There’s an enormously crowded field of candidates so far for this fall’s race to replace the universally mocked and reviled Bill de Blasio as New York City’s mayor, including such familiar names as former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and, on the Republican side, Guardian Angels founder and radio talk show host Curtis Sliwa. The big wild card in this race, however, is whether anybody can get New York’s apathetic voters interested in their governance again.

New York City has, according to the Census Bureau’s pre-pandemic estimates, 8.34 million people, of whom about 6.6 million are age 18 or older. It’s …