Judging from Wednesday night’s debate — the last before next week’s primary — the question New Yorkers must ask before voting is: Can Gotham afford to take a chance on a slightly bumbling, slightly stumbling mayor?

If so, it may be worth it to give Sal Albanese, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s only real challenger, a chance.

De Blasio’s visions of a parade in his honor notwithstanding, New Yorkers are hardly enthralled with him. His approval rating is just 50 percent, even with crime at record lows and jobs at record highs.

So why are voters unhappy? The answer was clear at the debate.

Voters are fed up with politics-as-usual politicians — and de Blasio is the perfect politician. He can’t give a straight answer to the straightest question.

Should New York take down the statue of Christopher Columbus from Columbus Circle (and, presumably, change the name to just Circle)? “I don’t think it makes sense for me to opine,” de Blasio said. Do New Yorkers have the right to know when a donor asks for a favor, as several have? “High standards were kept to,” he says primly.

Should the Red Sox spy? “My faith has been shaken.”

By contrast, Albanese is congenitally honest.

“We need a higher standard for mayor than not being indicted,” he says about pay-to-play scandals. He’d keep Columbus — “I don’t need a commission to tell me” — and he “hates” the Red Sox.

Albanese too refused to take the bait on dismantling the Times Square plazas — a dumb idea de Blasio wouldn’t rule out in his own first campaign, for fear of offending anyone. “I think that’s a mistake,” Albanese said.

Honesty is commendable. But, as one moderator asked, who is Sal Albanese?

Albanese has a New York story: He was born in Italy and came here at age 8.

And he’s had a solid enough career. He was a public school teacher for 11 years, represented Bay Ridge in the City Council until 1997, was the sales and marketing director at a small investment firm and works as a lawyer.

Albanese is no superstar. Still, he is no less qualified than the other guy. De Blasio was a councilman and public advocate (a job with no responsibility) before becoming mayor. Unlike de Blasio, “I think being in the private sector is a good thing,” Albanese said.

As for the issues: Albanese points out that homelessness is at an “epidemic level” and that the mayor has “mismanaged the problem.” The mayor’s plan to “saturate the city” with 90 new shelters is indeed ridiculous. It’s true, too, that construction firms have taken over city streets “like the Wild West,” creating congestion, noise and other quality-of-life problems.

No, Albanese is no visionary. But is he incompetent? The only comparison is to the other guy.

Oddly, the fact that New York is doing so well makes the question less important.

De Blasio sleepwalks through his job. But he stayed awake long enough to hire two good police commissioners.

He said recently that he wishes New York could dispense with private property so that “city government [would] be able to determine which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it.” Yet he hasn’t scared companies from creating a record number of jobs.

(De Blasio ignores, too, that the city could cap out-of-scale building heights to avoid shadows in parks — this is called zoning and is hardly Leninist — but mysteriously hasn’t done so.)

The question is not whether Albanese is ideal, but whether he can do as well as, or better than, the incumbent. If so, then shouldn’t New Yorkers take a stand against what he calls the “legalized corruption” of the current administration?

And shouldn’t New Yorkers take a chance on a regular guy — someone who takes the subway rather than SUVs and helicopters?

The conventional wisdom is that New Yorkers don’t have much of a choice; no real terrific candidate is running. No, there’s no slick, packaged alternative who, in any event, would be, well . . . another de Blasio. But there clearly is someone who seems decent and modest enough to consider.

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.