to bring Generation Z into the fold of grueling campaign work. One veteran Democratic operative who has worked on presidential campaigns articulated these fears to me via text message.

    “It seems like many of these kids would be shocked and upset at just normal boring office jobs and the expectations there. And campaigns are so much harder than that,” wrote the operative, who requested anonymity because of professional concerns.

    Morales’s situation raised the possibility that young progressives are unwilling to make the sort of labor commitments necessary to actually elect a progressive. That said, much of the Morales drama was specific to the candidate. Other campaigns have unionized successfully, including Ocasio-Cortez’s. In fact, progressives in New York might argue that all of their apparent troubles in the mayoral race are candidate-specific, and not in any way indicative of the movement’s strengths or weaknesses. They might also argue that the mayoral candidates simply don’t represent progressives’ most promising prospects in the city.

    Sure, they failed to rally around Stringer. But is Stringer really that progressive? He was dubbed a “moderate” and “middle of the line Democrat” by The New Republic as recently as 2013. Morales also—thanks to her past support for charter schools and her history as an allegedly “negligent” landlord—has faced questions about whether her politics are genuine. Even Wiley, who now remains the left’s last real hope in this race, has had to confront difficult questions about her previous work in the administration of the current mayor, Bill de Blasio, including what the Daily News described as a “more moderate pose” on police issues.

    Progressive strength lies elsewhere. The left has already won a number of elections in New York, which has a growing socialist cadre in both the state legislature and city council. However, because many of New York’s rising progressive stars were elected only recently, they were poorly positioned to run for mayor. That’s partly why the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization whose on-the-ground volunteers helped drive many of these recent wins, sat out the mayoral race entirely. Cea Weaver, a member of the DSA’s housing committee, told me that the city’s top socialists are focusing on trying to “build our bench” by backing candidates for the city council.

    The progressive stars who stayed on the sidelines this time around will almost certainly get some new reinforcements on Election Day—even if they don’t manage to take city hall. The DSA has backed six council candidates and two other hopefuls running for office upstate. Ocasio-Cortez has also identified 60 candidates—including a handful who oppose each other—that have pledged to back some of her policy priorities.

    If Wiley falls short and the mayor’s race is a defeat for the city’s insurgent left, progressives remain well positioned for the future. But in New York and elsewhere, they may have to settle for imperfect champions.


    I cant really speak to local NY politics, but the part about purity politics speaks true to me and I dont doubt the bit about Gen Z with unrealistic expectations about campaign work (though I am sure every generation had this to an extent). I myself have never worked on a campaign, but a lot of my friends have and they told me its extremely difficult work with low to nonexistent pay and 14-hour days. While a lot of young people join campaigns as idealists, the burnout rate is high and many only do it for one cycle before finding other lines of work. A hardy few make campaigns their career if they arent angling for a job with the candidate upon victory. But the difficulties of campaign work tends not to be communicated, for obvious reasons. Just another thing that people have to learn the hard way I guess.
    Last edited by Hooahguy; 06-19-2021 at 19:34.
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    Ja mata, TosaInu Forum Administrator edyzmedieval's Avatar
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    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    It popped up to me in the news about the NYC race as well, particularly about the candidate with the union-busting while reading it on Bloomberg.

    It felt a bit surreal. This is essentially what the progressive platform is campaigning about and to go on a union-busting move, straight out of a mega-corporation playbook, was not just ironic but also comical. Even more, it was covered rather extensively in business newspapers because it made "business tactics" in a non-profit, mayoral campaign, which campaigns exactly against this.

    Also, one thing to note - despite some of the NYC members of Congress who are very very popular, NYC is not just progressives. I don't find it surprising that they're electing another centrist when essentially the whole city is a mix of cultures and viewpoints.
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  16. #16

    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    Quote Originally Posted by Hooahguy View Post
    Monty, what do you make of this article?

