Supporters of Zohran Mamdani celebrate during an Election Night event at the Brooklyn Paramount Theater on Tuesday. Photo: Angelina Katsanis/AFP/Getty Images
When New Yorkers elected Zohran Mamdani, they gave a much-needed boost to the next mayor by approving ballot measures that will ease the process of building housing, which experts say will be a boon to the mayor-elect’s ability to deliver on his campaign pledge to make the city more affordable.
Proposals 2 and 3 create a fast-track review process for publicly financed affordable-housing projects and cut down the time to review smaller projects. The fourth measure creates a board that has the power to overrule the City Council’s rejection of or revisions to affordable-housing proposals. Most significantly, the measures curtail the City Council’s inputon land-use decisions, removing them from the review process and ending the practice of member deference, which gave councilmembers significant power to block projects in their communities.
“I think it’s going to shave a lot of time, possibly years, off some of the new affordable-housing units that the city is financing, so I think that’s really significant to the next mayor’s housing plan,” says Rachel Fee, the executive director of the New York Housing Conference.
Mamdani has promised to jump-start housing construction, with the goal of creating 200,000 units over the next ten years. Amit Singh Bagga, campaign director of the Yes on Affordable Housing PAC, which supported the ballot questions, said that such lofty goals will not be possible without these changes to the city’s housing process.
“Unless we are able to turbocharge the amount of housing that is produced every single year, we are not going to be able to meet that 200,000 figure that Zohran Mandani has promised for his first term. Because 15,000 to 20,000 units a year does not equal 200,000 in four years,” he says, referring to the current rate of housing creation in the city.
The measures would allow potential projects to avoid the typically lengthy Uniform Land Use Review Procedure that requires applications to undergo months of scrutiny by city agencies, as well as by the local community board and the borough president, culminating in a City Council vote that is subject to the mayor’s approval or veto.
The City Council swiftly condemned the proposed measures and moved to defeat them, first attempting to block the questions from appearing on the ballot and later launching a campaign that spent more than $1.5 million on mailers urging voters to reject the allegedly “misleading” ballot questions — actions that some critics believe run afoul of the city’s laws against electioneering.
Bagga believes the reaction to the measures has been overblown and that the City Council was removed from these review processes for a good reason. “The reason for that is that our current system has essentially been weaponized by a small-minded few that have forced individual City Council members into a Hobson’s choice, which is block housing or lose your seat. What that has resulted in is a total lack of movement on housing for decades in multiple iterations of the Council,” he says. However, he did offer praise for the current City Council and its Speaker, Adrienne Adams, noting that they ushered through the “City of Yes” plan to build more housing.
Mamdani was notably mum on his position on the ballot measures throughout the election. Some of his most prominent allies were on opposite sides of the issue, with Comptroller Brad Lander, Governor Kathy Hochul, and Cea Weaver, who has advised Mamdani on housing policy, supporting the measures and union backers like Local 32BJ SEIU and the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council opposing them. Ultimately, Mamdani revealed Tuesday that he voted “yes” on the proposals.
Fee believes that the measures could spur new construction in areas long seen as resistant to new housing and will motivate developers to give project proposals a second look. “If those proposals require a councilmember saying ‘yes’ in the City Council and that councilmember has indicated to the development community that their answer is going to be ‘no,’ nobody’s even looking at sites. Nobody is looking at those opportunities. They’re not going to take the risk of buying a site, investing time and money in a ULURP process that’s going to go nowhere,” she says.
“I do think developers will take a fresh look at some of these areas where we’ve not been building any housing at all and that we will see some new proposals come up that never would have without these changes,” she says.
For months, Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, independent candidate Andrew Cuomo, and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa have crossed the five boroughs to make their case to the voters on why they should be next to lead City Hall. More than 735,000 New Yorkers cast ballots during the early voting period that ended Sunday, and each campaign seems to see that record-setting turnout as a boon to its chances. Since the primary, political researcher and strategist Michael Lange has become one of the most prominent voices analyzing the race, known for his district-by-district breakdown of the city’s electorate and his prescient forecast that Mamdani would ultimately be victorious in June. With Lange set to release his Election Day prediction Monday morning, I spoke with him about his views on the early-voting turnout, whether polling has improved in the race since the primary, and who has the momentum heading into Tuesday.
Record numbers of New Yorkers cast their ballots in early voting across the city. What are your impressions of the data so far? I think Cuomo got a not-insignificant bump in the first couple days from older, wealthier voters in Manhattan, many of whom I guess you would describe as very Zionist and who do not like Mamdani’s position on Israel. There were many people I respect who normally never sound the alarm but were genuinely a little spooked by some of that. But Cuomo was never getting the numbers in other parts of the city that he would need to really make this super-close or to have Mamdani on upset alert.
But some of the electorate being a little older, that’s of course a consequence of the general election, too. Sliwa’s voters, however many there are, they’re almost all over 55. The Republican off-year electorate in New York City is super-old. So that also contributed to it. But I never saw a reason for Mamdani to be concerned, really. I thought the only thing that might have been in jeopardy was him hitting 50 percent. I see that as kind of the biggest question of the next couple days, rather than just a win-loss thing.
There’s always the most early voting kind of towards the end. Amongst that bump, it was very young. The Halloween stickers on Friday certainly paid off. It was the youngest day. Getting over 700,000 early votes puts us well in that 1.8, 1.9 million range for the total come Election Day. I think it further contextualizes that there was that little Cuomo flurry at the very beginning, in terms of a lot of his older supporters coming out. But then as time progressed, it got younger and younger and younger and the curve kind of leveled out and resembled more of the primary. And I think I’ve seen more and more evidence that Mamdani should be confident going into Tuesday, not only about winning, but about the margin of victory.
How does this early-voting electorate compare with early voters in the primary? Are new groups being motivated? We saw very, very high turnout in the first few days of early voting from the Upper East Side and Upper West Side of Manhattan, that Sutton Place, Midtown East area. All of which were some of Cuomo’s few bright spots in Manhattan during the primary. Then if you compare that with the Democratic primary during early voting, the vote was almost exclusively coming from areas Mamdani would win besides the Upper East Side, Upper West Side. Early voting just in general is kind of skewed toward each coalition’s white voters, right? They’re more likely to have a car in the outer-boroughs to go to the polling site, or they’re a higher percentage of the demographics in some of these denser neighborhoods where people can walk to vote. So the distribution of the vote was a little more spread out than what we’re seeing in the general election so far. This general-election electorate, it’s very young compared with other general elections. It’s just not quite as young as in the primary.
What do we know, if anything, about these older early voters? All we really know is which districts and neighborhoods they’re coming from. Right now, the biggest concentrations of support are, again, in those Central Park–adjacent neighborhoods in Manhattan, which I expect right now lean Cuomo. Then you have those neighborhoods adjacent to Prospect Park in Brooklyn; where Central Park leans Cuomo, the crew around Prospect Park is overwhelmingly Mamdani. And then you have Staten Island. The southern parts have had some pretty solid turnout that leans toward Sliwa and, to a lesser extent, Cuomo. Staten Island’s the most Italian county in the country.
The thing about Cuomo, though, is that he has this support from very affluent voters but he’s been hemorrhaging support from all the working-class parts of his coalition. I think he can win the Upper East Side again or narrowly win the Upper West Side perhaps. But he’s going to lose almost everywhere else.The people who vote on Election Day in New York City are generally more working class and more diverse, and a few more of them are Republicans in the general election. In the primary, there was a worry in the Mamdani campaign, like, Oh yeah, we win early voting, but are we just going to be blitzed on Election Day when all these places in “Cuomo Country” can really start voting? But they weren’t. They won Election Day, just by a smaller margin than the early voting. I think now he’s poised to do even better with the people who vote next Tuesday. So I just don’t really see where Cuomo is gonna make up any of this deficit.
Are there any signs, so far, that Cuomo has been able to cultivate the support he’ll need? No because we’re not seeing any type of upticks in some of the other areas that he did well in the primary.
I should give a special shout out to Brigid Bergin from Gothamist and WNYC. She’s been doing a lot of anecdotal but also instructive talking to voters at different sites. And she chose two very good places to do it. She went to the southern shore of Staten Island and encountered some Republicans who are holding their nose and voting for Cuomo because he’s viable. I’ve encountered the same. But there are still plenty of Republicans, which is what Cuomo would really need to move the needle significantly, who are still sticking with Sliwa, even though he doesn’t really have a chance. And I saw that she was also out Sunday in East Flatbush — which is the area that Cuomo won convincingly in the primary that he would need to hold to make the general competitive — and it’s basically switched to Mamdani.
So, the way I’m thinking about the outcome, the margin, things like that, it really comes down to Cuomo versus Sliwa among Republican and more moderate conservative independents. If Sliwa holds on to any decent level of support, then Cuomo’s ceiling is cut down further. And then also just Cuomo versus Mamdani in the Black community and to what extent that’s competitive. Maybe it won’t be. Maybe Zohran will win super convincingly. But I think the other parts of all three candidates’ coalitions are relatively baked in.
It’s a matter of turnout and enthusiasm and these other things. Those two that I mentioned, it’s very persuasion-based. Turnout is great because you can just kind of create votes from thin air. Persuasion is good because you gain a vote and it takes it away from an opponent. So, that’s kind of how I see it going into Election Day. I think all the other parts of the Mamdani coalition, they’re not really under threat of being captured by Cuomo or captured by Sliwa. I think they kind of exist as standalone Mamdani-friendly demographics, coalition groups, things like that.
