2020 Voter Guide

Where do the candidates stand?

Explore this voter guide to see how the candidates for mayor compare on issues of concern to low-income New Yorkers — and to the city as a whole. Browse by topic using the tabs below, or click on the numbers to see additional questions. Learn More

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Housing + Transit

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1. What is your plan to make housing more affordable?

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2. What is your plan to reduce homelessness?

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3. How do you plan to fix aging city infrastructure like bridges, subways, and public housing?

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Health

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1. What is your plan to provide affordable, universal health care?

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2. Will there be a role for private insurance under your health plan?

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3. Will your health plan cover undocumented immigrants?

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4. What is your plan to expand mental health services?

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Economy + Green Jobs

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1. Will you raise the federal minimum wage to $15?

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2. Will you guarantee benefits like paid family leave, sick days, and vacation?

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3. How will you combat climate change and advance environmental justice while creating good jobs?

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4. Will you make the wealthy pay their fair share in taxes?

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5. How do you plan to tax corporations?

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6. Do you support the right for workers to organize in unions?

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Public Safety

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What are your plans to regulate guns and ammunition?

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2. How will you end mass incarceration?

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3. How will you reduce racial bias in policing?

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4. How will you help people who have been incarcerated re-integrate in the workforce and their communities?

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Education

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1. What is your plan to make public college affordable for everyone?

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2. How will you address the student loan debt crisis?

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3. How will you expand access to affordable, quality child care?

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Democracy

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1. What are your plans to end voter suppression?

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2. What are your plans for campaign finance reform?

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3. How will you improve our election security to prevent meddling and foreign interference?

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4. How will you comprehensively reform our immigration system?

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5. How will you create a roadmap for citizenship?

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COVID-19

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1. Workers who have been hit hardest by pandemic-related job losses worked overwhelmingly in low-paid service industries such as restaurants, hotels, and other sectors requiring in-person interactions. These sectors have experienced widespread layoffs and business closures. How will your administration ensure that these workers can transition back to full-time employment?

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2. The pandemic has exposed the absence of an adequate social safety net for undocumented workers, app-based gig workers, and other New Yorkers in nonstandard work arrangements. These workers are ineligible for employer-provided health coverage, unemployment benefits, and emergency government relief. What is your position on providing more financial assistance and workplace protections to these workers?

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3. The pandemic and ensuing recession has destabilized the city’s low-income families, who were twice as likely as those with higher incomes to suffer permanent job loss related to COVID-19. The most vulnerable are children in households reeling from loss of income, food insecurity, and housing instability. What steps would you take to provide relief for low-income families struggling to survive as the city begins its economic recovery?

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Economic Equity

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1. According to a recent report from the New York State Comptroller, New York City is currently facing a $4 billion budget gap. How would you strengthen the city’s fiscal outlook while minimizing the impact of potential cuts in critical public services on low-income New Yorkers?

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2. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the devastating racial inequities that exist in our city – from healthcare access to housing discrimination to education resources. What will you do as mayor to address racial disparities in city policymaking?

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3. Student loan debt is impacting about one million New York City residents, and first-generation college students and communities of color are bearing the brunt of this debt. What role can New York City play in tackling student loan debt and how would you start to address these disparities?

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4. More than 220,000 New Yorkers have enrolled in Fair Fares, a program that provides half-priced MetroCards to New Yorkers living at or below poverty. Yet the program was slashed by $65 million in the city's Fiscal Year 2021 budget. Most low-income New Yorkers continue to rely on public transit for their daily commute and jobless New Yorkers struggle to afford the fare as they attempt to return to the workforce. What is your position on ensuring adequate funding for the continued expansion of Fair Fares?

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Housing

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1. Under the de Blasio mayoralty, affordable housing has been a key priority, but the housing that has been produced has not met the needs of the bottom 40 percent of income earners. How would you re-align both the city’s affordable housing programs and its land use policies to promote deeper levels of affordability at a larger scale?

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2. NYCHA and its 500,000 residents are an integral part of the city, and homelessness has reached record highs. Yet public housing and homelessness are often treated as afterthoughts or outliers in city planning discussions. How should the next mayor integrate preserving public housing and ending homelessness into their comprehensive affordable housing plan?

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3. Despite new city investments in NYCHA public housing during the de Blasio administration, the data indicates these investments have not kept pace with worsening, accelerating deterioration of resident living conditions. What initiatives would you take to improve NYCHA living conditions and address its $40 billion capital backlog?

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4. Decades of risky financial practices have left rental buildings overleveraged and vulnerable to foreclosures or debt buy-outs, with pandemic-related rent arrears adding to their financial distress. As a result, many landlords are having difficulty maintaining payments on their buildings. What would you do as mayor to prevent speculative investors from buying up these buildings and their debt, and to instead promote their preservation as permanently affordable forms of social housing?

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Health Care

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1. Immigrants are disproportionately uninsured due to federal and state policies that limit eligibility and discourage access to health programs available to citizens and lawful residents. As mayor, what types of programs or policies would you champion to maximize enrollment of immigrants in quality insurance coverage that they can afford?

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2. In 2020, Manhattan had 6.4 hospital beds for every 1,000 residents, while Queens had only 1.5 hospital beds for every 1,000 residents. Similar disparities exist in the Bronx and Brooklyn. The COVID-19 pandemic is exposing the devastating toll these maldistributions have had on New York’s communities of color in the outer boroughs. What would you do as mayor to ensure that healthcare infrastructure is distributed equitably?

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3. Policy experts and advocates have long argued that New York City’s public Health and Hospitals system that serves hundreds of thousands of low-income uninsured patients annually is under-funded by the state lawmakers that control the allocation of billions of Indigent Care Pool and Medicaid dollars. Mayors typically have been unable to turn this situation around. What would you do to improve the financial stability of NYC Health + Hospitals?

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4. Over 6,000 New York City residents have been sued by New York’s non-profit charitable hospitals for medical bills, often at a 9 percent commercial interest rate. Hospital lawyers usually win these cases on default – most patients do not appear in court and none have lawyers. What would you do as mayor to protect patients and prevent non-profit hospitals from filing these lawsuits and other unfair and/or discriminatory hospital policies?

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5. Black women in New York City are much more likely than white women to die from pregnancy-related causes. What would you do as mayor to address the maternal mortality crisis experienced by Black and Brown women in New York City?

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Criminal Justice

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1. Following a series of highly publicized police killings of civilians, police reform is on the nation’s agenda. Here in New York City we’ve been concerned over the NYPD’s troubling lack of accountability for officer misconduct, as well as general lack of transparency and apparent lack of real action concerning disciplinary issues. What would you do as mayor to hold officers accountable for misconduct, and how would you reform the NYPD to minimize that misconduct, if not eliminate it?

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2. The enduring consequences of a criminal conviction history can result in a “civil life sentence” that denies individuals access to jobs, housing, higher education, bank accounts, and credit. Given this reality, how would you work to ensure that fewer New Yorkers become entangled with the criminal justice system in the first place? In your answer please include any diversion programs you think should be introduced or expanded, particularly those that could obviate the need for arrest in certain circumstances.

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3. Of the 13.3 percent of Americans currently looking for work, individuals with a criminal record will almost certainly be among those last hired once jobs do reappear. What are your thoughts on legislation that allows individuals to have their record expunged after a certain period of time?

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