AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Ranked-choice voting. As New Yorkers head to the polls in the primaries for upcoming local elections, voters will have the chance to vote for not one, but up to five of their preferred candidates. This is a brief explainer from the New York Board of Elections.

NYC BOARD OF ELECTIONS EXPLAINER: There’s a new way for New Yorkers to have their say in city elections, a way that gives voters more choices and can lead to more diverse winners. It’s called ranked-choice voting. Seventy-four percent of New York voters chose to use it in primary and special elections for city offices — mayor, public advocate, comptroller, borough president and city council.

AMY GOODMAN: This is a relatively new system for New Yorkers. It was introduced following a referendum in 2019. It’s also in use in Maine, in Alaska, in San Francisco. It’s gaining interest across the country.

We’re joined now by John Tarleton. He’s editor-in-chief of The Indypendent, which is closely following New York City’s mayoral election. They had Zohran Mamdani on the cover of their January issue. John’s recent piece is headlined “Zohran Mamdani’s Path to Victory.” They were also the first publication to have AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, before she was elected to Congress, on their cover.

Welcome, John, to Democracy Now!

JOHN TARLETON: Amy, it’s great to be with you.

AMY GOODMAN: So, RCV, ranked-choice voting, talk about what it is and how it came to New York, the whole history.

JOHN TARLETON: Sure. So, ranked-choice voting was first implemented in San Francisco in 2004, and it’s now used in about 40 cities and towns across the United States, including in Oakland; Boulder, Colorado; Minneapolis; Burlington, Vermont; Takoma Park, Maryland; and other places. And it’s also used statewide in Maine and Alaska. And like that announcement was saying, we had a voter referendum in New York that approved it in 2019, and we first implemented it 2021 in our last mayoral cycle here in New York.

AMY GOODMAN: And what’s the problem it’s correcting?

JOHN TARLETON: Well, the problem — OK, the problem it’s correcting in our kind of winner-take-all electoral system is that if you vote for a lower-performing candidate in a race where there’s a lot of candidates, your vote can be wasted or spoiled. An example I think many people could relate to in your audience is in Florida 2000, when Ralph Nader got 97,000 votes, and Al Gore ultimately lost the presidency by 537 votes. If there had been ranked-choice voting, Green Party supporters, who might have wanted to keep, you know, a Republican from getting in the White House, they could have made Al Gore their second choice.

AMY GOODMAN: They could still do Ralph Nader first.

JOHN TARLETON: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: But they would make Al Gore second.

JOHN TARLETON: Yeah. And so, all those debates about, you know, spoilers and wasted votes that we get every four years in presidential politics, if we had ranked-choice voting, people could vote both — it allows you to both vote for who you most want, but then to also make a second-choice selection for other candidates that you also like. And it prevents the dynamic if you vote for a low-performing candidate, that someone else that you would least want to win ends up prevailing. So it gives voters more choices and more power in determining the ultimate winner of an election.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, when was it first instituted here in New York? The election is Tuesday.

JOHN TARLETON: Yeah. It was first instituted in our city elections in 2021. Under our rules here in New York, you can vote in order of preference for as many as five candidates. So, yeah, it’s really changed the dynamic of the election here.

AMY GOODMAN: So, for people who might find this ad very confusing, I wanted to play you the New York City mayoral candidates Brad Lander, who was just recently — 

JOHN TARLETON: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — arrested by ICE, and Zohran Mamdani, who released a video in which, I mean, they’re two mayoral candidates who cross-endorse each other using ranked-choice voting. This is what they said.

BRAD LANDER: We both love New York City.

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: And that’s why it’s so important to not send scandal-ridden, corrupt Andrew Cuomo to City Hall.

BRAD LANDER: New Yorkers deserve so much better than a disgraced creep.

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: Agreed.

BRAD LANDER: Zohran, you’ve done a remarkable job building a historic grassroots campaign for a New York City all New Yorkers can afford.

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: Brad, you’ve been a principled, progressive leader in our city for years.

BRAD LANDER: Early voting stars tomorrow, and we both know what we need to do to save our city from Andrew Cuomo. You want to tell them?

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: You go first.

BRAD LANDER: Nah, you go first.

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: Let’s do it together.

BRAD LANDER & ZOHRAN MAMDANI: We’re cross-endorsing.

BRAD LANDER: In New York City, we have ranked-choice voting. That means you can rank up to five candidates for mayor.

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: Brad and I are officially telling our supporters, “If I’m your number one, rank Brad number two.”

BRAD LANDER: “Rank me number one, rank Zohran number two.” Let’s send Andrew Cuomo…

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: …back to the suburbs.

