You know that Drag Race confessional where Jade Jolie confidently declares that she’s “happy with what I got from the dumpster”? Well, the 2021 New York City mayoral election has thus far been very much that, minus the “happy.”
The frontrunners for most of the race have felt extremely Scylla and Charybdis, with former presidential candidate slash multimillionaire husk of a man Andrew Yang threatening to gut social services under the guise of instituting a universal basic income and Brooklyn borough president Eric Adams calling for more cops every chance he gets.
Beyond those two, who’s left? We’ve got Scott Stringer, the city’s comptroller since 2014, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by two women. Then, there’s former Sanitation Department commissioner Kathryn Garcia and all her various rat facts (love) and moderate politics (do not love). And don’t even get me started on former nonprofit director Dianne Morales! Tweeting about the importance of accountability while reportedly firing campaign staffers who’d been trying to unionize? Let’s just say the former nonprofit director JUMPED out.
Is there a single viable progressive politician who can win the upcoming Democratic primary and replace current mayor slash spiritually flaccid man-about-town Bill de Blasio later this year? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thinks that Maya Wiley can. The famously left-of-center New York representative endorsed the mayoral hopeful at a Manhattan event on Saturday, the New York Daily News reports, calling the civil rights attorney the only candidate “who can center people, racial justice, economic justice, and climate justice.”
That all sounds great, but if de Blasio’s administration has taught me anything it’s that politicians can literally say anything on the campaign trail and do the exact opposite once in office. Still, a cautious reordering of how I plan to rank the candidates in the upcoming primary might be in order…