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.
Given the many excesses of Trump 2.0, and the desperate desire of Democrats for signs of a backlash, the results of off-year elections in New Jersey, Virginia, California, Pennsylvania, and New York City would have inevitably been interpreted as in part a referendum on the turbulent first year of the 47th presidency. But Trump has also gone out of his way to make himself an issue on November 4 in various ways.
He has all but become Andrew Cuomo’s most important backer in New York City, and his threats to punish Gotham for the likely election of Zohran Mamdani is overshadowing the entire campaign.
He has directly campaigned for New Jersey Republican gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli, whose decision to embrace Trump this time around (after keeping his distance four years ago) was a major gamble.
He’s made a lot of noise in opposition California’s Prop 50, which was already being framed by its sponsors as all about retaliating for the president’s gerrymandering power grabs.
And even in a contest where he did not make an endorsement, the Virginia governor’s race, his snub of GOP nominee Winsome Earle-Sears has become a last-minute preoccupation, signaling that Republicans have given up on their candidate.
A Democratic sweep of these races would not just be a setback for Trump’s party; it would also put to rest the claim that 2024 signaled a pro-GOP alignment of the electorate for the foreseeable future.
Former congresswoman Abigail Spanberger defeated Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, who was outraised by the Democrat and failed to earn the endorsement of President Donald Trump.The win flips control of the commonwealth’s governor’s mansion. While local issues and the biographies of the candidates played a strong role in the race, the results also reflect a contest where Trump’s presence loomed.Virginia has a concentration of federal workers in the north and has deeply felt both the impact of the president cutting the workforce and of the government shutdown.Virginia was one of two states, along with New Jersey, where voters were picking a governor on Tuesday. Voters were also selecting a new mayor in New York City, and in California, were deciding whether to approve a new congressional map that is designed to help Democrats win five more U.S. House seats in next year’s midterm elections. Here are the latest time-stamped updates from Election Day 2025 (ET): 8:15 p.m.Results for two high-profile mayoral races have come in.According to AP, Democrat Aftab Pureval has won the Cincinnati mayoral election over Cory Bowman, who is the half-brother of Vice President JD Vance.And in Atlanta, Democrat Andre Dickens won reelection over three challengers.8 p.m.Democrat Abigail Spanberger has won Virginia’s gubernatorial election, becoming the first female governor in the commonwealth’s history, according to AP projections.Spanberger, a former congresswoman and CIA case officer, defeated Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears.Spanberger ran a mostly moderate campaign, offering a model for Democrats who want the party anchored by center-left candidates.Spanberger tied Earle-Sears to President Donald Trump but kept her arguments mostly on Trump’s economic policy and her support for abortion rights.Notably, Trump did not endorse Earle-Sears.7:30 p.m. Economic worries were the dominant concern as voters cast ballots for Tuesday’s elections, according to preliminary findings from the AP Voter Poll.The results of the expansive survey of more than 17,000 voters in New Jersey, Virginia, California and New York City suggest they are troubled by an economy that seems trapped by higher prices and fewer job opportunities.The economic challenges have played out in different ways at the local level. Most New Jersey voters said property taxes were a “major problem,” while most New York City voters said this about the cost of housing. Most Virginia voters said they’ve felt at least some impact from the recent federal government cuts.7 p.m.Polling locations have closed in Virginia.Polls across the commonwealth’s counties and cities were open from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. Voters in line at a polling place at 7 p.m. can still cast ballots.Virginia voters are choosing a new governor and lieutenant governor. They’re also deciding whether Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares should get another term or if Democratic challenger Jay Jones should replace him. All 100 seats in the House of Delegates are also up for election.There are well over 6 million registered voters in Virginia. The last time these statewide races were on the ballot in 2021, overall voter turnout was 55%.This year, nearly 1.5 million people have cast absentee ballots, mostly through the mail or in person.Video below: Spanberger makes last push before Tuesday’s election for VA governor6:55 p.m.New York City’s Board of Elections released another turnout update Tuesday evening.As of 6 p.m., 1.7 million people have voted in the mayoral election.That’s the biggest turnout in a New York City mayoral election in at least 30 years. Just under 1.9 million people voted in the 1993 race, when Republican Rudy Giuliani ousted Mayor David Dinkins, a Democrat.6:45 p.m.Here is when polls close in states with key races. New York: 9 p.m.New Jersey: 8 p.m.Virginia: 7 p.m.California: 11 p.m. (8 p.m. PT)6:30 p.m.It’s not a presidential election year or even the midterms, but the stakes for Election Day 2025 remain undeniably high, with outcomes that could leave a lasting impact on the nation’s direction.Will California redefine the congressional landscape ahead of 2026? Could New York City elect a democratic socialist as its next mayor? And how will the perception of the Trump administration impact critical gubernatorial contests in New Jersey and Virginia?This week holds the answers to those pressing questions. Here’s what you need to know before the results start rolling in Tuesday night.
