Six on History: NYC Mayoral Elections
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1) A charter school comeback? Top NYC candidates support the alternative schools, POLITICO
"After years in the wilderness of the de Blasio administration and waning influence in Albany, charter schools are gaining a foothold in the city again — if the race for mayor is any barometer.
The three leading candidates in the Democratic primary are decidedly supportive of charter schools — a dramatic shift from when Mayor Bill de Blasio was elected eight years ago and another sign of the citywide electorate hewing closer to the center in the June 22 Democratic primary.
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, former city sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia and entrepreneur Andrew Yang — all of whom have hit first place in recent polls — have pledged to allow for the creation of more charters, publicly-managed but privately run schools that occupy space in public school buildings, if elected.
Of those three, Garcia has gone the farthest: The city’s former sanitation commissioner recently said she supports lifting the charter cap — a limit set by law on the number of new schools that can be created — during a forum hosted by Civic Builders, Democracy Prep and Achievement First.
Adams wants to keep the cap but called for closing failing charters and duplicating successful ones during a town hall hosted by the United Federation of Teachers, the city’s teachers union. He also said he supports smaller charter networks and unionizing charters.
Yang also wants to keep the cap, but is pushing to resurrect “zombie charters" — schools that won a charter but either closed or never opened. He and his former test prep company in 2008 put up at least $110,500 to help start a charter school in Manhattan.
De Blasio has continually butted heads with charter leaders, most notably Eva Moskowitz, the CEO of Success Academy and, for many years, the face of the city’s charter movement. In Albany, charters reaped the benefits of Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo as well as the GOP-controlled state Senate, but saw that support slowly dissipate, culminating in a Democratic takeover of the state Senate in 2019.
Richard Buery — president of the charter network Achievement First who also served as a deputy mayor for de Blasio — attributed the shift to charter leaders doing more work in their communities, more robust electoral and political work and polling showing most Democratic voters support families having the choice to send their children to charters.
The ongoing fight over the city’s notoriously segregated schools has helped. De Blasio’s attempts to diversify the city’s best-performing district schools came late in his tenure and — in the city’s elite public high schools at least — segregation has worsened on his watch. The city’s reluctance until recently to remove admissions screens for the high schools and high-performing middle schools may also be driving more support from Black and brown families for alternatives to the district schools.
Roughly 138,000 students currently attend 267 charter schools citywide, and Black and brown students that come from homes with low incomes make up the majority of those students.
"As I look at the vast majority of [the mayoral] field, what I see is a bunch of people who are not approaching this question from a deeply ideological standpoint,” Buery said, adding they’re "open to conversations or asking the question, ‘What [is] best for children?'"
Deep-pocketed charter school supporters have also taken notice.
Yang has the support of donor Jeff Yass, co-founder of investment firm Susquehanna International Group, who said Yang would be the best candidate for school choice. Jenny Sedlis, executive director of pro-charter group StudentsFirstNY, is leading a political action committee on Adams’ behalf.
Other charter supporters, including hedge-funders Kenneth Griffin and Daniel Loeb, contributed a combined $2 million to the Adams PAC. Griffin and Loeb also donated $500,000 each to the Comeback PAC run by public relations consultant Lis Smith to support Yang.
Sedlis, charter supporters say, has been a crucial player in the new energy around the schools. She took a leave of absence from StudentsFirstNY to run the pro-Adams effort, and even supporters of rival campaigns are singing her praises.
“Jenny's the consummate coalition builder, she knows how to mobilize just a whole range of stakeholders — parents, philanthropists, politicians in pursuit of a common cause,” said Rep. Ritchie Torres, a co-chair of Yang’s campaign and one of a few pro-charter Democrats. “Most people in politics over-promise and under-deliver. Jenny, in my experience, under-promises and often over-delivers."
He alluded to a discrepancy between rhetoric on Twitter and what rank-and-file Democratic voters are expressing, particularly in communities of color.
"There seems to be a set of people who are shocked that the leading candidates for mayor — Andrew Yang, Eric Adams and Kathryn Garcia — have pragmatic views on education and public safety,” Torres said. “I'm not shocked at all given the conversations I have on the ground in the community.”
Sedlis said she was around when de Blasio put a “big target” on charters in 2013 — when it was politically popular “to say ‘let’s annihilate them.’”
