With four candidates in the race (and counting), progressives look to ranked choice to defeat Eric Adams

Last July, a few dozen progressive organizers and others supportive of a challenge to Mayor Eric Adams gathered on Staten Island to discuss coalescing around a formidable left-leaning candidate to challenge the incumbent, moderate Democratic mayor.

More than a year later, a single left-leaning challenger has not emerged. Instead, at least four candidates to the left of the mayor have mounted campaigns, posing a challenge to the progressive movement of how to unify a base of voters who are unhappy with the incumbent but who have different allegiances and fall along different points of the left-of-center political spectrum.

Making good use of the city’s ranked choice voting system, and promoting ranked rather than singular endorsements by influential groups, will be a start, some said. 

The New York Working Families Party, the progressive organization that many are looking to for lefty leadership in the race, is on board. “We learned a lot from 2021,” co-directors Ana María Archila and Jasmine Gripper said in a statement. “We have to be united. And we have to lean into the power of Ranked Choice. New York deserves a better leader, and we’re organized and ready to roll up our sleeves to elect one, together!” 

The WFP is expected to spearhead a strategy that aims to avoid failures on the left to coalesce around a single progressive candidate – or a coherent slate of candidates – in 2021. This time around, some want to see them adopt a “big tent” approach that addresses the skepticism of progressive messaging in the more moderate communities of color where Adams has done particularly well. Some want to see progressive candidates commit their energy to campaigning against Adams rather than each other. How much of that will be in the actual WFP’s strategy – and the strategies of other progressive organizations, or even left-leaning labor groups – is something that likely won’t be made public until after the presidential election in November. 

The actual viability of the mayoral campaigns of Comptroller Brad Lander, former Comptroller Scott Stringer, state Sen. Zellnor Myrie and now state Sen. Jessica Ramos has yet to be proven, with competitive fundraising and proof of coalition-building still a question mark for most. The field isn’t set. It could still grow to include socialist Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani, or more moderate challengers if Adams’ legal troubles further complicate his reelection. The field could also shrink if some candidates currently in the race can’t find a path to win. 

But for now, in the absence of a single heavy-hitting challenger to the mayor, progressives see hope in utilizing the ranked choice system in a more strategic way than was done in 2021. The system, which went into effect in 2021 for city primaries, allows voters to choose up to five candidates and rank them – rather than settle for one choice. If one candidate receives more than 50% of first-choice votes, they win, but if no candidate crosses that threshold in the first round, then the last-place candidate’s votes are distributed to whoever their voters ranked next. This process is repeated until one candidate crosses the 50% threshold. “In a perfect world, maybe there would be one really compelling progressive candidate that the whole movement could get behind a year before the election. That is not going to happen,” said Janos Marton, an organizer who hosted last year’s Staten Island meeting along with political strategist and organizer Cristina González. “Fortunately, because we have a ranked choice voting system, we have an opportunity to do something that’s just as effective, or potentially even more effective.” Marton noted, though, that in addition to being hopeful about that strategy being more effective, “It’s also just the reality that we are not going to have a single candidate.”

What does a more strategic approach look like? While ranked endorsements are something the city may see from the WFP and some labor unions, they wouldn’t be entirely new in 2025. The WFP ranked three candidates in its 2021 endorsement – Scott Stringer, Maya Wiley and Dianne Morales. The party and other progressives later pulled their endorsement of Stringer, following an accusation of sexual harassment against him, which he denied. Morales’ bid imploded following internal strife in her campaign. Though Stringer is running again, the WFP’s catch-and-release last time around makes another endorsement this time unlikely.  

Beyond releasing a slate of ranked candidates, some consultants and organizers are hoping to see more coordination of campaigns publicly and behind the scenes. Publicly, that might look like candidates enthusiastically cross-endorsing – encouraging their bases to rank another challenger second and third. Organizations or the campaigns themselves might adopt a simpler message to voters; “Don’t rank Adams.” Behind the scenes, campaigns might agree to focus their attention and resources on challenging Adams rather than each other.

Right now, those ideas are hypothetical. Campaigns have barely begun to lay out specific platforms, and how much interest they’ll have in public or behind the scenes coalition building with their competitors is unclear, though most have indicated some level of openness to those conversations. “I think that each of these candidates, because of their respective experience, are going to go after Adams from different angles, which I think is a great strategy. And all of them have agreed that it is a bad strategy to come after each other,” González said last month, noting that she thought that included both the candidates who had declared and those rumored to run at that point. “The only problem that any of us really see in that is the supporters of the respective candidates sort of holding to that.”

But between debate over contentious issues that have divided the left, such as the war in Gaza, and more garden variety political sniping, some fear more crossfire among those campaigns as the race progresses. “The chances of that happening are very, very high,” said consultant Eugene Noh. “As progressive as we are, this is still a winner-take-all election. It’s really going to take that larger entity to be able to spell out the big picture for these candidates at all times, to kind of eliminate this crossfire as much as humanly possible.”

That the contours of a coordinated strategy remain elusive is not entirely surprising, given that the campaigns themselves are mostly messaging in broad appeals for change rather than specific policy platforms. Despite track records and histories of support that suggest their progressive credentials, several candidates have so far shied away from claiming the “progressive” title, likely in order to avoid alienating more center-left or moderate voters who may not be satisfied with Adams but who balk at that identifier. 

While that kind of detailed strategy might be a few months away at least, some are hopeful that the WFP will be its author. “I think it's going to take that kind of third party, that WFP, to unite people who are, let’s say, on the far extreme of the (Democratic Socialists of America), as well as folks who may be kind of just slightly left-of-center,” Noh said, using the term “progressive pragmatism” to describe the approach he believes the WFP can and will take. “I wish it weren’t oxymoronic.”