Eric Adams (Probably) Defeats Socialism in New York City

T he never-ending quest to find some actual workers who support the socialist agenda crashed into the following number last night in New York City: 46–17. Those two figures are from the Bronx, the poorest, least white, least-educated, and hence most proletarian borough of New York City. Ex-cop Eric Adams, preaching the gospel of law and order, won 46 percent of the first batch of votes tallied in the Bronx. Lawyer Maya Wiley, an MSNBC socialist campaigning on defunding the police, got 17 percent. Adams also trounced Wiley in Staten Island, the borough that for decades has been New York City’s redoubt for the white middle class and working class. In Staten Island, Adams beat Wiley by a score of 31–13 in early tallies.

Socialist heads are spinning, but New York City advances a trend seen elsewhere in the country, in which some of the least-affluent minorities are moving right even as affluent whites are moving left. Just as South Florida Latinos don’t want to hear about socialism, neither do Bronxites. (The Bronx is the only majority-Hispanic borough of the five that constitute New York City; a 2013 survey estimated the non-Hispanic white population to be 10 percent.)

The socialists just can’t seem to process enough white people through Oberlin to get themselves to a majority, even in their intellectual capital, New York City. The nifty interactive voting map put together by the New York Times indicates that likely fourth-place finisher Andrew Yang did extremely well in Asian neighborhoods in Queens, plus one patch of Brooklyn, while Wiley’s sweet spot was the most Oberlinian neighborhoods in hipster Brooklyn. There are some micro-districts in Williamsburg and Greenpoint — Lena Dunham’s Brooklyn — in which Wiley walloped Adams by as much as 40 points. Wiley also did well in Queens neighborhoods represented by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, suggesting AOC’s endorsement boosted her there; wealthy neighborhoods in Manhattan were dominated by former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia, suggesting that her endorsement by the New York Times was influential with the paper’s core readership. Wiley and Garcia are neck-and-neck for second place, with Yang, the frontrunner as recently as May, out of the money.

The rest of the Times map is pretty much a sea of purple, the color assigned to Adams. He enjoyed a nine-point lead over Wiley, 31.7 to 22.3 percent, as vote counters went to bed Tuesday night. In a low-turnout primary in which 220,000 voters requested absentee ballots — and those ballots will count as long as they were postmarked by June 22 and arrive by June 29 — the results could shift: Adams had earned only 253,000 votes as of Wednesday morning. Moreover, for the first time, New York City has implemented a ranked-choice balloting system in which voters were invited to list as many as five candidates in order of preference. Since simulations running on various hypothetical scenarios have consistently shown that whoever tops the field as the first choice is highly likely to prevail, though, it seems unlikely that one of the other candidates will pull off a shocker and best Adams.

In November, one of the aforementioned Democratic candidates will battle Curtis Sliwa, the talk-radio host who won the Republican nomination on Tuesday, but judging by the last two mayoral general elections, both of which Republicans lost by more than 30 points, Sliwa has no chance.

A shooting in Times Square on May 8, in which two women and a four-year-old boy were wounded by stray bullets (all survived), seemed to cement crime as the city’s leading issue. Both Yang and Adams rushed to capitalize on the sense of disorder, emphasizing that neither had supported the defund-the-police movement, but Adams, as a former NYPD captain, struck New Yorkers as better equipped to handle the crime surge of the past 18 months, even though he had built his career on liberal reformist rhetoric. Wiley was languishing in the polls until she was endorsed by AOC and Elizabeth Warren, but her surge appeared mainly to hurt Yang, who had appealed to the Left with his talk of sending out checks to the masses.

Declaring victory prematurely Tuesday night, Adams couldn’t resist dunking on socialist intellectuals such as Wiley, whose vision of policing sounded like an improvisation by the eighth-brightest student in an undergraduate sociology seminar: “And how dare those with their philosophical and intellectual theorizing and their classroom mindset talking about the theory of policing,” Adams said. “You don’t know this. I know this. I am going to keep my city safe.”

There was a consolation prize for socialists on Tuesday night: New York’s second city. Step forward, Buffalo, you’re America’s next socialist paradise. The obvious takeaway from these two results is that every Marxist intellectual in Williamsburg and Park Slope should get herself to Buffalo and prove that her ideas are workable in the first U.S. city to elect a socialist mayor since 1960. Sure, only a little more than 20,000 people bothered to vote in Buffalo, a city of a quarter-million souls, so it wasn’t exactly a mass proletarian uprising that propelled socialist India Walton to a victory margin of 2,000 or so votes, but like other viruses, socialism is opportunistic and has to take advantage whenever someone’s guard is let down.