Former congresswoman Abigail Spanberger defeated Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, who was outraised by the Democrat and failed to earn the endorsement of President Donald Trump.
The win flips control of the commonwealth’s governor’s mansion. While local issues and the biographies of the candidates played a strong role in the race, the results also reflect a contest where Trump’s presence loomed.
Virginia has a concentration of federal workers in the north and has deeply felt both the impact of the president cutting the workforce and of the government shutdown.
Virginia was one of two states, along with New Jersey, where voters were picking a governor on Tuesday. Voters were also selecting a new mayor in New York City, and in California, were deciding whether to approve a new congressional map that is designed to help Democrats win five more U.S. House seats in next year’s midterm elections.
Here are the latest time-stamped updates from Election Day 2025 (ET):
8:15 p.m.
Results for two high-profile mayoral races have come in.
According to AP, Democrat Aftab Pureval has won the Cincinnati mayoral election over Cory Bowman, who is the half-brother of Vice President JD Vance.
And in Atlanta, Democrat Andre Dickens won reelection over three challengers.
8 p.m.
Democrat Abigail Spanberger has won Virginia’s gubernatorial election, becoming the first female governor in the commonwealth’s history, according to AP projections.
Spanberger, a former congresswoman and CIA case officer, defeated Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears.
Spanberger ran a mostly moderate campaign, offering a model for Democrats who want the party anchored by center-left candidates.
Spanberger tied Earle-Sears to President Donald Trump but kept her arguments mostly on Trump’s economic policy and her support for abortion rights.
Notably, Trump did not endorse Earle-Sears.
7:30 p.m.
Economic worries were the dominant concern as voters cast ballots for Tuesday’s elections, according to preliminary findings from the AP Voter Poll.
The results of the expansive survey of more than 17,000 voters in New Jersey, Virginia, California and New York City suggest they are troubled by an economy that seems trapped by higher prices and fewer job opportunities.
The economic challenges have played out in different ways at the local level. Most New Jersey voters said property taxes were a “major problem,” while most New York City voters said this about the cost of housing. Most Virginia voters said they’ve felt at least some impact from the recent federal government cuts.
7 p.m.
Polling locations have closed in Virginia.
Polls across the commonwealth’s counties and cities were open from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. Voters in line at a polling place at 7 p.m. can still cast ballots.
Virginia voters are choosing a new governor and lieutenant governor. They’re also deciding whether Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares should get another term or if Democratic challenger Jay Jones should replace him. All 100 seats in the House of Delegates are also up for election.
There are well over 6 million registered voters in Virginia. The last time these statewide races were on the ballot in 2021, overall voter turnout was 55%.
This year, nearly 1.5 million people have cast absentee ballots, mostly through the mail or in person.
Video below: Spanberger makes last push before Tuesday’s election for VA governor
6:55 p.m.
New York City’s Board of Elections released another turnout update Tuesday evening.
As of 6 p.m., 1.7 million people have voted in the mayoral election.
That’s the biggest turnout in a New York City mayoral election in at least 30 years. Just under 1.9 million people voted in the 1993 race, when Republican Rudy Giuliani ousted Mayor David Dinkins, a Democrat.
6:45 p.m.
Here is when polls close in states with key races.
New York: 9 p.m.
New Jersey: 8 p.m.
Virginia: 7 p.m.
California: 11 p.m. (8 p.m. PT)
6:30 p.m.
It’s not a presidential election year or even the midterms, but the stakes for Election Day 2025 remain undeniably high, with outcomes that could leave a lasting impact on the nation’s direction.
Will California redefine the congressional landscape ahead of 2026? Could New York City elect a democratic socialist as its next mayor? And how will the perception of the Trump administration impact critical gubernatorial contests in New Jersey and Virginia?
Photo: Christian Monterrosa/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Donald Trump has made no secret of his feelings about New York’s mayoral race, inaccurately denouncing Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani as a “communist” and threatening to withhold federal funding to the city if he wins. But in an interview on Sunday’s 60 Minutes, the president finally gave his official half-hearted backing to another candidate in the race: independent Andrew Cuomo.
“I’m not a fan of Cuomo one way or the other, but if it’s gonna be between a bad Democrat and a communist, I’m gonna pick the bad Democrat all the time, to be honest with you,” Trump said.
Mamdani and his campaign gleefully responded to Trump’s announcement, sharing a graphic congratulating Cuomo:
Cuomo disappeared from weird confrontation over Trump’s quasi-endorsement during a radio interview on Monday:
He later acknowledged Trump’s comments during a campaign stop:
He called me a bad Democrat. First of all, I happen to be a good Democrat and a proud Democrat, and I’m going to stay a proud Democrat. Mamdani is not a communist. He’s a socialist. But we don’t need a socialist mayor either.
Cuomo also called Mamdani a liar and denied Trump’s message was an endorsement. “Trump did not endorse me. I said repeatedly I would not accept Donald Trump’s endorsement,” he said. And he insisted in a social-media post that he was the candidate best-suited to challenge any federal overtures from the president.
