New York just weathered one of the ugliest political seasons of the last 50 years, with multiple public figures pumping out literally thousands of divisive, hateful messages about Muslims that were seen and heard by millions. Unfortunately, the bigotry has continued postelection and will poison our city until and unless a vocal majority demands it come to an end.
On the night of Zohran Mamdani’s election victory, Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, posted congratulations on social media, writing, “New Yorkers faced a clear choice — between hope and fear — and just like we’ve seen in London — hope won.” But Khan, the first Muslim mayor of London, knows all too well that even after hope wins, hatred hangs around like an angry drunk in an alley, spoiling for a rematch.
“Any decent New Yorker, certainly any Jew, should hate this bastard,” WABC radio’s morning host, Sid Rosenberg, recently told listeners in a rant against Mamdani that the station not only aired but excerpted and pushed out on social media. Two days before Thanksgiving, Rosenberg was at it again: “This punk is now the mayor. This little bitch,” he spat. “Now he’s putting together this transition team, which looks more and more like the Iraqi soccer team.”
These comments are typical of the sort of bigotry the station aired throughout the campaign. I asked WABC’s owner, billionaire and former Republican mayoral candidate John Catsimatidis, why he allows it. “You know what I said to Zohran? I said to him, ‘Look, before November 4, there was war. After November 5, let’s settle down and forget about the past and go forward,’” Catsimatidis told me.
I asked whether he plans to rein in the hate speech on his station. “I would not allow any hate speech,” Catsimatidis promised, and I will take him at his word.
It would be nice to believe that New York’s problems are confined to one radio station and a troubled broadcaster who has frequently gotten himself fired, but politicians who know better have generated similar garbage. The losing campaign of ex-governor Andrew Cuomo, who chuckled along when Rosenberg suggested during an interview that Mamdani would cheer if another 9/11 attack happened, created and posted — but then quickly took down — an overtly racist ad that included a Black man wearing a keffiyeh while going on a shoplifting spree.
“It was an ad that was created by a social-media personality, a comedian who came in at the very end, who put it together, and it was put up. And as soon as it was brought to my attention, other senior people on the staff’s attention that it was up, it was immediately pulled down because it hadn’t been approved,” Cuomo’s campaign adviser, Melissa DeRosa, told me. “It hadn’t gone through the right legal channels. And so that was a mistake, and we acknowledged it at the time.” The problem, of course, is that the ad was created in the first place.
“The depth to which they were willing to go to polarize the city, to polarize the Jewish community, to inflict real fear in the Jewish community, I think, is inexcusable,” Morris Katz, a strategist for Mamdani, told me. “Andrew Cuomo, at the top of his lungs, for six months, with millions of dollars behind the effort, was essentially telling Jewish New Yorkers that this person is an existential threat to your safety. And eventually, that’s going to break through, to a degree. It was a real organized, deliberate, cruel misinformation campaign that penetrated certain parts of the Jewish community in New York.”
The political ads were part of a deluge of online messaging, mostly on X, that only accelerated as Election Day approached. “We found a huge spike in online hate and fearmongering targeting Muslims in the aftermath of Mamdani’s primary win, blending racism, anti-Muslim bigotry, red-baiting, and anti-immigrant sentiment into one dangerous narrative,” Raqib Hameed Naik, the executive director of the Washington-based Center for the Study of Organized Hate, told immigrant-oriented news website Documented. The center issued a report after studying 6,669 public social media posts about Mamdani in a 17-day window during the campaign and found that just under 2,000 of the, “frame Islam itself, not any policy detail, as a public threat.”
In posts that racked up hundreds of millions of views and other forms of engagement, “Muslims were portrayed as threats to national security, incompatible with democracy, or as agents of an imagined foreign agenda,” Naik said. He’s talking about messages like the one right-wing agitator Laura Loomer posted the night Mamdani won the primary — “There will be another 9/11 in NYC and @ZohranKMamdani will be to blame” — which got more than a million views.
“We know from experience that this kind of online demonization and dehumanization doesn’t stay online,” Naik told Documented. “It creates a permissive environment for real-world harm.”
Real-world harm is exactly what a Texas man named Jeremy Fistel promised before he was arrested, extradited to Queens, and charged with making a series of graphic, terroristic threats against Mamdani and his family. “I get messages that say, ‘The only good Muslim is a dead Muslim.’ I get threats on my life … on the people that I love. And I try not to talk about it,” Mamdani said at an emotional September press conference, placing some of the blame on his political opponents. “I’m characterized by those same rivals as being a monster, as being ‘at the gates,’ language that describes almost a barbarian looking to dismantle civilization,” he said. “Part of this is the sad burden of being the first Muslim candidate to run for mayor.”
