109 mayors, all men. When will New York elect a woman?

It was a constant refrain for the two leading female candidates running for mayor of New York City: The city has had 109 mayors, and all of them were men. It was finally time for a woman.

The two candidates, Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley, had experience in government. They had major endorsements from unions, elected officials and newspaper editorial boards. They raised millions of dollars and gained momentum in the final weeks of the campaign.

But Garcia, the city’s former sanitation commissioner, and Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, still fell short, placing second and third in the Democratic primary behind Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president.

New York is one of a handful of major cities where voters have yet to elect a woman as mayor, along with Los Angeles, Detroit and Philadelphia. Boston recently got its first female mayor, and women currently run more than 30 of the nation’s 100 largest cities.

Wiley and Garcia won more than 380,000 first-choice votes between them, or nearly 41% of the votes. Garcia finished just 1 percentage point behind Adams under the city’s new ranked-choice voting system.

But their loss felt like a missed opportunity for those who believed that New York would at long last elect a woman.

“I’m disappointed and sad,” said Christine Quinn, a former City Council speaker who ran for mayor in 2013. “I give a lot of credit to Eric Adams, but I want a woman to be mayor of New York. It is truly, truly disheartening.”

The Democratic primary field was the most diverse ever: Four women were on the ballot, including Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive, and Joycelyn Taylor, a businesswoman. A fifth, Loree Sutton, a retired Army brigadier general, dropped out of the race in March. Of 13 candidates on the ballot, only three were white men. If he is elected in November, Adams will be the city’s second Black mayor.

This was the first time New York City used ranked-choice voting in a citywide election, allowing voters to choose up to five candidates in order of preference. In other cities, candidates have often formed alliances to boost their chances.

While Garcia and Wiley each ran strong campaigns that embraced the notion that it was time for a woman to lead the nation’s largest city, they did so independently.

The two campaigns had discussions about Garcia and Wiley campaigning together, and Garcia wanted to do it, according to a person who was familiar with the discussions.

But Wiley appeared to have reservations on a policy level. Garcia was more conservative on policing, for instance, and was one of three candidates favoured by the union that represents police officers. Wiley wanted to cut the police budget by $1 billion a year.

Observers also suggested Garcia may have had more to gain from an alliance than Wiley. Some of Garcia’s moderate voters, for example, might not have voted for Wiley even if the candidates campaigned together.

Maya Wiley during a news conference in New York on Wednesday, Jul 7, 2021, where she conceded the Democratic primary race for New York City mayor to her opponent Eric Adams. Kathryn Garcia and Wiley placed second and third in the Democratic mayoral primary. Sara Naomi Lewkowicz/The New York Times

Garcia instead struck a late alliance with Andrew Yang, a former presidential candidate, and that helped win over some of his supporters.

Wiley said Wednesday that she did not have any regrets over her decision not to campaign with other candidates.

“We stood as a campaign on principle, and we stood with everyone who met our principles,” she said.

Nearly 130,000 of Wiley’s votes — roughly half of her total support — were reallocated to Garcia under ranked-choice voting once Wiley was eliminated. Adams received nearly 20% of Wiley's votes. The rest were “exhausted” or eliminated in the final round because the voters did not rank either finalist. In the end, Garcia lost to Adams by fewer than 8,500 votes.

Ester Fuchs, a political science professor at Columbia University, said it would have been a smart strategy for Garcia and Wiley to endorse each other, despite their differences, to give each a better chance at beating Adams.

“Why did Adams start panicking when Yang and Garcia campaigned for one day together?” she said. “Garcia did get quite a few of Yang’s voters. That’s how ranked-choice voting can work.”

The new voting system also could have hurt Wiley’s chances in a less obvious way: Under the old system, Wiley — who finished with the second-highest number of first-place votes — would have moved on to face Adams in a head-to-head runoff election.

Women are expected to make gains in the City Council, which could have a majority of female members for the first time next year. But the major citywide offices — mayor, comptroller and public advocate — will be occupied by men, and potentially four of the five borough presidents will be men as well.

