Opinion: Let’s play ‘Ranked Choice Voting’

I was speaking with one of the many Democrats running for mayor recently, and they sounded very confident of victory. “I’ll be everyone’s number two choice,” they told me.

How’s that for a campaign slogan? “Vote for me…I’m the best second choice in town!”

This all reminds me of a very different campaign – 165 years ago – for the Republican nomination for president. A little-known, tall bearded guy from Illinois who many thought was odd-looking went to all the GOP power brokers and said something like: “You may not vote for me (on the first ballot) but at least make me your back-up choice.”

Going into that convention, Abraham Lincoln was considered the fourth-most-likely winner. New York Gov. William Seward was seen as the frontrunner, with Gov. Salmon Chase of Ohio and Missouri’s former Whig Party leader Edward Bates in second and third place, respectively. For various reasons, though, all three of the top candidates had alienated wings of the Republican Party.

Sensing an opening, Lincoln strategized his way to victory. Fresh off the popular Lincoln–Douglas debates and a thunderous speech at New York’s Cooper Union (think Barack Obama at the 2004 Democratic convention), Lincoln knew Seward didn’t have enough votes to win on the first ballot, so he campaigned for second-choice votes from Chase and Bates supporters.

Lincoln’s shrewd gambit worked on the third ballot, and the rest is history. If not for Honest Abe’s insightful political maneuvering, we might have had a more calamitous Civil War and the embarrassment of slavery continuing well into the late 19th century.

This is all to say that candidates like Scott Stringer, Brad Lander, Zellnor Myrie, Jessica Ramos and Zohran Mamdani, as well as more recent arrivals to the race – Michael Blake, Whitney Tilson and Jim Walden – should brush up on their presidential campaign history and try to rip a page out of Lincoln’s playbook.

Right now, Mayor Eric Adams is still the embattled frontrunner, however weakened he is by the non-stop corruption engulfing his administration. He is an incumbent mayor who still has a portion of his base of support from 2021, along with a $4 million war chest (though no public matching funds). He also has close to 100% name recognition, for better or worse.

The only potential candidate who can match his name recognition (or is it notoriety?) is former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is looming in the wings ready to pounce in early 2025 if he sees a clear path to victory.

If Cuomo does jump into the race, it may behoove both him and Adams to form an alliance as the two best-known moderates in the race. Each would benefit from being the second choice of the other’s supporters.

On the flip side, I’d imagine that an “Anyone but Eric (or Andrew)” ticket of progressive candidates like Lander, Ramos, Myrie and Mamdani could give the left wing of the Democratic Party a real shot at electing a worthy heir to Bill de Blasio’s liberal mayoralty.

By banding together, those four candidates could cross-endorse and encourage their supporters to pick the other three as 2nd, 3rd and 4th on their ballots, effectively freezing out Adams – and potentially Cuomo – from what appears to be 20–33% of the Democratic primary voters. 

The Working Families Party, which helped engineer de Blasio’s 2013 victory, is reportedly trying to corral those candidates into a broad anti-Adams coalition, though it remains to be seen how effective they will be at getting these four elected officials to play nice with one another.

We’ve only had once ranked choice mayoral election – in 2021 – and a late-in-the-campaign cross-endorsement by Andrew Yang and Kathryn Garcia nearly catapulted the little-known former Department of Sanitation commissioner to victory.

One wonders what would have happened if they had done this earlier in the race or even enticed Maya Wiley to join them in a troika of cross-endorsements. Perhaps they could have prevented Adams’ extremely narrow victory, blocked him from Gracie Mansion and saved federal prosecutors a lot of work.

I’d like to see some computational polling genius game out the various alliances and permutations and then poll that. Let’s see some spreadsheets showing possible cross-endorsements and how they could affect the race.

That would be an eye-opening set of data as we embark on the six-month sprint to the June 24 primary. Right now, there are so many moving parts and potential candidates that it’s hard to predict how the upcoming campaign might shake out.

It may be useful also to brush up on the traditional children’s game of musical chairs. If memory serves me, you’d have to form alliances to survive to the next round as the number of chairs was whittled down and more players got knocked out.

The 2025 mayoral campaign may have a similar cadence: when the music stops (at the fundraising deadlines), who’ll be left as a viable candidate and who will need to drop out early due to lack of funds or meager polling numbers.

As we turn the page onto 2025, let the music begin and may the best candidate win and occupy the chair at City Hall for four years starting Jan. 1, 2026.