AMY GOODMAN: So, there you have it, as they click their coffee cups. You have New York Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, and you have the city comptroller, Brad Lander.

JOHN TARLETON: Yeah, it’s strange.

AMY GOODMAN: So, explain —

JOHN TARLETON: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — because especially at a time when public officials are being arrested, when the politics in this country are so vitriolic, to have two competitors cross-endorsing each other, explain it again, John Tarleton.

JOHN TARLETON: Yeah, it’s strange to watch political rivals praise each other to their supporters. But yeah, one of the things that — other things that ranked-choice voting does is it both incentivizes candidates, especially similarly minded candidates, to campaign in a more friendly way, so that they can attract those second-choice votes from the supporters of their rivals. And it also creates a structure where — it creates a structure where someone with a more broad base of support is more likely to win an election, because under the ranked-choice voting system, next Tuesday night, when we get the election returns here in New York, if none of the 11 Democrats in the primary ballot surpasses 50%, then a week later, all the ranked-choice votes will be tabulated.

And what happens in ranked choice is the numbers that the lowest-performing candidate — they’re removed, and then the second-choice votes that their supporters made for other candidates are then reallocated, and you move up that chain. As each, you know, candidate is knocked out, the second or even third choices of their supporters get reallocated, until someone surpasses 50%. And so, what you see in that cross-endorsement is that means if Zohran surpasses Brad Lander, then, when Brad Lander is knocked out, this will help bring more Brad Lander supporters into Zohran’s column, and vice versa if Lander surpasses Zohran, the same effect. So it creates a coalition that will combine the forces of both of their supporters and give them a better chance of defeating Andrew Cuomo, who’s the front-runner.

AMY GOODMAN: John, let’s talk about Andrew Cuomo.

JOHN TARLETON: OK.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the DREAM coalition, D-R-E-A-M, which stands for “Don’t rank evil Andrew for mayor.” Talk about what drove Governor Andrew Cuomo to resign, the scandals around that, and what this coalition of groups has — their message, “Don’t rank Andrew Cuomo,” what that means.

JOHN TARLETON: Yeah. I mean, Andrew Cuomo was governor of New York for about 10-and-a-half years. His father, Mario Cuomo, was a three-term governor in the 1980s. He has tremendous name recognition. During his decade in power in Albany, Andrew Cuomo really ran sort of — it was sort of a pay-to-play paradise for special interests.

But the two things that really brought him down in the end, in 2021, is, one, he was credibly accused of sexual harassment of his — by 13 women who worked in his administration, and then the second thing was, during COVID, in the early days of COVID, he signed an order that allowed for COVID-positive patients in hospitals to be transferred to nursing homes, which just — I mean, it set off a massacre in our nursing homes. I mean, to have COVID-positive people going into nursing homes, where older people were the most vulnerable people in the pandemic. So, it’s estimated that as many as 15,000 elders died in these nursing homes because of what — of the order that Cuomo gave. And before he issued that order, he signed a law that gave full legal liability to the hospitals and the nursing home industry, so nobody could be held accountable. Of course, the Greater Hospital Association of New York was a major campaign contributor to Cuomo over many years, so just another case of him doling out favors to his supporters.

But those two things sort of became this mega-crisis, the rampant sexual harassment in his administration and the nursing home. And his administration also went out of its way to deceive the public about how many people had died in the nursing homes. So it all kind of caught up with him. And when it looked like the state Legislature was going to impeach him, rather than go through the humiliation of being impeached, he finally resigned, and then that’s how Kathy Hochul became our governor. And he’s been brooding on that ever since, and he’s trying to resurrect his career in this mayor’s race. And he hasn’t lived in New York City in 35 years. He’s been living up in the suburbs. And now he moved back to the city for this race, seeing an opportunity to revive his career.

AMY GOODMAN: And he’s been way ahead, though that lead has been gradually eroded by none other than the New York state — Democratic Socialist New York State Assemblymember — 

JOHN TARLETON: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — Zohran Mamdani. I wanted to go to the last New York City mayoral primary debate. And this is a key moment, where Andrew Cuomo and Zohran Mamdani face off. Well, they faced off a number of times. This is one of the exchanges.

ANDREW CUOMO: To put a person in this seat at that — at this time, with no experience, is reckless and dangerous. To Mr. Lander and his experience, remember, this was the fiscal watchdog under the Eric Adams administration, which was like the bookkeeper at Tammany Hall.

ERROL LOUIS: Do you want to — Mr. Mamdani?

