--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into, don't you know? That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: New York City is shopping for a new mayor. And I know what you're thinking, right? Like, why should I care? Yeah, no, that's a great question.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, obviously, like, you know, here in New York, we're a little self-interested and self-involved. So we think everybody should care. But they really shouldn't.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: David Friedlander writes about New York politics for New York Magazine. And apparently he thinks you're right. You shouldn't care.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There goes our show for the day. But maybe they should in this case, because, oh, thank God.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, one thing is that these New York City mayoral races, they tend to kind of get reconceptualized after the fact. It's telling this larger national story.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For example, in 2013, when Bill de Blasio was elected, it was largely seen as this, like, as a way for the American political left to kind of show its teeth.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We understand that making big change isn't easy. And there are those who have said our ambition for this city is too bold.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, let me say this. We are New Yorkers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He was running as an unabashed progressive, and his win sort of heralded this new progressive movement that was sort of shaking up the Democratic Party.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that really turned out to be correct.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, two years later, Bernie Sanders announced he was running for president. He did a lot better than anyone thought.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, now the left is this, like, really legitimate force in the Democratic Party and in American politics.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I certainly would not have had an opportunity to run as a Democrat.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In 2001, when Mike Bloomberg was elected, it was really read as the sort of post-9-11 moment, where even in sort of like liberal corners of the United States, Republicans were kind of on the march.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Republicans asked me, and I agreed with the fiscal conservatism in the city, and they believe in good government.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's an opportunity to get to the public. And then, of course, he was elected in 2001.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In 2002, Republicans held seats in the Senate and in the House in the midterms.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's one of the few times the sort of out party hasn't made any gains in a midterm.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Eight years before that, in 1993, Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor of New York.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that was really read as a kind of end of a certain kind of, you know, urban, democratic, big city liberalism.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The mayor has to be a proponent for much tougher laws against street criminals, violent criminals, and drug dealers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: City of New York is unfortunately just about the best place to commit a crime because you get more benefits, more breaks, more opportunities from this system than you do anywhere else.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then we never heard from him again.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, that was the end of Rudy Giuliani, which is ironic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Put down your crumb. She's 15. She's too old for you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: She's my daughter. Please, take me instead.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, it is the sort of, you know, famously is called the second toughest job in America.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there's just, you know, there's so much that sort of comes through New York.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, the coronavirus most recently.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's also just so much media attention here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So much sort of commerce and business kind of has to come through the city that it ends up being a kind of almost like national platform in a way that being mayor of L.A., Chicago, Houston, I think just sort of isn't.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, let's talk about the people who are running for this, you know, second most important job in the country, second toughest job in the country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Who are they? I know everyone knows one of them, but who else is up there?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, currently the polling leader is Eric Adams, who is the Brooklyn Borough president.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sometimes when you're in a dark place, you're not buried, you're just planted.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The question is, what are we going to do with the fruits of our harvest?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I was a state senator before that and was a police officer in the transit system before that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he is a African-American moderate who's running on a sort of tough on crime platform that also running kind of against, I think, the kind of ascendant left, both in the city, you know, and in the country in a way.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, he's somebody who never got sort of taken in by the defund the police movement or anything like that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So he's a Democrat, but he's not quite a lefty.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I mean, he's a Democrat for sure, but he's sort of carved out a space that's really like against what, you know, you would sort of call the very online left.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I don't even frankly think he has a TikTok account as far as I can tell.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: My TikTok was about TikTok, but um, yeah, and Andrew Yang is like he running as the extremely online candidate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When I hear the term Yang, I think of all the incredible people who I met on the and have supported me in the campaign.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I love the Yang Gang and it's impossible for me not to then love the term Yang Gang.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It seems to be that if he can achieve a sort of level of internet fame, then he will be elected mayor of New York.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For a long time, that seemed like a really good bet.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He was leading in the polls through most of the race until very recently.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He would do these tweets that would seemingly like were just kind of bizarre.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, they were, oh, this is my favorite pizza place.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it just looked like some kind of disgusting piece of pizza.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He would hop on the subway and say, I can't wait to go to like, you know, we're on my way to the Bronx.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the train he would be on would be, you know, terminating in Harlem or something.