Mamdani and Cuomo were like a tale of two campaigns during the primary in terms of voter outreach and candidate accessibility. From what you’ve seen, how have both candidates adapted to the general-election season? With Cuomo, I would say they gave a very incomplete and convenient autopsy of why they lost. They’re like, Oh, we were too safe. We didn’t do enough social media. That’s kind of it. I don’t think they’ve reckoned with the bigger questions of their campaign where he didn’t really have any type of affirmative message. The suburban-esque scolding was just not going over well. But they kind of ignored that. They didn’t really adapt. It was very much like a surface-level pivot. And then, of course, Cuomo just reverts back to who he is. They scrapped much of the stuff they started doing right after. And now it’s replaced by this AI-slop nonsense, which is somehow even more hollow than, you know, the videos of Cuomo with his muscle cars.
It just seemed like they could never quite get a handle on what New York City voters want, like they very much struggled to adapt. They were kind of running a 2020 Albany playbook. It’s different when you run for reelection as governor: You’re the most powerful person in the state; you have all the money in the world, all the labor unions, you’re on television all the time. They just tried to run the safe front-runner playbook and bludgeon their opponents, but they ran into someone genuinely talented who brought new people into the process. Frankly, they’re completely outmatched. They were outmatched even before the primary, but now Mamdani has a bigger team, more resources, more institutional support, and they’re just kind of getting crushed.
Throughout the race, there has been a big question about whether Mamdani’s campaign can make inroads in the city’s Black communities against Cuomo and, until recently, Eric Adams. Have there been signs of these voters coalescing behind Mamdani now that he’s the Democratic nominee? Yeah, I would describe — very broadly, of course — the Black political community in New York as built heavily on relationships and certain political institutions, right? Since he has become the Democratic nominee, Mamdani has had opportunities to continue to build those relationships. To visit the churches on Sunday, to not only be double-booked but to get into the churches that have the biggest audiences and things like that. Now he has many more validators in those neighborhoods. In the most recent Emerson poll, he was at 70 percent among Black voters, right? I think if he even got anywhere close to that, it would be a big earthquake. It would portend well for him getting 50 percent of the vote. He has steadily increased his support there. And I think to the extent Cuomo support still remains, even more so than in the primary, it’s heavily indexed to age.
After the primary, you wrote about Mamdani’s “coalition of the in-between,” saying he won overwhelmingly in districts that are majority renter and middle income as opposed to communities with more homeowners. Does that calculation change at all with an electorate that likely skews more moderate and Republican compared with the primary? I don’t think so. If anything, his coalition will get a lot stronger, ironically, with rent-stabilized tenants. He did best in the primary with market-rate renters. Especially in parts of the Bronx and Upper Manhattan where there’s a lot of dense rent stabilization, I think he’ll do a lot better. I still anticipate Cuomo will have some resonance with the folks at the relative bottom of the economic spectrum. It’ll be very interesting to see how the candidates perform in the city’s public-housing developments. But I think the Cuomo and Sliwa coalitions are very much built around a kind of outer-borough, white ethnic homeowner and then Cuomo is also very much leveraged with certain degrees of the financial elite. There are tons of people in Park Slope and Carroll Gardens who live in brownstones worth many millions of dollars who love Mamdani, love Brad Lander, and hate Cuomo. It’s not even a different type of wealth in terms of raw money than your Upper East Side penthouse-condo owner, but it’s more like an orientation to it, like old money vs. new money. So I think there will still be stiff resistance to Mamdani at the very top of the economic spectrum. I can’t imagine there will be too many Upper East Side penthouses for Mamdani, but we’ll see.
Sliwa has been a hot topic in recent weeks as Cuomo and his supporters have described him as a spoiler, suggesting he’s standing in the way of a potential Cuomo victory. What do you make of Sliwa’s campaign this time around compared with his prior mayoral run? He has certainly gotten a lot more attention. Sliwa’s opening statement in the debate was almost indistinguishable from Dan Osborn or Bernie Sanders. It’s fascinating to see both the Democratic and Republican nominees for mayor be so openly hostile to the billionaire class. And then you have the independent Cuomo, tail between the legs, supported heavily by that billionaire class. I think Sliwa is the classic outer-borough populist. He has certainly built a following for himself, made a name for himself. I’m sure he’ll bleed some Republican support being kind of tarnished as a spoiler. But I’ve met plenty of Republicans who are sticking by him and dislike Cuomo considerably. Sliwa will get a negligible share of the vote in Manhattan besides his own, but he’ll do well in some of the white ethnic enclaves: Italian neighborhoods in Brooklyn, the Russian Jews in southern Brooklyn. Cuomo will win more of the Sephardic and the Orthodox. In Queens, Breezy Point, Whitestone; in the Bronx, Country Club, parts of Throggs Neck. And then, of course, there’s the southern shore of Staten Island, the most Republican-leaning legislative district in the whole Northeast. It’s very, very Republican, and I don’t expect Cuomo to go in there and usurp that. I haven’t made up my mind, but I don’t think Sliwa will dip below the double digits.
People have floated this idea of Sliwa actually passing Cuomo, but that is probably unlikely. The Emerson poll had them closer, but I don’t think it’s likely. It seems Sliwa is bleeding a degree of Republican support to Cuomo, which would just make it very hard because he’s not someone who has a ton of juice with independent voters, voters of color. It’ll be actually interesting. Sliwa did very well in Chinese neighborhoods four years ago, which was kind of the first warning sign of Uh oh, like, Democrats are on the verge of losing support in these communities. I’m curious if Sliwa can, to any degree, replicate some of that past performance or if it was just a flash in the pan. His coalition is pretty old. His numbers got a little bit of a flurry, I would say, from the debates because he put in a pretty solid performance and landed some blows. But as the voting gets close and you have a lot of prominent Republicans saying, “You can’t support this guy. You got to support Cuomo,” I think it’ll slowly trickle down.
In the primary, we saw a significant polling miss, to say the least, as Mamdani won overwhelmingly despite months of polls showing him significantly behind Cuomo. Does it seem the polling has been corrected since then? Some have adjusted more than others. The younger part of the electorate, the under 45, under 50, is being underpolled. In the presidential election in New York City last year, 51 percent of voters were under 50, which is a lot. In a lot of these surveys, their ratio of that under-50 group is a lot less, and that is with Mamdani now on the ballot. I think they’re still making mistakes and Mamdani is in a pretty solid position to outperform the polling once again. His coalition is very hard to poll. It’s not even just because he brings in younger voters in droves that pollsters don’t know quite how to screen for. It’s also because he has tons of support in certain immigrant enclaves that pollsters just routinely ignore or don’t do as good a job reaching into. So it’s a unique thing. Given more time, the pollsters will start to adjust, but I haven’t seen a ton of evidence that they have to a significant extent. So I think we could again be on track for an overperformance to a lesser extent, but an overperformance nonetheless.
A poll released over the weekend from AtlasIntel caused a stir as it showed Mamdani ahead of Cuomo by only six points, the smallest margin to date. Is this poll likely an outlier? It certainly seems that way. All due respect to AtlasIntel — it seems like some of their national polls have been relatively on the nose — but I’ve not seen them poll a race in New York City super accurately. Like Emerson has a track record, Data for Progress has a track record. But I try not to read into the polls most of the time, especially again where the electorate is going to look so different from 2021 and the turnout is going to be so greater that I try and be measured with that. But they had Mamdani at 40 percent. I mean, I would mortgage all my assets and say that he will finish above 40 percent. I would retire if he finished below 40 percent. It would just not compute with everything I know about politics in the city.
You predicted Mamdani would win the Democratic primary. As you gather your thoughts for Tuesday, what stands out? I think the race has been, for four months, very static. There’s not a lot of persuasion, I would say, that each candidate has a solid idea of where their voters are and it’s just a matter of turnout and enthusiasm. Mamdani gets his people out with an affirmative message: hope, inspiration. There’s a huge community of people who volunteer for him and are inspired by him that has really taken off among younger folks in particular, but not just younger folks. Cuomo is trying to motivate his folks with, I would say, more fear, right? The polls say a significant percentage of Cuomo voters are going with him because he’s not Mamdani. But for as much as people might talk about how Mamdani has a ceiling, Cuomo has a ceiling too. We saw that in the primary. Cuomo was in many respects an ideal general-election opponent for Mamdani because he’s not very well liked by independents or Republicans. I think Mamdani, of the two, has the higher ceiling and more of that emotional momentum, more of that enthusiasm, the I’ll walk over broken glass to vote for you. There are certainly “swing neighborhoods.” Many in Queens and southern Brooklyn could split between the three candidates in an interesting way. But for the most part, it’ll just be another game of turnout and enthusiasm, and I think that favors Mamdani.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Lis Smith is one of the few political consultants who can approach the celebrity level of their clients. An opinionated, sometimes pugilistic presence in Democratic politics (and online), she is best known for engineering Pete Buttigieg’s overachieving 2020 primary run. But Smith already had an extensive résumé before that, including running rapid response for Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection and serving as a spokesperson for Bill de Blasio, before a romance with former governor Eliot Spitzer got her fired. Later, she advised — and defended — Andrew Cuomo during the thick of the sexual-harassment allegations that ended his governorship before turning against him sharply. Since releasing a campaign memoir in 2022, Smith has worked for Michigan senate hopeful Mallory McMorrow, among others, and is now advising a new Super-PAC, Majority Democrats, that advances a moderate agenda. I spoke with her about Zohran Mamdani’s star-making campaign, how Democrats bungled 2024, and who she has her eye on for 2028.
