| | | | | |  | | By Ryan Heath | Presented by |  | | | With help from Renuka Rayasam RANKED CHOICE VOTING: IT'S AUSTRALIAN FOR ELECTIONS — Ranked choice voting isn't complicated — but you'd never know it from New York City's mayoral race. When Nightly contacted each of the top candidates, not one of them had a plan for telling their voters how to rank the rest of the candidates on their ballots. Sure, Andrew Yang has been saying for months that he would rank Kathryn Garcia second, and he urged his supporters to do so at a weekend rally — but he failed to even update his website with the instruction. A list of ranked-choice recommendations is not posted on any candidate's site, or printed on their mailers. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave a more detailed RCV guide for downballot races than any of the mayoral candidates did for their own race. That's Election 101 stuff in Australia, my home country and the global capital of ranked choice voting , where the system is used in all elections from college campuses to federal elections. In New York, where I live now, voting may be about to end at 9 p.m. ET, but the crapshoot among five leading candidates is only just starting. Ever since New Yorkers voted by a 74-26 margin to introduce ranked choice voting in 2019 — joining the state of Maine and cities including San Francisco and Minneapolis — the system has been under attack, including from Eric Adams, the leading candidate in today's mayoral race . In a decision that may fuel suspicions, the city's notorious election board won't commit to timely publication of ongoing vote totals. But the real problem has been the failure of the candidates to adapt their campaign strategies to the new system. In a ranked choice system, self-interest dictates that a candidate should make deals with rivals and communicate those deals with voters. But admitting you need voters who think you're only second-best is the antithesis of New York toughness. The lowest-ranked candidates could have formed a coalition to take on the big shots, while the more left-wing candidates such as Maya Wiley, Scott Stringer and Dianne Morales could have worked together to blunt the moderates at the top of opinion polls. Instead it was moderate Kathryn Garcia who did most to explore preference deals, and even that was half-hearted. She failed to return the favor when Yang recommended her as his second choice. Australia's experience with ranked choice voting shows that deals among candidates can affect the results. Australian candidates have won ranked choice elections with as little as 0.2 percent of first choice votes . Senator Ricky Muir won a Senate seat in 2013 after starting with 0.5 percent of the vote: He vacuumed up another half million or so votes from voters who ranked him second or lower, closing a 400,000 vote gap. (Muir is an exception, though. The main outcome the system has led to in the Australian Senate, where eight parties are represented, is diversity without gridlock.) More common are "Anyone But X" campaigns. In San Francisco, mayoral candidates Jane Kim and Mark Leno formed a tactical alliance against Mayor London Breed, getting within 2,500 votes of unseating her in 2018. In New York, Adams — a former Republican — is a vulnerable frontrunner sitting at the top of opinion polls with just 24 percent support. An "Anyone by Adams" campaign could have worked, but his rivals missed that tactical opportunity, leaving it up to individual anti-Adams voters to coordinate to defeat him. Polls alone should have told the leading candidates the usual tactics wouldn't cut it. Five candidates have regularly polled in double digits — Adams, Andrew Yang, Kathryn Garcia, Maya Wiley and Scott Stringer — but none is polling above 25 percent. That means each of them needs to double or triple their vote totals to win by collecting second, third, fourth and fifth preference votes as their lower-ranked rivals are eliminated and their votes are redistributed. In the absence of coordinated rivals, Adams used his frontrunner status to slam ranked choice voting as a form of voter suppression: "Everyone knows that every layer you put in place in the process, you lose Black and brown voters and participation," he told POLITICO. He railed Monday against Yang and Garcia for finally daring to campaign together. By Adams' logic, the same people who voted for ranked choice voting are going to be disenfranchised by it. But voters say they're happy with the system, and Adams is in pole position. In 96 percent of American ranked choice elections since 2004, the candidate with the most first-preference votes ended up winning. It's not even New York's first time at this rodeo: A version of ranked choice voting was in place from 1936 to 1947, allowing the first women and black candidates to be elected to the City Council. The local Democratic machine disliked the reduced control that ranked choice voting forced on them, and worked for years to abolish the system. As the leading candidate, Adams cannot coast to victory under ranked choice. Instead, he must listen to and appeal to voters well beyond his base. If he fails in that task, one of the lower ranked candidates will sweep up second preference votes and overtake him when the final results are tabulated sometime in the week of July 12. If Adams ends up winning, he may work to kill New York's new voting system. His rivals would have only themselves to blame. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas for us at rheath@politico.com, or on Twitter at @politicoryan.
