Tracking the Machine
What my new 2025 NYC Mayoral Endorsements Tracker tells us about the state of the race
Despite the name and focus of this Substack, I don’t particularly enjoy reliving unpleasant memories. But it’s often necessary to elucidate certain recurring historical forces (or ghosts), and so in this case, we are, regrettably, going to take a trip back to July 2024. Carlos Alcaraz had just slaughtered Novak Djokovic in straight sets to win his second straight Wimbledon title, while the Yankees were clawing their way back into first place. Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song” had finally reached number one after twelve weeks on the chart. Taylor Swift had just played her 113th Eras Tour in Zurich, celebrating the milestone by playing a medley of her “favorite songs” in the acoustic set, namely “All You Had To Do Was Stay,” “Right Where You Left Me,” “Sad Beautiful Tragic,” and “Last Kiss” (all total longshots). And after weeks of fierce insistence that he would continue his reelection bid, President Joe Biden had become “more receptive,” according to the New York Times, to the idea of dropping out, while CNN reported that Biden had entered a “contemplative stage.” What changed? After a not-particularly-subtle dig from Nancy Pelosi on Morning Joe (“It’s up to the president to decide if he’s going to run, and time is running short.”), a steady trickle of congressional Democrats began to urge Biden to drop out, escalating from Lloyd Doggett to Jamie Raskin to Adam Schiff, eventually culminating in Chuck Schumer driving from Brooklyn to Rehoboth Beach to inform him that no more than five of the fifty-one Senate Democrats supported Biden, and to beg him to drop out before they went public.
When Biden did finally drop out later that month, he did not immediately endorse a replacement (for about thirty minutes), and commentators wondered if prominent Democrats like Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer might throw their hat into the ring. But according to the Wall Street Journal, Vice President Kamala Harris spent “more than ten hours on phone conversations with more than 100 party leaders, members of Congress, governors, labor leaders, and leaders of advocacy and civil-rights organizations.” Biden dropped out at 1:46PM; virtually every single elected Democrat in the country, including Whitmer and Newsom, endorsed Harris by 5PM.
The point of this stylized flashback is that in a moment of uncertainty, with a political party paralyzed by fear, short on time, and facing a high-stakes decision about its next figurehead, the endorsements of elected officials and other party elites mattered a lot. Or to pull from political scientists Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller’s 2008 book The Party Decides, when it comes to nominations for general elections, “the most consequential contests remain the candidates’ fights for prominent endorsements and the support of various interest groups and state party leaders.” So today, I’m launching my tracker of NYC mayoral endorsements. I’ll walk you through which endorsements I’m tracking, how I’m counting them, and what the results say about the state of the race.
I’d advise taking these with a grain of salt though. I’m stealing this idea from the recently deceased FiveThirtyEight.com, which started tracking endorsements for both presidential primaries in 2015, and used The Party Decides as its guiding principle for much of their coverage that year. Polls, we were told, were far too unreliable to be predictive in a race with so many candidates, months before most voters had started paying attention. But an aggregation of different kinds of endorsements could give you insight into who was winning the “invisible primary” that Cohen and co. deemed the “most consequential contest.” Then, Marco Rubio took a commanding lead in endorsements, while Donald Trump did not receive a single one. It turned out that the “party,” as represented by its elected officials and influential elites, could not decide the winner for its voters, and the FiveThirtyEight team was left with egg on their faces.
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortes won a similar victory in New York City’s Democratic Party in 2018, unseating longtime Queens powerbroker Joe Crowley, even though he received support from the Governor, the Mayor, both US Senators, eleven House Representatives, thirty trade unions, and thirty-one local elected officials. A year later, public defender Tiffany Caban came within 55 votes of defeating sitting Borough President Melinda Katz in the race to become Queens District Attorney, with the latter again enjoying widespread institutional support. Insurgent candidates can win nominations without this support, if the elites and institutions are sufficiently out of step with the voters that they purportedly represent.
But both nationally, and in New York City, this is rare, partly because those power brokers have a vested interest in not being caught out of step in this way, and partly because a large majority of card-carrying members of both parties simply don’t care that much about nomination fights, especially local ones. Even for an office as prominent as Mayor of New York City, fewer than a million of the city’s 4.3 million registered Democrats turned out to vote in the 2021 primary. The rest were happy to outsource the decision to the endorsers, a large plurality of whom chose Eric Adams, the eventual winner.