    The NYC Mayor’s Race Is a Warning for Progressives



    I cant really speak to local NY politics, but the part about purity politics speaks true to me and I dont doubt the bit about Gen Z with unrealistic expectations about campaign work (though I am sure every generation had this to an extent). I myself have never worked on a campaign, but a lot of my friends have and they told me its extremely difficult work with low to nonexistent pay and 14-hour days. While a lot of young people join campaigns as idealists, the burnout rate is high and many only do it for one cycle before finding other lines of work. A hardy few make campaigns their career if they arent angling for a job with the candidate upon victory. But the difficulties of campaign work tends not to be communicated, for obvious reasons. Just another thing that people have to learn the hard way I guess.
    I didn't learn about the Morales campaign controversies since she was always a marginal candidate, but from what I gather she continually alienated her staff and frustrated basic unionization efforts that have passed through other campaigns without incident. Her campaign began striking when she fired leading unionizers, with Morales finally resorting to firing almost her entire staff a few weeks ago. If a candidate is at the point of literally dissolving her entire team, either she picked the worst team conceivable or she is a terrible manager. So, terrible management one way or the other. Reminder: Sanders, Warren, AOC, and myriad other progressives have apparently run unionized campaign crews without running into any alleged brick wall of Gen Z laziness and entitlement...

    The concern about lack of unity behind a single left candidate is misidentified, as this is a ranked choice contest; Wiley only needs hope that the ~10% of voters still placing Stringer and Morales at first choice have her elsewhere before Adams, which I'm sure is the case on net - it just might not be enough depending on how support for Yang and Garcia allocates.

    The question of whether distal sexual misconduct allegations, one of admited sexual harassment and another of sexual assault with unclear corroboration, should be disqualifying, is thankfully deferred by the consciousness that Stringer is far from indispensable. Evidently most of Stringer's base did consider it disqualifying, or at least deprecating, according to his steep slide in the polls. Politicians should take note, since alertness against sexually-predatory tendencies will only increase. Or to be blunt, since the Right doesn't care about this stuff and the Left does, it makes no raw political sense to pander to the opposite constituency.



    More weirdness from Yang:

    “I have a pet peeve I want to share with you,” Andrew Yang declared immediately after we were introduced on Zoom late Thursday night.

    The emotional toll of a series of setbacks that saw Yang fade from frontrunner to fourth place in some polls was evident. He leaned forward towards the camera, face taut.

    “So, Eric Adams two debates ago said what he couldn’t do without was a bubble bath,” Yang said. “When he gave reporters a tour of the basement he supposedly lives in, there is no bathtub in the basement. So, I just want people to notice there’s no bathtub.”

    [...]

    “You can tell that this is actually frustrating,” Evelyn said as she gestured towards her husband who was rocking in his chair and stewing after begging the city to pay attention to Adams’s basement bathroom. She describes herself as “more fired up” about the campaign than ever after watching what she sees as unfair and racial attacks on her husband. “You can tell I have a lot of this pent up right?” she asked with a laugh.

    [...]

    Evelyn also suggested campaigning is harder on Yang than his gleeful appearances might lead you to believe. The couple both described Yang as an introvert and she described public life as “depleting” for him.

    “To be in the spotlight as he is, that’s not where his energy comes from,” Evelyn said of her husband after he retired to bed. “He gets his energy from … being alone basically.”
    It's relatable, but dude, you shouldn't be mayor.

    As an evangelist for giving everyone money, Yang said he initially expected to be viewed as “left of Bernie” Sanders when he entered the presidential race, but instead was perceived as a “libertarian.” [...] Yang similarly believes entrenched politics are behind progressives’ reluctance to embrace him in New York, too.
    If we're talking about disqualifications, the profound lack of knowledge of politics betrayed by the expectation that a corporatist political orientation coupled with a Friedmanite signature social welfare policy would mark someone as a socialist could be one. For my next magic trick, watch me primary Ted Cruz from the right by campaigning on secular technocracy.
    Last edited by Montmorency; 06-21-2021 at 02:22.
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  17. #17
    Stranger in a strange land Moderator Hooahguy's Avatar
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    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    Good point about ranked choice making polling kinda iffy. Considering how long it took NYC to get results counted for the 2020 elections, I wonder how long it will take to get the final results for this one.

    So, terrible management one way or the other. Reminder: Sanders, Warren, AOC, and myriad other progressives have apparently run unionized campaign crews without running into any alleged brick wall of Gen Z laziness and entitlement...
    I think the point was that forming a campaign union this late in the race is self-sabotaging, likely borne from a mixture of unrealistic expectations and poor upper management. Other campaigns do it just fine because they tend to do it much earlier and have at least somewhat seasoned campaign operatives at the helm.
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  18. #18

    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    Quote Originally Posted by Hooahguy View Post
    Good point about ranked choice making polling kinda iffy. Considering how long it took NYC to get results counted for the 2020 elections, I wonder how long it will take to get the final results for this one.