On Monday evening, Trump doubled down, attacking Mamdani and dismissing Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa in a Truth Social post and telling his followers “you must vote for” Cuomo:
A vote for Curtis Sliwa (who looks much better without the beret!) is a vote for Mamdani. Whether you personally like Andrew Cuomo or not, you really have no choice. You must vote for him, and hope he does a fantastic job. He is capable of it, Mamdani is not!
This time, Cuomo partially agreed with Trump. He called into WABC and responded: “The president is right. A vote for Sliwa is a vote for Mamdani. Now it’s gonna be up to the Republicans, and I hope they listen to the president.”
Also on Monday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk threw in his support for the former governor, knocking Sliwa and mocking Mamdani’s name in the process. “Remember to vote tomorrow in New York! Bear in mind that a vote for Curtis is really a vote for Mumdumi or whatever his name is,” Musk wrote on his social-media platform. “VOTE CUOMO!”
Musk has his own bit of history with Cuomo. In 2014, the then-governor came to a deal for the construction of a solar-panel factory in Buffalo with a company that was ultimately bought out by Tesla. The factory project, which was bolstered by just under a billion dollars in state funds, has been criticized for not delivering on the number of jobs promised, as Politico noted earlier this year.
In the waning days of the mayoral race, Cuomo has also picked up endorsements from a number of self-professed foes, including some Republican members of the state’s congressional delegation who opted for Cuomo over Sliwa. Representative Nick Langworthy told Fox News that he would be endorsing Cuomo from across the aisle, saying that the longtime Democrat is the only clear option in the race as Sliwa continues to trail in third place. “I’ve had plenty of disagreements — very publicly over the years — and fought tooth and nail with Governor Cuomo. But there’s no doubt in my mind he would be a far superior mayor than a communist,” he said.
Representative Mike Lawler also suggested Cuomo is the best choice between him and Mamdani, telling WABC host Sid Rosenberg that the former governor was the “lesser of two evils.”
Cuomo also got the reluctant backing of former congressman and felon George Santos who said Mamdani posed an existential threat to the city and that a vote for Sliwa is ultimately a vote for the Democratic nominee. “I am urging you all to really consider voting for Andrew Cuomo because it is the only solution we have,” he said on social media Monday.
But not all of the state’s Republicans are switching sides in the race. Representative Nicole Malliotakis, the only Republican member in New York City, urged moderates and conservatives to consolidate support behind Sliwa, calling him the “ONE mayoral candidate who has NOT contributed to the demise of our city” back in September.
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.
Former PresidentBarack Obama told Zohran Mamdani that he was invested in the New York mayoral candidate’s success during a phone call Saturday, according to a report from The New York Times.
Obama called Mamdani and they spoke for about 30 minutes, two people who were either on the call or were briefed about it told the outlet.
Mamdani is leading in the polls over his rivals, former New York governor and independent candidate Andrew Cuomo, and Republican Curtis Sliwa.
During the call, Obama praised Mamdani’s campaign and offered to be a “sounding board” for the Democratic candidate. The pair also discussed Mamdani’s affordability agenda as well as hiring a new administration, according to the report.
Newsweek has reached out to Mamdani’s press team and the Obama Foundation on behalf of the former president for comment via email on Saturday.
A Quinnipiac University poll released on October 29 found Mamdani leading among likely voters 43 percent, followed by Cuomo with 33 percent and 14 percent for Sliwa, with 6 percent saying they’re undecided. In comparison to the October 8 poll, Cuomo’s support held at the same figure, while Mamdani received 46 percent and Sliwa had 15 percent.
The voters surveyed also signaled that they’ve made up their minds on who to support and are unlikely to change. For Mamdani voters, 92 percent said it was either not so likely (15 percent) or not likely at all (77 percent) that they would switch candidates. Cuomo backers were similar, as 90 percent said it was either not so likely (15 percent) or not likely at all (75 percent) that they would change their minds on the former governor.
As for Sliwa supporters, 81 percent responded that it is either not so likely (15 percent) or not likely at all (66 percent) that they would move from their candidate. The poll surveyed 911 New York City likely voters from October 23 to October 27.
In a September op-ed, former mayor Bill de Blasio officially endorsed Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, praising his ambitious platform calling for universal child care, a rent freeze for tenants in stabilized apartments, and free buses.
“We don’t just need Zohran Mamdani to be our mayor because he has the right ideas, or because they can be achieved. We need him because in his heart and in his bones he cannot accept a city that prices out the people who built it and keep it running,” he wrote in the Daily News.
But the local political scene was briefly stunned when a reputable British newspaper published an article featuring quotes of the former mayor seemingly bashing Mamdani’s proposals, statements that de Blasio emphatically said he never made.
“I want to be 100% clear: The story in the Times of London is entirely false and fabricated. It was just brought to my attention and I’m appalled,” de Blasio wrote on social media. “I never spoke to that reporter and never said those things. Those quotes aren’t mine, don’t reflect my views.”
