“Oh no, not me, we never lost control” ~ David Bowie (1970)
Under Counting Overseas
As June 24 approaches, there were a couple of interesting elections overseas which might provide insights for our mayor election.
Conclave election of Pope Leo XIV: As we awaited the white smoke out of Vatican City, Robert Prevost had 1.5% odds according to Polymarket at 8:00 AM yesterday. By the afternoon, it was announced he would be the first American pope.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, good bettors might have an edge in data, but most bettors are analyzing the same data we all have in an “optimal” way. In the election of the pope, one of the most secretive processes, there is not a lot of available data beyond journalistic prognostications.
Open democratic elections such as the mayoral election have polling data. There are also some implied correlated voting trends with macroeconomic factors. There is also gut feeling. That is not a lot of data.Goldstein election of Tim Wilson: Zoe Daniel, running for re-election of the Melbourne Seat of Goldstein in the Australian House of Representatives, gave a victory speech after the Australia Broadcasting Corporation said her reelection was basically secured last weekend. A few days later, challenger and former seat holder Tim Wilson was the victor.
Australia is a veteran to RCV. The greatest lesson to be learned is that people are not always politically driven. Countless studies have proven this. Despite mayoral candidates saying “vote for us” as opposed to “vote for me” — which frankly is confusing messaging — voters are nuanced. They value more than political beliefs when judging their political leaders. It adds chaos to the election process.
When I see semi-recent polls — such as the Siena College one with 20% undecided — my instinct says the 88% for Andrew Cuomo (as of 5/8/25) is too aggressive. 20% undecided means that the election is still not top of mind for voters. Voters are likely both undecided on if they will vote along with who they will vote for. Unless Cuomo starts approaching consistent 1st round polling in the mid 40s% with undecideds < 10%, I would be skeptical of >88% chances.
What’s the Deal with …?
I have two camps of readers. One faction screams “how is this going to impact the mayoral race?” The other hollers for “more Seinfeld.” Recall that non-fat yogurt is what cost Dinkins re-election in 1993.
I answered the age old question: if our mayoral candidates were Seinfeld characters, who would they be?
I developed two data sets: one with quotes of all the Seinfeld characters and the other with speeches + interview transcripts + op eds from the mayoral candidates.
I was able to analyze the term frequency (i.e. how often a word appears) and the inverse document frequency (i.e. how rarely a word is used). This allows me identify the uniqueness of each character/candidate’s communication style. I then compared each major candidate (> 1% in polling) to each major character (>100 lines) to see how similar they are based on their comms. I filled a call sheet by limiting to one character.
For those of you not Seinfeld fans, here is the Chat GPT-4o summary of why each Seinfeld character would make a great mayor.
I will let you decide if these character descriptions are apt comparisons to their candidate counterparts.
The most interesting part of doing this exercise is that Jerry and George were the highest matching characters on average. Jerry’s calmness combined with George’s full range of emotion equates to one real human and one cartoon character. (For those of you wondering, the least similar characters were Kenny Bania and David Puddy).
MayorModel
Now that Eric Adams has dropped out of the democratic primary race, we finally have polls to reflect this change.
A recent Honan poll has Cuomo earning 45% in the first round. I suspect this is the reason for optimism in the prediction markets — and the MayorModel. I will note that Honan was an independent pollster in 2021. When other polls were giving Maya Wiley 16-21%, Honan had her at 7%. She finished with 21%. When other pollsters were giving Andrew Yang 13-20%, Honan had him at 21%. He finished with 12%. It is good for a pollster to be independent, and Honan Strategy Group certainly has a history of not following the herd.
Even without this poll, Cuomo’s numbers are looking good, but a lot can happen in a month and a half. In 2013, de Blasio was polling in the teens around this point before winning the primary.
Enjoy your weekend, all. Get out there and love every minute of it!