You have been very critical of Andrew Cuomo’s mayoral campaign. What do you make of what he’s been doing out there? This has been an unimpressive effort — did he lose his political touch at some point? Look, he earned the nickname “The Prince of Darkness” for a reason. He’s channeling the side of him that people call Bad Andrew, where he will do basically anything he can do to hold on to power. And what we’re seeing is a very dark campaign that appeals to the worst aspects of humanity and is closing on the most pessimistic note possible. Laughing about Zohran Mamdani cheering on 9/11; standing with Eric Adams when he talks about radical Islamists burning down churches; having supporters run ads with the word “jihad” over Zohrani Mamdani’s face. Contrast that with Mamdani, who has run an issue-based, positive, sunny campaign. I think New Yorkers ultimately will choose a positive, sunny campaign over Andrew.
Wasn’t Cuomo always like this, on some level? You really see someone’s character when they’re cornered. And with me, with other advisers, you really saw that at the end, when he was called on to resign and when he was faced with the threat of impeachment. That’s what you’re seeing right now. His general-election campaign is, I would note, much darker than his primary campaign was. His real character is coming out right now, and I think it’s the character of someone who should not be handed the reins of power again.
You’re somebody who’s pretty familiar with young talent in the Democratic Party. Was Mamdani on your radar before this race? No. In October of last year, my friend Eric Koch, who is a Democratic consultant, told me, “You’ve gotta keep an eye on this Zohran Mamdani guy. I really think he could be the nominee.” I thought he was crazy, but I remember just being lights-out impressed by him, especially in the debates. Generational talents don’t come around that often — that’s why they’re called generational talents. I talk about Bernie Sanders’s socialism as DSA 1.0. AOC is DSA 2.0. I think Zohran Momani is DSA 3.0, where he’s less into demonizing political opponents and people who disagree with him and more interested in engaging with people who have different viewpoints. You’ve seen him do interviews on platforms and with media outlets that are not exactly DSA friendly — Fox News, The Bulwark.
He’s done the podcast circuit. Yeah, Flagrant. And he has run a very positive, issue-based campaign at a time when Democrats have gotten into a trap of only talking about Donald Trump and not offering up big ideas. I think there’s something Democrats on every part of the spectrum can learn: That you shouldn’t just run against Donald Trump, and that you need to offer an affirmative vision. And if you do that, people will rally around you, even if you are an unknown 33-year-old member of DSA.
On a somewhat similar note, there’s the Maine Senate race, where we’ve got Graham Platner, who is, in a way, a perfect test case of various questions surrounding the Democrats. There’s this debate about how big a tent the Democratic Party should be. Purity tests are less popular now, but Platner not only wrote all these Reddit posts he had to apologize for but he got a symbol associated with Nazis tattooed on his chest. Polls nonetheless show him winning by a lot, though at least one came out before the Nazi thing. People want a challenger who seems honest and authentic, but is there, like, a limit to that? I managed to avoid the great online Maine Senate War of 2025, but I guess it’s inevitable I’d have to weigh in at some point. The poll that came out showing Platner with more than double the support of an established, relatively popular governor — that’s a real wake-up call. It should be a flashing red light to party leadership that Democratic voters are pissed off and they’re not gonna take it anymore. They are pissed off at the gerontocracy that cost us the 2024 election. They’re pissed off at being force fed, subpar subpar, uninspiring, yesterday’s-news candidates, and they’re just hungry for something new, for unconventional, refreshing voices, and even people outside politics like Graham Platner.
That being said, some of these revelations about him are obviously pretty troubling — the tattoo, his old posts. But we haven’t really seen much sign that Maine voters are moving away from him. I do think we need to leave room in politics and the Democratic Party for second chances and redemption stories, because, let’s be real, most of the people who turn out to vote for these candidates are not all a hundred percent good themselves. We’ve all done things through regret, all had our struggles. So I think some of Platner’s story — the idea of being lost, finding a community and purpose — is actually relatable to a lot of people. But that being said, one man’s redemption story shouldn’t come at the cost of a Senate seat.
It does test the limits of the big-tent approach. It does, and it also tests the limit of recruiting a 77-year-old to run for Senate. In all the research I’ve seen, Democratic voters are saying, “No more gerontocracy. We want fresh, new voices.”
Another young candidate, Jay Jones in Virginia, texted violent fantasies about his political adversaries but has not dropped out of the attorney-general race there. What do you make of that story? Jay Jones made a mistake. It’s the worst possible text to come out in the weeks after Charlie Kirk was assassinated. But he apologized for it. He owned up to his mistake. And I do think people should be judged by more than their worst moments.
It’s really hard for me to take the criticism from the right wing all that seriously when they have a president who goes out and stokes violence on a monthly basis and who encouraged the insurrection on January 6. Ultimately, I think Jones will be able to pull through, because attorney-general positions right now are really important when you have a president who has completely weaponized his DOJ and weaponized federal law enforcement.
I was watching an interview you did with Jen Psaki in which you reminisced about working on Obama’s reelection bid in 2012, when the campaign painted Romney as this corporate villain early in defining him and how effective that was. That did not remind me of Mamdani a bit — not so much defining his opponents that way but the relentless focus on the economy and affordability. With all this talk about the future direction of the party, do you think that is the most surefire way forward for Democrats right now? Yes. And the biggest mistake we made in 2024 was not leading every single conversation by talking about the economy. When people feel like they are one accident, one incident, one layoff away from financial collapse, they do not want to hear us starting conversations by saying, “The most existential issue you should care about is democracy.” Or abortion rights. Those are very important issues, don’t get me wrong. But we were not listening to voters, and we were not meeting them where they were.
I think this is part of a trend among Democrats in recent years, where we stopped treating voters like adults. When they would say, “Prices are killing me,” we would say, “Actually, inflation is higher in Sweden.” When they would say, “Crime is out of control,” we’d respond, “Actually, it’s lower than it was 40 years ago.” And when they said, “Hey, shouldn’t we maybe do something about the border?” we said, “Turn off Fox News. That’s a right-wing talking point.” Voters noticed that. They thought we weren’t listening to them. And that is why they were willing to go vote for someone like Donald Trump. Say what you will about him — he at least was speaking a language of grievance, talking about taking on the status quo that was driving a lot of these problems. And to a lot of people, that was more appealing than people who were talking down to them or not even listening to them.
The thinking was that Democrats’ strongest issues were abortion rights and democracy and that they were getting killed on the economy, so it was better to all but ignore it. But it wasn’t even that, because you remember the Biden administration had the whole “Bidenomics” campaign.
Yeah, but then they got rid of it when they realized it wasn’t working at all. In 2012, Barack Obama was running with an unemployment rate at which no president had been reelected in the past. How did he win that election? It wasn’t by ignoring the economy. It was by going right at it and saying, “We are working every day to dig our way out of this recession. I know it’s not enough, but look at who the opponent is. This is a private-equity guy who’s gotten rich by buying up companies, laying off workers, and destroying communities, and that’s not who we need to hand the economy over to at this moment.” By making the economic contrast clear and acknowledging that there was still work to do, that things weren’t perfect — we didn’t call it Obamanomics — Barack Obama was able to win when the economy was still in pretty dire straits.
Who in the Democratic Party is impressing you at the moment? It feels like things are wide open in a way they haven’t been in a long time, and there’s a real reward for being creative, mixing it up, doing something different. I’ll put Pete Buttigieg aside, because people know I’m very biased toward him, so anything I say about him will come with that asterisk. But I still do think that he is one of the Democrats’ best and most compelling communicators.
Ruben Gallego is someone I tell everyone to take a look at. He is someone who really understands how to speak to the financial fragility that people are feeling, this feeling that the American dream no longer exists, the feeling that you can do everything right in life and still not be able to pay your bills, not feel safe in your community, not be able to send your kid to a school that you feel is going to educate them well. And he meets voters where they are on immigration. He talks about the need for a secure border but also an end to the lawless ICE raids and the racial profiling that’s happening with interior-immigration enforcement across the country. And he’s someone who also just speaks like a normal person. He doesn’t talk in policy talking points. He doesn’t sound like he’s reading off a staffer’s memo. He’s also got a very compelling personal story. Another thing I think is impressive about him is that he was able to vastly overperform the top of the ticket in 2024 and to win Latino voters. Democrats will need to figure out how to fix our problem with Latino voters and our problems with Black voters and Asian voters if we’re going to win more elections.
Trump does already seem to be alienating some of the Latino voters who came over to vote for him last year. Yeah. One thing we saw is Latino voters are pretty conservative on the issue of the border and illegal immigration. But the racial profiling we’re seeing from ICE, and these chaos-inducing raids, are just a bridge too far. But we’re not going to be able to win by hoping Trump screws up enough on immigration. Democrats need to go out and say some hard truths. One is that we need a secure border. We’re a sovereign nation; sovereign nations have secure borders. Two is that we need to deport criminals, violent criminals especially. And until we state those two plain truths that a lot of Democrats have seemed loath to do in recent years, we will not have credibility with voters. Voters will not let us get to the part where we can criticize the ICE raids and talk about how they’re undermining public safety and how they’re deeply immoral until we acknowledge the hard truths that Democrats have had so much trouble acknowledging in recent years.
How do you feel about Gavin Newsom’s strategy of going on offense by trolling Trump all the time? There’s always a room for a troll in a political party, so I’m glad he’s taking up that mantle.
You think he’s presidential timber? I don’t know, but in 2028, whoever is going to win will be someone who doesn’t just focus on Donald Trump and who has an affirmative vision, one that’s rooted in understanding that people are sick of the status quo, sick of the Establishment, and they really want change. I think 2028 is very ripe for our party finding another Barack Obama type. Voters are pissed off and want to take on the status quo, just as Obama did in 2008 when he criticized all the people who voted for the Iraq War, when he took on the Clinton dynasty. And I think we’re ripe for another moment like that.