On Tuesday, the Times of London posted a piece with the headline “Zohran Mamdani Ally Bill de Blasio Says His Policies Don’t Add Up,” featuring quotes from de Blasio claiming he had gone through the assemblyman’s proposals and found them lacking. One quote read, “In my view, the math doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, and the political hurdles are substantial.”
Then de Blasio quickly issued his own statement disavowing the article, telling the public that he never spoke to the Times of London and demanding a retraction. “It is an absolute violation of journalistic ethics. The truth is I fully support @ZohranKMamdani and believe his vision is both necessary and achievable,” he said.
Within the hour, the Times of London had removed the article from its website and a spokesman issued a statement saying its reporter had been duped. “The Times has apologised to Bill de Blasio and removed the article immediately after discovering that our reporter had been misled by an individual falsely claiming to be the former New York mayor,” the paper said in a statement to the New York Times.
The newspaper did not provide any additional details as to how the deception occurred. The Times of London is the oldest daily newspaper in the U.K. with a storied history dating back to its founding in 1785. The paper was purchased by media magnate Rupert Murdoch in 1981 and is currently operated by News UK, a subsidiary of News Corp.
But the article still made the rounds despite its early deletion. The New York Postquickly aggregated the fake quotes, and staffers with former governor Andrew Cuomo’s campaign shared the Post story, which was later updated with de Blasio’s actual quotes refuting it.
Early voting in the mayoral election began on Saturday, and the figures so far show it has smashed numbers from the last race and even the June Democratic primary when high voter turnout elevated Zohran Mamdani to victory.
According to preliminary numbers released by the city board of elections on Tuesday night, 297,718 New Yorkers have already cast their ballot, a staggering figure for the first four days of the early voting. Brooklyn is currently leading the other four boroughs with 92,035, followed by Manhattan with 89,474 votes cast, then Queens with 68,873. Staten Island has the lowest number of early voters at 22,417; the Bronx is just above that at 24,919. By comparison, the June primary logged 131,882 early voters by the end of the fourth day. And this year’s general-election early vote has already far surpassed the total early vote in 2021 (169,486), though the comparison to Mayor Eric Adams’s victory is an imperfect one, as that general election was not competitive and came during the pandemic. A total of 384,338 New Yorkers voted early in this year’s primary election.
The significant level of turnout suggests a high level of enthusiasm among voters, which powered Mamdani to a double-digit victory over Andrew Cuomo thanks to an immense showing from young and first-time voters who went uncaptured in preelection polls.
A caveat, though: A data analysis of the first two days of early voting from Gothamist shows Gen-X and baby-boomer voters combined made up 50 percent of early votes cast, two demographic groups that Cuomo has consistently led with in polls. Sixteen percent of those early voters are voters between 25 to 34. It’s unclear if these findings are indicative of a Cuomo boost or if it’s a sign of motivation among Republican voters as well following an uncompetitive primary in June when nominee Curtis Sliwa ran unopposed.
The gap between Brooklyn/Manhattan/Queens and the Bronx/Staten Island — as a percentage of total early votes, compared to 2021/2024 — continued to grow. That is not good for Cuomo. He needs big Election Day turnout from both boroughs (especially the Bronx). … Age breakdowns from Days 1-2 looked pretty good for Cuomo, but the story on geographic breaks was more nuanced than many takesmiths made it out to be.
The Mamdani campaign made a big push for early voting over the weekend, which began with a long-awaited endorsement from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and ended with a stadium rally in Queens with Mamdani alongside Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The rally also featured appearances from Comptroller Brad Lander as well as Governor Kathy Hochul, who was heckled by the audience with calls to “Tax the rich!” a key plank of Mamdani’s platform that Hochul has expressed reservations with.
Early voting continues through Sunday, November 2. New York City residents can find their early vote polling sites here.
This post has been updated to include the latest totals.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., conducts a news conference about the government shutdown on the House steps of the U.S. Capitol on Thursday, October 23, 2025. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images
He made it just under the wire.
On Friday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries finally announced his endorsement of Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani following months of anticipation and hours ahead of the party leader’s own self-imposed deadline of the start of early voting.
Jeffries made it official in a statement to the New York Times in which he noted that while he and Mamdani had “areas of principled disagreement,” it was crucial for the party to unite at a time when President Donald Trump poses an “existential” threat to the city.
“I deeply respect the will of the primary voters and the young people who have been inspired to participate in the electoral process. Zohran Mamdani has relentlessly focused on addressing the affordability crisis and explicitly committed to being a mayor for all New Yorkers, including those who do not support his candidacy,” he said. “Together, along with Mark Levine and Jumaane Williams, they won the nominations for Mayor, Comptoller and Public Advocate in a free and fair election. In that spirit, I support him and the entire citywide Democratic ticket in the general election.”
