The Morning Dispatch: After de Blasio

Happy Wednesday! Yesterday was a great day: The Dispatch’s pirate skiff grew by six! Please give a special TMD welcome to Harvest Prude, a reporter who is joining us from World Magazine, and our new interns—Emma Rogers, Price St. Clair, Tripp Grebe, Jonathan Chew, and Jeffrey Lam. We can’t wait to share all their work with you.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The Department of the Interior announced yesterday it was suspending oil and gas leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, reversing a Trump administration move from last winter.

• Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas issued a memo yesterday officially terminating the Trump administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols, better known as the Remain in Mexico program. The Biden administration had paused the program back in February.

• Democrat Melanie Stansbury soundly defeated Republican Mark Moores in a special election conducted in New Mexico yesterday to fill Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s former House seat.

• JBS—the world’s largest meat processor—was hit with a ransomware attack this week that forced the company to shut down nine beef plants across the United States and disrupted production at several poultry and pork facilities. JBS officials say they expect most plants to reopen today. The White House believes the ransomware attack originated from a “criminal organization likely based in Russia.”

• The Biden administration announced a series of efforts on Tuesday intended to “build black wealth and narrow the racial wealth gap,” including additional rules against housing discrimination, and a prioritization of “small disadvantaged businesses” in federal government contracting.

• The United States confirmed 22,797 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday per the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, with 5.7 percent of the 401,501 tests reported coming back positive. An additional 642 deaths were attributed to the virus on Tuesday, bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 595,207. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 19,355 Americans are currently hospitalized with COVID-19. Meanwhile, 1,475,390 COVID-19 vaccine doses were administered Tuesday, with 168,489,729 Americans having now received at least one dose.

New York State of Mind

On June 22, New York City Democrats will head to the polls to choose their party’s nominee for mayor in a ranked-choice primary that is all but guaranteed to determine who will succeed Bill de Blasio at the helm of the United States’ most populous city.

In a departure from tradition, the Democratic Party opted for a ranked-choice primary this year—a system that will allow voters to order their top five candidates by preference. The votes will be counted in a multi-step process: If no candidate garners 50 percent of the first-place votes, the candidate with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated, and his or her supporters’ votes are redistributed to whomever they listed as their second choice. The process repeats until one candidate attains a majority.

So who’s winning? Initial surveys of likely Democratic voters allowed Andrew Yang—the 2020 presidential candidate with sky-high name ID—to emerge as the race’s clear frontrunner, a role he enjoyed for several months. But the race has tightened significantly in recent months.

A recent poll of likely Democratic voters conducted by Emerson College and PIX11 News showed that Yang (16 percent) had been surpassed by former Sanitation Department Commissioner and interim New York City Housing Authority Chair Kathryn Garcia (21 percent) and retired police officer and Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams (20 percent). New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer (10 percent), former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio Maya Wiley (9 percent), and progressive organizer Dianne Morales (7 percent) were the only other candidates to score above 5 percent in the survey.

Crime, housing, and pandemic recovery have emerged as some of the biggest issues on the campaign trail—a marked contrast to what Democrats are talking about at the national level.

“I don’t think that a lot of people a year-plus ago would have said crime is going to be the number one issue on the minds of New York City Democratic voters,” a Democratic consultant involved in the race told The Dispatch. “A year ago during the George Floyd protests in New York, I think a lot of people would have said it’s going to be police reform, it’s going to be going to the left on all of these issues, when now we’re seeing the complete opposite happen.”

Adams—a black man who says he was inspired to become a cop after being beaten by an officer when he was 15—has surged in the polls by making safety a top priority of his campaign. “We cannot allow New York to go back to a city that is unsafe,” his website reads. “The debate around policing has been reduced to a false choice: You are either with police, or you are against them. That is simply wrong because we are all for safety. We need the NYPD—we just need them to be better.”

Yang—who’s never held elected office—has made the implementation of a basic income program a centerpiece of his campaign, reviving an issue he featured during his presidential campaign. Under his plan, 500,000 New Yorkers living in extreme poverty would receive an average of $2,000 per year, with the goal of growing the program over time “as it receives more funding from public and philanthropic organizations.”

“Our goal is to end extreme poverty in New York City by putting cash relief directly into the hands of those who desperately need help right now,” Yang’s website reads, “ensuring that every household has an annual income that is at least above extreme poverty, taking into account the true cost of living in New York City.”

Garcia—whose bump in the polls coincided with the New York Times Editorial Board’s endorsement of her—is playing up her housing policy chops. She’s pledging to create 50,000 units of “deeply affordable” housing and otherwise boost housing supply by ending apartment bans and “discriminatory zoning,” as well as expediting private partnerships to build more.

With time running out—early voting in the primary kicks off on June 12—the campaign has grown increasingly negative as candidates look to separate themselves from the pack. Adams this week dismissed Yang’s presence in the race as a “joke” that is “not funny anymore.” Yang, for his part, slammed Adams as a career politician whose “moment has passed.” Weeks after Yang praised Garcia as someone he hoped would be a “partner” in his administration, he turned around and criticized the job she did as the head Department of Sanitation. These lines of attack are sure to reemerge in tonight’s debate.