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: To Mr. Cuomo, I have never had to resign in disgrace. I have never cut Medicaid. I have never stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from the MTA. I have never hounded the 13 women who credibly accused me of sexual harassment. I have never sued for their gynecological records. And I have never done those things because I am not you, Mr. Cuomo. And furthermore, the name is Mamdani, M-A-M-D-A-N-I. You should learn how to say it, because we got to get it right.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, Cuomo’s response to that is “You’ve never done anything.” But he didn’t respond to the charges. John Tarleton?

JOHN TARLETON: Well, Cuomo — I mean, Cuomo is carrying so much baggage into this race, any number of scandals throughout his time as governor, long before the ones that finally took him down. I mean, as Mamdani was saying, Cuomo repeatedly defunded the MTA, our mass transit system. The subway system fell apart during his second term due to lack of repairs. He even at one point transferred millions of dollars from the MTA to assist several upstate ski resorts. So, Cuomo’s arguments that he’s a great manager, you know, I think, bear more scrutiny. I’ve talked to aides of his, former aides, who have said, you know, the guy is a total micromanager, a vindictive bully, and a lot of his energy goes into seeking revenge against people he thinks have wronged him, which is really not a great trait for somebody who’s going to be the chief executive of the city. So, certainly, Cuomo’s history is very dubious.

And as far as with Zohran Mamdani, I mean, I think we are seeing, really, obviously, a generational clash here between, you know, sort of a very tired and stale party establishment and a very energetic challenge from somebody who’s not only younger, but obviously more ideologically to the left, who’s arguing that we should use government as a catalyst for improving people’s lives. He’s promised a permanent rent freeze for 2.4 million New Yorkers who live in rent-stabilized apartments, free and fast buses, universal child care, and also setting up some city-run grocery stores to provide low-cost groceries for people. And so, all of this is anathema to sort of the neoliberal Democratic Party establishment that’s always sort of preaching austerity, and “You can’t really expect too much from government.” And Mamdani is saying, “Well, yes, we can, and we should.” And Mamdani has really — his support has grown rapidly as the campaign has, you know, developed.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, Cuomo was ahead by like 40 points and is now down to single digits.

JOHN TARLETON: And a lot of that is, I think, also Cuomo has tremendous name recognition. So, when he came into the race, you know, again, maybe in some ways he was like an oil slick. You know, his support was a mile wide and maybe an inch deep, at least with some New Yorkers, who, once they — also, very few people at the beginning of the race knew who Zohran Mamdani was. He was elected to the State Assembly in Queens five years ago. He’s a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. And as people have learned more about him and his platform, he’s drawn tremendous support.

Also, I mean, he’s been an incredible presence on social media with all his videos explaining what he’s trying to do, and it’s really captured the imagination especially of younger people, under 35, under 45, here in the city. It’s a real split between people who get their information from sort of legacy media sources, from local news stations, or The New York Times or whatever, and then people who, you know, get other — you know, whether it’s social media or other outlets outside of that kind of very narrow traditional media.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you talk about legacy media. I want to talk about The New York Times, that said it was not going to make an endorsement.

JOHN TARLETON: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: But it instead told voters not to vote for Zohran Mamdani. They talked — they said, “Mamdani is running on an agenda uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges. He is a democratic socialist who too often ignores the unavoidable trade-offs of governance. He favors rent freezes … He wants the government to operate grocery stores, … He minimizes the importance of policing.” Your response to all of this, as you, John Tarleton, have a front-page piece in The Indypendent headlined “Zohran Mamdani’s Path to Victory”?

JOHN TARLETON: OK, first of all, I would say The New York Times is uniquely unsuited to talk about what’s important for working-class people in New York City. I mean, talk about out of touch. I mean, Zohran Mamdani’s ideas, I think, for many people, are starting to seem more and more like common sense. And there’s other towns and cities that have free buses. Michelle Wu has experimented with that up in Boston, and other places have tried it. The same thing with municipal-run grocery stores. It’s like, “Huh, you take the profit motive out of a — you know, out of a grocery store, and it just focuses on providing low-cost food and basics to people in the city.” People are excited about that, and when we’ve seen the tremendous inflation in the last few years, and you go to the grocery store, and the carton of eggs is $9, and prices up, up, up. Well, yeah, so this is a different approach.

