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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning everyone. By the way, how about Michael Hill singing us in this morning? We're going to have to get him to sing the weather one day on the show. We will begin today with our continuing coverage of the New York City mayoral campaign. The New York Times has a story today called Who's Winning the New York Mayor's Race? Even Pollsters Are Confused. Gothamist has a story called On the Campaign Trail, Andrew Yang Tries to Live Up to The Hype.

NY1 is covering Eric Adams, defensive stop-and-frisk when it's used legally, Adam says and they're covering state senator and former New York City comptroller and mayoral hopeful John Liu, endorsing Yang despite significant policy differences. Plenty to talk about with primary day four weeks from today. Yes, four weeks from today. Absentee ballots are already in people's homes. Some people could theoretically have already cast a vote and mailed it back. It's time to start deciding as we welcome Spectrum News, NY1 political anchor, Errol Louis, host of Inside City Hall on NY1 weeknights at seven o'clock.

As some of you know, Errol and I and Josefa Velasquez from THE CITY were the questioners in the recent Democratic mayoral primary debate and we will also be doing that in the Republican primary debate tomorrow night at seven. Our Brigid Bergin is with us, senior political correspondent for WNYC and Gothamist. Good morning, Brigid. Good morning, Errol.

Brigid: Good morning, Brian.

Errol Louis: Good morning. Good to be with you.

Brian: Brigid. What's it like for Yang out on the stump as a celebrity for his presidential campaign, but a newcomer to New York City politics? What was it like for you covering him out there the other day? I see you wrote about that, too.

Brigid Bergin: He's obviously a very enthusiastic candidate, enthusiastic campaigner. He's spent a year doing this across the country. I'd actually seen him in New Hampshire when I was covering Mayor de Blasio when he was also running for president. It wasn't the first time I'd seen him on the stump but certainly, New York City voters are a unique creature. We started the day up in Harlem last Thursday, a lot of retail politicking, a lot of glad-handing which you're used to seeing with any candidate out in the stump, but certainly one of the things that people would just shout out, people would drive by in a car, and they'd say, "Hey, Andrew Yang," or, as they were walking into the subway, they'd be talking about his universal basic income plan.

One woman, said to him as she was walking down to the subway, "You're still going to give us $1,000?" He smiled and said, "I'm working on something like that," which is an interesting point because he does have a universal basic income plan or a direct cash plan for New York City voters but it is much different than the national plan, for obvious reasons. We are dealing with a smaller budget, and it's only $2,000 a year for the entire year for the neediest 500,000 New Yorkers. That's not the type of conversation you're going to have when you're standing out in the stump when someone's running into the subway.

It was a really interesting day. Some in a bunch of different situations. Some were really strong. Some showed some of what he's still learning about New York City.

Brian: One incident you mentioned in your piece was Yang getting embarrassed when someone asked him his position on the law known as 50-a, a state law that shields many police disciplinary records from public view, and he didn't seem to know what the term "50-a" referred to. What is that representative of? Has there been fallout from that lack of knowledge?

Brigid: It's so interesting, Brian, we are in this just new cycle that moves so, so quickly. In many ways, that feels like old news. That happened last Thursday. Yes, he was asked by New York Post reporter Julia Marsh, did he agree with the repeal of 50-a? For the full context of what was happening in that situation, he was trying to introduce his police reform proposal, and while he was doing it, there was a heckler standing behind him who was shouting nonstop throughout the entire press conference. It made it hard to hear him. I'm sure if you were trying to present a proposal, it probably made it hard to present it.

When he was asked that question, he stumbled, and you got the sense that he wasn't exactly sure what she was asking about. He was standing with Edwin Raymond, former police officer who is running for City Council who tried to give him a cue. Then he said he believes there should be more transparency, started to answer the question. As you could hear if you heard the story, it definitely sounded like he was flustered. I asked him later, we sat down and talked, is that something that he's experienced a lot? He took it in stride, said, "Look, it's New York, I expect New Yorkers to have lots of opinions, and I wouldn't have it any other way, but those nitty-gritty details are challenging."

Brian: Errol, on that same day, your in NY1 colleague, Courtney Gross had to correct Yang after he proposed creating shelters for victims of domestic violence. What happened there?

Errol: Well, that was a case where there was a specialized forum. In fact, it was Christine Quinn, former speaker of the Council, who now runs a nonprofit that deals with homeless families. She had a candidate forum or a succession of interviews and when it came time for Andrew Yang to answer questions about it, he said, this is something that he's done frequently throughout the campaign. It almost seemed as if he was thinking in the moment. He says, "Well, you know what? It would really be helpful if we had shelters for victims of domestic violence."

