“We need someone who is going to walk into the room and say, ‘Let me see the spread sheets, and let’s deal with the crisis at hand,’” said Mr. Lewis, who has known Mr. McGuire since their days as undergraduates at Harvard. “We need somebody who is going to be able to get their hands around this budget, talk to Washington and help get us more money. We need somebody who’s going to say everyone needs to pay their fair share.”

Mr. McGuire joins a growing field of declared and likely candidates, including the Brooklyn borough president, Eric Adams; Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller; Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive; a former federal housing secretary, Shaun Donovan; Maya Wiley, a civil rights lawyer and former counsel for Mr. de Blasio; Kathryn Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner; a Brooklyn councilman, Carlos Menchaca; and Loree Sutton, the former veteran affairs commissioner.

City laws prevent Mr. de Blasio from running for a third consecutive term.

Many successful business leaders, like Ronald Lauder and John A. Catsimatidis, have in the past tried and failed to win the mayoralty. But the notion that a sudden shift or a calamity could alter the trajectory of New York City’s elections is hardly implausible.

The fiscal crisis of the 1970s helped push Edward I. Koch into office in 1977; he was then unseated in 1989 by David N. Dinkins, whose campaign to become the city’s first Black mayor took flight after the racially motivated murder of Yusuf Hawkins in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.

In 2001, Michael R. Bloomberg, a billionaire businessman then running as a Republican, captured the general election, an upset that was widely attributed to the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center and its devastating aftereffects on the city’s economy and psyche.

Mr. McGuire resisted comparisons to Mr. Bloomberg. Raised by his mother, a social worker who was a single parent, and his grandparents in Dayton, Ohio, Mr. McGuire says he has never met his father. Scholarships helped him attend the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut, and Mr. McGuire went on to attain degrees from Harvard College, Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School.

“I doubt we’ve arrived at the point where we would hear anyone who followed in my footsteps being called the white Ray McGuire,” he said. “Judge me on my merits.”

Source: New York Times

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