As Sarah pointed out in yesterday’s edition of The Sweep, ranked-choice voting throws a massive wrench into political polling, an industry that is already under heavy scrutiny following massive misses last November. The unpredictable reshuffling of votes that occurs during ranked-choice primaries makes forecasting a likely winner a difficult task for pollsters. The expectation is that there will be six or seven rounds of vote counting before a winner is declared, meaning many voters’ ballots will be reapportioned in a way horse-race polling doesn’t track.

“[Polls] are looking at who people’s first choices are,” the Democratic consultant said. “And that’s not how this works, right?” 

Meanwhile, the polls we do have at our disposal are not as credible as election analysts typically hope for. As New York Times reporter Dana Rubinstein pointed out last week, the region’s three biggest pollsters—Quinnipiac University Poll, Siena College Research Institute, and Marist College Institute for Public Opinion—have not conducted any surveys for this race, and likely won’t until the Democratic nominee is decided, if at all. The absence of reputable polling has confused a lot of political junkies and operatives in the city, the Democratic consultant said, because “no one knows what’s legit and what isn’t.”

Worth Your Time

• Politico reporters Meredith McGraw, David Siders, and Sam Stein spoke with more than 20 Republican lawmakers, ex-lawmakers, strategists, and staffers for a recent article, and picked up on a common theme: Many in the GOP are worried about the Trump-related litmus tests dominating the party today, and how they are creating a “lost generation” of conservative policymakers across the country. “Political parties have gone through concerns about talent drains before,” they write. “At the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, Democrats warned that the bench of up-and-coming lawmakers he left behind was painfully thin as the party suffered tremendous setbacks in Congress and the statehouses. Trump, too, oversaw the loss of seats down-ballot. But unlike Obama, he has not receded from public view after leaving office. And his continued presence has sparked fears—mainly, but not exclusively, from the GOP diaspora—about the narrowing of the party.”

• Kate Julian is out with a long and thought-provoking piece in The Atlantic about the United States’ relationship with alcohol—and how it’s evolved over the years. “Since the turn of the millennium, alcohol consumption has risen steadily, in a reversal of its long decline throughout the 1980s and ’90s,” she writes. “Even before COVID-19 arrived on our shores, the consequences of all this were catching up with us. From 1999 to 2017, the number of alcohol-related deaths in the U.S. doubled, to more than 70,000 a year—making alcohol one of the leading drivers of the decline in American life expectancy. These numbers are likely to get worse: During the pandemic, frequency of drinking rose, as did sales of hard liquor. By this February, nearly a quarter of Americans said they’d drunk more over the past year as a means of coping with stress.”

• If you are anything like us, you probably enjoy a nice plate of chicken wings from time to time. (We got two orders of them at a reporter lunch in D.C. yesterday.) Josh Dzieza has a great piece in The Verge this week about the future of food delivery—restaurants creating “virtual brands,” or aliases, designed to boost their placement in food delivery app search results—and how chicken wings are central to the gambit. “Wings, like pizza and unlike, say, tacos, handle delivery well, and some of the restaurants that specialize in wings, like Wingstop, were already adept at digital ordering and particularly well-suited for the pandemic,” Dzieza writes. “Wings are also extremely simple to make. ‘It’s a one-ingredient menu, right?’ says [Franklin Junction CEO Rishi] Nigam. ‘There’s no barrier to entry. You and I could launch a wing brand by 6PM tonight.’ Crucially, no one brand dominated the category, and there is no proprietary wing type or sauce, so any given restaurant’s overnight wing brand had a decent chance of winning attention on the delivery apps. This made wings an obvious first target for restaurants that had idle kitchens and needed additional revenue.”

Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• On Tuesday’s Advisory Opinions, David and Sarah chat about the latest happenings at the Supreme Court, a copyright case involving Andy Warhol, the legality of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s call for a coup, critical race theory in schools, and much more.

• Sarah says she is “PUMPED” to see how ranked-choice voting affects the New York City mayoral race—check out this week’s Sweep to see why. Plus, Chris Stirewalt stops by to provide some analysis on a special election in New Mexico, and Audrey takes a look at the gubernatorial race in Virginia.

• Jonah’s Remnant guest yesterday was some guy named David French. Ever heard of him? They start by discussing critical race theory’s philosophical origins, and end by debating superhero morality. In between, they touch on First Amendment jurisprudence, crippling video game addictions, and the ongoing debate over whether Army of the Dead is actually worth watching.

Let Us Know

Let’s see if the new interns read all the way to the bottom this morning: What is the best piece of work-related advice you received early in your career? 

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Haley Byrd Wilt (@byrdinator), Audrey Fahlberg (@FahlOutBerg), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), Ryan Brown (@RyanP_Brown), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).