Early frontrunner Andrew Yang slips in New York mayoral poll

Andrew Yang has fallen to fourth place in two polls ahead of New York City’s mayoral Democratic primary election on Tuesday, weeks after being depicted as a tourist candidate.

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In new polling conducted by the New York Post in conjunction with pollster McLaughlin, the former presidential candidate and an early frontrunner in the race languishes with 9.6% of voters saying he is their first choice, lower than the 13% in a Marist poll published earlier this week and 15% in a separate poll from PIX11/Emerson College.

Former Brooklyn borough president Eric Adams comes in with 21% support, with Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, and former sanitation department chief Kathryn Garcia tied at 16%. The poll was conducted among 1,000 likely Democratic voters with a 3.1% margin of error.

Pollster John McLaughlin said that while Adams may be in the lead, a fifth of voters are still undecided and , calling it a “tenuous lead,” he told the outlet.

The pollster said the city’s many and diverse Hispanic voters had yet to put their weight behind any single candidate. “Hispanic voters are an important part of the final outcome,” McLaughlin said. “They haven’t coalesced around anyone.”

Yang’s political team have challenged the candidate’s slip in polls, saying that internal polling suggest a tighter polling numbers.

“We’re still doing very, very strongly with Asians, Jews, Latinos, and white moderate voters,” Chris Coffey, one of Yang’s campaign managers, told Vanity Fair. “The Marist poll [which had Yang in fourth] doesn’t mesh with Andrew’s reception in the street.”

But political postscripts are already being compiled. The latest poll also found that Maya Wiley, backed by Bronx-Queens congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Kathryn Garcia, could benefit from a ranked system of ballots, with voters backing the candidates as their first and second choices.

Equally, McLaughlin said, undecided voters who hadn’t made any choices could tip the scales in any direction.