In what is likely the only televised Public Advocate primary debate, five Democratic candidates jousted on-air last week. (Video of the full debate is available here from NY1.) The race remains both close and out of the public eye, with the most recent public poll (from NBC 4 NY/WSJ/Marist) reporting that 49% of “likely” Democratic primary voters are undecided. Of the likely voters who have a preferred candidate, it’s 16% for Tish James, 12% for Cathy Guerriero, 12% for Daniel Squadron, 3% for Reshma Saujani and 2% for Sidique Wai.
Today, DC 37 announced that it is endorsing John Liu for mayor. In this report, we’ve posted some extended clips of Liu at DC 37’s mayoral candidate forum, as well as a brief post-forum interview with Liu.
Be sure to watch our other coverage of the DC 37 candidate forum here and here.
At the mayoral candidate forum hosted by DC 37, four Democratic candidates responded to a question on whether they were opposed to retroactive pay under union contracts “in principle”. The four responding candidates were Bill de Blasio, Sal Albanese, Erick Salgado and John Liu. Christine Quinn did not attend the forum and Bill Thompson arrived after this discussion.
Be sure to watch our earlier coverage of the DC 37 Forum here.
Yesterday evening District Council 37 held a mayoral forum with five Democratic candidates. We’ll be providing some extended reporting on the forum.
Update #3: DC 37 endorsed John Liu for mayor on May 29th. Extended excerpts of John Liu at the mayoral forum are here.
Update #2: Excerpts showing the discussion on retroactive pay under union contracts are here.
Update: Here are excerpts showing moderator Bob Hennelly in action. In this forum, his campaign season premier, he joined the ranks of the 2013 campaign’s most effective moderators. He skillfully used humor to facilitate the discussion, kept it moving while allowing time for substantive answers and interacted with a very engaged audience. Unlike many moderators, he began with his own impassioned description of the state of the city as Mayor Bloomberg’s term comes to an end.
Our initial clip covers a question, and full answers, on a proposal to allow non-citizens to vote. The exchange illustrates several features of last night’s forum: host Bob Hennelly’s use of humor to effectively facilitate the discussion while keeping it moving, the candidate’s attempts, some humorous, to engage the audience, in this case with their widely varying spanish language skills, John Liu running to the left of the more measured Bills (Thompson and de Blasio) and a very engaged audience which at the start of this question objected to the questioner speaking in spanish rather than english.
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