Maybe now Andrew Yang will stop calling Kathryn Garcia to persuade her to join forces in his quest to become mayor of New York City.
For weeks Yang, the apparent front-runner, has been telling reporters that if elected he would hire Garcia, one of his rivals, to run the nuts and bolts of city operations. He’s been making a similar case to her privately—a lobbying effort both strategic and patronizing. “Andrew is a lovely human being, and he calls me all the time,” Garcia told me last week. “He wants to convince me we should be working together more closely. That’s not why I’m running. I’m not running to be his deputy mayor.”
Garcia is very emphatically running to be elected mayor herself, and on Monday she got an enormous boost, landing The New York Times endorsement. It was a surprise in one sense: Garcia has been languishing in the low single digits in polling. Yet she possesses nearly all of the qualities that voters say they want in a mayor. Garcia, 51, is a lifelong New Yorker who grew up in Brooklyn and sounds like it. Her parents were public servants who adopted Garcia and two other kids; two of her four siblings are Black (“she needs to get that story out there more,” a Democratic strategist says). Garcia is a Democrat, but her guiding ideology is less political than managerial—she worked her way up in the Bloomberg administration’s Department of Environmental Protection, playing a key role in the response to Superstorm Sandy, then was appointed commissioner of the Sanitation Department by Mayor Bill de Blasio, Bloomberg’s polar opposite. Garcia has a wry sense of humor and refuses to trim her Yankees loyalty in pursuit of votes (“Yeah, I know, I just lost half the electorate,” she says). And she is a she, at a time when female political leaders are ascending; Garcia would break ground as the city’s first woman mayor.
For all of that, though, Garcia’s greatest would-be appeals are her toughness and her competence. She was the first mayoral candidate to call on Scott Stringer to drop out after he was accused of sexual assault. (Stringer has denied any wrongdoing.) Garcia says she believes Stringer’s accuser, but the quick call also demonstrated her decisiveness. Her former boss de Blasio, during his eight years in office, has become infamous for dragging his feet on decisions and meddling in the work of his agency heads. Garcia was a very successful exception, keeping the streets clean and earning the respect of the Sanitation Department’s rank and file, so much so that its union has endorsed its former boss in her mayoral campaign, a rare thing in management-labor relations.
“There was a part of me that just ignored the mayor’s office and said, ‘This is the agenda that I’m pursuing. Tell me if you disagree,’” Garcia says. “If they had a problem, they didn’t get back to me.” As mayor, she says, she would be an energetic public presence, but she would also show up early in the morning at City Hall and demand that things get done. “I know part of the job is being a booster of the city,” she says, teeing up an oblique shot at Yang’s all-cheerleader candidacy, “but the other piece is the day-to-day accountability of, Did we do our job? Are the kids in school? Did we make sure that crime is coming down? Are we setting up those metrics and paying attention to them and ensuring that you are funding the things that you think are most important? Basic management has to happen in order to be effective as mayor.”
Yang is certainly not wrong in wanting to enlist a person of Garcia’s skills for his prospective mayoral team. But they also very much have one tactical eye on the city’s first experience with ranked choice voting: persuading Garcia, who remains a long shot, to name one of them as her preferred number two choice could add crucial votes to the Yang or Adams total if she’s knocked out in an early round. A top Democratic strategist who has worked for candidates in ranked-choice-voting races says he’s surprised such deals haven’t been cut yet. “It feels like a lot of New York’s political class doesn’t understand how ranked choice works,” the strategist says. “In other states and cities, the alliances would have already formed and the coordinated attacks would be happening. Time is running out.”
The most consistent speculation is that Maya Wiley and Dianne Morales will team up to go after Yang. Garcia says she understands the RCV calculus perfectly well—and that she’s in the race to win it on her own. “I don’t need to make an alliance with anyone,” she told me, even before landing the Times endorsement. “Voters think that sounds like you’re trying to game them. And I’m not running to become deputy mayor. There’s a lot easier ways to get that job.”
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