A group of nine leading Hasidic sects in Brookyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, including the two large Satmar factions, have decided to back Andrew Yang as their first choice for mayor, sources who were involved in Monday night’s decision told the Forward.
The endorsement locks up the Orthodox voting block for Yang, one of the leading candidates for mayor of New York City, and gives him a welcome boost in the remaining weeks before the June 22 Democratic primary.
With New York City under the new ranked-choice voting system, the Orthodox voting blocs, which historically have been influential in local elections, are also expected to rank Eric Adams, Brooklyn’s borough president, as their second choice and Scott Stringer, the city’s comptroller, as their third. Recent public polls show Yang and Adams in a close race for first place, with Stringer in third.
Andrew Silow-Carroll is the editor-in-chief of JTA
New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang, top, third from left, meets with haredi Orthodox Jewish leaders in Borough Park, Brooklyn, in an undated photo supplied by his campaign. (Yang for New York via JTA)
JTA Two frontrunners in the race for New York City mayor are vying for endorsements from leaders of the city’s ultra-Orthodox communities.
Andrew Yang, the businessman and former Democratic presidential candidate, announced endorsements Wednesday morning from Orthodox leaders in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. They included community activists from the Belz, Bobov and Satmar Hasidic denominations.
Top NYC mayoral candidates vie for haredi Orthodox endorsements April 28, 2021 3:29 pm New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang, top, third from left, meets with haredi Orthodox Jewish leaders in Borough Park, Brooklyn, in an undated photo supplied by his campaign. (Yang for New York)
Advertisement
(JTA) Two frontrunners in the race for New York City mayor are vying for endorsements from leaders of the city’s haredi Orthodox communities.
Andrew Yang, the businessman and former Democratic presidential candidate, announced endorsements Wednesday morning from Orthodox leaders in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. They included community activists from the Belz, Bobov and Satmar Hasidic denominations.
Andrew Yang promised he would not take action on secular education in yeshivas. Eric Adams visited a Brooklyn yeshiva to learn about how it teaches science, math and English. Ray McGuire hosted a roundtable with rabbis in which he boasted about his comfort level praying at the Western Wall.
These are just a few examples of the pointed outreach that leading candidates in the race for mayor of New York have been making to court the city’s Orthodox Jews, which historically have been an influential voting bloc in local elections.
Experts estimate that New York’s 1.1 million Jews make up about 20% of the voters in the city’s Democratic primaries. Historically, they have proved a powerful and even decisive factor in mayoral elections, particularly the approximately 80,000 voters in Brooklyn’s Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox communities, where rabbinic dictates about ballot choices can lead to a reliable bloc of votes.