Had Jumaane Williams, the New York City public advocate, decided to run for mayor three years ago, he probably would have won.
I don’t consider this an especially scintillating take. The 2021 Democratic primary for mayor lacked a single dominant candidate. For a while, Andrew Yang led, and then he collapsed. Scott Stringer, the city comptroller, was poised to knit together a winning coalition until a #meToo-style scandal kneecapped his campaign. Kathryn Garcia was a virtual unknown who benefited from Stringer’s fall and nearly won. Maya Wiley was the default choice for progressive voters and never inspired much enthusiasm. Eric Adams, then the Brooklyn borough president, held steady, and narrowly beat Garcia when the ranked choice tabulation was done.
Williams could have entered this race with the best of all worlds. He had the ability, as a Black Democrat who once represented East Flatbush in the City Council, to compete for African American and Afro Caribbean votes in central Brooklyn and even Queens, cutting into Adams’ support. As a proud progressive, he was popular in the socialist belts of Astoria and Bushwick, and could make a strong pitch to wealthier white liberals in Park Slope, Gowanus, and the West Side of Manhattan. It is not hard to imagine Williams, in 2021, fusing together the Garcia and Wiley coalitions, snagging endorsements from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Times editorial board on the way to victory. While concerns about rising crime and the pandemic recovery consumed the race in the final months, the primary was a year removed from the George Floyd protests, and Williams had more than a decade under his belt as a leading voice for police reform in the city. There was a social justice vote to be won, and it would have been Williams’.
Instead, Williams didn’t run. He decided to focus on a bid for governor in 2022. For a variety of reasons, this campaign was doomed from the start, and Williams squandered political capital getting crushed by Kathy Hochul. In 2018, he had nearly beaten Hochul in the lieutenant governor’s race, but Hochul, four years on, was the actual governor, and this made a tremendous difference. Williams ran far worse than the prior two left-wing gubernatorial candidates, Cynthia Nixon and Zephyr Teachout, and raised doubts about whether progressives can ever be competitive statewide.
His trajectory, since then, has been somewhat muddled. The public advocate is a powerless, ill-defined post unique to New York City’s government. At best, it is an ombudsperson for the rest of the city, monitoring agencies, issuing reports, and helping with constituent affairs. Since there’s so little tangible responsibility, it can be a political springboard for a savvy operator. Bill de Blasio was public advocate before he was mayor. His successor in the PA’s office, Letitia James, is now the state attorney general. The most relevant aspect of the position is that it is second-in-line to the mayor. If Adams resigned, Williams would become the acting mayor of New York until a special election.
De Blasio’s identity, in his four years as public advocate, was carved out rather neatly. He was the liberal foil to Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor who ran three times as a Republican. For the many Democrats frustrated with Bloomberg’s third term, de Blasio represented the loyal opposition. Williams was elected in a 2019 special election and has now served alongside two mayors, de Blasio and Adams. This has been awkward for Williams because, at various times, he has been political allies of both men. In 2013, he was one of the few politicians in the five boroughs to endorse de Blasio’s mayoral campaign. In 2021, despite his strong disagreements with Adams on public safety—Adams, an ex-police captain, ran a tough-on-crime campaign and floated a partial return of stop-and-frisk—Williams announced he would rank Adams as one of his top five Democrats when he went to vote.
The two men, Black Democrats from Brooklyn, seemed to have a rapport, and Williams spent the next two years avoiding direct conflict with an incendiary, bombastic mayor who otherwise battled the progressive left at every turn. There is little, beyond identity, that Williams and Adams share, and at the start of this year, a certain amount of political gravity returned.
Williams supports legislation, passed in the Adams-hostile City Council, that would require police officers to report data on lower level stops. Adams is against it. During a press conference, he lashed Williams for daring to back the bill at all. “I find it astonishing that we have a public advocate who pushed for this police bill. He lives in a fort,” Adams said, adding that Williams is someone who is to trying to “erode the ability of police to do protection when you have an entire army protecting your family, and you drive around with police protection, and I don’t know when the last time he was on the subway system.”
And so Adams burned his last bridge with Williams, who does reside on the Ft. Hamilton Army Base in Brooklyn with his wife children.
Williams seemed glad, at last, to battle back.