Something similar happened when Khan, the mayor of London, first ran in 2016, defeating a Conservative Party opponent whose closing argument to voters was that “London stands on the brink of a catastrophe,” next to a photo of a bus blown up in a notorious terrorist attack. Khan went on to win by 13 points and has been reelected twice. As one Conservative activist noted, the party was blowing “a dog whistle in a city where there’s no dog.” It must also be noted that Khan continues to require as much security as King Charles III and has recently been the target of a surge in anti-Muslim online hate, according to a report commissioned by the Greater London Authority.
The lesson from overseas is that bigotry’s defeat is never final: People of goodwill must always be ready to speak up, again and again, to drown out the stale rants of the haters with the voice of a diverse, tolerant democracy.
The secret fear of the loudest die-hard critics of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is not that he will fail as the city’s leader but that he has a very good chance of succeeding. If the new administration demonstrates it can deliver on its promise to lower the cost of living while managing our city efficiently and keeping the streets safe, it will become clear that the fearmongers who have been screaming warnings about a coming municipal apocalypse were peddling nonsense all along.
We had nearly a year of discussion and debate before voters gave the go-head to Mamdani’s core four promises: freeze the rent, expand early education, make buses fast and free, and open one government-owned grocery store in each borough to help ease New York’s endemic hunger problem. “The residents of the city have spoken, and it’s been very clear, and they’ve done it in amazing numbers, and their response to the Mamdani campaign is that this has to happen,” Dean Fuleihan, a veteran government manager who will be Mamdani’s first deputy mayor, told me. “So I don’t see it as a question of choice.”
Fuliehan also points out that naysayers have been wrong before. “You and I have actually witnessed many times when someone said or commented, ‘Can’t be done,’ and then three months later, it gets done,” he said. “I was part of [creating] universal pre-K with Mayor de Blasio, and everybody said it could not happen. Could not happen in the education department; it would take five years. The then-governor of New York said, ‘Impossible. Start with a pilot.’ And it happened in two years.”
Fuliehan’s smooth confidence, the product of decades spent in state and local government, stands in contrast to the sky-is-falling prognostication of many New York leaders, who ought to know better. “If the city of New York is going socialist, I will definitely close, or sell, or move or franchise the Gristedes locations,” billionaire John Catsimatidis, the owner of the Gristedes chain, told Fox Business.
That is an absurd overreaction to Mamdani’s proposal to open five government-owned grocery stores in so-called food deserts. An estimated 1.8 million New Yorkers already rely on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, including 40 percent of Bronx residents, and more than 500 soup kitchens and pantries around the city also try to fill the gap. Mamdani’s proposal to open one outlet in each borough – essentially, five more food pantries – will in no way affect the profits or losses of Castsimatidis’s 17 supermarkets.
“I love New York. I will never move from New York, but there’s a lot of other people that will and are leaving New York,” Neil Blumenthal, the founder and CEO of the Warby Parker eyeglasses empire, told the Free Press. “Then there are others that will never even become New Yorkers because the cost of living is just too high. We’re one election away from becoming San Francisco.”
Another worried rich man, billionaire Bill Ackman, who has made one laughably wrong call after another about New York politics this year, predicted before the election that “if Mamdani becomes the mayor of New York, you’re going to see the flight of businesses from New York. Most of the businesses that operate in New York City in the financial sector are incredibly portable.”
Individual families or companies may pull up stakes, the way Ken Giffien moved the financial giant Citadel from Chicago to Miami and Elon Musk shifted Tesla’s headquarters from California to Texas, but cases like these run counter to broader data showing that the rich, as a group, generally do not move around the country chasing low income-tax rates. An exhaustive 2016 study by researchers at Stanford University and the U.S. Treasury Department tracked the tax records and movements of every millionaire in America for 13 years and concluded, “Millionaires are not very mobile and actually have lower migration rates than the general population. This is in part because family responsibilities and business ownership are higher among top income-earners, which embeds individuals in their local regions.” More to the point, the study says, “their elite income itself embeds them in place: millionaires are not searching for economic opportunity — they have found it.”
A similar study by the Fiscal Policy Institute found that 2,400 millionaire households moved out of New York during the pandemic years of 2020 to 2023 — but the state gained 17,500 millionaire households over the same period. “High earners do not move in response to tax increases,” the study found. “Out-migration for those most impacted by recent effective tax increases (in 2017 and 2021) did not increase significantly in response to the tax increases.”