In a statement, Mamdani said, “I welcome Leader Jeffries’ support and look forward to delivering a city government, and building a Democratic Party, relentlessly committed to our affordability agenda — and to fighting Trump’s authoritarianism.”
Many speculated whether the House minority leader would endorse Mamdani at all, as many Republicans across the aisle appeared eager to tie the democratic socialist candidate to the more moderate Jeffries and other House Democrats. After Mamdani shocked the local political world following his primary upset against former governor Andrew Cuomo, all eyes soon turned to the New York congressional delegation and state leadership as the new Democratic nominee sought to coalesce support ahead of the general election.
While there were some immediate pickups, including Representatives Jerry Nadler, Adriano Espaillat and Nydia Velázquez, Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer were two prominent outliers as they both congratulated Mamdani on his win but appeared hesitant to throw their support behind him. Mamdani joined Jeffries in the leader’s home district in Brooklyn for a meeting that Jeffries’s team described as “constructive, candid and community-centered, with a particular focus on affordability,” but still an endorsement did not emerge from the hour-long conversation.
In the months that followed, Mamdani picked up support from Governor Kathy Hochul, State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, and his current boss, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, as Jeffries hinted that a decision would be coming prior to the start of early voting on October 25. The Democratic leader also sounded more complimentary of Mamdani in recent interviews, applauding his intention to ask NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch to stay on in her role if elected mayor.
Jeffries’s endorsement comes just one day after Mayor Eric Adams threw his support behind his onetime mayoral rival Cuomo with the intention of bolstering the former governor’s chances of defeating Mamdani. It’s not yet clear if Schumer will soon follow suit with his own statement of support. This week, CNN reported that the Senate minority leader said he was still having conversations with Mamdani and declined to weigh in on the race at that moment.
Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate for mayor of New York City, speaks at a press event at City Hall on September 30, 2025, in New York City. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
With Election Day two weeks away, all eyes are on Curtis Sliwa, as pressure grows on the Guardian Angels founder and Republican nominee to drop his mayoral bid.
On Monday, John Catsimatidis, a businessman and top conservative donor, urged Sliwa to quit the race, saying that Republicans “cannot take a chance” on Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani winning. Catsimatidis is also the owner of the radio station 77 WABC ,where Sliwa has hosted a radio program for years. “Curtis has to realize that he should love New York more than anything else. It certainly looks like Curtis should pull out right now,” Catsimatidis said on radio host Sid Rosenberg’s show, per the Daily News.
The New York Daily News and New York Post editorial boards are both in agreement. They both published articles calling for Sliwa to suspend his campaign in order to make the race a one-on-one matchup between Mamdani, the heavy favorite, and independent candidate and former Governor Andrew Cuomo. “It burns to write this, but: It’s time for Curtis Sliwa to face reality, and admit that the city’s best hope to avoid the disaster of a Zohran Mamdani mayoralty is for him to drop out of the race, the Post editorial board wrote.
Still, local Republican Party leaders are standing united behind their candidate.
Sliwa got a boost on Tuesday when Republican Party chairmen from all five boroughs issued a joint statement reiterating their support for him. Republicans should not have to clean up the mess Andrew Cuomo and the Democrats created, and we will not allow the political class to interfere with voters or hijack our ballot,” the county leaders said. “Curtis Sliwa is our candidate, the credible leader who will defeat the radical left and restore safety, affordability, and common sense to City Hall.”
Cuomo, who has consistently trailed Mamdani in the polls, has attempted to make overtures to Republican voters and has dismissed Sliwa as a “spoiler” in the race. In a recent appearance on Fox News, Cuomo addressed Republican voters directly, saying the mayoral race is about “the future of New York and saving New York City.”
“The only alternative is Zohran Mamdani. Curtis Sliwa is not an alternative. He is not a viable candidate. You vote for Curtis, you might as well vote for Zohran Mamdani directly,” Cuomo said. “And if this city becomes a Zohran Mamdani city, a socialist city, it’s going to be the death of the city as we know it, whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican.”
The former governor seemed to suggest he was open to extending Sliwa a job offer in a possible Cuomo administration. “I haven’t even thought about it to tell you the truth, but, yes, that would be something that I am interested in,” he said on Rosenberg’s radio show on Tuesday, per the Daily News.
But Sliwa has consistently rebuffed such proposals, and appears poised to take his campaign to the end. On Monday, he addressed his supporters in a video, telling them that elites are trying to push him out of the race and urging them to join him on the first day of early voting Saturday, when he intends to cast his own ballot.
“The billionaires are not going to determine who the next mayor is. You, the people will,” he said.
There’s one thing New York City mayoral candidates all agree on: property tax reform is a lightning rod.
But despite consensus that the system is unfair, there has yet to be any meaningful change.
“The problem with property tax reform is you’re going to have winners, and you’re going to have losers, and the political system does not like having losers,” Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo said during a mayoral forum hosted by Crain’s on Wednesday. “That’s why no one wanted to go near it.”