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's easy to make fun of, but we would all spend all day talking about Andrew Yang.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he sort of knocked that off a little bit.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I don't know if it was sort of strategy, but I will say some questions have been raised, I think, about his sort of knowledge of city government, about his readiness to do the job, about his sort of sense of the gravity of the job.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: To be clear, I mean, he's never voted in a municipal election ever, which is a heck of a thing for someone running to be mayor.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But rather than kind of answer these questions, rather than go on some kind of wonky public, you know, radio podcast where they pepper you with policy questions, he went on Showtime on Z-Way.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hi, Andrew. Hello, Z-Way. How are you? Good. How are you doing, Andrew Yang? Thank you so much for doing my show. You're an icon. Oh, thank you. You're an icon yourself.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: where they asked him what his favorite rap song is.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was Jay-Z and a little bit of Nas.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What's your favorite Jay-Z song? I mean, he's a New Yorker. Yes. What is my favorite Jay-Z song? It's, can I get an encore? Do you want more?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's just continuing to go back and go back and go back on this notion of just if you're just kind of famous enough, you'll be able to win.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Of course, another New York politician with a lot of name recognition, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who recently endorsed someone else, not Andrew Yang and not Eric Adams.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Right. She endorsed Maya Wiley.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We have an option of a candidate who can center people, racial justice, economic justice, and climate justice.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Who was a MSNBC commentator, a civil rights lawyer, She was also briefly a lawyer for Bill de Blasio and his administration.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Rather than calling 9-1 and getting a badge and a gun if what you need is a mental health care professional, we're going to use those resources, shift them out of the police department so that we have mental health crisis responders.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: AOC's endorsement came fairly late.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's two weeks to go in the election.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This was supposed to be a campaign where the New York left was really ascendant, where, you know, Ocasio had won.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They had kicked out a bunch of longtime moderate state legislators.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A number of Democratic Socialists of America candidates won.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And folks, you know, really thought that this was sort of the left's moment in New York City.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That has not happened.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Some of that has not happened because it turned out that I think some of those ideas were not as popular as it seemed they could be on Twitter and in similar spaces.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And some of that was just like the actual sort of left candidates kind of just completely collapsed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One such candidate, Scott Stringer, who is the sort of second highest ranking city official, his campaign has collapsed over a number of sexual harassment allegations.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Another leftist candidate named Diane Morales, who is a non-profit executive, her campaign has collapsed when her campaign staff kind of revolted over some of the sort of internal workings of her office, which left Maya Wiley as the kind of standard bearer for that, you know, political faction.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, so you've got Adams, you've got Yang, you've got Wiley.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is there anyone else here who's, you know, a serious contender?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, sure.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, I think Catherine Garcia, who is a former sanitation commissioner.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In some ways, you know, she's kind of like the Joe Biden of the race.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: She's the candidate who you sort of can just kind of, you know, start ignoring politics again if she wins.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For the last 14 years, I've been New York City's go-to crisis manager.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: From pumping out water during Hurricane Sandy to delivering a million meals a day during the pandemic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When there's a crisis, sometimes you've got to break glass to solve it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: She's not wearing a kind of ideological cape.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's just about getting government to work, you know, having the streets swept, the trash picked up, all that kind of stuff.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: She's sort of running under this, like, managerial competence banner in a way that none of the other candidates really are.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What issues are most resonating with voters this time around coming out of this pandemic and after, you know, a very long time of Bill de Blasio being criticized for nearly everything he does, as far as I can tell?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Mayor Bill de Blasio has now been implicated in the death of an innocent grandhog.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, the big one, I think, is crime.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Relative crime rates are, you know, low, but it has seen an alarming spike, especially in violent crime.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so that's really taken on as the big issue here in the final weeks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And, you know, that's really on Eric Adams' turf.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For 22 years, I wore a bulletproof vest and stood on the street corners and protected children and families in the city of New York.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Please come and join me inside my house as I show you how simple items such as bamboo paper can be an indicator of marijuana use or a cut of straw can be an indicator of using cocaine.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's someone who sort of made that the most salient issue of the race and kind of hoped it would be in a funny way the most salient issue of the race.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So that's the most important thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If crime is the thing we're talking about over the next two weeks, I think Eric Adams has a tremendous advantage.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Otherwise, you know, I think it's really kind of recovering from the coronavirus.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, this city was just sort of locked down and really devastated by the pandemic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so I think that how we come out of that is going to be you know the big question.