How do you think Chuck Schumer and Democrats have handled the government shutdown? It seems like Schumer has quelled the critics a bit, for now at least. Everyone wants a fight, and he’s finally picked one. Democrats have been smart to zero in on the issue of health-care costs and ACA subsidies. They could have gone in a million different directions.
I’m a little surprised at how effective it’s been. Cost is the No. 1 issue for voters. And one of the top three concerns about costs is health care, so it was a really smart fight to pick. It’s also smart because Democrats know there are Republicans in the House and Senate who want to extend these subsidies. They know it’s a fight they’ll win with the public, and it’s one that they’ll likely win with the House and Senate, whether it’s in a shutdown negotiation or months afterward.
I sometimes see people make the point that maybe the median voter’s No. 1 issue isn’t Trump destroying democracy, or tearing down the East Wing of the White House, or any of the other crazy things he’s doing, but that the point of politics is to make people care about these issues more. And so to downplay those issues is political malpractice. We’ve got to meet voters where they are. Do we need to save democracy? Hell yes. But to save democracy, maybe we don’t talk about democracy. Maybe we talk about cost. Maybe we talk about a commonsense approach to the border. Maybe we talk about ways we’ll overhaul health care, whatever it is. But election after election has shown us that voters do not respond to this democracy argument.
To go back to Pete Buttigieg: Do you think America is ready for a gay president? I think America could be. The same question was raised in 2008 with Barack Obama — was America ready for a Black president? A lot of people thought no. I think sometimes we don’t give the American people enough credit that their views can change and evolve over time and that they’re willing to look past identity labels and look more at someone’s characters, someone’s ideas, someone’s passion to lead, more than an identity characteristic. That’s something we learned with Barack Obama and that maybe one day we could learn with Pete.
I was surprised he didn’t run for the Michigan Senate seat. Does experience like that matter to voters anymore? Actually, in a lot of races, we’re seeing that experience is more of a negative than a positive, because a lot of voters equate experience with being part of the problem. If you’ve been in office and you haven’t fixed things, why should I vote for you? It’s not always fair, but this is a moment when people are looking for leaders who will challenge the status quo. That’s more likely to come from someone who hasn’t spent their career climbing the ladder and who hasn’t spent their career asking for permission to run for this office or that office, or get this endorsement from leadership or that endorsement from leadership.
It reminds me of what was happening with the GOP in the early 2010s. There’s this conversation about whether Democrats are going through a Tea Party moment. Maybe — maybe it’s our own little version of the Tea Party. But to me it feels less ideological than the GOP version in 2009 and 2010. It feels more generational, and more rooted in who will fight versus who will fold. Also, Democratic voters, more so than Republican voters for whatever reason, seem a bit more concerned about electability. 2026 will test it; these primaries will test it. But in focus-group polling I’ve seen for 2026, the top issues for voters are generational change, getting rid of the gerontocracy, who will stand up and fight, and electability. And that’s pretty notable — that even when they want to take on the Establishment and want a new generation of leadership, they still want someone who can win. Whereas in 2010, it really felt like Republican voters wanted just to burn the house down, even if they were in it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The moderators and the other candidates all treated him like the frontrunner, and at times Mamdani looked more uncomfortable than he has in debates past.
One notable example of Mamdani getting cornered was when he was pressed on his position on this year’s ballot initiatives regarding housing policy. Both Cuomo and Sliwa loudly and simultaneously hounded him about not having a position, and when asked by a moderator how he planned to vote, Mamdani responded, with what seemed like a knowing half-smile, “I have not yet taken a position on those ballot questions.”
“Oh, what a shocker!” Cuomo quickly responded. Sliwa howled, as did some in the audience.
Later Mamdani again declined to take a position on a different ballot question, prompting a similar response from Cuomo and Sliwa.
Noted Bernadette Hogan at NY1, “This is also a little taste of what reporters on the campaign trail experience when asking Mamdani questions. He goes out of his way to not answer certain questions that could lead to controversy.”
Though he struggled a bit, Mamdani didn’t lose the debate, either. He still effectively centered his campaign messages about affordability and optimism, and he took multiple opportunities to go after Cuomo (and Mayor Adams).
We are almost three quarters of the way through, and while there haven’t been any knockout blows, the most striking feature of the debate has been Mamdani’s aggressiveness. He is not running out the clock on his polling lead but taking the fight right to Andrew Cuomo, and has gotten some of the most memorable lines of the night.
Among them, after Cuomo talked up his Zohran’s Law plan to means test rent stabilized apartments, Mamdani said: “What you’ve heard it from Andrew Cuomo is that the number one crisis in this city the housing crisis, and his answer is to evict my wife and I. He thinks you address this crisis by unleashing my landlord’s ability to raise my rent. If you think that the problem in this city is that my rent is too low, vote for him.”
Also, after Cuomo attacked Mamdani on his experience, Mamdani responded, “What I don’t have in experience, I make up for in integrity. And what Andrew Cuomo lacks in integrity, he could never make up for with experience.”
And finally, noted that his plan to have city-run grocery stores would cost the same as the state paid to represent Cuomo in the various lawsuits against him.
Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate making his second run for mayor, is closing out the campaign the way he does everything: with restless energy, a bull-headed refusal to back down, and an endless string of wisecracks and wild, well-told anecdotes and observations accumulated during a lifetime spent roaming the streets of New York. But behind Sliwa’s constant patter is a plan.
“Look, I start with 28 percent from the last election. I don’t think most of them are going to leave me. The Republicans will come home, and I have even more independents than Republicans,” he told me recently. “And now, with the Protect Animals ballot line, first time ever in electoral politics, I figure I’ll get another four or five percent. It’s mostly women. But then I’m a contender.”
At first glance, the political math checks out: The last two Republican candidates for mayor before Sliwa, Representative Nicole Malliotakis and hospital executive Joe Lhota, finished with 28 percent and 24 percent, respectively, against Democrat Bill de Blasio in 2017 and 2013. Assuming a baseline GOP vote of 28 percent or so, there’s good reason for Sliwa to think that hard work and a bit of luck could move him within striking range of the Democratic leader in the race, Zohran Mamdani, who is polling around 46 percent in most surveys.
“Please, Mr. President, don’t say any nice things about me. Be Switzerland, be neutral, stay out of this race,” he said. “You can’t help, you can only hurt. New York City is not Trumpland. Everywhere I go, and I’ve been in all 350 neighborhoods, he has pockets of support, but I’m gonna win them anyway.”
Sliwa’s efforts have been further impaired by pro-Cuomo independent political committees that are spending millions on ads warning voters that electing Mamdani, a democratic socialist, would be an existential threat to life in New York. Pressure on Sliwa to drop out of the race and support Cuomo has been intense, and recently led to threats sufficiently credible that Sliwa has hired armed security to guard him and his wife.
“You gotta understand, I’m a guy who was targeted by the Gottis and Gambinos and shot five times with hollow point bullets. I never had armed-security,” he told me. “Obviously, the rhetoric is way too high; Zohran Mandami is getting all these threats. We need to lower it. Let the people decide the election.”
Sliwa’s goal is to create an urban Republican movement that is not socially conservative or pro-Trump, but pro-business, tough on crime and welcoming to communities of color. He made the point by opening a campaign office in Brownsville, Brooklyn, a low-income neighborhood that has been a Democratic stronghold for generations. Walking a single block with Sliwa took 10 minutes, as Black and Latino residents stopped him for selfies, chitchat, and promises to vote for him. One bus driver even stopped in traffic, honked and waved Sliwa on board so he could make a quick pitch to passengers.
Setting up shop in Brownsville was a homecoming of sorts for Sliwa, who lived near the corner of Hegeman Avenue and Osborn Street from 1974 to 1976 after getting expelled from Brooklyn Prep, a Catholic high school for boys. Sliwa, the class president, had organized protests against the school’s jacket-and-tie dress code; the Jesuit priests who ran the school were not amused.
“Boy, that was an experience, the only white guy there, married to Koren Drayton at the time. I couldn’t go back to Canarsie because I was married to a Black woman, and the brothers were like, why are you coming into our community, snacking on our women. I was damned if you do, damned if you didn’t. And then I moved to the Bronx. I figured, hey, the Bronx will accept me. And they did, because the Bronx was burning and I ended up becoming a night manager at Mickey D’s.“
It was at McDonald’s, besieged by crime, that Sliwa organized his overnight shift workers into a safety patrol called the Magnificent 13, later renamed the Guardian Angels, that adopted uniforms and began doing literal hand-to-hand combat against muggers and gang members on streets and subways. Decades later, says Sliwa, “I can go into neighborhoods where the only Republican they’ve ever seen is Abraham Lincoln on a five-dollar bill and be accepted because of the work I’ve done with the Guardian Angels.”
The street-patrol veteran says that, if elected, he would hire 7,000 additional cops, hike their pay, and revive the NYPD’s Homeless Outreach Unit. “When Bill de Blasio and the city council pulled a billion dollars out of the budget for the police in the summer of 2020, they disbanded this great unit. They knew the clients,” he told me. “They would go into the homeless shelters. They’d speak with the directors, the security, speak with community leaders. Once they disbanded that, they left it to the local precinct, men and women who are not trained to deal with that. It takes a very strong skill level.”
On the subways, says Sliwa, “I cannot comprehend why they are not putting police officers on the moving trains,” roaming from car to car rather than standing on the platform. He would also implement crackdowns on shoplifting and public weed smoking.
And far from focusing exclusively on public safety and quality of life, Sliwa wants to encourage homeownership as a way to build wealth and stability in low-income neighborhoods, including by refashioning public housing developments as resident-owned co-ops. On education, economic development and other topics, he said he’d consult with experts and frontline city workers to find strategies to build the middle class.