And if we’re looking at particular cases, let’s not forget that Jamie Dimon, the CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase, just cut the ribbon on a new $4 billion headquarters on Park Avenue this year; Google opened a new $2.1 billion headquarters last year. They and other big-money firms are staying put because they know that the secret of New York’s trillion-dollar annual output is the army of young, talented professionals, artists, and scientists who grow up in our city or flock here from every corner of the globe. Mamdani has promised to help these folks find their footing in New York, whatever it takes.
“The affordability crisis was top of mind for folks and challenged everyone else in the race to speak to that, and no one spoke to it as well as he did,” Mamdani’s campaign manager, Maya Handa, told me. “People are unhappy and people are angry, and they feel like the system has screwed them over, and [Mamdani showed] a willingness to really call that out in an honest and authentic way and really say we should not be afraid to tax the rich, we should not be afraid to redistribute some of that wealth so that people can live a life of dignity. I just think that message spoke to folks.”
That blame-the-rich rhetoric has some elites worried. New York’s high-earning families, by and large, work hard, spend freely, and donate tons of money to charity. They aren’t used to being criticized by anybody, and certainly not by the activated army of pro-Mamdani young New Yorkers. But they should get used to it: If Mamdani succeeds, it will be more clear than ever that the city’s public- and private-sector leaders should have addressed New York’s affordability crisis long before now.
Above all, says Morris Katz, a campaign strategist who served as a senior adviser to Mamdani, New Yorkers should stop listening to the doomsayers. “They’re the same people who said in April that he would never win a Democratic primary, the same people who said nine months before that, that he will never even be viable, the same people who said it would all crumble in a general election,” Katz told me. “Zohran demands a culture of excellence. He pursues excellence relentlessly. And it was that culture that took the campaign from polling at 1 percent to defeating and toppling a political dynasty. And I think it’s gonna be that same culture of excellence that delivers this agenda in City Hall. And it’s going to be some of those same people with egg on their face.”
In a development almost certainly motivated by the election of Zohran Mamdani, and perhaps even timed to coincide with Mamdani’s White House meeting with Donald Trump, the U.S. House for the second time passed a non-binding resolution condemning the “horrors of socialism.” As with an earlier resolution passed in 2023, the resolution cites atrocities committed by communist regimes over the decades, adds in the post-communist Maduro regime in Venezeula, and then in a huge bait-and-switch identifies all these bad actors with “socialism” writ large.
The New York Postquoted Staten Island Republican congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis as saying: “Let me educate our colleagues on the other side of the aisle: socialism is communism-light.” That is, to put it bluntly, a historically illiterate lie. The battle against 20th-century communism featured vast numbers of democratic socialists, beginning with the last non-communist leader of Russia, Alexander Kerensky; the bulk of European social democrats between the October Revolution and World War II; the democratic-socialist parties that governed Western Europe on-and-off throughout the Cold War; and the democratic-socialist international labor movement that rigorously opposed communism in all its manifestations.
It’s disgraceful that 86 House Democrats voted for this resolution, which gives a stamp of approval to the ongoing MAGA practice of labeling the self-same Democratic Party’s leaders as “communists” (a label Donald Trump repeatedly applied to the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris). It also promotes ignorant or malicious misinformation at a time when understanding of history is more important than ever.
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.
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.
Representative Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican from New York, speaks to members of the media outside the Capitol on Friday, June 27, 2025. Photo: Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg/Getty Images
New York’s congressional map is facing another legal challenge.
On Monday, a group of Staten Island voters filed a lawsuit alleging that the 11th Congressional District, which contains the entire borough and parts of Brooklyn, dilutes the voting power of Black and Latino voters in violation of the state constitution.
The filing alleges that the district in its current form doesn’t meaningfully account for the decadeslong growth of Staten Island’s Black and Latino populations and the decline of the borough’s white population.
“CD-11’s antiquated boundaries instead confine Staten Island’s growing Black and Latino communities in a district where they are routinely and systematically unable to influence elections for their representative of choice, despite the existence of strong racially polarized voting and a history of racial discrimination and segregation on Staten Island,” the filing reads.
The lawsuit calls for the current congressional map to be declared in violation of state law and for the district to be redrawn so that Staten Island is “paired with voters in lower Manhattan to create a minority influence district in CD-11 that complies with traditional redistricting criteria.”