    I think the point was that forming a campaign union this late in the race is self-sabotaging, likely borne from a mixture of unrealistic expectations and poor upper management. Other campaigns do it just fine because they tend to do it much earlier and have at least somewhat seasoned campaign operatives at the helm.
    Despite continuing to have no interest in examining a doomed candidate, I'm confident these issues didn't just arise spontaneously, like her staff just got a notion at the last minute. Morales has been running for mayor since 2019.

    Speaking of which, Adams is such a sleazy asshole. Let the record show I never wavered on preferring Yang to him in the last measure.
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  19. #19

    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    Adams will most likely win a close victory in the end, given his current lead. Definitely in the 50-55% range. Find out in mid-July, you know how it is with New York electoral administration.

    Yang has conceded after meeting his doom as the irrevocable 4th-place candidate.

    Some astoundingly-competitive races downballot from Mayor, toss-ups.

    Turnout could reach 20%, which is considered impressive for New York primaries.

    These were funny trolls at least.


    Adams campaign kicks out New York reporter over critical article
    New York contributor David Freedlander reports he was denied entry to the Adams victory party over a critical article he wrote about the candidate last week. According to Freedlander, campaign staff approached him at the door of a venue in Williamsburg hosting the Adams party and one person said, “You’re not getting in here” before proceeding to say how the article was supposedly flawed. New York spoke with the Adams campaign prior to the publication of “The Company Eric Adams Keeps,” which quoted 30 people in New York politics — “almost all of them anonymously, citing the fear that he would soon be mayor and look to exact revenge on the mayoral front-runner’s decades in politics.” Freedlander reported on Adams’s controversial history, including his history of standing by a former lawmaker who was convicted of slashing his girlfriend and of his close connection to Frank Carone, a Democratic lawyer in Brooklyn, lobbyist, and fixer.
    *sigh*
    Last edited by Montmorency; 06-23-2021 at 04:48.
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  20. #20
    Stranger in a strange land Moderator Hooahguy's Avatar
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    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    I wonder where Yang will go from here. Hard to come back from two high profile losses, but who knows. I mean Nixon came back after a couple of high profile losses too, but Yang doesnt seem like a Nixon type.
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  21. #21

    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    Also, an wonky analysis, making such important points as:

    But voters are not required to number five preferences. Adams will have a much better chance if large numbers of voters have just chosen to mark a first preference. I would argue that is the key metric that will decide the race.

    If we want to be technical, there are three different exhaustion rates we need to consider:

    Votes that exhaust before reaching the final three (out of 26.5% of the total vote cast for the other ten candidates)
    Votes that exhaust before reaching Adams or Wiley (out of 46.0%)
    Votes that exhaust before reaching Adams or Garcia (out of 48.8%)
    This fellow seems to focus on Australian and UK elections otherwise. Anyway, I would like to point out there's a mathematically-intuitive way to reinterpret "exhaustion," which is that the top two candidates in a ranked choice contest have a certain share of the (first-order) vote, and the final tally - keeping the identity of the final two static - depends on the apportionment of 100 - [Top Two]% of the vote among them (or 100 - [Top Two] - X% where X is the exhaustion factor explicitly).

    For completeness' sake, there is one scenario, which the analyst doesn't account for (perhaps he hasn't been following the political aspects of the race).

    Yang, especially in the past month, has been intensely, visibly and vocally, opposed to Adams, and as noted previously concluded a formal ranking coalition with the NYT's endorsement, and 2nd/3rd place candidate, Garcia. To the extent that these signals influenced some proportion of both Yang and Garcia voters to, for example, rank each other *and* Wiley before Adams, or even unlist Adams entirely, then there could be a hidden anti-leader reservoir of an uncommon sort.

    A subset of this scenario would be where a tilted Yang allocation pushes Garcia past Wiley to second place, thus eliminating Wiley, and on net allocating her support more to Garcia than Adams, affording Garcia a narrow victory (because, hypothetically, Wiley voters are more likely to prioritize ideological proximity than ethnic proximity between candidates).