“I would have a totally transparent administration. The good but also the bad and the ugly,” he told me. “The other thing I would elevate are the civil servants, many of them who have served for Democrats and Republicans. They’re the silent number of people who keep the government going, because elected officials, I don’t care if they’re Republicans or Democrats, they’re too busy dialing for dollars. The staff does all the work. They never get put on a pedestal. They’re never given an opportunity of exposing great ideas.”
It’s the kind of practicality you’d expect from a man who dropped out of high school but now wants to run the nation’s largest education system. “As mayor, I would sit back, I’d analyze, I have to sign off on it,” he told me. “I’d say, ‘You, George, you’re the one who was the architect of this. You’ve been a correctional officer for 32 years, you know the system inside out. I want you to give the press conference and explain how this works.’ Wouldn’t that be a novel idea?”
It was well past midnight on Sunday when Eric Adams finally walked down the echoing stairs of Gracie Mansion and, carrying a blown-up portrait of his mother, sat on a bottom step and looked into a camera to finally tell New Yorkers that he was dropping out of the mayoral race.
The late hour was reflective of a mayor who always kept odd hours, but also of someone who was, aides and allies say, genuinely torn over whether or not he should keep campaigning, losing sleep and unable to come to a final decision.
“He was just really struggling, really doing some soul-searching,” says John Catsimatidis, the supermarket magnate and a longtime Adams ally. “He just finally reached a ‘fuck you’ level and realized that he couldn’t turn it around.”
In the end, there was no one moment that made the mayor finally wake up and see what everyone else has seen for a long time: that he has no better chance of being reelected than I do, or you do, or the ghost of Abe Beame does. Nearly every day brought a new round of rumors that his exit was imminent; the mayor dug his heels in farther, continuing to insist that he wasn’t going anywhere. Even as donors and allies privately prodded him to leave the race, Adams seemed to believe that once New Yorkers heard his story, compared his record on crime and the economy to anyone else’s, they would come around.
But as September came to a close, Adams ceased campaigning. When asked on Saturday by Reverend Al Sharpton on MSNBC if there weren’t any circumstances upon which he would drop out, Adams for the first time demurred: “No, I can’t say that,” he told Sharpton, whose daughter endorsed Adams four years ago. “I’ve been sitting down with my team, having our pathways, finding out how we get the money into the coffers to do the commercials, to do the mailers, to pay for our team and staff,” he said. “We’ve got to make the right decision. I’ll make the right decision for the city of New York, a city I love.”
There had been a moment when it looked as if Adams could have been a serious contender in this campaign. Just after the June primary, money was pouring into his campaign coffers as it looked unlikely that Andrew Cuomo could mount a comeback after his disastrous 13-point loss to Zohran Mamdani. There was talk in elite business circles of making a hostile takeover of the Adams operation, installing professional-grade political operatives and rallying Republicans and Democratic moderates around the mayor as the best “Stop Mamdani” option.
But none of that came to pass. Eugene Noh, a political operative with a history of controversial behavior who had been removed from social media for inflammatory and racially inflected posts, was named campaign manager, and the rest of the operation remained bare-bones. Former staffers say that Frank Carone, the mayor’s former chief of staff and the official campaign chairman, was never much involved. Adams was denied matching funds by the city’s Campaign Finance Board ever since he was indicted on corruption charges last year, and he never seemed to want to spend the money he did have. Talks about joining the Trump administration in exchange for quitting the race went nowhere.
Adams has been polling in the single digits throughout the campaign. He never hired his own pollster and maintained that public polls showing him in a distant fourth were rigged against him by pollsters secretly working for Cuomo. He believed that his numbers would change in August and September, but just as the campaign was preparing for a last push, longtime ally Ingrid Lewis-Martin was indicted in a lurid bribery scandal that involved allegedly trading away traffic-calming measures for a brief cameo in a Hulu TV show. Winnie Greco, another longtime aide, was busted for handing a reporter cash inside a potato-chip bag. “Everything was just a mess,” says one Adams campaign staffer. “The chaos kept on coming and coming, and there was no way to get past it.”
It remains an open question how much Adams’s exit will impact the contours of the race. Private polling for the Cuomo campaign has shown that Adams supporters break 80 percent for the former governor, with the remaining going to Republican Curtis Sliwa, but public polling shows Cuomo getting closer to half of the Adams vote and the remaining going to Sliwa, Mamdani, or undecided. Wealthy donors who have largely sat out the campaign until now are expected to come out in a major way for Cuomo in the coming days. And a race that has been consumed by the question of “Is the mayor in or out?” now has space for other media narratives.
Meanwhile, remaining Adams loyalists consider yesterday’s announcement to be not so much a retirement” but, as one aide put it, “a reset.” They believe the mayor’s record will look better in four years, especially if a Mayor Mamdani tries to bring his brand of democratic socialism to the capital of capitalism.
“Look at Donald Trump,” says one aide. “He left in disgrace, and four years later, he is president of the United States. Anything can happen. This isn’t the end of Eric Adams.”
Adams had next to no chance of winning. His languishing independent bid was marred by middling poll numbers, lackluster fundraising, and an often-present air of controversy.
It’s an anti-climactic end to what once seemed to be a promising political story that began in 2021 as the then–Brooklyn borough president Adams defeated his party rivals handily in the mayoral primary, later declaring himself the “the face of the Democratic Party.” When he was sworn in on New Year’s Day in 2022, Adams became only the second Black mayor in the city’s history.
But Adams’s sole term in office was marked by a seemingly endless stream of controversies, including federal raids on some of his top aides and appointees and a revolving door of resignations that saw the mayor name four police commissioners in the span of two years. The turmoil in City Hall reached a fever pitch last year when federal prosecutors unveiled an indictment against Adams, accusing the mayor of intentionally soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations and luxury travel benefits in exchange for favors in a scheme that extended back to Adams’s tenure as Brooklyn borough president in 2014. Adams long denied the allegations against him and resisted calls to resign from his seat.
Adams’s exit from the race helps to thin the general-election field in a likely boon to former governor Andrew Cuomo, who is eyeing a rematch with Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, who defeated him in the primary in June. Also in the race is Republican Party nominee and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, who has said he intends to stay in the race, even if offered another role.
The New York Times reported in early September that associates of Adams had been in touch with top Trump advisers, discussing a possible role for the mayor in the administration in lieu of continuing his reelection bid. But Adams had long denied the speculation that he was under consideration for a federal-government position, telling reporters, “I have a job. I’m running for my reelection, and I’m still doing that, and I’m looking forward to getting reelected.”
Bill de Blasio knows firsthand what the closing weeks of a mayoral race feel like. He is less familiar with a dramatic finish; in 2013 (after a hard-fought Democratic primary) and in 2017, de Blasio trounced his Republican opponents. This year’s front-runner, the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, can’t breathe as easy, even if he does enjoy a hefty lead in the polls against Andrew Cuomo, Curtis Sliwa, and scandal-plagued incumbent Eric Adams — not when the Trump administration is throwing its weight around to push Adams and Sliwa out and force a two-man race.
De Blasio endorsed Mamdani earlier this month, and the two have plenty of political common ground, such as a focus on affordability. But de Blasio’s admiration clearly runs deeper than any policy platform. I spoke with him about why he thinks Mamdani is a uniquely talented politician, how the end of the race might play out, and whether it matters that Chuck Schumer still won’t endorse.
The polls have been telling a very consistent story, with Mamdani getting support in the mid-40s, Cuomo in the mid-20s, and Curtis Sliwa and Eric Adams well behind those two. What do you think would have to happen for Mamdani to lose at this point? Well, I’m certainly not here to give you doomsday scenarios, but I think I’d flip the equation and say the best way for him to guarantee his victory is to break 50 percent. I think about his trajectory from the primary until now, because the primary is always a measure of just Democratic voters, so it’s a smaller universe, and he ended up low mid-40s there. And then, of course, with the fuller distribution, even higher. But to convert that now to, give or take 45 percent of the overall city electorate — independents, Republicans, minor parties, everybody — that’s a major achievement, to basically take his primary performance and superimpose it on the general-election electorate. That’s a lot of movement.
So the first thing I’d say is that the trend line is extremely impressive and encouraging. And then the second piece is the turnout question, which has become more and more central in the last ten years. And I think we’ve seen here a shocking disparity between a candidate and a campaigner who has a truly well-defined, massive turnout operation, versus three other campaigns that show no evidence of that, and certainly no evidence of a grassroots organic turnout operation.
Yeah, Mamdani’s volunteers are everywhere. Right, and that really counts, considering so much of voting is emotional, spontaneous, last minute. Human contact in the final days is just immensely powerful in terms of actually motivating someone to vote. So I really do believe his current 45 percent or so in polling probably translates to 50 percent or more in actual vote terms, because of that turnout differential. But obviously he has to execute that. Whether he’s up against one opponent or three opponents, it’s academic if he breaks 50 percent.
We still don’t know the final candidate lineup. There are all sorts of possibilities — six weeks is forever. One or more candidates might drop out, and of course that will change things. But what that doesn’t change is the way people are running their campaigns. There’s really no such thing as six weeks out a candidate having a conversion experience and suddenly turning into a different or better candidate. If you have not produced a compelling campaign by now, it’s locked in, basically. That’s a reason why Zohran’s team should feel some confidence, but not overconfidence.
