If you stack two improbable and long shot political runs on top of each other, do you get the next Mayor of New York City? Andrew Yang certainly hopes so, and for a while now it’s looked like many New Yorkers joined him in that hope. After a year of staggering through Covid, a Presidential election, and the heady early days of a vaccinated summer, next month’s mayoral Democratic primary has snuck up on everyone. In less than three weeks, New York City will pick its next chief executive.
It seems like Bill de Blasio has been mayor for forever, a decade-long punchline that is just part of the urban mental landscape. But he’ll be gone soon, and the city will still be poised at a precarious moment between rebirth and crisis. Things feel a little unsure right now, with a pulsing street level energy alongside urban brow furrowing about fleeing elites, eroding tax bases, and a very real and worrisome increase in crime, particularly of the most violent kind.
The question everyone is asking is the same one that was raised during his presidential campaign: is he serious? Yang’s resume is bereft of any government experience, the kind of public service box checking that used to be a precondition for pursuing office, or at least was before the spectacularly unqualified Donald Trump won the presidency. And it’s not as if Yang can point to smashing success in the private sector, either: Venture for America, his start up non-profit, was more bang than bite, and he has never quite been an upper echelon Silicon Valley mogul: his background is largely in test prep companies. In form if not in content, his famous for being famous vibe bears not a little resemblance to the man he ran to replace in the White House.
And yet, despite a presidential run that garnered more positive press coverage than votes, Yang seems to be the frontrunner in Gotham as the race turns the bend into its final weeks. New polling has shown some tightening in what had previously started to resemble a blowout, and gauging New Yorkers’ sentiments is a notoriously tricky business. But the fact that Yang is closing in on the finish line in something like a photo finish is remarkable. If the Yang Gang can eke out a victory, their man will be one of the most improbable characters in a long history of them to move into Gracie Mansion.
Why is this happening? How has it come to pass that the greatest city on earth might be on the precipice of electing a man whose presidential campaign failed to garner a single national delegate and whose most memorable merchandise was a hat that said simply “math?”
The answers say a lot not only about New York, but about the prevailing political winds during this strange season, when Trump’s time in the spotlight has receded even as he looms large offscreen, and the Biden Administration places big bets on big spending while trying to hold together a Democratic coalition that is being pulled hard by Joe Manchin to the right and the Squad to the left. We’ll see how long Joe Biden can balance his party’s scoop of ice cream on its cone.
Locally, the fact that the two frontrunners in the race for mayor are Yang and former Republican and police officer Eric Adams suggests that New Yorkers are not on board with the progressive energies that engulfed the city last summer. The city is still closer to Blomberg than Ocasio-Cortez, and the lessons it has taken from the de Blasio are more negative than positive. Yang’s politics are hard to pin down, but he has consistently raised the ire of the Twitter left and has clearly positioned himself in opposition to the progressive candidates, Maya Wiley and Diane Morales. The urge to defund the police seems less urgent than the imperative to keep the city safe.
What Yang offers is a kind of start up centrism married to a vague idea that New York needs to be made fun again. He can’t really offer a track record of solving problems, but his is a bet that the biggest problem of all is New York’s swagger and self-confidence.
But perhaps the strongest lesson to emerge from Yang’s success is that the days of backdoor politics and local connections trumping all are endangered if not completely extinct. We all live online now, and so do our politics. Long-time New York comptroller Scott Stringer has failed to gain traction: nobody cares how much time he’s spent pressing the flesh in the five boroughs. Kathryn Garcia, who did laudable jobs in the bowels of the city government, was virtually anonymous until the New York Times endorsed her, leading to a brief spike in support.
Yang has managed to drive news coverage and keep the social media eye firmly trained on him, despite a less than stellar record of civic engagement with the city in the past: he has never voted in an election here.
This isn’t to say that Yang has ignored the inside game. He has secured the support of much of the city’s Ultra-Orthodox community, despite being a relative neophyte to Satmar court politics and crucial fixers. A walk through Chinatown reveals a Yang sign nearly every storefront: there is something powerful about the symbolism of his run at a time of mounting attacks against Asian-Americans, both in the streets and by admissions departments
Even as I readily concede that Yang is more flash than function and more style than substance, part of me feels like that might be the vibe of this post-Covid, hot girl summer moment. If these 2020’s are to roar, we want someone who will get on with the party, not be a killjoy. We need to have fun, and Yang is down for it.
At a hyper-partisan moment, Yang can be one of the avatars of a new politics that is funky and irreverent, beholden neither to Trump nor AOC.
That’s the pitch, at least. We’ll see who buys it.
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