Without specifying exactly how, some of the candidates want to harness the energy around the issue.
During Wednesday’s event, a rare opportunity to see all three candidates under the same roof, Assembly member Zohran Mamdani said he “absolutely” supports comprehensive reform to the city’s lopsided property tax system.
Mamdani noted that he is on the Assembly’s standing committee on real property taxation and that he wanted to introduce legislation to amend the tax system, but was told “in no uncertain terms” that the state was waiting on the mayor to deliver a citywide plan.
Previous administrations have promised and failed to change New York’s property tax system. Mayor Eric Adams pledged to fix the city’s property tax regime within his first year in office, and when that didn’t happen, repeatedly committed to do so but did not deliver reform.
Mamdani also cited Tax Equity Now New York’s nearly decade-old lawsuit challenging the system and recommendations made at the end of the de Blasio administration as potential paths forward.
“I think that there are a number of proposals that can make it easier with circuit breakers, also to ensure that any fix is not one that then creates a new level of burden on a different class of homeowners or owners of different sets of rental properties,” he said.
Cuomo, acknowledging that likely nothing will change otherwise, said the courts may need to force the city’s hand.
He cited TENNY’s lawsuit, which argues that the city’s property tax system is inequitable. Most recently, the group has asked a state court to require the city to make changes to how one-, two- and three-family homes, as well as condo and co-ops, are assessed.
“The legal case can actually be used, frankly, as a facilitating device to say, ‘we have to do this,’” Cuomo said, adding that a court order would give City Council members political cover from the angry condo and co-op owners who would see their tax bills rise as a result of reform.
Embracing court-powered reform is a departure from previous administrations, which have argued that lawmakers should enact change.
Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa repeatedly noted the need to slash property taxes, alongside other taxes.
The pitch
At Wednesday’s forum, the three mayoral contenders appeared separately, each making their case to the business community. For some that was a bigger challenge than others.
Mamdani acknowledged that he likely wasn’t their “dream” candidate, but said he believes there is “far more commonality” between their visions for the city.
When asked whom he is planning to hire if he becomes mayor, Mamdani demurred, but noted that he is talking to current and former members of the Adams administration, including former First Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer and City Planning head Dan Garodnick, in preparation.
He also echoed a comment made by Real Estate Board of New York President Jim Whelan at a Crain’s event last month. Whelan said his advice for Mamdani would be to hire the “best people,” citing how former Mayor Michael Bloomberg built up his team. Mamdani also name-dropped Bloomberg and the need for mayors to surround themselves with top talent.
Mamdani’s plan to freeze rents for stabilized apartments for four years, meanwhile, doesn’t sit well with many in the real estate industry. When asked about the rent freeze, and the fact that this promise comes before the city’s Rent Guidelines Board has had a chance to deliberate on the issue, Mamdani said the move would help align the board’s actions with its own analysis of the city’s rent stabilized housing stock. He pointed to increased landlord profits and stagnant tenant wages.
Landlord groups have long criticized the board’s reports detailing rises in buildings’ net operating income because those calculations include market rate units.
He also said a freeze isn’t meant to punish landlords and doesn’t preclude other actions aimed at helping struggling property owners, including alternative insurance options, reforming property taxes and combatting rising utility rates.
Housing timelines
Mamdani indicated that he wants to encourage the private sector to build more housing and said that in conversations with real estate leaders, he’s been “taken aback” by the fact that some of the largest costs they face in building housing is the “cost of waiting.” He mentioned the prospect of reforming the city’s environmental review process.
Still, he did not commit to supporting four housing-related ballot questions, most of which are aimed at speeding up approval of housing projects in the city. He said he is glad that New Yorkers will get to decide these issues in November, but has not himself taken a position on them.
Throwing his support behind the measures is politically tricky: Two powerful unions that have endorsed his run for mayor, 32BJ SEIU and the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, oppose the three most controversial questions that, if approved, weaken or skip the City Council’s role in certain land use approvals.
“I am opposed to the City of Yes, that would destroy the residential makeup, especially of the outer boroughs,” he said. “I am a preservationist in many ways, which clearly these two candidates are not. Andrew Cuomo is in the back pockets of the developers and realtors as is his predecessor, Eric Adams.”
When asked what he would do to make it easier to build affordable housing, he pointed to inefficiencies at the Department of Buildings.
“The Department of Buildings is often your enemy, whether you’re making changes in your existing occupancy or you’re trying to build a new facility,” he said.
He has previously said that he would make cuts to the DOB to help pay for his proposed tax cuts.
Cuomo said a top priority if he is elected mayor will be building 500,000 new homes across 300 sites “simultaneously,” though it’s unclear how that would be accomplished in terms of labor and financing, if he were speaking literally.
Crain’s reporter Nick Garber asked Cuomo how he would work with a progressive City Council, and why the business community should have confidence that he could block leftist legislation, given the passage of significant reforms to the state’s rent law in 2019 when he was governor.
