Lefties’ Loss
With crime soaring, NY tunes out progressives
GOTHAM’S self-styled progressives are going to lose Tuesday’s Democratic mayoral primary, and they should be glad. The relentless chaos of the past few months shows that nobody cares about “progressive” issues, like bike lanes or a higher minimum wage, when crime is rising — all they care about is order. Multiple polls show: Voters’ main issue in this race is public safety.
Last week’s Post poll of potential Democratic voters shows that 29.4 percent rank crime as their most important issue, nearly triple the second big issue, housing, with 10.6 percent. The results mirror a Manhattan Institute poll showing that 52 percent of New Yorkers are worried about crime.
Poorer people and minorities are the most fearful, because crime hits them hardest: In the Post survey, 35 percent of Bronxites were voting mostly on crime, compared to 26.3 percent of Manhattanites; 38.7 percent of people making less than $20,000 picked crime as top of mind.
These voters will ensure that a moderate will serve as the Big Apple’s next mayor. Of the eight men and women still standing, four are moderates, and three —
Post pick Eric Adams, Kathryn
Garcia and Andrew Yang — have a credible shot at winning City Hall.
Of the four progressive candidates, only one, Maya Wiley, polls well, and even if she consolidates the ranked-choice votes of all four, it won’t be enough to win.
The progressives, of course, are despondent. All over lefty urban Twitter — mostly affluent, young and white — the cries are the same: Why weren’t there questions about bike lanes at the debates? Why doesn’t anyone care about climate change?
They don’t quite blame the voters. Rather, the implication is that the voters are dumb: People are afraid to ride the subway not because entirely random slashings, stabbings and pushings drove the number of violent felonies on the subways from 64 in April to 116 in May, more than three times higher than in 2019, when adjusted for ridership. Rather, progs think, they’re afraid because the
media, by reporting on the news, have tricked them.
But progressives’ best hope is a tough-on-crime major who wrests today’s numbers — a murder rate that’s 53 percent higher than in 2019 — down. When crime is high, New Yorkers only care about crime, and they don’t care about much else.
Worried about pedestrian deaths? You should be: They’re up 21 percent this year, compared to 2019, with 57 dead, so far, this year. But you don’t hear much about it, do you? When people are worried about being shot, they’re uninterested in street design: 1990, with 701 traffic deaths, compared to 2019’s 220, was also the year of a record-high 2,262 murders.
Want more investment in public parks? The good liberals who live around Washington Square aren’t going to support more funding for the city’s parks when their park has been turned into an all-night, drugfueled slash-fest.
Want enlightened policing, better homeless services, “social justice,” reduced racial tension, better environmental policies? They’re so low on potential voters’ list of priorities — all in the single digits — that you can barely see them.
More bike lanes? In the late 1980s and early ’90s, the city’s pro-cycling ’zines were filled with tips about how to avoid
violent robbers on the Brooklyn Bridge and how to prevent your bike from being stolen.
Better subway service? With ridership still below half of preCOVID levels, in part because of fear over crime, the constituency for on-time service is indefinitely smaller.
The $15 minimum wage, sick leave for all workers, universal pre-K: The city only achieved those things during the early de Blasio years because crime was so low that New Yorkers could relax and broaden their interests to other matters. Righterthan-average Mayors Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg paved the way for New York’s progressive renaissance (Bloomberg was progressive on many issues himself ).
The best thing for the city’s left wing is a closer-to-rightwing mayor (within the liberal New York context, of course). Once murders edge down closer to 300 a year, rather than 500, progressives can then merrily go back to advancing their causes, some good (more bus and bike lanes) and some bad (legalizing prostitution).
Then they can complain to their friends over brunch in the city’s safest neighborhoods about the bad old days of yet another moderate mayor who had to save them from themselves.