I don’t find any of the Democratic candidates running to be the next mayor of NYC to be inspiring. In order to write about them, I’ll begin with numbers. I know it is not fashionable to trust polling, but if one takes the majority of polls during the Democratic presidential primary as an example, Biden always led in every poll and Sanders never topped 30%. I recall few pundits ever acknowledged Sanders’ ceiling, and the ceiling for progressives as a whole in such a national campaign. In this case, the polls accurately forecasted a Biden victory in the primary election booth.

But NYC is a different pond. Perhaps a “progressive” candidate like Maya Wiley, freshly endorsed by political influencer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is now the “frontrunner.” Based on today’s report on a current NY1/Ipsos poll of likely Democratic voters, the mountain Wiley has to climb is significant. To be sure, this poll was conducted prior to the AOC endorsement, but how much “juice” does AOC really have (she didn’t move the needle for Sanders. This will be a test of her political influence: it is risky to spend political capital on a high profile, losing campaign, again)?

The top three candidates in order of preference are Eric Adams (22%), Andrew Yang (16%), and Kathryn Garcia (15%). Wiley doesn’t break into double digits (9%) and is behind Scott Stringer (10%). So let’s say the AOC push jumps her above Stringer. Will this endorsement really lift her above Garcia into 3rd place? Again, if one abides by polls, hasn’t Wiley already hit her ceiling? And despite the online media echo chamber re Stringer and Yang, are they really “done” as viable top 3 candidates? (The poll suggests yes for Stringer, but no for Yang). What AOC’s endorsement may have achieved for Wiley is to lift her level of familiarity with likely voters (52% in this poll, behind Yang 85%, Stringer 77%, and Adams 73%). But increased familiarity will bring more scrutiny, which may not help a candidate lacking the experience in government of her likely immediate opponents (Adams and Garcia).

If the Biden presidential primary victory is a harbinger of the mood of Democratic Party constituencies, then experience and a return to regular order in politics and social life are valued more highly by Democratic electorates than a call for big changes. At the national level, candidates like Warren and Sanders failed to “read the room”: Big Structural Change and “revolution” fared poorly in the midst of the daily chaos and deadly incompetence of the former guy’s presidency and the economic and social upheaval of a pandemic. Has Wiley read the room accurately in a race in which a former police officer (Adams) now leads the pack, a race in which likely voters identify crime/violence (46%) and affordable housing (45%) as the top 2 “main problems facing New York today”?