Times have changed, she said.
"My view is if you are a champion of charter schools and of kids and families, I want to support you, I want to pull resources together, voters for you and put an infrastructure around you to ensure that you can get elected, keep your seat," Sedlis said. "The charter sector is a community that supports our friends."
James Merriman, CEO of the New York City Charter School Center, also credited Sedlis and StudentsFirstNY with helping improve the political fortunes of charters and said mayoral candidates are, at the very least, willing to work with charters. Candidates Shaun Donovan and Ray McGuire — who also wants to raise the charter cap — have both spoken in support of charter schools, though their campaigns have yet to catch on with voters, according to the polls.
"We decided that the future was with the Democrat Party in New York… we also knew it was the more natural party for charters to be in,” Merriman said. “The teachers union’s politics made that almost impossible to actually do but… we've become part of the family of interests and activities and a sector that the Democratic party looks to."
Another major piece of the shift is the growing presence and recognition of leaders of color within the charter movement as well as charters pursuing less punitive and draconian practices.
The Black Latinx Asian Charter Collaborative, a partnership of public charters, was established in late 2018. The group recently hosted a forum on education equity issues with Adams and McGuire.
“[We] met with a bunch of elected officials [in Albany] who were quite frankly shocked that there were charter schools run by people of color and that was the thing that we heard repeatedly,” said Miriam Raccah, executive director of Bronx Charter School for the Arts, who is part of the collaborative. “When electeds specifically were reacting to charters, they were not aware that there were charters in their communities that were run by and founded by people of color, which was just shocking to all of us."
Even as charters see a new dawn of sorts this election season, there is still a movement of families and advocates who remain wary of charter growth and are taking steps of their own to fight it. City Comptroller Scott Stringer remains a strong candidate in the race and his skepticism over charters was among the factors that won him the endorsement of the United Federation of Teachers — the city’s powerful teachers union which is helping fund a multimillion dollar, independent expenditure in support of his campaign.
Last week, “Our City” — a left-leaning political action committee headed by Gabe Tobias — hosted a rally urging New Yorkers to not rank Adams or Yang, referencing the candidates' support from hedge fund billionaires linked to school privatization.
Maria Bautista, campaigns director for the Alliance for Quality Education — one of the groups that participated in the rally — told POLITICO the shift is about who’s funding the campaigns.
"I'm sure that's the story they're telling, that they're super invested in Black and brown communities, but the reality is that they have infinite amounts of money to pour into these elections,” Bautista said. “The candidates are looking for people to bankroll them and it's very clear that that's what's happening, I mean, follow the money."
She applauded Stringer, Maya Wiley and Dianne Morales, who are running more to the left in the mayor’s race, “for standing up to big money.”
When asked why the rally only targeted Yang and Adams given Garcia’s standing in the polls, Bautista said Garcia’s strong position came about only a few days before their rally.
“We're gonna be focused on all candidates that are supportive of charter schools and taking this sinister money and calling that out,” she added. (Garcia, so far, has not had a big super PAC supporting her campaign.)
Rafiq Kalam Id-Din II, founder of Ember Charter Schools in Brooklyn — an elementary school that focuses on African American culture and anti-racist practices — said he wants candidates to address the racial equity gap in the charter sector as far as school leaders of color not getting issued charters, noting only McGuire and Adams have addressed it.
He also said the receptiveness stems from recognition of the work schools did during the pandemic, noting how they did “innovative things” and worked hard to “be open and available as much as possible.”
“I think any mayor who's going to be taking over the city coming out of this pandemic is gonna want to make sure they have at their disposal every possible tool and resource, especially one that's as good and as powerful as charter schools,” Kalam Id-Din II said. “I think they're thinking strategically about that."
Over the years, Adams, who is running for mayor, has cultivated a reputation as someone difficult to pin down politically, particularly on issues of law enforcement. “They can’t put me in a category,” he told me, deploying a favorite line with a smile. “I’m a New Yorker. We’re complex.” Born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, by a single mother, Adams was beaten by N.Y.P.D. officers in the basement of a South Jamaica precinct house when he was fifteen years old. A few years later, heeding the advice of a mentor, the Reverend Herbert Daughtry, Adams joined the city’s police ranks, hoping to fight racism and abuse from inside the system. In the nineteen-nineties, he came to public prominence as a co-founder of a police reform group called 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. The group denounced police killings and abuse, and did community outreach, holding seminars for young Black men on, for instance, how to behave during a stop-and-frisk. “Reaching while black shouldn’t be punishable by death,” Adams told the Times, in 1999. “But I can’t teach kids on the way it ought to be. I have to teach them on the way it is.” In the two-thousands, after retiring from the N.Y.P.D., as a captain, he was elected to office in Brooklyn, first to the New York State Senate and most recently to the post of borough president. Along the way, he made little secret that City Hall was his ultimate goal.
