New York goes to the polls as Eric Adams stands on brink of becoming city's next mayor and De Blasio files paperwork to run as governor
New Yorkers head to the polls Tuesday in a mayoral election that is virtually guaranteed to elect black former policeman Eric Adams as the next leader of America's biggest city.
The centrist Democrat is expected to trounce Republican candidate and volunteer crime fighter Curtis Sliwa in the liberal-voting bastion to become just the second African American to lead the Big Apple.
If the 61-year-old Adams wins, he will succeed unpopular progressive Bill de Blasio, whose two-term limit ends December 31.
The next mayor will also be tasked with leading the city's recovery after the pandemic, which has killed more than 34,000 residents and closed hundreds of thousands of businesses.
As mayor for more than eight million people, he will also oversee America's largest municipal budget, crippled by the COVID-19 crisis, and its biggest police force and public school system.
Both candidates have vowed to fight the rise in crime throughout the city, as Sliwa, 67, has gained support from New Yorkers upset with outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio's vaccine mandate.
But despite de Blasio's lack of popularity in the city, the outgoing mayor has filed paperwork to start a new committee that could raise money for statewide elections.
He has not officially declared he is running for governor of New York, but has said he will continue in public office.
Polls in the city opened at 6am and close at 9pm.
Almost 170,000 people out of some five million registered voters have already cast ballots in early voting.
The earliest results likely will not be released until at least 10pm.
Democratic Mayoral Candidate Eric Adams arrived at PS 81 in Brooklyn to cast his vote
Adams is facing Republican Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa in the race
New Yorkers headed to the polls on Tuesday to cast their ballots for New York City mayor
Adams, who is widely considered the frontrunner in the mayoral race, defeated progressive rivals in June's Democratic primary by mainly pledging to crack down on violent crime that soared during the pandemic while also vowing to reform the police department.
That has sparked the interest of some Upper West Side residents, the New York Times reports, with Steve Rush, 65, a retired city worker who identified himself as a moderate Democrat saying he wants to see the next mayor handle police reform with sensitivity and without compromising public safety.
'I think he has a healthy caution about NYPD,' Rush told the Times early Tuesday morning, adding: 'We have to do public safety in a way that doesn't hurt minority communities, as it has.'
Adams has gained strong support from working and middle class voters of color outside Manhattan, and with labor unions.
He promised to tackle wealth inequalities and reform the education system, as well.
But as mayor, Adams will have to grapple with a severe lack of affordable housing, violent chaos at the notorious Rikers Island prison and the effects of more extreme weather events on New York City's creaking infrastructure.
One of his trickiest balancing acts will be trying to reform police practices while keeping onside a heavily unionized force that feels it has been underappreciated during the Bill de Blasio era.
Adams opposes defunding the police, a policy that is a rallying cry for many on the American left. He is also seen as being friendly towards the business community and has not called for higher taxes for wealthy residents.
In a news conference after he cast his ballot, Adams was seen wiping away a tear
He is widely considered to be the favorite to win the mayoral race
After casting his ballot at Public School 81 in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn early on Tuesday, he painted a picture of New York City 'battered and beaten' by violence, the COVID pandemic and an economic downturn as he promised to return the city to its working-class roots.
'The policies that I ran on, they were clear,' Adams said in an emotional news conference Tuesday morning. 'It's about being safe. It's about working on behalf of blue-collar people.
'If we abandon blue-collar Americans, we're going to lose our party,' Adams said of the Democrats. 'I don't believe we're doing that.'
He also spoke about what this election means to him, as he clutched a photo of his late mother, Dorothy, who died on March 30 at age 83.
'This is an amazing day to reach this point,' he said. 'Back in 1977, my mom brought me into that polling place.
'Every little boy or little girl who was ever told they'll never amount to anything - every child with a learning disability, every inmate sitting in Rikers, every dishwasher4, every child in a homeless shelter - this is for all of you,' said Adams, who has dyslexia.
'I only have three words: I am you?'
Adams was born into poverty in Brooklyn in 1960, and was raised in a large family living in a working-class neighborhood of Queens. His mother was a cleaner, and his father was a butcher.
Adams briefly ran errands for a gang as a teenager. When he was 15, he was beaten by two NYPD officers after they arrested him for criminal trespassing.
That sparked his determination to join the NYPD so he could reform it from the inside. Adams entered the force in the mid-1980s, serving 22 years and rising to become a captain.
In 1995, he co-founded "100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care," an advocacy group designed to fight against racism in the police and that still exists today.
Adams retired in 2006, winning election to the New York State Senate that year. He served until 2013, when he was elected Brooklyn borough president, providing a springboard for his mayoral ambitions.