The plaintiffs are being represented by the Elias Law Group, a Democratic law firm that has undertaken numerous redistricting cases across the country, and the matter was filed in Manhattan Supreme Court.
The 11th Congressional District is currently represented by Nicole Malliotakis, the lone Republican member of Congress in New York City. Ed Cox, the New York Republican Party chairman, called the lawsuit “frivolous” in a statement. “Everyone should see this effort for what it is: a naked attempt to disenfranchise voters in NY-11 and elect a Democrat to this congressional district contrary to the will of voters,” he said.
It’s unclear how successful this legal challenge will ultimately be. Currently, New York delegates the responsibility of drawing district lines to an independent redistricting commission, the result of a voter-backed amendment to the state constitution. That panel fell into controversy in 2022 after its bipartisan members failed to come to an agreement on a pair of maps, prompting a controversial intervention from the state legislature, which drew new lines that were quickly subject to lawsuits. That dispute devolved into a much larger saga that resulted in the courts appointing a special master to draw its own lines.
But Representative Dan Goldman, whose neighboring district contains parts of lower Manhattan, signaled that he would challenge Malliotakis if his district is ultimately redrawn to include Staten Island. “NY-10 is my home, and I will be running for Congress in my home district. If Staten Island is drawn into my district, then I will be ready to step up and take the fight for democracy and a Democratic House majority to Nicole Malliotakis’s doorstep. Nothing can stand in the way of us defeating Donald Trump and his spineless lackeys in Congress. Flipping the House isn’t optional — our future depends on it,” he said in a statement.
The moderators and the other candidates all treated him like the frontrunner, and at times Mamdani looked more uncomfortable than he has in debates past.
One notable example of Mamdani getting cornered was when he was pressed on his position on this year’s ballot initiatives regarding housing policy. Both Cuomo and Sliwa loudly and simultaneously hounded him about not having a position, and when asked by a moderator how he planned to vote, Mamdani responded, with what seemed like a knowing half-smile, “I have not yet taken a position on those ballot questions.”
“Oh, what a shocker!” Cuomo quickly responded. Sliwa howled, as did some in the audience.
Later Mamdani again declined to take a position on a different ballot question, prompting a similar response from Cuomo and Sliwa.
Noted Bernadette Hogan at NY1, “This is also a little taste of what reporters on the campaign trail experience when asking Mamdani questions. He goes out of his way to not answer certain questions that could lead to controversy.”
Though he struggled a bit, Mamdani didn’t lose the debate, either. He still effectively centered his campaign messages about affordability and optimism, and he took multiple opportunities to go after Cuomo (and Mayor Adams).
We are almost three quarters of the way through, and while there haven’t been any knockout blows, the most striking feature of the debate has been Mamdani’s aggressiveness. He is not running out the clock on his polling lead but taking the fight right to Andrew Cuomo, and has gotten some of the most memorable lines of the night.
Among them, after Cuomo talked up his Zohran’s Law plan to means test rent stabilized apartments, Mamdani said: “What you’ve heard it from Andrew Cuomo is that the number one crisis in this city the housing crisis, and his answer is to evict my wife and I. He thinks you address this crisis by unleashing my landlord’s ability to raise my rent. If you think that the problem in this city is that my rent is too low, vote for him.”
Also, after Cuomo attacked Mamdani on his experience, Mamdani responded, “What I don’t have in experience, I make up for in integrity. And what Andrew Cuomo lacks in integrity, he could never make up for with experience.”
And finally, noted that his plan to have city-run grocery stores would cost the same as the state paid to represent Cuomo in the various lawsuits against him.
Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate making his second run for mayor, is closing out the campaign the way he does everything: with restless energy, a bull-headed refusal to back down, and an endless string of wisecracks and wild, well-told anecdotes and observations accumulated during a lifetime spent roaming the streets of New York. But behind Sliwa’s constant patter is a plan.
“Look, I start with 28 percent from the last election. I don’t think most of them are going to leave me. The Republicans will come home, and I have even more independents than Republicans,” he told me recently. “And now, with the Protect Animals ballot line, first time ever in electoral politics, I figure I’ll get another four or five percent. It’s mostly women. But then I’m a contender.”
At first glance, the political math checks out: The last two Republican candidates for mayor before Sliwa, Representative Nicole Malliotakis and hospital executive Joe Lhota, finished with 28 percent and 24 percent, respectively, against Democrat Bill de Blasio in 2017 and 2013. Assuming a baseline GOP vote of 28 percent or so, there’s good reason for Sliwa to think that hard work and a bit of luck could move him within striking range of the Democratic leader in the race, Zohran Mamdani, who is polling around 46 percent in most surveys.