Cuomo said vetoing the 2019 law would have been the politically easy route: The legislature had the votes to override a veto. He said he opted to negotiate for a better bill instead.
He said the City Council will be easier to wrangle because it is a lot smaller than the state legislature.
That idea could be put to the test with one of his latest ideas. During the forum, Cuomo revealed a new proposal to abandon the city’s plan to close Rikers in favor of rebuilding the jail. The borough jail sites slated to replace Rikers would instead be used for housing and commercial use. Doing so would require buy-in from the City Council, which passed a law in 2019 to shutter and replace the complex with four new jails.
Council member Sandy Nurse, who co-chairs the City Council Progressive Caucus, called the proposal “inept” on social media and said the City Council would not backtrack on the 2019 law.
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REBNY’s message to Mamdani: Hire “the best people”
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.”
Added to the chaos is a convergence approach of willful ignorance from both the extreme right and extreme left. The extreme right likes to pretend that guns have nothing to do with gun violence, whereas the extreme left likes to pretend that crime really isn’t much of a problem at all, and to the extent it is, that police are not part of the solution.
We truly live in strange times. But as Fiorello LaGuardia, perhaps the best mayor New York has ever had, once famously said, “There is no Democratic or Republican way of cleaning the streets.” Such is also the case with fighting crime.
But this is not an academic exercise, a matter for ideological pontification or just another front-page story. It is a matter of life and death. And it is the first responsibility of the government. Because nothing else works – schools, housing, economic development – if people don’t feel safe.
Public safety is job one. Always has been, always will be.
But the hard truth is this: denial is not a life strategy. For too long, leaders have looked the other way, telling people not to believe their lying eyes, deploying selective statistics or insisting that a few isolated incidents don’t require a real solution to a systemic crisis. New Yorkers know better. The problem of gun violence is both immediate and structural. It is about gangs and guns, but also about unemployment, disinvestment, and hopelessness. And so the solution must also be both immediate and structural.
That is why, last week, I laid out a comprehensive five-point plan to meet the challenge head-on. It is not theoretical or ideological. It is grounded in what works, what has worked before, and what will work again.
At the heart of it is a recognition that law enforcement and community investment are not competing values—they are complementary necessities. New York City today has thousands fewer officers than in the 1990s, when we drove crime down to historic lows. That absence is felt most acutely in the subway system, where riders feel under siege. We must rebuild the ranks: 5,000 more officers citywide, 1,500 dedicated to transit, and provide the incentives to keep experienced cops from walking away. Presence matters. Training matters. Precision policing that focuses on the few individuals and places driving the majority of crime matters.
But policing alone is not enough. Violence doesn’t begin with a trigger pull—it begins with despair. If a 17-year-old believes he has no future, the gang on the corner becomes his only employer, his only family. When I was governor, we invested hundreds of millions in workforce development and youth employment across the state, including in New York City. It worked. Young people who had options took them. Hope is the best deterrent to violence. That’s why my plan calls for a new $100 million investment in workforce programs and youth jobs right here in our city.
We must also confront the culture of violence itself. Community-based groups—the violence interrupters who mediate disputes before they erupt—are saving lives every day. Programs like Cure Violence and Save Our Streets have cut shootings by double digits where they operate. They are not a substitute for law enforcement; they are a partner in prevention. We should double down, expanding their reach and funding them to do what government can’t do alone: rebuild trust, defuse tensions, change behavior block by block.
And we have to get the weapons off the street. Every illegal gun we remove is a life potentially saved. Gun buyback programs aren’t glamorous, but they are effective. Every firearm surrendered is one less tool of destruction circulating in our neighborhoods.
When you weave these threads together—restoring police ranks, investing in youth and jobs, supporting interrupters, buying back guns, and targeting enforcement with precision—you begin to see the tapestry of a city that can once again feel safe. A city where children can play outside without fear. A city where families don’t have to live with the daily anxiety of stray bullets. A city where justice is measured not in political slogans but in lives preserved.
Some on the far left want to defund the police, as if stripping away law enforcement will somehow make us safer. It won’t. Others on the right talk only about more cops, as if flooding the streets alone will solve the problem. It won’t. The truth is more difficult—and more hopeful. We need police to protect, jobs to prevent, interrupters to heal, and a strategy that is smart, fair, and relentless.
We’ve done it before. When I was governor, we faced spikes in gun violence, and we brought them down. When I was HUD Secretary, we pioneered holistic approaches that became national models. We know what works. The only question is whether we have the courage to do it.
Gun violence is not inevitable. It is not destiny. It is the result of choices—our choices as a city. Let’s choose safety. Let’s choose opportunity. Let’s choose life.
Andrew Cuomo, a former governor of New York, is an independent candidate for NYC mayor.
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.”
