NYC Election Results: Andrew Yang Is Out

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams appeared to take a fragile lead Tuesday in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, but it could be weeks before it becomes clear who is actually on top in the first citywide election to use ranked-choice voting, the AP reports. As ballot counting began Tuesday, a plurality of Democrats ranked Adams as their first choice in the race. It was tough to tell, though, whether that lead would hold. As many as 207,500 absentee ballots remained to be counted. Voters’ full rankings of the candidates have yet to be taken into account. It could be July before a winner emerges in the Democratic contest. Adams, a former police captain who co-founded a leadership group for Black officers, was leading former city sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia and former de Blasio administration lawyer Maya Wiley.

Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who was far behind in early returns, conceded about two hours after polls closed and vowed to work with the next mayor. In the Republican primary, Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa defeated businessman Fernando Mateo. Ranked-choice voting wasn’t a factor because there were only two candidates in the race. Sliwa does not have much of a chance to win the November general election in a city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 7 to 1. In other New York primary results, Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren, who is currently under indictment in a campaign finance case and under fire for her handling of a police killing in the city, was defeated in the Democratic primary. And it was too early to declare a winner in the Manhattan district attorney Democratic primary, but Alvin Bragg was in the lead—slightly. (More on how the NYC mayoral primary will play out here.)