And one of the things that’s striking about that New York Times editorial is just this idea that nothing should ever change, that we should just always keep on doing things the way we are. And what this kind of reminds me of, in this race, where you have this very kind of stale establishment figure that’s been around a long time, and then sort of a charismatic challenger who’s, you know, putting out a much more dynamic platform, is of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, where there was — tremendous support started to build up behind Bernie Sanders, and then not only the Democratic Party establishment, but the, you know, liberal media organs, like The New York Times, all rallied around the idea that, “Oh, Bernie Sanders would be the most dangerous and unacceptable person to possibly put in the White House. We’ve got to stop him, no matter what.” And we’re seeing the same dynamic again. And one of the things that’s amusing about that New York Times editorial, when they say, you know, Zohran Mamdani is a very unreasonable man, is they cite Bernie Sanders as a paragon of a leftist politician who knows how to be reasonable and work within the system. So, they’re now holding up Bernie as the —

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, Bernie Sanders just endorsed Zohran Mamdani.

JOHN TARLETON: Yeah, so, yeah, The New York Times editorial is so incoherent. As you said, they announced last year that they were out of the business of doing local endorsements, and then they belatedly summoned this sort of board of experts to do — to share its thoughts. And they kind of divided in who they supported. Brad Lander got the most support of any of the candidates from this board of experts. But then, as Zohran Mamdani’s support was clearly cresting, it almost feels like somebody hit the panic button. Maybe Michael Bloomberg gave them a call. Who knows? And they come out all of a sudden with this anti-endorsement against Zohran Mamdani.

AMY GOODMAN: Think about what happened when AOC was running.

JOHN TARLETON: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: At the beginning, people were knocking on doors. The establishment media certainly didn’t think she would win.

JOHN TARLETON: I’m not even sure — 

AMY GOODMAN: Indypendent — 

JOHN TARLETON: Yeah, I’m not even sure most of the establishment media knew she existed.

AMY GOODMAN: And The Indypendent had her on the cover.

JOHN TARLETON: Yeah, we had her on our cover well in advance of the election, that was held in June of 2018. And when I was reporting that story, one thing I realized as I talked to volunteers who were doing the door-to-door canvassing and the phone banking for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they were telling me over and over again, “Whenever we talk to voters, most of them don’t even know who our congressperson is,” Joe Crowley, even though he had been in office for 20 years. And he was completely out of touch. He lived in the Virginia suburbs. And also, the district had changed dramatically and had become a majority people of color district. So you had a situation where most people didn’t know who their congressman was, and a young, dynamic Latina, people got really excited when they were hearing about that they actually had an option in a district where there had been no challenger for many years.

And it really made me really start to think, “OK, she’s really got a chance here. Nobody even knows who this guy is.” And I also just did some math. I looked at the numbers for turnout in the 2016 presidential primary in that district, and then also in the mayoral primary in 2017, and this was a low-turnout district. And I kind of calculated, “Huh, she could — 15,000, 20,000 votes could win this primary, because not that many people vote in this district.” She ultimately won with 16,000 votes and, obviously, rocked the Democratic Party establishment. And that set off the beginning of the Squad and so much else. And yeah, we had it first on the cover of The Indypendent, and The New York Times didn’t even talk about her until the day after the election. So, I think The New York Times should really sit down and think again about how they approach local politics here in New York.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the history of the left in New York City.

JOHN TARLETON: Oh boy. Well, you know, in the 1930s and '40s, I mean, you know, the Communist Party was a very — you know, was a powerful force in labor organizing. They also managed to elect some people to city council in the — I believe in the 1910s era. Socialist Party ran some very strong candidates. Also, I believe there were five Socialists elected to the state Legislature from New York City in 1920, and they were thrown out of the state Legislature for being Socialist, essentially, in sort of the Red Scare after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. And we didn't have anybody, any socialist, in the state Legislature in New York until 2018.

The same year that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won that historic upset in June of 2018, we had state legislative primaries in September. Julia Salazar, running as a candidate of the Democratic Socialists of America, defeated a longtime incumbent out in North Brooklyn. Since then, eight more Democratic Socialists have been elected to our state Legislature. And every single one of them has won reelection in their districts by at least 65% since then. None of them has ever been defeated. So, obviously, for all the scaremongering about socialism, at least so far here in New York, when socialists win office, their constituents must be happy with the job they’re doing, because they keep on getting overwhelmingly reelected.

And I think the bigger story here is this is providing a real challenge to the traditional Democratic Party establishment in New York. In 2016, when Bernie Sanders ran that insurgent campaign, at the end of it, there was sort of this giant sort of national conference in Chicago that I covered, and it was organized by the National Nurses Union, which was one of Bernie’s big supporters. And you had all these grassroots people from all over the country. And the message that was kind of going out is, “Let’s take the energy from the Bernie campaign and run local races.” And, you know, Bernie was like, “Run for school board. Run for Congress. You know, get out there and do it. Bring the political revolution back to your hometown.” And people were all excited. I was in a circle where Larry Krasner introduced himself, saying he was running for Philadelphia district attorney. He had represented protesters for many years there. And he got elected the next year. So, there was all this ferment and excitement in the air.