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that includes businesses opening back up tourists coming schools reopening really every piece of it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Early voting in New York's Democratic primary begins this weekend because the city is so blue.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Democratic primary will almost certainly decide who becomes mayor eventually.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But of course, there's a little bit of a wrinkle here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is going to be an election unlike any other in the history of New York City, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, it is.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's it's it's well, it's going to be a mess.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're doing what's called ranked choice voting for the first time in the city.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what that means is that voters will not just pick one candidate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They will pick five and they will rank them in order of preference, which is confusing enough as it is.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I don't think many voters know of five candidates running.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And those that do know and are like really following it closely, I think you're going to have a hard time finding five candidates that they affirmatively like and want to be mayor.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So the way it works is that you have to get over 50 percent of the vote.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Once everyone puts down their sort of first choice preference, the person with the lowest number, they get eliminated.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The people that voted for that person second, those votes kind of get redistributed up the ladder, so to speak.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it just keeps on going and going with the lowest vote getter getting eliminated until someone gets over 50 percent.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, yeah, I think I think we just kind of don't know how all this is going to go.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In a moment, we're going to hear from big ranked choice voting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for today's show comes from Adio.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They say it's extremely powerful, adapts to your unique data structures and scales with any business model.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: According to Adio, Adio takes less than a minute to set up.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You'll see all your relationships in a fully fledged platform, they say, all enriched with that actionable data.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Read, watch and listen to The Guardian for free at theguardian.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So have you ever taken a bunch of kids to the ice cream store and asked them what their favorite ice cream is?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I promise you every single one of those kids will not just tell you their big favorite.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They'll tell you your second favorite, their third favorite, their fourth favorite.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Susan Lerner might be the biggest fan of ranked choice voting in New York City.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So everybody ranks naturally.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The only thing that is throwing people off is that they don't think about ranking in the context of elections.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When people actually see the ballot, which is straightforward, there's an aha moment.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, I get it. Yeah, no problem.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: She's the executive director of Common Cause New York and helped this ranked choice thing happen.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We did exit polling.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There was four special elections in New York City, two in Queens in February, two in the Bronx in March.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: OK. We did exit polling.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 95% of the people told us that the ballot was straightforward and simple to use.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I can see that argument.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, I appreciate the analogy because I believe it's applicable in some situations.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If you showed me four presidential candidates I've spent, you know, 24 months with, I could probably tell you my rankings.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But just in the last D.C., you know, local election, I was trying to figure out who these city council members were and these, you know, at large candidates.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it was nearly impossible.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I pitied anyone who didn't have as much time as I did to do it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is it safe to assume that New Yorkers haven't done a ton of research on the third and fourth and fifth favorite candidate?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, here's the thing, Sean.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In D.C., there's no incentive for a candidate who doesn't think that you're likely to vote for them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You're not part of their base to spend any time reaching out, talking to you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: With ranked choice voting, candidates have to behave differently.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Even though you might have another candidate as your first choice, you may not be part of the base of voters that the candidate would have relied on in a traditional first-past-the-post race.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now the candidates spend more time reaching out to voters and providing that information in a ranked choice voting election.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I suppose ranked choice voting is in the spotlight a little bit right now because of the New York mayoral election.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How popular is it outside of New York in this country?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We are seeing increasing numbers of cities and states who are picking up ranked choice voting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hi, guys. It's Jen Lawrence.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Over the past year, I have been working with both conservatives and progressives on nonpartisan initiatives that help make government work better for all Americans.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Maine was the first state to use ranked choice voting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The people of Maine approved ranked choice voting in 2016 a simple fair common sense system of voting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But last year in November, Alaska's voters decided to vote in ranked choice voting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's on the ballot in a number of additional cities across the country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Let's talk about timing for a second.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I know early voting starts this weekend.