And there’s also just external events. Inevitably, things happen, and they do frame how people think. There’s been a lot of history of that in New York City. It doesn’t change anything about strategy. Something might happen in the world that affects people’s thinking, and you can’t plan for it. So what you do is continue the steady growth and continue to build a turnout operation. And then if something really fundamental happens in the world, or in the city, it’s a question of how each candidate quickly and agilely responds to it. And in that kind of scenario, I would give Zohran a much greater likelihood of knowing how to do that, doing it in a way that people felt was real.
One other thing I’d say is that I still expect a huge amount of money to be thrown against him toward the end, and attempts to misrepresent him, which we saw in the last weeks before the primary. I assume it’ll happen again. It wasn’t effective in the primary, but I don’t think that will stop folks with a lot of money from trying. And you just don’t know how that plays out.
I was struck by something you said recently about Mamdani, that “he is more talented in many ways” than you were. This was in the context of him reaching out to skeptical business leaders, which you said he did in a smart way. What in particular impresses you about Mamdani? I would say on the broader talent level, he’s just a natural, organic communicator. He has a really great ability to keep his message short and clear without dumbing it down. And I’ve noticed even in more spontaneous settings, his brain takes a question and breaks it down to something clear and understandable, but still emotionally meaningful. It’s just who he is. I would dare say I’d give some extra credit to his mom, because if you have a mother who explains the world to people in very emotional and visual terms, I’m sure that is a great influence. We’ve all been to movies where a single line or a brief scene can speak volumes. I think he’s organically learned that, and that’s a massive talent. His human ability to connect with people very fluidly — I have some of that, but I think he has more.
“Democratic socialism with a human face,” as you’ve put it. Yes, exactly. Look, you can drop me into any community in New York City and I can relate to anyone, but he has a way of doing it that’s particularly engaging. Talent is such an interesting thing. I think of this through a sport, particularly my beloved baseball. Some players show up and they just can do things other people can’t do. It’s just in their DNA, in their bloodstream, in their influences, whatever. This guy can do things most other politicians can’t do.
He’s also clearly moderating as he approaches the general election. He has backed off on the phrase “globalize the intifada,” for instance, and has said he would apologize to the NYPD for calling them racist in the past, although he hasn’t yet. The relationship between you and the police force was fraught for a time. What do you think of the way he’s handling this? I think it’s a good start. I always tell people from my own rich experience that the notion of referring to “the police” as a totality politically is an inaccurate frame. I always say there are three pieces. There’s the rank and file, who are, in broad strokes, about half from the city, half from the suburbs, half people of color, half white. They’re very diverse in every sense. They are not politically monolithic. And then you have the leadership, including the leadership that a mayor brings in and elevates, and folks who rise up the ranks, who are often also diverse in their worldview. They’re often very intelligent, subtle people who don’t just see the world in black-and-white terms.
And then you have the unions, and there are five of them. All five are different, and their leaders are different. The newer leaders at the PBA and SBA are different than their predecessors. There’s a common history with the PBA in particular of stirring the pot and often practicing a kind of right-wing populism, but it’s not monolithic.
So there’s no simple way of describing the police worldview. But I think, generally speaking, anybody would want to hear that you care about them, you respect them, that if you had some negative assumptions, you’ve reevaluated those and you want to make sure that they know that you’re listening to them, that you’re thinking objectively. He’s doing those things in his own way. I think those are the right things to do. It’ll take more, and also it will never be perfect. If an officer happens to have a more reform-minded worldview, they’ll give him more of the benefit of the doubt. If an officer happens to be a MAGA person, they’ll give him less benefit of the doubt. That’s just human reality.
But also it’s which leadership he chooses, how he relates to them, and then how he relates to the union leaders. And I had good days and bad days with that. I go back and look at the first months of my administration — we actually had a chance of having a more productive relationship with the police unions. And the death of Eric Garner, obviously, threw everything into a painful, conflictual dynamic. But again, each union is different. There are new leaders. He has a chance to establish his own cadence and connection. And none of this stuff is preordained.
You endorsed Mamdani in early September. Governor Hochul did a few days ago, but a bunch of prominent leaders, like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, haven’t yet. Well, I don’t know if I’d say a bunch anymore. It’s a pretty small number. Hochul came through; Yvette Clarke came through the other day. I think Schumer and Jeffries should endorse him for sure, but they’re in a very unusual position as the two leaders of the party in each chamber nationally, from one borough. When does that happen? But if you put them aside — the DNC is supporting him. So you’ve got Jay Jacobs, you’ve got Jeffries, you’ve got Schumer.
And Tom Suozzi. That’s four people. The vast majority of other Democrats, that I know of, are supporting him. So it’s almost like the ones who are not are such outliers at this point.
But the problem is that the ones who are not are two of the most powerful Democrats. But with deepest respect for them, in terms of moving a vote in New York City, I’m not sure I would say that.
I was going to ask if you had some sympathy for their position, and it sounds like you do. I understand they are representing a national worldview and a variety of constituencies, and I get that there’s some complexities. That said, he is the Democratic nominee. He won overwhelmingly, and they should support him, period. It’s time. It’s really not a good reason. I can see the complexity of their lives. I don’t think it changes anything. They should support it. But the real question is, at this point, when we’re talking about votes on the ground, is the absence of that handful of endorsements changing the reality of the ground? Not really.
Lastly, your feelings on Andrew Cuomo are well documented. The race isn’t over, but do you feel any sense of solace, or even triumph, watching him struggle to win this race? No, because it’s not over. I think the public has seen through him once and for all. I think the emperor has no clothes and his old tricks aren’t working, but that’s all academic until the votes are counted.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Election day is rapidly approaching, and Andrew Cuomo is losing. But the Cuomo camp still has a long-shot plan to defeat Democrat Zohran Mamdani in November. It requires several things to come together: The field must shrink, then shrink further. Then deep-pocketed donors must make a last-minute pivot to Cuomo, who will use their money to peel off part of the Democratic voter base from the front-runner.
“I am not going to blow smoke. It is a narrow path,” said Cornell Belcher, a pollster for Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns who recently joined Cuomo’s campaign. “But I haven’t worked for a candidate in the past decade who didn’t have a narrow path to victory.”
The polls, to be sure, are bad, showing Cuomo trailing Mamdani by an average of 19 points. The labor unions and elected officials who endorsed the former governor in the Democratic primary have almost entirely abandoned him. Cuomo is losing the money race, and the national media has all but anointed the 33-year-old democratic socialist as the Next Big Thing.
Longtime aides and allies concede it’s a daunting challenge, especially given that Cuoma will be running on a third-party line in a city where almost two-thirds of registered voters are Democrats.
It doesn’t help that the Cuomo campaign’s multipronged approach rests on something happening that keeps not happening, despite constant rumors that it might. “There is very much a path here for us,” said one Cuomo official. “But the first step is that Eric Adams has to get the fuck out of this race.” But Adams, running a distant fourth, insists that he is not dropping out and that Cuomo is at fault for suggesting he will.
As a result, members of the Cuomo camp have been treating Adams cautiously, fearful not just that he will attack them more but also that any efforts to nudge him out will backfire. When billionaire hedge-funder and onetime Adams supporter Bill Ackman tweeted, “It is time for Mayor Adams to step aside,” some close to Cuomo cringed, knowing the mayor would be less likely to leave if he felt pushed.
Adams’s exit wouldn’t have a major impact on the polls. But, for Team Cuomo, consolidating the race from four candidates to three would unlock the second part of the plan: resetting the political chessboard in the race’s final weeks and getting anti-Mamdani donors to start shelling out money again. “If Eric gets out, there is going to be a gush of money coming Andrew’s way, $20 million to $30 million in a matter of weeks,” said one supporter of Cuomo’s.
Once that happens, Cuomo’s advisers see part three playing out: the sidelining of Curtis Sliwa. The Republican, now running third, has been even more adamant than Adams about staying in the race. But a sample of what could be in store for Sliwa came recently, when Trump made an appearance on the Fox & Friends couch and proceeded to belittle the perpetually bereted Guardian Angels founder and radio host.
“I’m a Republican, but Curtis is not exactly prime time,” Trump said. “He wants cats to be in Gracie Mansion. That’s the magnificent home of the mayor. It’s beautiful. We don’t need to have thousands of cats there.”
Sure, Sliwa is a Republican, Trump transmitted to the MAGA faithful. But he’s also something of a weirdo — more a character than a mayor.
Cuomo’s people were thrilled by Trump’s remarks, hoping they give other Republicans permission to dismiss Sliwa too. One adviser to Cuomo told me they believe as much as half of Sliwa’s vote — currently hovering around 15 percent — would be gettable for Cuomo. Add that to the share of the Adams vote Cuomo would be likely to receive and it could put him within five points of Mamdani.
“I think this is going to come down to a two-person race at the end of the day, and I don’t think people are going to waste their vote,” Cuomo said when asked about the possibility of Adams (or even Sliwa) staying in the contest. “That would be the natural resolution, as it was in the primary. And in the primary, there were candidates who had 14 points, and they wound up with three. Why? People see who’s viable and who’s not, and there are only going to be two viable candidates in my opinion.”
Getting over the top would involve reclaiming some working-class Democratic voters who supported Cuomo in the primary while trying to dampen enthusiasm for Mamdani among his most fervent fans: young voters on the left (who historically have not turned out en masse).
For his part, Mamdani is engaged in a similar, if reversed, two-step: trying to keep his left-wing base energized while also expanding his tent to include Democratic moderates. In one day, Mamdani both doubled down on his pledge to arrest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and expressed regret for his 2020 tweet that called the NYPD “racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety.” (Social-media posts from voices on the left angry over Mamdani’s backpedaling on some progressive rhetoric have been gleefully passed around on pro-Cuomo group chats.)