And then I came back to New York, and I looked around and in the primaries, which were held in September back then, I realized, of all the congressional and state legislative primaries, which are dozens and dozens in the city, there was only one race where there was even a challenger to a Democratic incumbent. So, 10 years ago, if you won office in New York, it was essentially yours for as long as you wanted it.

That’s no longer the case. And so, Democratic Socialists won races in different parts of Queens and Brooklyn, in particular. And for a while it looked like they had sort of been contained to certain parts of the city. But with the Zohran Mamdani race, he’s popularized their ideas and brought it to a much larger audience here in New York. And the Mamdani campaign is really the largest electoral effort the left has undertaken in this country since Bernie’s presidential campaign, running for mayor of a city of almost 9 million people.

AMY GOODMAN: So, as we begin to wrap up, you are the editor-in-chief of The Indypendent — 

JOHN TARLETON: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — which is about to celebrate 25 years, “a free paper for free people.”

JOHN TARLETON: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve been active in almost all of those years.

JOHN TARLETON: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the significance of this institution, your paper that has really grown? It’s a website. It’s a radio show, social media.

JOHN TARLETON: Yeah, radio show on Pacific station WBAI. Yeah, I mean, The Indypendent, we started 25 years ago to provide an alternative here in New York City. We’ve always emphasized really covering visionary social movements that are fighting for change and justice here in New York and beyond New York. And in the last 10 years, we’ve really also started to closely follow electoral campaigns where there’s real options for change that are on the ballot, and have followed that, really, the rapid development of electoral left here in New York, as well. And what we try to do is amplify and bring forward the voices of all these people in the city fighting for change. And we also are a place where young journalists get a lot of opportunities to build their skills and develop. And we certainly appreciate all the sudpport our readers and everybody else has given us over the years. We’re grassroots-funded. And it’s been quite a journey.

AMY GOODMAN: You also, John Tarleton, are the nephew of Texas’s liberal Frances Farenthold, known as “Sissy” Farenthold. In 1971 she was the only woman elected to the Texas House. She led a revolt against corruption, then overcame the odds to become a serious candidate for Texas governor.

JOHN TARLETON: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: In '72, she lost a bid to be the Democratic Party's vice-presidential candidate, but later went on to head the National Women’s Political Caucus to recruit women to run for elected office, dedicating the rest of her life to nuclear disarmament, human rights in Central America, abolishing the death penalty. You come — you have quite a legacy there.

JOHN TARLETON: Yeah. Sissy was a remarkable woman. She died several years ago at the age of 94, lived an incredible life. She was definitely an icon in sort of Texas liberal politics. She served in the state Legislature for four years. When she entered the state Legislature in 1968, she was the only woman in the House, and Barbara Jordan was the only woman in the state Senate. And yeah, she led a crusade against corruption within the Texas state government, the speaker of the House, governor implicated in real estate scandals. And that, you know, ultimately led to her gubernatorial campaign in 1972. And she sort of assembled an early version of what we’d call, you know, the rainbow coalition, of a multiracial coalition, a lot of young people. That was the first year 18-year-olds could vote. And she ultimately finished in second, behind a millionaire cattle rancher named Dolph Briscoe, but it obviously made a real impact.

And one of the reasons she fell short, there was a controversy during the later stages of the campaign where she criticized openly the Texas Rangers, which is this paramilitary police force in Texas that had a horrible record in the past of murdering large numbers of Blacks and Mexican Americans in South Texas. And she grew up in South Texas, and she spoke openly about it. And that, you know, brought a lot of criticism to her. And I asked her one time, “Do you regret speaking out about this, in that it might have hurt your campaign?” And she was like, “No, I don’t, because why would I run for office if I’m not going to tell people what I believe in?” So, that was who she was. And she was a great person. She was also — in the final couple years of my dad’s life, she was with him all the time. She was a very compassionate person in her private life, as well as being an exemplary public servant.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, John, thank you for your years of service, and congratulations on your upcoming the 25th anniversary of The Indypendent. John Tarleton is its editor-in-chief and has been closely following New York City’s mayoral race. They had Zohran Mamdani on the cover of their January issue. John’s most recent piece, “Zohran Mamdani’s Path to Victory.” We’ll link to it at democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.