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think it all wraps up by like June 22nd or something like that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But then I heard there's like a worst case scenario that results won't be in by mid-July.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is that because of ranked choice voting?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Guess what, Sean?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Tell me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's not because of ranked choice voting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That is because of the very generous rules which New York state has for providing grace periods and curing periods for absentee ballots.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And as we have more absentee ballots, it takes longer to get them in to be sure that the voter is eligible and to give the voter a chance to correct their mistakes if there are mistakes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It takes us longer to explain how ranked choice voting works than it does for the computer to calculate the rounds.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That is a perfect transition to what I want to do next with you, because we earlier today ran our own ranked choice voting election on a computer and got the results very quickly.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And with your help, I want to, through this election, explain ranked choice voting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So here's the deal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our staff and friends of our staff voted for their favorite Coney Island summer snacks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Perfect New York story.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I actually don't know the winner, but I imagine you have the candidates in front of you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I do.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's boardwalk pizza.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know what's always been there for you every day in the pandemic?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's right. It's pizza.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A little pepperoni, a little Sicilian, a slice of Joe's, a famous raise, a 99 cent.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You want it? You got it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're always right around the corner.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You vote for pizza, you're voting for a slice of New York.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Cotton candy. I'm sweet. I'm pink. I'm blue. I'm light. I'm fluffy. Vote for cotton candy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Lobster roll. You don't want to crack my shells just like I don't want to crack your skull. Vote for me. I'm the perfect summer delight.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ice cream. It's a hot, humid day. You spent it baking on the beach. Who else can cool you down but me? Ice cream.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Nathan's hot dog. Listen up, New York. You're going to come out. You're going to vote hot dog number one. Make it number two, three, four, and five as well.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We got to relish this moment. We got to catch up. We're coming out of the pandemic. I love you, New York. Vote hot dog.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So how does it work?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, so I think we had 13 people voting in it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Did the winner end up being just the majority of first choices?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No, it went through four rounds.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So on round one, nobody wanted cotton candy. Cotton candy got no first place votes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No, no, no, no, no. All right.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What about round two?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The snack with the least votes was Boardwalk Pizza.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay. And Boardwalk Pizza had two votes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So you eliminate Boardwalk Pizza.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, come on. One vote transferred to Lobster Roll. Woo! One vote transferred to Ice Cream. Yes!
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we had Lobster Roll with three, Ice Cream with three votes, and Nathan's Hot Dogs, again in the lead, with five.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Are we on round three now?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're on round three.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Lobster Roll was eliminated. Womp womp.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The votes then went to a combination of ice cream picked up one, but Nathan's picked up three votes to transfer.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Nathan was the clear winner with a total of, let's see, I think it's eight votes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hot dog, New York. Thank you for this honor. I don't know what to say.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, I'm relishing this moment and oh, my God, I got to catch up with all these texts and mustard.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Congratulations, Nathan. Yeah, absolutely.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Not really a surprise outcome here. No, no.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in all honesty, I'd say 80 to 90 percent of the time, the winner of the first round ends up being the consensus majority of the voters.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because what we're looking to do with ranked choice voting is to be sure that the ultimate winner isn't the choice of a minority of the voters, which is what you get in a plurality, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But is a consensus choice of the majority of the winners.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So Nathan's was ahead in all of the rounds, but instead of being the winner at about 40% of the first choices, Nathan's at the end became the winner with a solid 60% of the choices.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that is just healthier for Nathan's.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's also better for democracy to have your elected official build a base of broad support among the people they're representing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Susan Lerner is the executive director of Common Cause New York.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Hotdog.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thanks to Amna Al Ice Cream, Emily Jo's Pizza, Victoria Candyland, Lobster Colette, and Philly Cheese Miles.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The show's also made by Will Reed, Afim Shapiro, Halima Shah, and Jillian Weinberger.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Your facts are double-checked by Laura Bullard.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Music from Breakmaster Cylinder and Noam Hassenfeld.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Extra help this week from Paul Mounsey.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Liz Kelly Nelson is Vox's Veep of audio.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Where do you listen? Is it in an app? Does that app let you rate and review the show? Have you done it yet for this show? Why not?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No further questions, Your Honor.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you.
--:-- [Theme music starts playing]
