What happens if de Blasio crumbles?

It’s impossible to pick up a local newspaper these days and not be inundated with stories about scandals and criminal investigations into the de Blasio administration. It’s far too early to say the mayor can be credibly accused of a crime, much less convicted of one. But I’ve done my time as a political consultant, and while I don’t work for candidates anymore, I still can’t stop myself from gaming different political possibilities.

To be clear, it’s still early in this scandal cycle, so we don’t know what will happen. But here’s my sense of the potential outcomes, in order from most to least likely:

Nothing bad happens and Mayor de Blasio coasts to reelection. Absent further steps on the legal front or a new scandal, the mayor will likely hold his support among most of his base and most of his key donors. Given the likelihood of low turnout (just 650,000 voters in the 2013 Democratic primary in a city with 3 million registered Democrats), de Blasio should have no problem winning the nomination and fending off the Republican challenger in the fall. So a two-term mayoralty is still probably in the cards. A serious primary challenge. This scenario, which is probably the second likeliest, is also the toughest to predict — because it’ll require judgment calls by wouldbe rivals about how weak de Blasio is with his base, how prone his core supporters are to stick with him, and what may or may not happen on the legal front.

If in the next six months, the fund-raising scandal doesn’t mushroom further and the mayor manages to avoid indictments of his top lieutenants, then he stands a very good chance of fending off a formidable Democratic challenger. Elected officials like Scott Stringer and Letitia James may not want to give up their current jobs to challenge him — and risk making a powerful enemy — unless he’s easily perceived as weak enough to beat. A special election. In 2002, Mayor Michael Bloomberg presciently proposed, and the

public passed, a change to the City Charter that requires a nonpartisan special election to be held 60 days after a mayoral vacancy. (Previously, the public advocate filled the remainder of the term.) If an investigation were to crescendo in 2016, this scenario would play out before next year’s mayoral election.

If the field is clear, a host of current elected officials — Stringer, James, Ruben Diaz Jr. — are sure to rush into the void. So possibly will a wild card from the private sector who can self-fund and will argue that the city needs a return to nonpartisan, competent governance.

But success here would require significantly higher turnout than normal, meaning using new ways of reaching and mobilizing nonprime voters. An open mayoral election in

2017. This would occur if de Blasio, feeling the heat, either steps down before reelection or finishes out his term but chooses not to run for a second term. In this scenario, the same cast of characters we’d see in a special election would vie for the mayoralty. But the odds of an outside candidate winning would sharply decline — because this would be a partisan election with party primaries, meaning the winner of the Democratic primary would have an inside track to win the general election, as de Blasio did in 2013.

While we can all guess at what the U.S. attorney, state attorney general and Manhattan district attorney will do, none of us really knows.

This much we do know: Whatever they say in public, everyone who wants to be mayor — and there are at least a dozen people in this city who think about it multiple times a day — is spending plenty of their time in private gaming out these scenarios.

Bloomberg’s former campaign manager games out scenarios