Cuomo needs around 30 percent of Democrats to support him in the general. There is a belief in his camp that the Democratic primary, even in this heavily Democratic city, is not reflective of the general electorate. One person involved in a potential outside spending effort on Cuomo’s behalf said that according to their metrics, more than half of Democratic voters in November won’t have voted in the primary and that they tilt far more moderate than the primary electorate.
“If you narrow this down to a two-person race and you look at the voters that are the most fluid on everything from crime to affordability to who can do the job, Cuomo has a significant lead with those voters,” said Belcher.
Current polls show that in a four-person field, Cuomo is trailing in nearly every demographic subgroup. But the campaign believes he can win loyal Democratic constituencies like Black, Hispanic, and Jewish voters, who tend to vote straight down the ticket for the Democratic nominee but may be persuadable that Mamdani is too much of a risk.
Many Cuomo advisers have discussed Rudy Giuliani’s 1993 victory, when half of the city’s electorate turned out to defeat David Dinkins. “You have to frighten people to give them a reason to go to the polls,” said one close Cuomo ally. “There is just a lot there,” said another. “There is public safety, there is the whole communist thing, there is the fact that if we elect this 33-year-old, then the city is going to go to shit. It will be de Blasio 2.0, and who wants that?”
With Mamdani nationalizing the race, bringing in figures like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on his behalf, the Cuomo camp thinks it can do a version of the same. “What is a Mayor Mamdani going to mean for our efforts to take back the House? What is a Mayor Mamdani going to mean for Kathy Hochul’s reelection or for the 2028 race?” said one person close to Cuomo. The race, in this vision, would be a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party — one in which democratic socialists are preparingto mount a takeover and Cuomo, who has been dogged by his close association with Trump throughout this race, manages to flip the narrative and become the person who is going save the city from the Trumpian menace.
“They are going to have to go scorched earth,” said Adam Carlson, a pollster not involved in the race. “It will have to be different from the primary — something like, ‘I am the only thing standing between New York City and a complete Trump authoritarian takeover.’ And Cuomo then becomes the ‘Don’t rock the boat’ guy.”
Still, much of this hangs on Adams getting out of the race.
“The next two weeks are crunch time,” said Democratic operative Chris Coffey, who advised Cuomo in the primary. “Because if you don’t see movement from Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa, it just gets harder for Cuomo to put something together.”
Election day is rapidly approaching, and Andrew Cuomo is losing. But the Cuomo camp still has a long-shot plan to defeat Democrat Zohran Mamdani in November. It requires several things to come together: The field must shrink, then shrink further. Then deep-pocketed donors must make a last-minute pivot to Cuomo, who will use their money to peel off part of the Democratic voter base from the front-runner.
“I am not going to blow smoke. It is a narrow path,” said Cornell Belcher, a pollster for Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns who recently joined Cuomo’s campaign. “But I haven’t worked for a candidate in the past decade who didn’t have a narrow path to victory.”
The polls, to be sure, are bad, showing Cuomo trailing Mamdani by an average of 19 points. The labor unions and elected officials who endorsed the former governor in the Democratic primary have almost entirely abandoned him. Cuomo is losing the money race, and the national media has all but anointed the 33-year-old democratic socialist as the Next Big Thing.
Longtime aides and allies concede it’s a daunting challenge, especially given that Cuoma will be running on a third-party line in a city where almost two-thirds of registered voters are Democrats.
It doesn’t help that the Cuomo campaign’s multipronged approach rests on something happening that keeps not happening, despite constant rumors that it might. “There is very much a path here for us,” said one Cuomo official. “But the first step is that Eric Adams has to get the fuck out of this race.” But Adams, running a distant fourth, insists that he is not dropping out and that Cuomo is at fault for suggesting he will.
As a result, members of the Cuomo camp have been treating Adams cautiously, fearful not just that he will attack them more but also that any efforts to nudge him out will backfire. When billionaire hedge-funder and onetime Adams supporter Bill Ackman tweeted, “It is time for Mayor Adams to step aside,” some close to Cuomo cringed, knowing the mayor would be less likely to leave if he felt pushed.
Adams’s exit wouldn’t have a major impact on the polls. But, for Team Cuomo, consolidating the race from four candidates to three would unlock the second part of the plan: resetting the political chessboard in the race’s final weeks and getting anti-Mamdani donors to start shelling out money again. “If Eric gets out, there is going to be a gush of money coming Andrew’s way, $20 million to $30 million in a matter of weeks,” said one supporter of Cuomo’s.
Once that happens, Cuomo’s advisers see part three playing out: the sidelining of Curtis Sliwa. The Republican, now running third, has been even more adamant than Adams about staying in the race. But a sample of what could be in store for Sliwa came recently, when Trump made an appearance on the Fox & Friends couch and proceeded to belittle the perpetually bereted Guardian Angels founder and radio host.
“I’m a Republican, but Curtis is not exactly prime time,” Trump said. “He wants cats to be in Gracie Mansion. That’s the magnificent home of the mayor. It’s beautiful. We don’t need to have thousands of cats there.”
Sure, Sliwa is a Republican, Trump transmitted to the MAGA faithful. But he’s also something of a weirdo — more a character than a mayor.
Cuomo’s people were thrilled by Trump’s remarks, hoping they give other Republicans permission to dismiss Sliwa too. One adviser to Cuomo told me they believe as much as half of Sliwa’s vote — currently hovering around 15 percent — would be gettable for Cuomo. Add that to the share of the Adams vote Cuomo would be likely to receive and it could put him within five points of Mamdani.
“I think this is going to come down to a two-person race at the end of the day, and I don’t think people are going to waste their vote,” Cuomo said when asked about the possibility of Adams (or even Sliwa) staying in the contest. “That would be the natural resolution, as it was in the primary. And in the primary, there were candidates who had 14 points, and they wound up with three. Why? People see who’s viable and who’s not, and there are only going to be two viable candidates in my opinion.”
Getting over the top would involve reclaiming some working-class Democratic voters who supported Cuomo in the primary while trying to dampen enthusiasm for Mamdani among his most fervent fans: young voters on the left (who historically have not turned out en masse).
For his part, Mamdani is engaged in a similar, if reversed, two-step: trying to keep his left-wing base energized while also expanding his tent to include Democratic moderates. In one day, Mamdani both doubled down on his pledge to arrest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and expressed regret for his 2020 tweet that called the NYPD “racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety.” (Social-media posts from voices on the left angry over Mamdani’s backpedaling on some progressive rhetoric have been gleefully passed around on pro-Cuomo group chats.)
Cuomo needs around 30 percent of Democrats to support him in the general. There is a belief in his camp that the Democratic primary, even in this heavily Democratic city, is not reflective of the general electorate. One person involved in a potential outside spending effort on Cuomo’s behalf said that according to their metrics, more than half of Democratic voters in November won’t have voted in the primary and that they tilt far more moderate than the primary electorate.
“If you narrow this down to a two-person race and you look at the voters that are the most fluid on everything from crime to affordability to who can do the job, Cuomo has a significant lead with those voters,” said Belcher.
Current polls show that in a four-person field, Cuomo is trailing in nearly every demographic subgroup. But the campaign believes he can win loyal Democratic constituencies like Black, Hispanic, and Jewish voters, who tend to vote straight down the ticket for the Democratic nominee but may be persuadable that Mamdani is too much of a risk.
Many Cuomo advisers have discussed Rudy Giuliani’s 1993 victory, when half of the city’s electorate turned out to defeat David Dinkins. “You have to frighten people to give them a reason to go to the polls,” said one close Cuomo ally. “There is just a lot there,” said another. “There is public safety, there is the whole communist thing, there is the fact that if we elect this 33-year-old, then the city is going to go to shit. It will be de Blasio 2.0, and who wants that?”
With Mamdani nationalizing the race, bringing in figures like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on his behalf, the Cuomo camp thinks it can do a version of the same. “What is a Mayor Mamdani going to mean for our efforts to take back the House? What is a Mayor Mamdani going to mean for Kathy Hochul’s reelection or for the 2028 race?” said one person close to Cuomo. The race, in this vision, would be a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party — one in which democratic socialists are preparingto mount a takeover and Cuomo, who has been dogged by his close association with Trump throughout this race, manages to flip the narrative and become the person who is going save the city from the Trumpian menace.
“They are going to have to go scorched earth,” said Adam Carlson, a pollster not involved in the race. “It will have to be different from the primary — something like, ‘I am the only thing standing between New York City and a complete Trump authoritarian takeover.’ And Cuomo then becomes the ‘Don’t rock the boat’ guy.”
Still, much of this hangs on Adams getting out of the race.
“The next two weeks are crunch time,” said Democratic operative Chris Coffey, who advised Cuomo in the primary. “Because if you don’t see movement from Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa, it just gets harder for Cuomo to put something together.”
A win by Zohran Mamdani on November 4 would make the 33-year-old New York’s youngest mayor in a century. But even in a contest against men twice his age, Mamdani has begun to sound like the adult in the room on issues of public safety, offering detailed, thoughtful policy proposals while his opponents — Mayor Eric Adams, former governor Andrew Cuomo, and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa — continue to campaign on the traditional idea that channeling more money, manpower and technology to the NYPD is the only way to keep the city safe.
By contrast, Mamdani backs a slate of criminal-justice reforms and innovations from around the country that can be replicated or expanded in New York to deal with issues like gang violence and disorder in the subways involving homeless people. We talked about it in an hourlong conversation co-sponsored by Vital City and Columbia University’s School of Journalism.
“A lot of times for New Yorkers, what is experienced or understood as an example of social disorder is then tasked to the police as if it’s their responsibility,” he told me. “What we have ended up with is police officers responding to 200,000 mental-health calls a year, and that cannot be separated from the fact that response times have increased by 20 percent over the last few years, where now the average time is closer to 16 minutes.”
