Adams holds on to lead in wide-open NYC mayoral primary: poll

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams is leading the field of Democrats vying to become New York City’s next mayor ahead of Tuesday’s primary, but ranked-choice voting means the race is far from decided.

A new Ipsos poll released on Monday found Adams as the top choice for 28 percent of New Yorkers, while former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang comes in second place with 20 percent support.

While those numbers bode well for Adams, it’s still well below the 50 percent threshold needed to win the nomination outright. And given the city’s new ranked-choice voting system, which allows voters to rank candidates by preference, other contenders will have a chance to pull ahead. 

The Ipsos poll simulated the effects that ranked-choice voting could have on the contest, projecting that the primary could go to a seventh round of counting before a winner is declared. 

In that scenario, the vote could come down to a head-to-head match-up between Adams and Yang, with Adams leading his opponent 56 percent to 44 percent, according to the Ipsos poll. 

Recent polling has consistently shown Adams as the front-runner in the primary, a position his opponents have been increasingly aggressive in challenging. Yang went on the attack against Adams at a debate last week, and over the weekend he and another candidate, Kathryn Garcia, campaigned together in an effort to stem Adams’s momentum in the race.

The Ipsos poll showed Garcia, a former New York City sanitation commissioner, running in third place, at 15 percent in the initial vote count. 

The poll is based on responses from 2,924 New York City residents gathered from June 10 to 17. It has a credibility interval of 2.8 percentage points for the entire sample.