Yang-Garcia Juneteenth tag-team ‘offensive’
Eric Adams ripped rivals Andrew Yang and Kathryn Garcia for campaigning together on Juneteenth — which he says represented a broadside against him, a black man leading the mayoral race.
On the holiday Saturday, Yang told supporters to rank Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner, second on ranked-choice ballots — a maneuver the front-running Brooklyn borough president said was offensive.
“That last-minute attempt to derail me on June 19! That is when they did that. While we were celebrating liberation and freedom from enslavement, they sent a message, and I thought it was the wrong message,” Adams said outside St. George’s Episcopal Church in Brooklyn.
“In a year with Black Lives Matters marches, when people talk about inequality, where people are talking about how do we lift up black and brown people in the city as well as all New Yorkers, that was their symbol on June 19, the federal holiday that was put in place,” Adams went on. “So I have a problem with that.”
Yang’s campaign fired back. “We’re expecting all sorts of crazy but this is particularly wacky, even for Eric,” said campaign co-manager Chris Coffey. “Andrew Yang has been saying nice things about Kathryn for months and Eric’s rhetoric won’t stop us from working together on issues we agree on. If Eric can’t work with others, he probably shouldn’t be mayor.”
Garcia spokesperson Annika Reno said, “These cynical attacks are factually wrong and insulting to New York City voters who passed Ranked Choice Voting by a 73 percent margin. We also hope all campaigns would encourage their supporters to fully exercise their voting power in this election, instead of resorting to divisive politics that erode New York City’s democracy.”
Adams’ comments came after Garcia and Yang, who is Asian American, on Saturday passed out campaign material together in Queens, where he endorsed Garcia as his second choice but she didn’t return the favor. The pair campaigned together in Flushing in the morning, and later held a joint press conference in lower Manhattan, after Yang rode along in the de Blasio administration official’s campaign van.
In response, Adams and his surrogates claimed the arrangement is a “back-room” effort and attempt at voter “suppression” to prevent a black candidate from being elected.
“It is very harmful to the process,” former Gov. David Paterson said Saturday in a statement blasted out by Adams’ campaign. “It is an act of political chicanery and introduces a very disturbing dividing of the city’s electorate.”