Census Outreach

To lead the city’s 2020 census effort, the mayor tapped Julie Menin. She previously had served as his Commissioner for the Department of Consumer Affairs and Commissioner of Media and Entertainment. The city allocated $40 million towards the count, which is crucial to determining how much money the city receives back from the federal government.

That investment allowed Menin to build an army of 150 trusted community organizations with ambassadors who worked to explain why completing the census mattered and encourage people to fill it out. They also paid for 34 media campaigns in 26 languages.

“The clear message was you need to fill the census out because it means more money for our schools, for transportation, for affordable housing,” said Menin. “We really were able to connect it to a measurable difference in people’s lives,” she added.

Ultimately, New York City had a better proportionate response, counting more of the population than every other big city in the country.

“We beat Los Angeles and Chicago, Miami, and Boston and Philadelphia,” said Menin.

Menin is now a Councilmember-elect for District 5 on Manhattan’s east side. She said she is committed to advocating for this model — relying on trusted voices — to engage New Yorkers in other important ways, whether it means using it to deliver social services and healthcare or simply to engage residents when it comes to registering and turning out to vote.

“To not utilize that model is quite frankly shameful,” she said.

Civic Engagement

The mayor established a civic engagement commission through a city charter amendment approved by voters in 2018. Expanding language access has been a key focus, but members of the commission expressed frustration that the pandemic interrupted their work and limited their ability to do face-to-face outreach.

At the same time, since the commission is now written into the city charter, it means it will outlast the current administration so there is an opportunity for their work to continue and go deeper into communities. Murad Awawdeh is head of the New York Immigration Coalition and was appointed to the body by the mayor. His term runs through 2023, and he said he’s focused on how their outreach efforts can pick up during the Adams administration.

“So that we’re bringing in more people into our democracy across the board, not just within elections, but in every type of decision making process that is happening across the city,” said Awawdeh.

As an example, he cited participatory budgeting, in which Council members give their constituents a say in how to allocate a certain amount of funds for their community. Awawdeh is also one of the proponents of a newly-passed Council bill that would grant voting rights in local elections to some 900,000 legal permanent residents who are not yet citizens.

Grading De Blasio on Democracy

“I think what’s happened here in New York represents real progress,” said Deepak Bhargava, a distinguished lecturer at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. “It’s part of this kind of broader trend of pro-democracy measures in democratic cities and states that’s a relatively recent origin,” he added, pointing to the geographic divide between red states and cities that have enacted more voter suppressive measures, with blue states and cities that have done the opposite.

Specifically, he cited California, Virginia and New York, which have all expanded the number of days that people can vote. While Bhargava made clear there was still room for much improvement, he said New York City was actually at the vanguard by trying to tackle these issues at the local level.

Among community leaders working on democracy issues here in the city, the assessment of the mayor’s plan was less rosy.

Eddie Cuesta, the executive director of Dominicanos USA, an organization that works to help people from the Dominican Republic achieve naturalization and register to vote, called the mayor’s plan, “well-intended,” noting the complexity of the mayor’s democracy initiatives and how the pandemic interrupted his efforts.

“That said, perhaps he over promised in setting an ambitious goal of registering 1.5 million new voters without providing sufficient funding for civic engagement nonprofit organizations to help him meet that goal,” Cuesta said via email.

While he credited de Blasio for investing $15 million to educate voters on ranked-choice voting for the June 2021 primary election, “funding to register voters was limited or nonexistent, left largely to grant-making foundations and other donors to support,” Cuesta added.

Susan Lerner, the head of Common Cause New York and a leader of the city’s effort to implement ranked-choice voting, said she believed that de Blasio made a concerted effort to promote democracy reforms and help New Yorkers be more civically engaged.

“As with any policy maker, it’s rare that 100% of the vision is actually implemented,” said Lerner.

This article is part of our Grading De Blasio series, assessing the mayor’s performance during his two terms in office. You can see other stories in the series here.