A Woman Mayor In NYC Is More Viable Than Ever, Even If There Is Not A "Women’s Vote"

Chicago may be the Second City, but it beat New York by four decades and counting when it comes to electing its first woman mayor. Voters did it again in 2019, electing Lori Lightfoot, the second woman, first openly lesbian, and third Black mayor in that city’s history. Across the country 27 of the largest American cities have women serving as their chief executives. New York City has had 109 mayors with one thing in common: they’re all men.

This year, more women than ever before are running for mayor of New York City, and while they face challenges, the path to winning seems more viable than in past elections. This year's female mayoral candidates have more access to donor dollars than in year's past, and a new voting system in place that weakens old-guard power brokers. There’s also broader acceptance that a woman is capable and qualified to be the boss. That doesn’t mean it will be easy.

“Oh my God, there's nothing but sexism in government and politics, all the time,” said Ruth Messinger, a stalwart of city government and a candidate for mayor in 1997. “There's this whole notion of women as executives - a little bit risky.”

When Messinger ran in the '90s she was the only female candidate; this year there are a dozen women who have set up campaign committees to seek the city’s highest office, including five women of color, out of more than 40 candidates for mayor.

The leading women candidates — Kathryn Garcia, who served as the city’s Sanitation commissioner; Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive; Loree Sutton, who was the city’s first Veterans Affairs commissioner; and Maya Wiley, who served as counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio and legal analyst on MSNBC — are running in the middle of the pack right now. Four months away from the June 22nd primary, they are lagging in money and limited public polling data.

But there’s plenty of time for those dynamics to change even in a compressed, Covid-constrained campaign season. Because, in a larger sense, the dynamics of politics and campaigns in New York are changing in ways that go well beyond a female candidate making a bid for mayor.

The shakeup is also behind the scenes: many campaigns are led by women who are pushing to change the norms around how elections are conducted and what a winner is supposed to look and sound like. And the advent of ranked choice voting, in theory at least, puts more power in the hands of voters rather than political clubs and old-school party politics.

When Messinger ran she was trounced by her Republican rival, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who at the time was a popular incumbent which, she argues, is the main reason she lost. But she also notes the reluctance among “certain ethnic and communities of color,” which she would not identify, to see her as a viable chief executive, according to her campaign’s internal polling.

C. Virginia Fields, who succeeded Messinger with two terms as Manhattan Borough President, ran for the Democratic nomination in 2005, the first Black woman to run for a major party nomination for mayor. She ultimately placed third. While she faced controversy over a doctored photo in one of her campaign fliers, Fields said her campaign struggled to overcome people’s doubts in her abilities, which dealt her the death-blow: “Raising money was a Herculean challenge,” she said.

Former City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the only woman running for mayor in 2013, said her race was defined to a large degree by people’s reaction to her as a woman and as a lesbian.

“The second thing that defined my race was my reaction to the reaction,” Quinn told Gothamist / WNYC. “I tried to be less of a lesbian and less of a woman to try to calm people's concerns or fears, which just led to me being less authentic, which was then another criticism I got, which was a fair one, actually.”

Bill de Blasio won the 2013 election with a strong turnout in predominantly Black neighborhoods in central Brooklyn and southeast Queens, as documented by the CUNY Graduate Center and the Center for Community and Ethnic Media. Bill Thompson, who came in second, found his strongest support in the Orthodox Jewish community. Turns out, there was no reliable voting base for Quinn. (She announced Monday that she would not enter this year’s race.)

“Chris Quinn, Ruth Messinger, Bella Abzug [the first woman to run for New York City mayor], all expected a woman's vote,” said Ester Fuchs, a political scientist at Columbia University. “Women who vote in New York City in Democratic primaries do not vote as a bloc,” she added, relying instead on other aspects of their identity, whether it’s race, religion, ethnicity, or neighborhood.

Data from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University shows that voters are coming around, with more women getting elected to legislative bodies. Women account for more than 26% of Congress and more than 30% of state legislatures. But the executive branch is more challenging: there are just nine women governors currently in office.

Debbie Walsh, director of the CAWP, said research shows that voters are more likely to question the qualifications of women candidates running for executive positions, which can lead to doubts about electability.

“If there is this little nagging concern about a woman candidate's qualifications and then the media starts to cover questions of their electability and their experience, it starts to feed on itself and it becomes, in effect, a self-fulfilling prophecy,” she said, pointing to the winnowing of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary field as a prime example.

Marti Speranza Wong, executive director of AmplifyHer, said her organization is trying to elect more women in New York City in part by pointing out the imbalance of representation, and the barriers that keep women from running, such as male-dominated party machines and the political establishment.

“If we don't solve that problem in the City Council level or by electing State Assembly and Senators that are representative, we're going to continue to have this issue in terms of citywide leadership,” said Speranza Wong, noting that currently there are no women in citywide elected office. Only 13 out of 51 members of the City Council are women.

In the mayor’s race, the leading women candidates have to navigate how much they want to talk about being female, and on what issues and in what circumstances that would benefit or hurt them. At a recent forum focused on issues facing Black women, sponsored by the group Community Voices Heard Action, they had no choice.

“Stump speeches out the window,” said forum moderator Christina Greer, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University. “You can speak from the head and you can speak from the heart.”

