If You Hold an Election for Mayor of New York, Will Anybody Show Up?

There’s an enormously crowded field of candidates so far for this fall’s race to replace the universally mocked and reviled Bill de Blasio as New York City’s mayor, including such familiar names as former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and, on the Republican side, Guardian Angels founder and radio talk show host Curtis Sliwa. The big wild card in this race, however, is whether anybody can get New York’s apathetic voters interested in their governance again.

New York City has, according to the Census Bureau’s pre-pandemic estimates, 8.34 million people, of whom about 6.6 million are age 18 or older. It’s tricky to estimate how many of those 6.6 million are eligible to vote; Professor Michael McDonald’s ElectProject estimates that 89 percent of the voting-age population of the state is eligible, the remainder being non-citizens and/or felons. That proportion is almost certainly lower in the city, with its huge immigrant population (36.8 percent of the city’s population is foreign-born, compared to 22.6 percent statewide), but if we assume roughly that 80 percent are eligible to vote, that would yield a population of around 5.3 million eligible voters. The city currently has 5.59 million registered voters, of whom 4,992,792 are classified as active, which suggests that the bulk of the city’s eligible voters are already registered. They just don’t vote that much, especially in elections for mayor. In the 2020 presidential election, 3.05 million people voted, 2.32 million of them for Joe Biden. That would be a turnout of around 57.5 percent — lower than the 63.4 percent turnout statewide or 66.7 percent nationwide.

The hallmark of de Blasio’s two victories was abysmally low voter turnout. He never cleared 800,000 votes even in his two landslide victories; Rudy Giuliani did better than that in defeat in 1989:

The lack of competitive elections due to the death of the city’s Republican party is obviously one reason for cratering turnout, although turnout was also quite low in 2009 in a race where Mike Bloomberg was held below 51 percent of the vote despite spending a preposterous $102 million on a municipal election. But it is not as if a ton of voters have been showing up for contested Democratic primaries and skipping the November general election – even with hotly-contested primary races and a vast registration advantage for Democrats, 1989 (when David Dinkins unseated Ed Koch) was the last time that turnout in the Democratic primary cleared a million voters, and four of the last six primaries have failed to match half that total:

It wasn’t always this way. In 1977, over 900,000 voters cast ballots in a ferocious primary featuring incumbent Abe Beame and challengers Koch, Mario Cuomo, Bella Abzug, Percy Sutton, and Herman Badillo, with five candidates clearing 130,000 votes and a sixth, Badillo, narrowly missing 100,000 (Badillo ran again as a Republican in 2001). 2.55 million people voted in the 1965 mayoral election when William F. Buckley ran for mayor; Buckley, who drew 13.3 percent of the vote, got over 341,000 votes, more than either of the Republican candidates who lost to de Blasio. 1969 was the last time 2 million people voted in a mayoral election in New York. The proportion of voters in the mayoral election, compared to the prior year’s presidential election, began sagging in the 1970s and cratered after Bloomberg’s first term:

Clearly, a couple of different factors have been in play. Identity politics is one of those. The city has run through a number of “firsts” as mayor, or candidates for mayor. In 1973, Beame became the city’s first Jewish mayor. In 1977, Abzug, Sutton, and Badillo were running to be (respectively) the first female, black, or Hispanic mayor. In 1989 and 1993, Dinkins was first elected as the first black mayor, then ousted by Giuliani, who ran as a sort of last hurrah for the city’s outer-borough blue-collar white ethnics. Also, some of the past races were about big things: the city’s existential fiscal crisis in 1977, and the question in the 1989 through 2001 races whether or not to pursue and then retain a stronger posture against crime. By 2005, when Bloomberg was running for the end of his first term, that argument had been decisively won and crime defeated as an issue, at least until de Blasio came along.

As a conservative, I do not fetishize high voter turnout. Choosing not to vote is the free choice of every citizen, and one that can be rational (when the voter sees no difference between the candidates) or responsible (when the voter doesn’t know enough to choose among the options). But extremely low-turnout elections risk capture by extremists, and leave much of the city without a voice. A city of 8 million people should not be ruled by 692,000 primary voters, as happened in 2013. The large number of disengaged voters probably cannot be mobilized any time soon to bring a Republican back to Gracie Mansion, but after a year of pandemic, economic blight, spikes in crime and homelessness, and residents fleeing the city, it is past due for New York City’s citizens to take back a role in choosing who leads their government.