'We won already,' Adams said on Tuesday, as he wiped tears from his face. 'I'm not supposed to be standing here, but because I'm standing here, everyday New Yorkers are going to realize they deserve the right to stand in this city also.
'This is for the little guy,' he said.
Sliwa is seen arriving to vote with his wife, Nancy Regula, and a rescue cat named Gizmo
Adams is facing Republican founder of the Guardian Angels Curtis Sliwa in the election.
Over the past few weeks, Sliwa, 67, has been keenly focused on public safety and addressing homelessness as the city's crime rate has skyrocketed.
Sliwa says his decades leading the Guardian Angels crime fighting group qualify him to keep New Yorkers safe.
'There will be safe streets, safe parks, safe subways. There will be safe schools,' Sliwa said on his last day campaigning, according to ABC 7 News. 'That's what I've been doing as head of Guardian Angels for 42 years.'
He has also tried to capitalize on anger over the vaccine mandate, and has tried to cast Adams as an elitist who is out of touch with everyday New Yorkers.
Around 2,300 firefighters were off work on Monday, as a rule enforcing COVID vaccination. Monday's deadline applied to all municipal workers, ranging from police officers to parks employees. Twelve firefighters from Ladder 29 in Mott Haven, in the Bronx, were sent home on Monday after reporting for duty unvaccinated
Andrew Ansbro, head of the Uniformed Firefighter's Association, on Monday night said that Bill de Blasio was rushing the process
The election also comes amid an increase in crime city wide
The election comes amid an increase in crime throughout the five boroughs.
According to data from the NYPD, rape incidents are up 2.1 percent over last year, felony assaults are up 8 percent and grand larcenies from automobiles are up 14.7 percent.
Shooting incidents, meanwhile, are up more than 2 percent, and the number of hate crimes this year is nearly double that from the same time a year before - up 94 percent.
The election also comes as de Blasio's vaccine mandate for all city employees, ranging from police officers to parks employees, goes into effect.
On Monday, about 9,000 of New York City's 378,000 municipal employees were put on leave without pay as the vaccine mandate went into effect, de Blasio announced on Tuesday.
Under the mandate, all city employees had until 5pm Friday to show that they had received at least one dose of the COVID vaccine or request an exemption.
About 92 percent have now received at least one dose, including a large number of first responders, CNN reports, while about 12,000 other employees have applied for a religious or medical exemption.
City officials are expected to rule on those cases in the coming days, and those who requested exemptions can continue working at least until their case is decided.
The mandate has not resulted in any service interruptions for the city police, fire and sanitation departments, de Blasio said on Monday, but angry essential workers protested in Manhattan against the rule.
'When we go to calls, we don't judge and say are you worth saving?' said one protester, speaking to Fox News on Monday. 'But now our livelihoods and our families well being is a question, are we worth it? We never asked that question during the pandemic.
'Now we are being thrown to the trash like garbage. It's not right.'
Tensions are running high in the city and when Kamala Harris, who was in New York City on Monday evening for a gala at Carnegie Hall, celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network, ran into a group of angry anti-mandate protesters, she was heckled.
In Staten Island on Monday, five demonstrators were reportedly arrested for blocking sanitation trucks from leaving the station, in protest against the mandate.
Andrew Ansbro, president of the FDNY-Firefighters Association, told Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham on Monday night that they were not anti-vaccine, but they did not support a vaccine mandate.
He criticized the de Blasio administration for their timeframe, describing it as unworkable.
'When you tell someone they have nine days to make a decision for a vaccination or lose their job, they don't want to work with you,' he said.
'Teachers were given over a month, and corrections does not have to make the decision until December 1st.
'So once again, the mayor is showing that people that care for criminals have more rights than people who care for the average New Yorker.'
Ansbro said that he was unable to confirm the figure of 2,300 firefighters calling in sick over the mandate, because the fire department did not share their data with the union.
Outgoing mayor Bill de Blasio has filed paperwork to run for statewide office
Meanwhile, outgoing mayor Bill de Blasio filed paperwork that sets him up for a run for governor.
On October 27, Bloomberg reports, de Blasio filled out two out of three forms required to create a new committee called New Yorkers for a Fair Future.
Once he files the last of the paperwork, the committee can start fundraising for statewide office.
De Blasio said in an interview with New York 1 News on Monday that the committee is 'a vehicle that I'll be using to get the message out about things we need to do differently in New York City and New York state.'
He said he plans to continue in public service, but declined to go as far as to officially declare his candidacy in a Tuesday interview on MSNBC.
'There's a lot that needs to be fixed in Albany,' he said, instead. 'I look forward to being part of that discussion.'
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