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New York Times

Eric Adams won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City on Tuesday night after he continued to hold onto a thin lead in a new tally of votes that included absentee ballots, according to The Associated Press.

Eric Adams won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City on Tuesday night after he continued to hold onto a thin lead in a new tally of votes that included absentee ballots, according to The Associated Press.

The news service called the race for Mr. Adams after results from the city’s Board of Elections showed that he held a lead of one percentage point over his nearest rival, Kathryn Garcia.

With most absentee votes now counted, Mr. Adams led Ms. Garcia by 8,426 votes in the city’s first mayoral contest to be determined by ranked-choice voting.

The results have not been finalized, and there are still a few thousand ballots to count — but with 118,000 absentee votes now accounted for, Mr. Adams had bested Ms. Garcia by a margin that makes it highly unlikely she can close the gap. As the Democratic nominee, Mr. Adams will be the overwhelming favorite to win in November against the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa.

Maya Wiley, who emerged late in the primary as a left-wing standard-bearer, ended up in third place in the tally released on Tuesday. She had come in second place in the initial count of in-person ballots cast on Primary Day and during the early vote period, with Ms. Garcia behind her in third.

But Ms. Garcia overcame a double-digit deficit to overtake Ms. Wiley and to nearly catch Mr. Adams as the ranked-choice voting process played out and absentee ballots were counted. It was a remarkable development for Ms. Garcia, a candidate who until recently was little-known and who lacked the institutional support and the political operation that helped propel Mr. Adams, a veteran city politician.

As of Tuesday night, though, Ms. Garcia had still fallen short of overtaking Mr. Adams, who has maintained a lead since Primary Day, fueled by his strength among working-class voters in Black and Latino neighborhoods and aided by significant support from labor unions.

Under the city’s new ranked-choice voting system, voters could rank up to five candidates on their ballots in preferential order.

Because Mr. Adams, a former police captain, did not receive more than 50 percent of first-choice votes, the winner had to be decided by elimination. In each round, the candidate with the least number of first-choice votes is eliminated and that person’s votes are distributed to the voters’ next-ranked choice. The round-by-round process continues until there is a winner.

The results followed an extraordinary stretch in the city’s political history: the race began in a pandemic and took multiple unexpected twists in the final weeks. Most recently, it was colored by a vote-tallying debacle at the Board of Elections.

There are still some ballots left to account for, and it was not immediately clear on Tuesday whether any of the contenders would mount legal challenges as the race neared its conclusion, though Mr. Adams’s lead, in pure vote totals, was a sizable one. All three leading candidates had filed to maintain that option.

The tally on Tuesday showed that Ms. Garcia strongly benefited when Ms. Wiley was eliminated. She also received a boost following the elimination of Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate with whom Ms. Garcia campaigned in the final stretch. When Mr. Yang was eliminated in the latest tally, that boosted Ms. Garcia from third place to second.

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