Adams stands between the city and its police department. Once an inside dissenter, he is now an outside advocate. He believes deeply that policing can be a noble profession, and that it is a societal necessity. “That uniform is a symbol of public safety,” he said. He rejects the arguments of police abolitionists, and waves away calls to defund the police. In his campaign for mayor, he has pledged to help the city’s thirty-six thousand police officers do their jobs while betting that he can still attract widespread support among the city’s Black voters—and that bet has paid out, according to the polls, some of which have started showing Adams leading the crowded Democratic Party primary field, with just a month to go in the race. Many voters have also started to tell the pollsters that crime is a top issue for them. That has surprised some, given that New York has spent years enjoying historically low crime rates. But Adams said that it came as no surprise to him. “I don’t care if you live on West Fourth Street or if you live in Brownsville,” he said. “You want to be safe. That is the prerequisite to prosperity.”
His opponents have tried to tag him as a conservative, a corrupt machine pol, a crank. Many critics have made much of the fact that, for a time in the nineteen-nineties, Adams switched parties, a decision that his campaign says grew out of frustration with the Democrats’ record on crime and race. (In the 1999 article about him in the Times, the reporter noted that Adams “calls himself a conservative Republican.”) But Adams doesn’t shrink from the past; in fact, he is perhaps the candidate in the race most interested in talking about it. “If you were to do an analysis of who is in office, and who is running for office, they don’t remember the old New York,” Adams said. “They know the New York. But, see, many of us, we know the old New York. That is why you see this trepidation, this anxiety, because we fought so hard to get out of that time.”
One of the key figures in Adams’s old New York is Jack Maple, a former N.Y.P.D. official who, in the nineties, helped usher in a new era of policing in the city. If Daughtry, a reverend, persuaded Adams to become a cop, it was Maple who instilled in Adams the faith in policing that he still holds. “I’m glad I knew him,” Adams said. “He changed my life.”
If you look Maple up on Wikipedia, you’ll see a black-and-white photograph of a portly, jowly white man wearing a bow tie and a homburg hat. If not for a splash of graffiti visible on a subway door behind him, the photograph could be confused for one taken in the nineteen-forties. “He was a real New York character,” Adams said. In his later years, Maple—who died in 2001, at the age of forty-eight—was a tabloid fixture, known for dining out at Elaine’s and talking big and smoking big cigars. But he had started out as a “cave cop,” patrolling subway platforms. In the eighties, he ran decoy squads—cops playing stock characters such as “the Jewish lawyer,” “the blind man,” or “the casual couple”—to catch muggers in the caves. He then started creating hand-drawn maps of the subway system, which he dubbed the “Charts of the Future,” trying to predict where crime would occur next and come up with tactics to stop it. “This is a revolution,” he would later tell The New Yorker. “Remember how Hannibal used infantry and artillery together, or how Napoleon used rapid deployment? Those were revolutions, and so is what we’re doing.”
Eric Adams Wants to CompStat New York City
"New York City candidates for mayor are competing aggressively for the often fractured Latino vote. With no one having fully secured this vote yet--expected to make up 20% of the electorate--mayoral hopefuls are increasing their efforts in these final weeks of the race, as the June 22nd primary quickly approaches.
Maya Wiley launched the “Vaya Con Maya” platform in Spanish last week, addressing public safety, quality housing, and stable healthcare, issues that Latino/Hispanic residents and lawmakers identified as top concerns.
Shaun Donovan released an ad that appeared on Spanish media. Unlike his rival mayoral candidates, Donovan speaks Spanish in the ad. And he demonstrated his Spanish-speaking skills on Saturday at la Iglesia Aliento de Vida, the largest Spanish-language church in the city." ...