| | A message from Amazon: "This is the first time in my life that I have dental insurance, visual insurance, [and] life insurance." Comprehensive benefits give employees like Leonardo a sense of security. Amazon is committed to creating good jobs with a starting wage of at least $15 an hour and benefits for employees. | | | | | | — Senate Republicans block election reform bill: Senate Republicans blocked Democrats' sweeping elections and ethics reform bill today , likely renewing calls from progressives to nix the legislative filibuster. In a 50-50 vote, the Senate failed to move forward on the legislation, a top priority for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Pelosi. With the bill guaranteed to fail, the path forward is murky at best on an issue that Democrats say they need to resolve before the 2022 midterms. — Biden likely to miss July 4 vaccine target: The Biden administration is likely to miss its goal of providing at least one Covid-19 vaccine dose to 70 percent of adults by July 4, White House and federal health officials confirmed today. The setback comes after a weekslong drop in the nation's vaccination rate and persistent difficulties in convincing younger Americans in particular to seek out the shot. Public health officials also are grappling with a spike in the more easily transmissible Delta variant of the coronavirus that now accounts for 20 percent of all cases and is expected to become the dominant strain in the U.S.
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| — Top adviser to Dem megadonor privately blasts party's prioritization of voting rights bill: The top political adviser to one of the Democratic Party's biggest donors privately urged fellow Democrats last week to abandon the push around federal voting rights legislation in favor of legislative items with better chances of passage. Dmitri Mehlhorn, a key confidant to Democratic funder Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, made the case to advisers to other Democratic megadonors that the attention being placed by activists and lawmakers on the For the People Act was setting the party up for failure, according to people involved in the discussions and emails obtained by POLITICO. — House Democrats urge Biden to extend eviction ban: A group of 44 House Democrats pressed Biden today to extend the CDC's nationwide ban on evictions before it expires at the end of the month. The lawmakers — led by Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) and Cori Bush (D-Mo.) — said in a letter to Biden and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky that without further action "millions of renters will once again face the threat of eviction" next week.
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A view from the 64th floor as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo speaks during a press conference at One World Trade Center on June 15, 2021 in New York City. | Getty Images | THE CITY THAT NEVER COMMUTES — About one-fifth of New York City workers are going back to their offices, according to data from Kastle Systems , which has been monitoring building access activity across the country. But even as city Covid restrictions lift and major New York firms order workers back, many people remain hesitant to resume their daily commutes to Midtown. With office workers a key to New York City's pandemic recovery, Nightly's Renuka Rayasam asked a group of experts: What, if anything, should be done to get them to return to Manhattan? These answers have been edited. "Younger office workers don't really want free tacos (although do keep those free tacos coming), they want respect and attention. We often say that the office is for surveillance. That's of course true but also, for many Manhattan workers whose work takes place on computers, the office is a place where they are mostly ignored and also where they need to further isolate themselves, wrapping themselves up in office blankets and noise-canceling headphones to do work. They can stay home for that! Respecting workers' in-office time with scheduled group attendance, meetings clustered in the course of a single day instead of over a week, public calendars across the hierarchy, at-will office hours with management and bosses and more transparency about larger group projects will bring people to work — at least a couple days a week. Less management chaos and secrecy makes the office more worth attending. Also, obviously, ban cars in Manhattan and make the buses and subways free to all." — Choire Sicha , incoming editor-at-large, New York magazine "For starters, people could lean on Albany to fix the MTA. Those of us who don't have cars have enjoyed not having unreliable overly long subway commutes for distances of less than 10 miles during the pandemic and were pretty happy to get two hours of our day back. New York City can't have a world-class economy without a world-class, accessible public transportation system. It's vital infrastructure." — Elizabeth Spiers, founder of political consulting firm The Insurrection and former New York Observer editor in chief "People are going to return to the office. Just not as many. If 20 to 25 percent of people work remote, that's a big hit to the economies of NY's central business districts. But it's not the office building, it's not the elevators that are holding people; it's the commute. The big factor here is people's fear of trains in transit, and their general dislike of long commutes. We have a once in a lifetime opportunity to remake these 9 to 5 mainly work neighborhoods into much better complete communities where people live as well as work. Time to start is now." — Richard Florida, professor at University of Toronto's School of Cities and Rotman School of Management, and distinguished fellow at NYU's Schack School of Real Estate "Nothing! Midtown Manhattan is one of the most expensive office markets in the world, so if there's a structural fall in demand for office space those buildings will eventually fill up one way or another as companies who want in-person work suddenly find they don't need to resort to Hoboken or White Plains to make it affordable. It's every other city's central business district that should worry." — Matthew Yglesias, writer and editor, Slow Boring