Eric Adams. Photo: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Speculation that Eric Adams was seriously mulling an end to his reelection campaign for mayor reached a fever pitch this week amid recent reporting that the Trump administration was discussing a potential role for Adams in the federal government in exchange for his exit. But in a fiery press conference on Friday evening, Adams insisted he’s staying in the race and took direct aim at his closest competitors, particularly former governor Andrew Cuomo — who he alleged was “a snake and a liar” — as well as Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani.
“There has been so much speculation, communications, announcements of what I’m doing no matter what I have stated over and over again publicly. So, I want to be clear with you. Andrew Cuomo is a snake and a liar. I am in this race, and I’m the only one that can beat Mamdani,” Adams said.
Adams also reiterated his frequent refrain from the campaign trail that Cuomo has a history of marginalizing Black politicians, naming former comptroller Carl McCall and former governor David Paterson. “You’ve heard me say it over again. Carl McCall, Charlie King, David Paterson. This is his career. That must stop with me. This city can’t go backwards,” Adams said.
The mayor also targeted Mamdani, saying his and Cuomo’s backgrounds do not reflect that of the average New Yorker. “I have two spoiled brats running for mayor. They were born with silver spoons in their mouths, not like working-class New Yorkers,” Adams said. “I’m a working-class New Yorker. They are not like us. They never had to fight. They never had to struggle, they never had to go through difficult times like you and I had to go through, New Yorkers. This is such a pivotal and important period, and we have to get it right.”
It was earlier this week that the New York Timesreported that associates of Adams had met with top Trump advisers about a potential role in the administration with the goal of narrowing the mayoral field. The outlet also found that the specific role of U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia had been raised in those talks and that Adams recently met with Steve Witkoff, the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, during a previously unannounced trip to Florida earlier this week.
The mayor shot down reporting from NY1 that he is slated to travel to Washington, D.C., next week to meet with Trump aides with the intention of discussing the future of his political career. Adams said he will be traveling throughout the five boroughs, promoting his campaign.
“I’m running for reelection, and I’m going to tell New Yorkers every day why I believe I should be the mayor of the city of New York in 2026,” he said.
Adams didn’t respond to shouted questions from reporters about whether or not he would accept a job from Trump.
The president was asked about the potential job offers shortly after Adams’s press conference. Trump denied offering Adams an ambassadorship, insisted it wasn’t wrong to offer him an ambassadorship, and made it sound as though he didn’t really care what Adams did:
Mamadani released a statement which didn’t directly respond to Adams’s latest attack, but he also tweeted this:
LOWER MANHATTAN, New York (WABC) — With the election now just two months away and trailing in the polls, Andrew Cuomo is now trying a new tactic, calling for Zohran Mamdani to participate in five debates, one in each borough in the final weeks of the campaign.
While Cuomo says he hasn’t talked to President Trump about intervening in the race, he is hoping Mayor Eric Adams and Republican Curtis Sliwa drop out.
It all comes amid a push by the candidates to stop the frontrunner, Mamdani.
The Adams campaign didn’t miss a beat on Thursday, as several Muslim leaders endorsed the mayor at City Hall. Adams insisted the stakes are high.
“If the president or anyone else that believe they have investments in this city of any magnitude is concerned, I say they should be concerned,” he said.
Adams is downplaying speculation that he would suspend his re-election campaign to serve in the Trump administration. The president reportedly wants to narrow the field of challengers to prevent socialist Zohran Mamdani from winning in November, a prospect regarded as “terrifying” to some in the city’s business community.
Billionaire John Catsimatidis says he’s appealed directly to President Trump.
“I said to him, ‘Time for you to save New York,’” Catsimatidis said.
Former Governor Andrew Cuomo has been running 20 points behind in a four-way race. If Adams and Republican Curtis Sliwa drop out, Cuomo is convinced he will beat Mamdani.
“Because the majority of New Yorkers oppose him,” Cuomo said. “And the only way he wins is by splitting that vote.”
Attorney Jim Walden suspended his Independent campaign and he’s urging the others to unite.
“I don’t care how you sort it out,” he said on Thursday. “Get in a room, pick straws if you have to. This is about anyone but Mamdani. The time for ego is over.”
But Sliwa was defiant.
“You can’t motivate me to leave this race. I am running as the Republican candidate,” he said.
Mamdani won the Democratic nomination with an historic turnout, which he insists is a mandate.
“This is a moment where we need to be working together to deliver not only a city that each and every New Yorker can afford, but one that they can feel proud to call their home and that’s what’s being called into question by these actions,” Mamdani said.
Congressman Jerry Nadler believes Mamdani will win but says Cuomo will be beholden to Trump if he wins with the president’s help.
“That’s the whole point. I don’t think it’s going to happen. I don’t think it’s going to work, but if it did, yes,” Nadler said
But Cuomo insists he has a history of standing up to the president.
“I fought him every step of the way. So, my speculation, if he wants anything-anyone-he wants Mamdani, because he would go through that kid like a Mack truck,” Cuomo said.
Meantime, Mamdani responded to the president saying if he wants to interfere in the mayor’s race he should come to New York City and debate him directly.
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