I can’t tell you whether this will be one of these rare insurgent races. Many Democrats do seem fed up with their elites. Many others seem interested in facing chaotic and #unprecedented times under the leadership of comfortingly familiar faces. So while the endorsements are not as magically predictive as we’d like, they usually contain valuable signals worth tracking. Here’s how I’m tracking them.
Elected Officials
I’ve made a list of all relevant New York City elected officials. This includes the 50 City Council members, the 66 State Assembly Members and 28 State Senators representing the city in the State Legislature, the two US Senators and fourteen US House Representatives representing the city in Congress, the city’s five District Attorneys and Borough Presidents, the citywide elected offices of Public Advocate, Comptroller, and Mayor, and the statewide elected offices of State Comptroller, Attorney General, Lieutenant Governor, and Governor. I’ve removed the six of these elected officials currently running for mayor (Lander, Myrie, Ramos, Mamdani, and both Adams’s), because you don’t get credit for endorsing yourself. I’ve assigned each office an arbitrary point value, roughly proportional to the number of people in that office’s district or jurisdiction, while also factoring in the power, prestige, and prominence of the office. And relying heavily on the City and State’s endorsement tracker article (although I believe I’ve scooped them on a few of these!), I’ve logged every candidate endorsement from these officials I can find. I also have an arbitrary point value for former elected officials, which is that I value them at half of what they would be worth if they were still in office. This applies to the endorsements of Cuomo by former Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr and former State Comptroller Carl McCall.
Group Endorsements
I’m tracking two kinds of group endorsements: unions and “organizations,” which I’m defining as groups that I’m pretty sure are not unions, which includes some edge cases like the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees. This latter group also includes local Democratic “clubs” like West Side Democrats and the Central Brooklyn Independent Democrats, as well as hyperlocal parties like the NYC Democratic Socialists of America and the Staten Island Democrats. All of these organizations have some amount of power, in the form of volunteer networks, email lists, and social media accounts, and their endorsements can generate news coverage and send valuable signals. I assigned points to union-endorsements based on the number of dues-paying members in that union. The endorsements of the biggest unions, like the service workers union 32-BJ SEIU and the public sector workers union DC 37, matter quite a bit, probably at the level of a US House Representative endorsement. I consider all non-union “organizations” equivalent to one another because it’s very difficult to determine how many members a local club has, or whether that’s even a fair metric of their influence. And while candidates can rack up some points with an accumulation of many “organization” endorsements, I do not value each individual “organization” very much. Candidates do court their endorsements, but I get the sense that some of these clubs are just five under-employed dads that like to meet up and chat every other week and have a website to commemorate that for some reason.
Where Things Stand Today:
It is still early, and the vast majority of elected officials have not yet issued endorsements. Not all of them will, but I project that we are probably less than halfway to what will end up being the total number of endorsements this cycle. We’re also still waiting on endorsements from the Tier One Unions, worth 15 points each in my scoring. With that said, it’s clear that Andrew Cuomo (Elected Officials Score–41, Organizations Score–26, Overall–67) has a commanding lead. His nine endorsements from current elected officials span four boroughs (he notably does not yet have an endorsement from an official in his native Queens), all levels of government, and include officials who supported both Eric Adams and Andrew Yang last cycle. They are all focused in outer boroughs, in predominantly Black neighborhoods like Harlem, or in predominantly Black neighborhoods in outer boroughs like Brownsville and Bedford-Stuyvesant. His biggest coups so far are the endorsements of Representative Ritchie Torres, the heterodox firebrand representing the Bronx who desperately wants to be elected Governor next year, and Carl McCall, the Black Brooklynite former State Comptroller who defeated Cuomo in a fierce 2002 gubernatorial primary, in part by making the case that Cuomo was a nepo baby outsider who didn’t understand the concerns of the Black community. His endorsement is indicative of the sea change in Cuomo’s standing among Black elites in the Brooklyn Democratic Party, which is the key to his current standing in the race.