| | | |   | | | "Workers will come back to Midtown Manhattan with or without any intervention by policymakers. If policymakers do decide to take active steps to help workers return then they will just benefit Midtown landlords leading to higher rents and building values. Physical proximity still has a lot to offer and almost no working location is more desirable than Midtown Manhattan. "Even if the pandemic led to a large realignment in how we work, the result would not be persistently empty buildings in Manhattan but lower rents and property values — with rents falling until they reach the point that they are sufficiently low to attract companies back from the suburbs they were previously fleeing to. If New York City takes steps to make it more attractive for employees to return to Midtown Manhattan that would mean that landlords would not need to lower rents as much to attract them back." — Jason Furman, Harvard professor of practice of economic policy; chair of former President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers "The idea of luring people back to a particular place, particularly one so saturated, it's just not clear to me that it needs to be at the top of anyone's priorities." — Betsey Stevenson, a labor economist at the University of Michigan and former member of President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers "The main thing I'm skeptical of is that WFH will stay indefinitely. A year ago I would've said, it's definitely temporary, having talked to a bunch of American white-collar workers about it in a variety of professions. Right now I'm uncertain, due to long-term changes in behavior among workers, many of whom prefer WFH, but companies are trying to get the workers back to the office. Singapore was almost entirely back until it had another outbreak, and Frankfurt is mostly back. New York and San Francisco are taking longer because people there have a once-bitten-twice-shy attitude, the same way they keep masking even outdoors, even if vaccinated, but they're slowly getting back." — Alon Levy, NYU Marron Institute fellow "To bring employees back to the office in a more balanced way, policies should address several key areas. First, power of place. Employers must focus their return plans on the formal and informal activities that benefit from co-location. Sometimes those benefits will be external to the individual employee, with the gains from a mentor or team leader's presence accruing to others. "Second, health and well-being. Examples of policies in this area include staggered start and end times and workdays, mitigating perceived risks from congestion in public transportation and supportive of child and elder care responsibilities. Technology-enhanced building investments, such as pooled waste testing, will also have a role. "Third, competitive places. New York City works because the tremendous value of locating here exceeds the very high costs. Private firms should engage actively with government to ensure the balance remains favorable, so we remain competitive in attracting innovative businesses and a talented workforce. The pressure on state and local public finance, and the prospect of higher taxes on our most mobile economic agents, threatens to undermine that competitiveness." — Sam Chandan, Larry & Klara Silverstein chair and academic dean of the NYU SPS Schack Institute; founder and non-executive chair of Chandan Economics
| | | ALLIES VS. RANSOMWARE — The United States and European governments will coordinate in fighting against ransomware attacks , which have surged in number in recent years, the U.S.' top security official said today. "We have now a new ransomware working group to address the scourge of ransomware that has hurt the U.S. so much, and so many other countries. We understand that the vulnerabilities of one, that we all share those vulnerabilities," Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said after meeting with European ministers for justice and home affairs in Lisbon, Portugal. "This is something we share, that increase of ransomware attacks during the pandemic, and that is an area where for sure we can do more together," said Ylva Johansson, the EU's home affairs commissioner.
| | | | | About 20 percent The percentage of the 20 million Covid-19 vaccine doses the Biden administration pledged to donate directly to other countries by the end of June that has been distributed, according to two U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the matter. The slow pace means the White House may not meet its original late-June target for those doses, the sources said. The shipments so far include 1 million doses sent to South Korea on June 4. | | | | | | "THE WOMEN REOPENING AMERICA" – A THURSDAY CONVERSATION: With more than 100 million people vaccinated against Covid-19, a strengthening economy and relaxed Covid restrictions on businesses and public gatherings, America is on a path to fully reopening. What policies and systemic changes can help women recover from the disproportionate impact of the pandemic? Join Thursday for a "Women Rule" conversation with leading women who are playing a pivotal role in determining what normal will look like for business, politics, schools and the workplace. REGISTER HERE. | | | | | | | | | | As much of liberal America anxiously awaits a series of Supreme Court rulings that could unwind the progressive legal achievements of recent decades, the conservative embrace of John Marshall Harlan, the progressive 19th-century justice best known as the sole member of the Supreme Court to stand up for Black rights and economic protections, is a reason for reconsideration. It's a reminder that the Trump Court wasn't really constructed by Trump, who expected (wrongly, it turned out) "his" justices to do his bidding after the election. Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett aren't the judicial equivalents of Jeannine Pirro and Michael Cohen. — PETER CANELLOS, IN "WHY THE 'TRUMP COURT' WON'T BE LIKE TRUMP," COMING WEDNESDAY IN POLITICO MAGAZINE | | | | A message from Amazon: "Going from nine dollars an hour to now earning 15 an hour at Amazon, I can help my family... and save money for college… if I hadn't taken this job, I don't know where I would be right now. It was life-changing for me."
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