    It's possible, if unlikely. And here ranked choice voting was designed to obviate tactical voting...

    Quote Originally Posted by Hooahguy View Post
    I wonder where Yang will go from here. Hard to come back from two high profile losses, but who knows. I mean Nixon came back after a couple of high profile losses too, but Yang doesnt seem like a Nixon type.
    I'm not sure Yang has anything to offer anywhere in politics, and he clearly wants to start with a high position. Didn't his kids, like, start Kindergarten during his years of campaigning?

    Last edited by Montmorency; 06-24-2021 at 03:20.
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  22. #22
    Coffee farmer extraordinaire Member spmetla's Avatar
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    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    It's possible, if unlikely. And here ranked choice voting was designed to obviate tactical voting...
    I think tactical voting and campaigning would still remain, but the concept of spoiler/throw away candidates is much reduced.

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  23. #23

    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    Mildly exciting news. To placate election watchers, NYC has released ranked choice results for the vote as it stands, though 15% of the total first ballot remains uncounted (absentee, etc.); that count begins today and will not conclude before 2 weeks from now.

    Based on the currently-counted 85% of ballots, Brad Lander beats City Council Speaker Corey Johnson 51.7-48.3 for Comptroller and Adams beats Garcia for Mayor 51-49 (the Yang alliance really did help Garcia, who displaces Wiley for second place in this count).

    As you can see, the election is close enough that absentee ballots have a non-trivial chance of swinging it for either Johnson or Garcia (though 3/4-point margins are almost always too wide to overcome; in 2019 there was a noteworthy city primary where the trailing candidate broke just a 1-point gap by 60 votes).

    The narrative will probably hold, that left-of-center candidates racked up victories across the city, but a conservative edged out in the mayoral primary.


    Note to climate change thread: This is the climatic disruption we experience with just 2° F warming from 1880 (the vast majority of which in the past 50 years). I can't wait to feel a minimum of 4° F warming by the mid-century.
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  24. #24

    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    ^^^ Never mind, New York electoral administration continues to be appallingly inept. Today's partial RCV has been retracted. Let's check back in in mid-July here.

    Elections 2.0: Sources tell me the Board of Elections is going back to the drawing board and running corrected ranked-choice numbers tomorrow. About 130,000 “votes” were part of a test-run that were never cleared from a computer.

    For those curious about campaign management and unionization, this piece points out that bad management that mistreats workers is a widespread issue in political campaigns and politics-adjacent work in general, one that unionization can moderate (as in the case of the Sanders 2020 campaign).
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  25. #25
    Stranger in a strange land Moderator Hooahguy's Avatar
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    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    Whelp

    It's been a wild ride, but I've finally seen enough: Eric Adams (D) is the apparent winner of the NYC Democratic mayoral primary, defeating Kathryn Garcia (D).
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  26. #26

    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    Quote Originally Posted by Hooahguy View Post
    There are a few ballots left to be counted, but given the speedier-than-expected ranking of what has been counted, we can say the absentee ballots helped Garcia only marginally, narrowing the gap from 51-49 to 50.5-49.5.

    940K ballots, 15% exhausted. Wiley's allocation broke around 2/3-1/3 for Garcia-Adams, respectively, leaving Adams ahead by a squeaker. What a shame.

    For the first time the City Council will be majority women.



    Speaking of NYC electoral administration, here are some dire articles on the state of it.

    Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 
    The BOE uses memory sticks to transfer voting data from scanner machines to their computer system. Those memory sticks, which were used on primary night, only collect data on first-choice votes, with a second set of memory sticks used to transfer the ranked choice data. Four of the five boroughs had the second set of memory sticks scrubbed of the test ballot info, but the Queens test data had not been cleared, sources told NBC New York.


    Though the ranked-choice system being used is fairly new to the city, complaints about the Board of Elections are not. Notoriously, the BOE has been staffed by family members of politicians and employees who will clock in and then head to the gym. Here is a non-exhaustive list of some of the board’s previous scandals.

    The long wait to vote early last fall
    The New York Post reported in October on the long lines voters had to endure when voting early in the 2020 election, citing large numbers of people at sites and not enough ballot scanners to accommodate the crowds:

    Take two locations in Brooklyn: The BOE only sent five ballot scanners to the New York City College of Technology on Jay Street, even though it assigned more than 60,000 voters to the site for early voting. And Barclay’s Center was allocated the same number of scanners, despite being the early voting spot for another 32,000.

