LATE WORD FROM THE NEW YORK CITY MAYORAL PRIMARY – OVERNIGHT: 

Vote counting has stopped for the night in the Democratic primary, with Eric Adams, the only candidate advocating anything close to a law-and-order policy, leading.  Adams, an African American with a police background, has about 31 percent of the primary vote.  About nine points behind is AOC's hand-picked radical leftist, Maya Wiley, who was a virtual unknown before Ocasio-Cortez anointed her.  Wiley is quite the image of the woke white New Yorker – fabulously wealthy, with a private security detail, yet talks about disarming the police, which serves the peasantry.

New York is now using something called "ranked choice" voting, an invention that few voters asked for, which allows the voter to name his or her first five choices for mayor.  Unless a candidate gets more than 50 percent in tonight's first round, which looks impossible at the moment, the new mechanism goes into action.  Through magic calculations reflecting the dark mystery of big-city politics,  the new system will determine the actual winner of the primary by combining first, second, and third choices.  I don't quite understand it, and have my serious suspicions.

What happens in the Democratic Party here will affect party thinking around the country.  If Adams pulls out an ultimate win in the primary and becomes the Dem nominee, he will almost certainly be the next mayor.   That will be a huge rebuke to the woke crowd and send a signal that New Yorkers are tired of crime and decline.  But if Wiley pulls an upset, it will vastly advance the power and prestige of AOC, lurching the party even further to the left.   Such a victory could even encourage Ocasio-Cortez to challenge U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is up for re-election next year.  A victory by Ocasio-Cortez over a Senate giant would probably split the Democratic Party and force the formation of a new center-left party.  It might also hurry the exodus of citizens from New York, which now has the largest out-migration of any of the 50 states.

New York City is crawling back from the pandemic and the suicidal policies of current Mayor Bill de Blasio, a fan of Fidel Castro.  Voters have a choice between a better future and a Marxist present.  Adams is hardly my ideal, but he's the best candidate running.

Oh, what about the Republicans?  True to Republican New York tradition, they've pretty much given up before the general-election campaign begins.  They had a mayoral primary, won by anti-crime crusader Curtis Sliwa.   But the party bigs, or smalls, show little interest in Sliwa or in putting up a fight.  A good Republican could possibly win in a year when voters are desperate for personal safety, but there is no well-known figure, like Rudy Giuliani, on the horizon.

June 22, 2021