Lessons From the DA's Race: Manhattan Voters Don't Embrace Radical Criminal Justice Reforms

Daily News
June.23.2021

It's over, sort of. Manhattan has never seen a district attorney election (well, primary, but let's not quibble) like this one. Nine candidates threw their hat in the ring, and astonishingly, eight stuck it out to the end. We don't yet have definitive results, but the in-person vote shows Alvin Bragg ahead of Tali Farhadian Weinstein by about 7,000 votes, with at least 27,000 and as many as 59,000 absentee votes yet to be counted. Bragg would be first African-American Manhattan DA in history, while Weinstein would be the first woman and the first immigrant.

My previous writings about this race focused on the substance of the issues, the office and the qualifications of particular candidates. But a day later, it's time to write about politics. With the caution that the available returns don't include those absentees, what did we learn?