    2020’s absentee-ballot mailing snafu
    Last September, Intelligencer wrote about the printing error by a BOE vendor that sent incorrectly labeled absentee ballots to voters’ homes:

    Almost 100,000 Brooklyn voters might receive absentee ballots with someone else’s name on them, meaning their votes would not be counted, according to officials. The gobsmacking error is just one more concern thrown on a pile of worries about the unprecedented use of mail-in voting with barely a month to go before Election Day.

    The New York City Board of Elections on Tuesday blamed a vendor’s single “print run” of ballots for potentially disenfranchising tens of thousands of voters. Rochester-based Phoenix Graphics is blamed for stamping the wrong name on “oath” return envelopes sent along with absentee ballots to voters across Brooklyn, NY1’s Courtney Gross reported. The ballots themselves contain no known errors.

    An illegal voter purge
    Vox’s Ella Nilsen reported on how the BOE purged more than 200,000 voters from rolls in 2014 and 2015, the majority from Brooklyn:

    After an investigation, the attorney general’s office detailed separate purges in a complaint against the City Board of Elections; first, the board manually identified and purged the records of over 100,000 voters who had failed to vote or update their forms since 2008, which is illegal under state and federal law.

    Second, the board looked addresses in the National Change of Address database, and removed another 100,000 voters from the rolls it suspected to have moved outside of the city. But they did this after giving these voters just 30 days notice, when they were required by state and federal law to keep voters on the rolls for at least two more federal elections after notifying them. …

    After investigating, the city and the attorney general’s office settled fairly quickly in 2017, and the board of elections agreed to a correction plan it would implement in the years leading up to 2020.

    As part of this, the board agreed to restore the voting rights of purged voters, be more transparent, and put down a plan to prevent further unlawful purges. Lerner said she believes the board and the city have put forward a good faith effort to try to correct the issue, but the fact remains such a massive purge leaves suspicion whenever similar problems arise.

    Serious problems uncovered by 2013 probe
    A six-month investigation by the Department of Investigation in 2013 uncovered a range of issues at the BOE, as DNA Info reported at the time:

    Investigators who visited several polling sites during the 2013 primary and general elections found poll workers who routinely gave incorrect instructions to voters, including workers at several sites who were taught to tell voters to “vote down the line,” according to the report. Investigators — who conducted their work both undercover and openly — also recorded more than a dozen different types of violation of voter privacy, including poll workers looking at and sometimes even commenting on a voter’s choices when they handed over the cards for scanning, the report says.

    In 61 instances, investigators posing as ineligible voters — which includes the deceased, convicted felons, and those who don’t live in the city — were allowed to cast a vote without being challenged or questioned by city poll workers, the report found. … In addition, the investigation found 69 board employees who appeared to have a relative working within the BOE, with the likelihood of many more, the report noted.

    The font debacle
    The New York Times reported in 2012 that voters received ballots on which the candidates’ names were printed in seven-point font, which the paper described as “akin to the ingredient list on the side of a cereal box.” The Times also noted that the instructions on how to fill out the ballot were easier to read than the names of the candidates.

    A long tradition of scandal
    In a long, must-read look at the beleaguered agency last October, the New York Times noted the BOE’s recent problems are part of a decades-old pattern:

    In 1940, a city investigation found it was plagued by “illegality, inefficiency, laxity and waste.” In 1971, a New York Times editorial derided it as “at best a semi‐functioning anachronism.” And in 1985, another city inquiry said it had an “almost embarrassing lack of understanding” of its job.

    The Times also passes along a startling story about missing ballots in 2000:

    [Liz] Krueger, a Democrat, narrowly lost a 2000 State Senate race to Roy Goodman, the incumbent and a Republican Party leader with sway over the elections board. Months later, according to three people familiar with the incident, workers found hundreds of ballots in a Board of Elections air conditioning duct. The ballots were from a part of the district that had favored Ms. Krueger. …

    “Now in close races,” Ms. Krueger said, “I personally call up each side and say, ‘Check the ceiling tiles every night.’”
    The official who oversees voter registration in New York City is the 80-year-old mother of a former congressman. The director of Election Day operations is a close friend of Manhattan’s Republican chairwoman. The head of ballot management is the son of a former Brooklyn Democratic district leader. And the administrative manager is the wife of a City Council member.