My colleague, Courtney gross, who was asking the questions had to point out that we've had those for years, and there are in fact, thousands of New Yorkers who have taken advantage of them. These are the kinds of little stumbles that some people think are important. Others think that they're not terribly disqualifying or politically damaging. I would say that there's a constituency out there. Frankly, a lot of them are your listeners, Brian, who, month by month and year by year, accumulate quite a lot of knowledge about how the city works, and what we need to do to fix certain things about it.

These are not trivial questions, issues like domestic violence, issues like police accountability. These are really serious, and in some cases, literally life and death issues. Andrew Yang has stumbled across some of that, and his supporters say, "Well, he's an outsider, and that's what we need." There are others, though, who think that we've been spending weeks, months, and years trying to get this stuff right for the benefit of New Yorkers who need us to get it right and candidates have to do a little bit better than that as we get closer to primary day.

It's been an issue that is daunting the Yang campaign. I don't think it's necessarily going to stop him from doing however well he was going to do, but he is certainly along the way, losing some votes here and there every time he talks about an important issue that has a sizable constituency and he indicates that he hasn't given those issues very much thought.

Brian: Errol Louis and Brigid Bergin with us covering New York City mayoral race. You both reported today on state senator and former comptroller John Liu endorsing Yang despite policy differences on policing. Liu is notably to the left of Yang on that. Errol, to the other side of your Spectrum News, Spectrum on this issue, you did a story last night on Eric Adams, who's usually neck and neck with Yang for number one and the few polls that exist if you don't count undecided, which is really in first place.

Adams is defending the use of stop-and-frisk by police, when it's used legally, but stop-and-frisk has become a very tarnished term because of how it was used under Mayor Bloomberg. What is Eric Adams actually defending here, Errol?

Errol: What he's defending Brian is what's called a Terry stop. Terry versus Ohio is the Supreme Court case that gives this police activity its name. The Supreme Court has determined that it is in fact legal, constitutional, acceptable, and so forth. Cops will tell you as a matter of strategy, it's actually essential that for reasons that fall far short of probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed if a police officer thinks that there might be something strange going on.

The example that Eric Adams gave during our debate, which I think is right on point is, if you see somebody you know squatting behind a dumpster at 4:30 in the morning in an alley, the cops have a right to go over and say, "What are you doing? Who are you? What are you doing here?" It doesn't mean you get to search them, you don't get to slap handcuffs on them. You can't be so intrusive, you can't even go through their pockets, but you can't stop them and ask, "What is going on here?" Eric Adams, having spent a couple of decades in the police department cannot conceive of policing without that elemental basic tool. Now, the way this debate has gotten so politicized over the years, and because there were so many abuses over the years, especially the Bloomberg years, whenever somebody says, "Stop and frisk, or stop, question, frisk," there's a political constituency out there that says, "No, no, no. We can't do that.""

Eric Adams is trying-- It's a difficult thing to do in the middle of a political campaign. He's trying to establish for people, "Wait a minute. We can't throw out the baby with the bathwater. It is not only legal, but it's essential and acceptable that cops have some ability." If you see somebody in a place where it looks like they don't belong, or if you just need some information, you can briefly detain people and it's not a constitutional violation. What he's saying is that at a time of rising crime in New York City, it would be a good idea to not throw out the baby with the bathwater because we need the cops to have at least some level of engagement if we ever want to get these guns off the street.

Brian: Brigid, politically speaking for Adams, is this a double meaning positioning, do you think? On the one hand, he's making a specific distinction between constitutional and unconstitutional use of stop-and-frisk, which is substantive and meaningful and maybe important to public safety. On the other hand, just saying, "Stop-and-frisk," as often as he seems to like to say, it signals more aggressive policing to those who want to hear it that way.

Brigid: Yes, I think when you go out and talk to voters and while the public polling is limited, when you see what voters say is among the issues they're concerned about, public safety does tend to be a leading issue right now. It's something that I heard consistently from many of the voters that Andrew Yang was talking to on the Thursday I was out with him. I think that there is an effort on the part of Adams and his campaign to make clear that he is the candidate that is taking the most conservative stand on public safety.

Brian: Brigid, a New York Times story today by Dana Rubinstein with the headline that says even pollsters are confused about who's winning in this Democratic primary race. The article makes the point that the three top polling organizations Quinnipiac University, Maris College, and Siena College, these are all academic public opinion research institutes, all three of them had put out more than a dozen polls combined by this point in the competitive 2013 primary that got Mayor de Blasio into office. Those same three pollsters have done exactly zero polls so far this year.

Some of the pollsters tell the Times that rank choice voting makes it more difficult to get an accurate read. Rank choice voting for those who don't know, I think most of our listeners know by now, will allow voters to choose up to five candidates in a ranked-choice order of preference. What's your take on the impact that rank choice voting is having?