Still, Wiley said Wednesday that she and Garcia had made significant strides for women in the city.

“We did shatter the glass ceiling,” she said. “The glass ceiling that said that women could not be top-tier candidates. The glass ceiling that said women would be discounted. The glass ceiling that said we can’t be seen as leaders, and I think we demonstrated that is not true.”

Garcia also referred to the glass ceiling in her concession speech, delivered in front of a women’s suffrage monument in Central Park featuring Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth. Wiley had held a major event earlier in the campaign in front of the statue, appearing alongside feminist icon Gloria Steinem.

“This campaign has come closer than any other moment in history to breaking that glass ceiling in selecting New York City’s first female mayor,” Garcia said. “We cracked the hell out of it, and it’s ready to be broken.”

While some voters were excited simply to vote for a woman, many others were focused on ideology or experience, and were drawn to Garcia’s experience as a manager or Wiley’s progressive values.

Michele Bogart, an art history professor in her 60s who lives in Brooklyn, ranked Garcia first and left Wiley off her ballot.

“She increasingly struck me as a solid, can-do sort of official,” she said of Garcia.

Catt Small, 31, a designer in Brooklyn, voted for Wiley first and also ranked Morales and Taylor on her ballot. After Adams won, Small was rethinking whether she should have ranked Garcia fifth to try and block him.

“I ranked so many women and so many women of colour on my ballot,” she said. “I was really hopeful that this was going to be the time.”

But Garcia and Wiley did face challenges during the campaign. They had some institutional support, but less than Adams did. They were also not viewed as seriously early on as Yang, even though he had less experience than they did, said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, which analyses women’s political participation.

Some voters also have reservations about electing women to executive jobs like mayor or president, Walsh said, and those may have come into play. These voters tend to be more comfortable seeing women in legislative roles.

“When they’re trying for that top job where the buck stops, there are still gender stereotypes about who can lead,” she said.

Voters might also have believed that a male candidate would be tougher on crime. The city has never had a female police commissioner, for instance, though Adams says he wants to change that. During the campaign, Adams focused intensely on public safety — the top issue for many voters — and highlighted his experience as a former police captain.

And although Wiley and Garcia both surged toward the end of the campaign, the momentum came too late to lift them to victory.

Wiley, for example, won early support from the powerful 1199 SEIU union, but progressive leaders like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did not endorse her until June. Garcia did not register high in the polls until she secured endorsements from The New York Times and the New York Daily News in May.

Garcia and Wiley faced less overt sexism during the campaign than Quinn, who lost to de Blasio in 2013 and was criticised for being unlikable, dowdy and not feminine enough. Ruth Messinger, a former Manhattan borough president, faced similar attacks over her appearance when she was the Democratic nominee for mayor in 1997.

One notable difference was that more female reporters were covering the race than in the past, and they covered gender with more nuance, Fuchs said.

“Gender did not hurt them for the first time in my lifetime,” Fuchs said of Garcia and Wiley. “The media did not weaponise gender in this race.”

The candidates did call out examples of what they viewed as sexism on the campaign trail. Garcia grew frustrated when Yang repeatedly said he wanted to hire her for his administration; she insisted that she wanted to be the mayor, not work for one. Wiley argued that she received unfair criticism for her ties to de Blasio instead of being judged on her own record.

Quinn said she thought both women were held to a higher standard than their male rivals. “They had to be more substantive and more competent than the men to even be considered on par,” she said.

And ultimately, she suggested, some New Yorkers may simply not have been comfortable voting for a woman.

“I don’t know if voters are even aware of it,” Quinn said. “I think it is for many voters ingrained in their being from having lived in such a sexist society for their entire lives.”

But Sutton, who endorsed Garcia after she dropped out of the race, said that while she was sad about the outcome, she was confident that a woman would be elected mayor soon.

“She was 1 percentage point away — it’s heartbreaking yet it’s also exhilarating,” she said. “It should make New York power brokers pay attention.”

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