    As the workings of American democracy have become more complex — with sophisticated technology, early voting and the threat of foreign interference — New York has clung to a century-old system of local election administration that is one of the last vestiges of pure patronage in government, a relic from the era of powerful political clubhouses and Tammany Hall.

    New York is the only state in the country with local election boards whose staffers are chosen almost entirely by Democratic and Republican Party bosses, and the board in New York City illustrates the pitfalls. In recent years, the board has made increasingly high-profile blunders, from mistakenly purging 200,000 people from rolls ahead of the 2016 election to forcing some voters to wait in four-hour lines in 2018.

    “It is really hard to have co-workers who are incapable of performing what they need to do,” said Charles Stimson, a trainer assistant who has worked at the board on and off since 1992.

    Mr. Stimson was one of more than a dozen current and former employees who told The Times that the agency has a culture where ineptitude is common and accountability is rare. Some staffers read or watch Netflix at the office, the employees said. Others regularly fail to show up for work, with no fear of discipline. Several employees said some staffers punch in and then leave to go shopping or to the gym.


    Under board rules, almost every job must be duplicated, with a Republican and Democrat each performing the same function.
    BIPARTISANSHIP

    The structure of the city Board of Elections is enshrined in the state Constitution
    I'm ambivalent about the construct of "local control," but so much of NYC governance is actually dictated by a state government in which the city is nearly half the population that it gets kind of silly.
    Last edited by Montmorency; 07-07-2021 at 05:19.
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  27. #27
    Stranger in a strange land Moderator Hooahguy's Avatar
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    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
    There are a few ballots left to be counted, but given the speedier-than-expected ranking of what has been counted, we can say the absentee ballots helped Garcia only marginally, narrowing the gap from 51-49 to 50.5-49.5.

    940K ballots, 15% exhausted. Wiley's allocation broke around 2/3-1/3 for Garcia-Adams, respectively, leaving Adams ahead by a squeaker. What a shame.
    I wonder if this will hold true, but it seems like a significant chunk of Wiley's voters either didnt understand the concept of ranked choice voting, or decided not to put anyone down, which gave Adams the win.

    Once Maya Wiley was eliminated, 73,979 of her voters' ballots were exhausted (because they ranked neither Adams nor Garcia).

    Adams's margin of victory is 8,426 votes in the current count.

    That was about a third of Wiley voters (in the three-way matchup round) who then ended up with exhausted ballots.

    The rest broke strongly for Garcia (129,446 to Garcia, and 49,669 to Adams)
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  28. #28
    Mr Self Important Senior Member Beskar's Avatar
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    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
    Meanwhile...
    Don't you know Montmorency? New York lives under the Purge.
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  29. #29

    Default Re: Andrew Yang

    Quote Originally Posted by Hooahguy View Post
    I wonder if this will hold true, but it seems like a significant chunk of Wiley's voters either didnt understand the concept of ranked choice voting, or decided not to put anyone down, which gave Adams the win.

    As I pointed out, the exhaustion rate for all ballots was 15%, but I should have excluded the ballots of Adams and Garcia from that calculation, because they were the final two and their ballots were not subject to exhaustion.

    So the 'real' exhaustion rate in this election was 31%, which is to say that on average 31% of the first-order votes for candidates other than Garcia and Adams did not flow to either of them. Wiley's exhaustion rate on the other hand was 29%.

    But yes, these exhaustion rates clearly may have affected the outcome. It should be noted however that exhaustion can happen because of incomplete ranking - which itself may be deliberate, due to misunderstanding of the process, or lack of knowledge/willingness to rank all slots - or just because the final candidates happen not to show up on complete lists. For any candidate's voters, including Wiley's, there could have been an element of a conscious rejection of both Adams and Garcia (i.e. voters not taking tactical voting into consideration). We'll never know the answer I suppose.

    I entertain that the exhaustion rate ought to be lower than 1/3 in good practice, as a matter of robust political process. Someone look up typical exhaustion rates in ranked systems internationally.
    Last edited by Montmorency; 07-12-2021 at 05:06.
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