Not far behind Cuomo in terms of support from elected officials is the race’s newest entrant Adrienne Adams (Elected Officials Score–30, Organizations Score–0, Overall–30). An impressive slate of endorsers showed up to Speaker Adams’s campaign launch in the Rochdale Village Mall last week, giving her a big boost right off the bat. Notably, most of her endorsers are also outer-borough Black elites, so they likely come at the direct expense of Cuomo’s campaign. And she actually leads Cuomo in terms of the raw number of endorsements (twelve to eleven), but as hers are more concentrated in her caucus in the city council, they are cumulatively worth less. She does have some higher-value endorsements, like that of State Senator James Sanders and former Manhattan Borough President C Virginia Fields. But the potential for her campaign lies in the looming specter of endorsements she does not yet have from Queens machine elites like Representative Greg Meeks, DA Melinda Katz, and Borough President Donovan Richards, as well as her close ally and mentor Attorney General Leticia James. Speaker Adams has close ties to all four of these officials, and will take a formidable lead in this category if she can secure these. If they wait too long, or if any one of them endorses another candidate, she’s probably toast. At this moment she has no organizational endorsements at all, having missed many of their endorsement panel events. By contrast, Cuomo is also leading the field in organization score, with key endorsements from the Staten Island Democratic Party, the carpenters’ union, and the city’s largest Teamsters chapter.
While Speaker Adams and Cuomo fight it out among the officials who endorsed Eric Adams last cycle, Brad Lander (Elected Officials Score–10, Organizations Score–16, Overall–26). and Scott Stringer (Elected Officials Score–16, Organizations Score–8, Overall–24) have tried to consolidate support among the officials and institutions that aligned with Maya Wiley and Kathryn Garcia. Neither has made much headway so far, but the endorsements they do have are big ones: House Representative Jerry Nadler for Stringer (as well as two State Assembly members) and NYC Public Advocate Jumaane Williams for Lander. Lander also dominated Stringer among local democratic club endorsements, including a few from groups in Stringer’s home turf like the Three Parks Independent Democrats and the Hell’s Kitchen Democrats. The former endorsement matters a great deal to me, because that organization usually canvasses and sells merch at a table right by the subway stop of my childhood home on the Upper West Side. I wonder how many other voters feel this way about the Three Parks Independent Democrats. It’s gotta be at least a few.
Stringer, it’s worth remembering, did very well with both organizational and individual endorsements last time around, but when news of his sexual harassment allegations broke, many of these endorsers abandoned his campaign and switched to Wiley or Garcia. It will be interesting to see if any officials who endorsed Stringer in 2021, and then renounced their endorsements weeks before election day, will now flip-flop again and endorse him this time.
And neck and neck with both of them in this tier is Queens State Assembly member and democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani (Elected Officials Score–19, Organizations Score–6, Overall–25). In many ways, it’s surprising that Zohran has any institutional support at all. The vibe and rhetoric of his campaign seems to echo that of the insurgent campaigns of AOC, Tiffany Caban, and before them, Bernie Sanders, proud socialists relying on a mass network of small-dollar donations driven by organizers and an intense social media presence, openly flaunting the political establishment and declaring most long-time officials enemies of the political revolution, who are out of step with the needs of regular voters. Unsurprisingly, those long-time officials are usually loath to endorse such rhetoric. But the DSA has been around for a couple years now, and this week Zohran announced endorsements from five elected officials, rocketing him into the same tier as establishment progressives Lander and Stringer. Notably absent, however, were the endorsements of fellow DSA members State Senator Julia Salazaar and State Assembly member Emily Gallagher. It would be an embarrassing loss if Zohran were unable to secure these endorsements, and a valuable coup for whoever else could.
Zellnor Myrie still struggles to get his campaign off the ground in this area. His lone endorsement is quite valuable: US House Representative Dan Goldman, who represents parts of Downtown Brooklyn, Park Slope and lower Manhattan. But that’s all he has so far, and he’s going to need more if he is going to assemble the cross-coalition campaign that pulls from both the Adams voters in Zellnor’s native Caribbean Brooklyn neighborhoods and the Garcia voters that seem most receptive to his ambitious policy agenda. So far, he has institutional support from neither camp.
And finally, completely absent from this chart at all, with no endorsements at all from any elected officials or organizations, is the sitting mayor, Eric Adams, who keeps insisting that he’s running for re-election, and that he’s going to win. If there’s one thing you can learn from this lengthy, meandering exercise, it’s that, at this point, there is not a single party elite in the entire city who believes this to be true.