What followed were revealing moments that spoke to the group’s members in a direct and personal way, said Afua Atta-Mensah, the organization’s executive director. She cited Dianne Morales, the first Afro-Latina to run for mayor, sharing how her own near-death experience due to inadequate medical care informed her healthcare policy; and Maya Wiley, the other Black woman candidate, talking about a participatory justice fund to combat gun violence funded by money diverted from the NYPD, as a way to promote public safety.

“It was clear that some of these issues resonated in a different way for some of the candidates,” said Atta-Mensah.

It’s not just that candidates are having different conversations this cycle, they are running different kinds of campaigns thanks in large part to women, particularly BIPOC women, who have senior roles across the mayoral race - for male and female candidates.

“I think it's pretty amazing, whether you are working for a Maya Wiley or Scott Stringer or any other campaign across the city, you are in a space where there are a lot of women who are setting the stage, setting the strategy and moving the program for their candidates to win,” said Camille Rivera, a senior adviser on Scott Stringer’s mayoral campaign.

It’s not easy work, Rivera said, because it still means challenging the status quo, whether it’s inside the campaign on matters of policy or strategy, or outside the campaign in the press. “And with women of color in particular, BIPOC women of color, the spotlight is on you constantly," Rivera added.

That’s why she said these women are also trying to set a new tone for how campaign teams interact. When the NYTimes ran a recent story examining critical tweets from Sasha Neha Ahuja, a New York City organizer who Andrew Yang hired to co-chair his campaign, women who worked for other mayoral candidates rallied to her defense.

L. Joy Williams, a senior adviser on Ray McGuire’s mayoral campaign, tweeted, ”We may be on different campaigns but I will always stand up for the Sistas I’m in community with every single day. Don’t get cussed out.” She was retweeting a message from Alison Hirsh, who works for Maya Wiley, who sent a message calling for an end to lines of attack that go after campaign staff, “especially women of color who are stepping up to lead.”

A lot can happen in four months. It’s not a lot of time to spread your message and increase name recognition, especially with a pandemic upending traditional methods of campaigning. But plenty of mayoral races have been decided in the final weeks, including the last open primary eight years ago. The current group of leading women candidates said they fully recognize the challenges they face.

“There are enormous obstacles for non-career politicians,” said Loree Sutton, a retired Brigadier General who led the city’s office of Veterans’ Affairs for Mayor de Blasio. While she was one of the earliest entrants to the mayoral race, she’s struggled to gain traction. “The system is designed by incumbents to protect incumbents,” she said, referring to her challengers with previous electoral experience.

“I'm more qualified than any of the men in the race, by far, and so I don't just run as the most qualified woman, I run as the most qualified person,” said Kathryn Garcia, the city’s former Sanitation Commissioner who stepped in to handle multiple crises and problems for the de Blasio administration, including food distribution during the pandemic and serving as interim chair of the New York City Housing Authority.

Garcia said she feels like people vet women candidates differently. It’s a lot of, “‘Yeah, you seem you seem nice, but,” she said, pausing so you can imagine all the doubting questions that follow. “They don't do that to the men. Nobody's saying, ‘Eric Adams or Scott Stringer, what exactly have you managed that’s of any scale?’ Or Andrew Yang, for that matter, who everyone is in love with.”

Dianne Morales said the narrative around who can be an “executive” needs to change.

“The bias of patriarchy is really deeply embedded and ingrained in everyone, not just white men,” she said. Morales, a first-generation woman of color who grew up in Bed-Stuy and raised two children as a single mother, has led two social-service agencies with multi-million dollar budgets.

“A woman who runs a household is, in fact, an executive. The number of things that need to be balanced and managed and executed and the multitasking that needs to happen is extraordinary and always underestimated and undervalued,” she said, while also stressing her professional experience as an executive of large organizations.

Wiley, who has raised the most money among the women candidates and just landed a major endorsement from a union made up largely of women of color, said there have been real obstacles that have prevented more women from even running for office.

“We have historically had a politics that's about machine politics, where candidates who win came from political machines. And that meant a lot more men in the pipeline for positions of power,” she said. Besides efforts underway to improve the pipeline, Wiley credited the city’s public financing system, now with an $8-to-$1 match, with giving less-resourced candidates a chance to compete.

From the days of Tammany Hall, to the modern-day county party organizations, political machines can make it harder for candidates who are not part of their clubs and hierarchy to run for office. They use their expertise in the procedural chess game that is getting on a ballot and then leverage their power on behalf of their own. Men dominate the leadership of the organizations: across the five Democratic county organizations in the city, only one is led by a woman.

But there are signs those organizations are changing, with ongoing fights over how power is wielded within them and a struggle to adjust to a growing cohort of young progressive leaders, including many women.

Add to the mix the city’s first open primary season with ranked-choice voting, which allows voters to select up to five candidates in order of preference. Proponents say it flings open the door to more non-white, non-male candidates and weakens the power of machines because candidates need to appeal to a broader swath of voters.

In the mayor’s race, there have been some early indications that candidates may receive cross-endorsements, with a person backing their first and second choices. State Senator Gustavo Rivera was the first elected official to announce his support for Scott Stringer as his number one and Dianne Morales as his number two.

At a forum earlier this month, when the candidates were asked that question, Morales and Wiley picked each other as their number two. The male candidates either dodged the question, or picked a woman, too.