"NEW YORK — It was their first chance to go at it in person, and the leading contenders in the New York City mayor’s race launched into full attack mode Wednesday night, questioning each other’s policies, ethics and competence.
The eight major Democratic candidates, facing off during the second of three televised debates, sparred over crime on the streets and in subways, the city budget and education. But it was a cutting exchange between Andrew Yang and Eric Adams that stood out.
With three weeks left until primary day, the race remains wide open, with many voters undecided and no clear frontrunner. The advent of ranked-choice voting has thrown the race into further confusion, as candidates compete for a much wider cross section of voters than in elections past.
Adams — the Brooklyn borough president and former NYPD captain — and Yang, a former presidential candidate, have traded first and second place in recent polls, along with former city commissioner Kathryn Garcia.
Adams went after Yang for never voting in a city election, leaving the city at the height of the pandemic and showing a lack of policy chops on key issues facing New York.
"You started discovering violence when you were running for mayor. You started discovering the homeless crisis when you were running for mayor,” Adams said at the height of the debate, co-hosted by WABC. “You can't run from the city, Andrew, if you want to run the city.”
Yang fired back: “The problems have been getting worse around you while you’ve been running for mayor and raising money from your friends in real estate,” he said, before tearing into Adams over a failed casino deal during his time as a state senator and his fundraising practices as Brooklyn borough president. The episodes have drawn scrutiny — but no charges — from city, state and federal investigators.
“We all know that you’ve been investigated for corruption everywhere you’ve gone,” Yang said. “You’ve achieved a rare trifecta of corruption investigations ... You don’t pay attention to the rules of the road. You’re unprincipled.”
Adams, who is Black, emphasized that he was never found to have committed wrongdoing and demanded Yang apologize for raising a false accusation against a person of color. Yang has also painted criticism of his own campaign as racially motivated.
The intense back and forth prompted Scott Stringer, the city comptroller, to chime in: “You’re both right. You both shouldn’t be mayor.”
Voters tuning in for the first time saw a glimpse of tensions that have been bubbling up on the campaign trail for weeks. Crime and economic recovery have topped the list of concerns for voters heading into the June 22 primary. And despite their attacks, Yang and Adams are largely aligned on policing strategy. If the election becomes about crime, Adams may have a built-in advantage as a former cop. If it’s economic recovery, Yang’s message of revitalizing the city’s tourism economy could carry the day.
But polls show voters also want a competent administrator after eight years of Mayor Bill de Blasio, a term-limited Democrat who has faced repeated accusations of mismanagement. With a recent boost from the New York Times editorial board, Garcia — the former sanitation commissioner and a go-to crisis manager for de Blasio — has recently jumped into the top tier, though she had few breakout moments Wednesday night.
Stringer has remained viable despite sexual misconduct allegations that he denies, and attorney Maya Wiley has tried to position herself as the leading progressive in the race after stumbles by other left-leaning candidates.
Yang raised alarms about the city budget, saying de Blasio has spent too much of New York’s federal stimulus money and set the city up for deep deficits down the road.
“Everyone on this stage should be livid about it, unless you don’t expect to be mayor,” he said. “We’re going to be left holding the bag.” (He was also the only candidate to say he’d accept de Blasio’s endorsement, as well as that of Gov. Andrew Cuomo.)
Stringer rejected the call for spending cuts.
“You don’t have any idea about the budget,” he told Yang and referred to a comment made by Yang’s top consultant, Bradley Tusk, who called his client an “empty vessel” in an interview.
“I don’t think you’re an empty vessel,” Stringer said. “I think you’re a Republican.”
The city comptroller also brought up the billionaire-funded PACs that have supported both Yang and Adams.
“They are people who want to privatize public education, and they’re among the largest Republican donors,” he said.
Adams responded that he is legally prohibited from coordinating with independent spenders, but he accused Stringer of violating his pledge not to take real estate money. “Give it back, Scott,” he said.
In another pointed exchange, Wiley targeted statements by Adams, a former NYPD cop, that he would carry a gun to church and as mayor. “Isn’t this the wrong message to send our kids?” she said. “Children who see their role models carrying guns may think it’s OK.”
Adams touted his work on anti-gun legislation and suggested voters check his record. “I’m just so happy that we have something called Google now,” he said.