Brigid: Brian, it's really fascinating. We've had a handful or four of these City Council special elections where small pockets of the city, small pockets of voters have been able to engage with rank choice voting and actually use it to cast their vote. The problem with what has happened so far is there's so much that we don't know about how they cast their vote. We know the results, ultimately we know how the results tallied in the end, but we don't know things like how many voters voted for just a single candidate, bullet voted. It's unclear at this point.

Five is a lot of choices for voters to be able to rank. When you think about the ability to rank up to five candidates for all of the city-wide races or the city offices, mayor, comptroller, public advocates, city council, borough president, that's a lot of ranks to hold in your head. It will be fascinating to know how many voters actually choose to rank all five. Or do they just rank three? Or do they just rank two?

I think that those types of decisions are part of why it makes it hard to pull because we don't really understand voters' behavior with it yet because we haven't seen it yet. We're going to learn a lot come June in terms of both how voters act and how we can determine how they're thinking about their choices going forward. Since we haven't done it here in the city yet, it is really hard to gauge where voters stand.

Brian: I'll tell you a little story. Somebody I know who has their absentee ballot in hand already called me up the other day and asked me to help walk them through the mayoral candidates and what they stand for because they think I know stuff. We had a conversation. I was trying to match their preferences with the right candidates and figure out the rank choices with them as a one-on-one political consultant. That was done and they said, "Well, now I want to go on to borough president," but we're exhausted. There we are.

Errol, it could be a good thing that there isn't a lot of polling because polls often do play a destructive role in political campaigns, both tempting candidates to pander and tempting voters to stay home thinking the outcome is already known, but your news organization did do a poll recently. How did you take rank choice voting into account? What do you think there was to actually be learned substantively from your results?

Errol: There are some things to be learned. The way we did ours with Ipsos, we asked them on other things, how people felt about certain qualities of candidates. It's not quite the same as saying, for example, "I want somebody who has a lot of government experience," then we ask, "How important is government experience to you?" Depending on their answer, you could read that as an endorsement of the candidacies or some support for the candidacies of those who have government experience. There are a couple of things that we could do that way that I think shed some valuable light on it.

Certainly, the story you tell is exactly on point, which is that you can't reasonably expect, even if you called and called and called so that you get somebody who finally is who you're looking for, Yes, they're registered to vote, yes, they're a frequent voter, yes, they're a Democrat and they live in New York City, and then, you're starting to ask them to spend 20 or 30 minutes on the phone with you answering all of these questions. People just don't want to do it. It's very hard, it's very expensive, and it's very difficult. We found, I thought by asking substantive questions about people's underlying preferences, you could get something useful out of it.

What we can't do, and I'm sure you have the same frustration, Brian, as I do, which is that no matter how many times you tell the audience, "This is just a snapshot. It is not a prediction. It is not a prediction. It is not a prediction." That's all people want to use it for. "So and so is going to win. I heard it on WNYC." I can hear you almost screaming in the background, "No, no, no, no. It's just a snapshot of where things work on a particular day." That very much, as you pointed out, undecided is beating all the candidates by a hefty amount.

Now, four weeks from now, by definition, there will be no undecided voters. Something is about to change. That's what everybody is trying to figure out. People are throwing millions of dollars at it to try and figure out, certainly the candidates themselves, the pollsters who are looking at some of this stuff. The "why" is in some ways more important than what is going to happen.

As long as people focus on polling questions that deal with why people want to end up in a certain position, why they want a certain kind of a mayor, do they think it's important to have the first woman mayor? does gender make a difference to you? does ethnicity make a difference to you? those are the kinds of questions that will give you some guidance if that's what you're looking for to try and figure out what the snapshot means and what the campaign is doing these days.

Brian: All good points. Listeners, I'll just tell you one thing that many of you know but some of you may not. In case you find it too head scrambling to even engage in rank choice voting, you don't have to list multiple candidates. You can just make your choice of one and submit your ballot that way. That's up to you. As we wrap this up, listeners to program notes, Andrew Yang will be on the show tomorrow as the latest guest in our May round of interviews with all eight leading Democratic candidates on the theme of economic recovery from COVID meets the need for economic justice that proceeded it.

Tomorrow night at 7:00, Errol and I, and Josefa Velazquez from the news organization, THE CITY, will be the questioners in the first Republican mayoral primary debate between Curtis Sliwa and Fernando Mateo. That'll be live on NY1 and here on WNYC at seven o'clock tomorrow night. We're inviting registered Republicans, those of you who actually get to vote in that primary to suggest questions you would like to hear us ask in that debate. You can email your suggested questions to blshow@wnyc.org, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Errol, I'll see you in our debate prep meeting this afternoon, and Brigid, I'll see you on the radio.

Brigid: Thanks, Brian.

Errol: Thanks a lot, Brian.

Brian: WNYC senior political correspondent, Brigid Bergen, and Spectrum News, NY1 political anchor, Errol Louis.

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