The line for the new Bed-Stuy outpost of the Jamaican restaurant Juici Patties snaked down the block on a recent hot evening, making the intersection of Fulton Street and Nostrand Avenue even more jammed than usual. Lawrence Wang, a thirty-seven-year-old political-communications strategist, was happy to see a crowd; he was looking for people to use in a man-on-the-street video. Wang is an organizer with the DREAM campaign, a grassroots group trying to keep the former governor Andrew Cuomo from winning the Democratic mayoral primary later this month. He and his team were in Bed-Stuy to convince voters, on camera, that Cuomo was the wrong choice.

DREAM stands for “Don’t Rank Evil Andrew for Mayor,” and one of the group’s aims is to educate New Yorkers about the city’s still new ranked-choice system, in which voters can rank five candidates, with their votes transferring to their next choice if their top pick fares poorly. “If you put Cuomo on your ballot, you are voting for Cuomo,” Wang said. “If you don’t want to vote for Cuomo, don’t rank him third, don’t rank him last, don’t rank him at all.” Wang argues that Eric Adams won the election in 2021—beating Kathryn Garcia by seven thousand votes—in part because people didn’t think too much about whom they put in the lower slots.

At Juici Patties, Brandon Tizol, who had come from his day job as a communications manager for a union, hoisted a video camera. Carla Marie Davis, a political-content creator, approached people in line. “Can I grab you for a couple seconds to talk about the mayor’s race?” she asked, holding a microphone and a stack of notecards scrawled with unpleasant facts about Cuomo. The customers, for the most part, smiled back in silence or looked at their phones.

DREAM originated last fall, and the acronym was designed to be flexible. Initially, it stood for “Don’t Rank Eric Adams for Mayor”; when Cuomo entered the primary, it morphed to “Don’t Rank Eric or Andrew.” “Evil Andrew” emerged when Adams left the primary to run as an independent. (Wang, a former ad copywriter who once crafted slogans for Dunkin’ Donuts and Ram Trucks, has a knack for names.) The idea has caught on: “Don’t Rank Cuomo” has been plastered across bus shelters and Instagram, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shouted it at the recent Puerto Rican Day Parade. A Cuomo spokesperson dismissed DREAM as “performance art.” But, in mid-June, a surprising poll showed Cuomo’s chief rival, Zohran Mamdani, inching ahead.

That day in Bed-Stuy, however, Cuomo’s spotty record was not top of mind. A clean-cut man in a green sweater gave Davis a killer quote: “He’s running as a criminal. Nobody believes in him . . . that comment about Negroes, that lost me.” Unfortunately, the man was referring not to Cuomo but to Mayor Adams, who had recently remarked, “All these Negroes who were asking me to step down, God forgive them.”

Wang, who has an Eagle Scout’s militant optimism, was undeterred: “Hey, he talked to us!” The team left Juici Patties to explore the intersection. In front of Cricket Wireless, they dodged a young white man who was eager to chat (“I’m going Zohran No. 1!”) and approached two Black men in Yankees caps. One offered that the current mayor “doesn’t do shit,” but declined to go on camera. A man selling sea moss and ginseng extract outside 99 Cent Supreme Pizza called out, “Adams gave me a raise!”

The organizers had zip. Many of the street conversations ended before they could even bring up Cuomo, or the nuances of ranked-choice voting. Their luck finally changed on a shady block of Halsey Street, where they found a smiling woman named Tonisha, holding hands with a little girl in a tutu.

“Do you feel like we’ve had a mayor that truly cared about Black New Yorkers?” Davis asked, after Tonisha signed a release.

“I have not, given what he said publicly about so-called Black people,” she said. Davis explained that Adams was out of the primary and Cuomo was in. Tonisha began praising Cuomo’s improvements to the city and his action on police brutality. Surprised but unfazed, Davis offered up statistics about rising rents and home prices under Cuomo’s governorship, and his record-breaking cuts to the M.T.A. “Hearing that, would you still want to rank Cuomo?” she asked.

“I’m not too sure,” Tonisha answered. “After everything the current mayor has put us through, we need someone who’s going to make sure that every New Yorker benefits from the city.” The team was ecstatic: they’d converted a Cuomo diehard.

The celebration turned out to be premature. Before she left, Tonisha realized that she’d mixed up Cuomo with Bill de Blasio, whom she adored. She wasn’t sure whether she hated Cuomo: she couldn’t remember. ♦