Yang, meanwhile, was grilled on his plan for cash payments to low-income New Yorkers, which candidate Shaun Donovan called a “false promise.” And former non-profit executive Dianne Morales pressed Adams on his past comments raising concerns about a housing development for LGBTQ seniors.
Public safety topics again dominated the debate, as it did at the first face-off amid a spike in shootings.
Adams in particular has zeroed in on combating violence and pivoted back to crime when asked about his economic recovery plans.
“No one is coming to New York in our multi-billion dollar tourism industry if you have three-year-old children being shot in Times Square,” he said.
Stringer, who has proposed some cuts to the NYPD, presented a different vision.
“Everybody keeps running toward flooding the zone with cops, and that’s not going to solve the problem,” he said.
The third and final debate will be hosted by WNBC and POLITICO on June 16."
"The New York Daily News has defended an editorial cartoon mocking Andrew Yang that the New York mayoral candidate’s camp decried as racist.
The political art, by staff cartoonist Bill Bramhall, depicts Yang emerging from the Times Square subway station as a vendor hawking New York City tchotchkes says, “The tourists are back!” The cartoon came after his Sunday interview with Showtime talk-show host Ziwe Fumudoh, in which he said that his favorite New York subway stop was Times Square — a prototypical tourist area that Yang noted was “my stop.”
In response to the cartoon, Yang issued a statement that said in part: “I’ve seen images like this before — in history books from the turn of the century and World War II. Images of Asians having beady, slanted eyes and buck teeth have been a part of the American consciousness for a long time. It’s grounded in a history of casting immigrants and children of immigrants as perpetual foreigners or even subhuman.”
He called the cartoon a “racialized caricature” and said it depicted him as a “perpetual foreigner.” Yang has lived in New York for decades.
Evelyn Yang, the candidate’s wife, tweeted her condemnation of publishing “this racist disfiguration of Andrew Yang as a tourist, in NYC where I was born, where Andrew has lived for 25 years, where 16 percent of us are Asian and anti-Asian hate is up 900 percent.”
She was writing in response to a tweet by the AAPI Victory Alliance that called the cartoon “disgusting and wrong,” noting that “every single day Asian Americans have to fight the notion that we are foreigners.”
Greenman added that Bramhall’s cartoon is “not a racial stereotype or racist caricature” and that altering the eyes did not change “the concept of the cartoon, which he and we stand by.”
Early Sunday, the Daily News editorial board published an editorial — headlined, “Yanging our chain: Andrew Yang doesn’t know enough to lead New York City” — that said the candidate “may be a quick study, but all the cramming he’s done since jumping into the mayor’s race can’t make up for years of inattention to New York politics and policies.”
Maya Wiley, one of Yang’s opponents in the mayoral election, defended him against the cartoon, saying on Twitter that he “should not have to endure this.”
The Bay Area graphic novelist, a past MacArthur Fellow, replied to her tweet by showing other historical examples of such racist imagery.
“The implication of foreignness was the most offensive aspect of the [Bramhall] cartoon,” Gene Luen Yang told The Post on Wednesday. “With my replies, I wanted to show that it’s a trope that’s cropped up again and again in American comics.”
“Ideas have a history to them, right?” Yang continued. “When we use them in our art, we should try our best to be aware of that history.”
“The current spasm of anti-Asian violence is heinous, and those hate crimes stem from a horrible and long legacy of anti-Asian racism in America,” Wuerker told The Post. “That said, I just don’t think you can connect the Bramhall cartoon to any of that: It’s a political cartoon lampooning Yang, I think fairly, for his small and silly misstep in trying to navigate the politics of one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world.”
As for the caricature, he said: “I think any cartoonist worth their salt is right to be sensitive to the long history of racist ethnic caricature in American political cartoons, but we’ve generally left that behind us.”
Wuerker noted that New York City is a place for “sharp elbows and a tough sense of humor,” and that if Yang were to become mayor, he should expect lampoons.
“I think political cartoons, at their best, come loaded with acid commentary and biting caricatures,” he added. “I look forward to the day when we as a culture have evolved to the point where politicians of all backgrounds can be satirically caricatured to the extreme and people will just see it as what it is — a cartoon.”