Mamdani wants to create a billion-dollar Department of Community Safety that would handle non-emergency calls. “Evidence and outcomes have to be the North Star of our administration and frankly of any administration,” he said. “What’s frustrating is that we have evidence of approaches that work, but they are not operating at the scale that they could be.” The new agency would become the home of the city’s violence-interrupter and crisis-management programs, along with an expanded version of the B-HEARD program, which dispatches counselors along with cops to emergency calls that have a low risk of violence.
“Thirty-five percent of calls that B-HEARD was eligible for, it did not respond to and the police responded to. And part of that is because it has been underfunded, part of it is because it has completely been deprioritized,” Mamdani explained. “The vision of B-HEARD has to be one where we have it present in every single neighborhood, and where in the 20 neighborhoods of the highest need we have two or three teams. And where we increase funding for it by about 150 percent.”
That is a world away from what the other candidates are saying. Cuomo promises to hire 5,000 new cops, while Sliwa says he’ll bring 7,000 onboard, and Adams recently launched quality-of-life policing that will send officers and other resources to high-crime neighborhoods. All three insist that crime is the top issue facing the city and frequently attack Mamdani for past social-media posts in support of reducing the NYPD’s budget. (He now disavows talk about defunding the police.)
But voters appear to be warming up to Mamdani’s approach: the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll shows Mamdani leading all candidates on the question of who would do the best job on tackling crime (Adams, the ex-NYPD captain, finished last). The openness to new approaches is a sign of New York’s long-overdue need for a substantive debate about crime and disorder. We’ve learned the hard way that medical and social-service professionals should be leading the response to more of the thousands of mental-health distress calls that routinely end up with the NYPD by default.
Mamdani deserves credit for educating himself about proven innovations like CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) a successful program in Eugene, Oregon, that has nonviolently resolved tens of thousands of cases without police intervention and inspired similar efforts around the nation. But he’s fighting an uphill battle against cynical voices of the status quo, including the New York Post editorial board, which recently dismissed the idea of shifting mental-health calls away from the NYPD as “barely even voodoo.”
“What has been so frustrating is that we’ve seen the complete lack of will from this executive means that so many of these kinds of programs have been prejudged to failure from the very beginning because they’ve never been given what they needed,” Mamdani told me, rattling off programs around the country that might work in New York.
“In Denver, they had a STAR program. This is a program that focuses on low-level crime. In the neighborhoods where they focused, crime went down by 34 percent. Over the period of a number of years, they had 12,000 clinical interactions. Of those, only 3 percent required a medical hold,” he said. On the subject of helping homeless New Yorkers in the subways, he name-checked a program in Philadelphia’s SEPTA mass-transit system that might work here.
While both men would surely object to the comparison, Mamdani’s willingness to bring new programs and a new mind-set reminds me of the long-ago 1993 campaign of Rudy Giuliani, an eager student of early theories of how focusing cops on low-level disorder could lead to major reductions in street violence. Notwithstanding later abuses of stop-and-frisk, in the early 1990s it was a smart and reasonable approach that saved lives and helped him win an election.
History may be about to repeat itself. “None of this is simple. None of it is going to be easy. But what has been so frustrating is it has seemed for many years as if there are many who are not even trying,” Mamdani told me. “They are simply at peace with a status quo that we know is broken for so many. And I am confident in our ability to actually deliver a new chapter.”
Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images (Cuomo), Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg (Mamdani).
When Andrew Cuomo decided to ignore the advice of many of his supporters and jump back into the New York City mayoral election after a bruising primary defeat, his campaign knew it needed to do one thing: turn the race into a two-person contest with Zohran Mamdani. And so Cuomo savaged Mamdani over his rent-stabilized apartment, ties to the Democratic Socialists of America, a vacation to Uganda, and his shifting positions on policing, while mostly ignoring the rest of the field.
With some eight weeks till Election Day, it looks as if Cuomo is finally going to get the two-man race he wants. But the terms of the contest have been completely upended. In a city that has seen its share of bizarre political moments over the past couple of decades, from a congressman’s penis pictures to the election of a congressional fabulist, the 2025 mayoral race is somehow still breaking new boundaries in political weirdness. Cuomo, the resistance hero who was once seen as a potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, has been talking up his close ties to Donald Trump. Mamdani, the democratic socialist who won the primary despite statements about how the NYPD is a rogue organization that should be abolished and capitalism equals theft, has been meeting with business leaders and racking up endorsements from rank-and-file Democrats. Eric Adams inherited a rush of enthusiasm (and donor money) after the primary but failed to translate any of that into a polling bump. Republican Curtis Sliwa’s proposal to unleash a feral-cat brigade to clean up the city’s rat population was somehow the least-surreal thing happening.
And then, the week after Labor Day, news broke that Trump was trying to edge Adams and Sliwa out of the race, floating administration jobs or plush sinecures for each of them if they dropped out to make a lane for Cuomo. Supporters of both the president and the former governor, including billionaire supermarket magnate John Catsimatidis, had been pressing the case that Mamdani would be a disaster for the city. When asked at a press conference about his involvement in the race, Trump said, “I’d prefer not to have a communist mayor of New York City.”
Mamdani immediately accused Cuomo of behind-the-scenes machinations. “I’ve heard rumors of this for months,” Mamdani told me on September 3 after an “emergency” press conference he held on the news. The president, he said, “knows that Andrew Cuomo represents the very kind of politics that he practices. He knows that he could pick up the phone and have a conversation with him without even having to consider the impact it would have on New Yorkers and that the entire conversation would be about the two of them and their interests.” Cuomo denied he had any involvement in Trump’s meddling, though he recently told a crowd of Hamptons donors he knows Trump well and believes “there’s a big piece of him that actually wants redemption in New York.”
Both Sliwa and Adams denied having any intention of leaving the race. Adams held a press conference in which he took aim at Cuomo, calling him a snake and a liar, asserting that only the sitting mayor could beat Mamdani. But the damage was done. For Adams, it was made worse when the New York Timesreported that he had flown to Florida to meet secretly with Steve Witkoff, one of Trump’s advisers, a sign the mayor was at least not totally oblivious to the realities of his struggling campaign.
It was a swift fall after a dizzying rebound. In June, Wall Street and real-estate titans were apoplectic over the notion that the Democratic nominee would install Trotskyite cadres across city government. Cuomo still hadn’t said if he was running in the general election. So in the mad scramble among the donor class to find someone to stop Mamdani, money poured into Adams’s coffers. One wealthy financier reached out with an offer to host a $50,000 fundraiser, and the Adams campaign turned him down. At that time, a mere $50,000 fundraiser simply wasn’t worth it.
By the end of the summer, Adams would have taken whatever change could be shaken out of the seat cushions. He was caught in a new swirl of scandal, baroque even by often-embattled mayors’ standards: One aide slipped a wad of cash concealed in a bag of potato chips to a reporter, and another was indicted (for a second time) for trading a cameo on a Hulu show for scrapping a planned bike lane in Brooklyn, among other allegations. No fewer than five senior police officials sued the administration for creating a culture of corruption and favor-trading at the NYPD. Polls showed Adams in the single digits, just a few points above Jim Walden, an all but unknown wealthy attorney who dropped out of the mayoral race at the start of September. Sliwa was polling higher in the mid-teens.
Still, Cuomo needed all other candidates besides the front-runner fully sidelined because he was polling around 15 points behind Mamdani. In a head-to-head race, however, the same surveys showed the possibility for a dead heat or, in one instance from a July poll, a double-digit Cuomo lead.
Mamdani has had mixed success breaking 40 percent in the polls, and the fear among his supporters is that he has a ceiling somewhere below 50. All summer he worked to consolidate the Democratic Party behind him, assuaging the concerns of sympathetic business leaders and disavowing some of his earlier, more radical statements. He also won the support of Democratic officials and labor unions that had backed Cuomo in the primary.
But campaigning as a regular Democrat was an uncomfortable fit for someone who only a few years ago was trying to make it in the music and entertainment industries. Mamdani has privately lamented that the trappings of being the Democratic nominee, with its chauffeured SUVs and security, take him away from the hand-to-hand contact that propelled his primary win. And the campaign has wrestled internally with the question of whether or not Mamdani should position himself as more of a normie Democrat in a city where Democrats out-number Republicans six to one or lean into the youthful outsider idealism that got him where he is in the first place. After all, it’s not as if Democrats are incredibly popular right now, and the entire universe of Democratic institutional support did Cuomo close to no good in the primary.
Then came the news that Trump wanted to intervene on Cuomo’s behalf. Had Adams or Sliwa simply quietly dropped out and ended up with an administration appointment months down the line, the link between them and Trump wouldn’t have been as clear. But the ham-handed and nearly public machinations by Trump and people supportive of Cuomo have been so shameless that it’s fair to wonder if the whole thing is a psyop, a scheme to secretly boost Mamdani so that Trump can have him as a foil. Regardless, Trump casting himself as Cuomo’s virtual running mate lit a fire for the Mamdani campaign.
At his emergency press conference, Mamdani spoke with the kind of passion that he hasn’t much harnessed since winning the primary in June, calling Trump’s parachuting into the race “an affront to what makes so many of us proud to be Americans: that we choose our own leaders, not that they get to pick themselves.” His campaign sees this as an opportunity to reignite youth interest as well as energize the center-left Democrats Mamdani needs to attract.
“This is no longer a race between Zohran and an opponent trying to cobble together a coalition of voters who don’t like him,” said Morris Katz, a senior Mamdani adviser. “It’s a race between Zohran and Donald Trump.”