Read more:
"Once peripheral ideas, like enacting universal healthcare or raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, have been mainstreamed, and everywhere you look another leftist seems to be winning a local office. In Democratic cities and states, legislatures have swung decidedly left, and progressive prosecutors are safeguarding their gains even as crime rises. A decade ago, when Occupy Wall Street took bloom, espousing left demands—an end to income inequality, higher taxes on the rich—could feel futile and fringe, like howling at a closed window of a darkened home. The Left, particularly the socialist left, does not wield significant power in America, but the fact that such a debate exists and Democrats need to reckon with these ideas demonstrates how much has changed over a decade.
As movements mature and become popular, many people seek to be a part of them. This is important—successful protests and successful campaigns must engage many thousands of people, and build alliances across racial and class lines. When unlikely champions emerge, like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Cori Bush, many more dreamers laboring in the shadows hope to join their ranks. Ambition is the fuel. Without it—without people willing to take risks and imagine themselves with far greater influence than they possess today—nothing else will happen.
Decentralized movements have a vulnerability that becomes more apparent as they grow. As more people seek to join them and lead them, opportunists lie in wait, hunting for their own taste of capital and fame. Since the gatekeepers, for the worse and for the better, have melted away, charismatic outsiders—or career insiders posing as them—can enter the firmament and rise, mastering the lexicon of the new movement. With social media as an amplifier, the charismatic striver no longer needs to stump from street corners and subway stations and clubhouses, rousing ever-larger crowds as they go along. Twitter will do.
In the rise and fall of Dianne Morales, mayoral candidate, the Left has lessons to learn. Of late, Morales is in the news for a bizarre staff revolt that has led to multiple firings, protests, and resignations. Instead of focusing on this unraveling, it is better to examine the Morales phenomenon as a whole and what it may have represented. The problem goes far beyond one candidate, her approach to staff unionization, and whether gradients need to be changed in Twitter headshots.
Morales sensed an opportunity and took it. In that way, she was like any red-blooded American capitalist. “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em,” said the old Democratic boss George Washington Plunkitt. Plunkitt was a Tammany man talking about the practice of taking bribes and getting rich buying up land on speculation. His politics, of course, were nothing like Morales’: a white man born well before the outbreak of the Civil War will have nothing to say about intersectionality. But the new Left, abound with young progressives and socialists ever hungry for the next AOC, brings with it its own opportunities for speculation. In this new political game, Morales became her own version of a political boss gobbling up parcels of land right next to where the new trolley line would eventually reach.
In 2019, Morales apparently failed a Department of Education background check, losing out on an opportunity to chair Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Equal Employment Practices Commission, an entity that acts as a watchdog over the diversity of hiring at city agencies. She couldn’t pass the background check because she had facilitated, in 2002, a $300 bribe to a crooked inspector who promised to get rid of an expensive water bill for her new, four-unit townhouse. Morales lied twice to the Department of Investigation before confessing to the truth of what happened. The scandal, ultimately, was minor, but it spoke to a troubling reality: Morales was willing to lie to protect herself in an official context and had committed the kind of infraction that would block her from future public sector work.
Later in 2019, Morales announced her long-shot bid for mayor. Observing the timeline in retrospect, it seems that the mayoral campaign would have never been launched if she had just passed the background check. A former public school teacher and nonprofit executive with two Ivy League degrees, Morales was poised to continue her career in the upper levels of education. Denied the opportunity in the de Blasio administration, Morales hit on something else: a campaign that could readily fill a vacuum in the next Democratic primary for mayor of New York City.
Morales could see what most political insiders, in those early days, could not. There would be no leftist running a viable campaign for mayor in 2021. The standard bearer was a clubhouse Democrat, Scott Stringer, who had climbed the ladder of municipal politics as a cautious, center-left operator.. A quiet master of the inside game, Stringer sensed an opportunity too, reaching out to younger leftists for the first time in 2018 and endorsing their State Senate campaigns against the Independent Democratic Conference and another machine Democrat. For the candidates he supported who would eventually triumph, Stringer understood that the price for admission, here, was surprisingly low. The Democratic Socialists of America would never back Stringer for mayor, but their state senator, Julia Salazar, would easily do it because Stringer had showed up for her in her insurgent campaign. Collecting these endorsements—other popular young politicians like Jessica Ramos and Alessandra Biaggi backed Stringer, along with Jamaal Bowman—signaled to other insiders that Stringer would be the Left candidate in the race, a successor to de Blasio more attuned to certain activist currents."