“Please, Mr. President, don’t say any nice things about me. Be Switzerland, be neutral, stay out of this race,” he said. “You can’t help, you can only hurt. New York City is not Trumpland. Everywhere I go, and I’ve been in all 350 neighborhoods, he has pockets of support, but I’m gonna win them anyway.”
Sliwa’s efforts have been further impaired by pro-Cuomo independent political committees that are spending millions on ads warning voters that electing Mamdani, a democratic socialist, would be an existential threat to life in New York. Pressure on Sliwa to drop out of the race and support Cuomo has been intense, and recently led to threats sufficiently credible that Sliwa has hired armed security to guard him and his wife.
“You gotta understand, I’m a guy who was targeted by the Gottis and Gambinos and shot five times with hollow point bullets. I never had armed-security,” he told me. “Obviously, the rhetoric is way too high; Zohran Mandami is getting all these threats. We need to lower it. Let the people decide the election.”
Sliwa’s goal is to create an urban Republican movement that is not socially conservative or pro-Trump, but pro-business, tough on crime and welcoming to communities of color. He made the point by opening a campaign office in Brownsville, Brooklyn, a low-income neighborhood that has been a Democratic stronghold for generations. Walking a single block with Sliwa took 10 minutes, as Black and Latino residents stopped him for selfies, chitchat, and promises to vote for him. One bus driver even stopped in traffic, honked and waved Sliwa on board so he could make a quick pitch to passengers.
Setting up shop in Brownsville was a homecoming of sorts for Sliwa, who lived near the corner of Hegeman Avenue and Osborn Street from 1974 to 1976 after getting expelled from Brooklyn Prep, a Catholic high school for boys. Sliwa, the class president, had organized protests against the school’s jacket-and-tie dress code; the Jesuit priests who ran the school were not amused.
“Boy, that was an experience, the only white guy there, married to Koren Drayton at the time. I couldn’t go back to Canarsie because I was married to a Black woman, and the brothers were like, why are you coming into our community, snacking on our women. I was damned if you do, damned if you didn’t. And then I moved to the Bronx. I figured, hey, the Bronx will accept me. And they did, because the Bronx was burning and I ended up becoming a night manager at Mickey D’s.“
It was at McDonald’s, besieged by crime, that Sliwa organized his overnight shift workers into a safety patrol called the Magnificent 13, later renamed the Guardian Angels, that adopted uniforms and began doing literal hand-to-hand combat against muggers and gang members on streets and subways. Decades later, says Sliwa, “I can go into neighborhoods where the only Republican they’ve ever seen is Abraham Lincoln on a five-dollar bill and be accepted because of the work I’ve done with the Guardian Angels.”
The street-patrol veteran says that, if elected, he would hire 7,000 additional cops, hike their pay, and revive the NYPD’s Homeless Outreach Unit. “When Bill de Blasio and the city council pulled a billion dollars out of the budget for the police in the summer of 2020, they disbanded this great unit. They knew the clients,” he told me. “They would go into the homeless shelters. They’d speak with the directors, the security, speak with community leaders. Once they disbanded that, they left it to the local precinct, men and women who are not trained to deal with that. It takes a very strong skill level.”
On the subways, says Sliwa, “I cannot comprehend why they are not putting police officers on the moving trains,” roaming from car to car rather than standing on the platform. He would also implement crackdowns on shoplifting and public weed smoking.
And far from focusing exclusively on public safety and quality of life, Sliwa wants to encourage homeownership as a way to build wealth and stability in low-income neighborhoods, including by refashioning public housing developments as resident-owned co-ops. On education, economic development and other topics, he said he’d consult with experts and frontline city workers to find strategies to build the middle class.
“I would have a totally transparent administration. The good but also the bad and the ugly,” he told me. “The other thing I would elevate are the civil servants, many of them who have served for Democrats and Republicans. They’re the silent number of people who keep the government going, because elected officials, I don’t care if they’re Republicans or Democrats, they’re too busy dialing for dollars. The staff does all the work. They never get put on a pedestal. They’re never given an opportunity of exposing great ideas.”
It’s the kind of practicality you’d expect from a man who dropped out of high school but now wants to run the nation’s largest education system. “As mayor, I would sit back, I’d analyze, I have to sign off on it,” he told me. “I’d say, ‘You, George, you’re the one who was the architect of this. You’ve been a correctional officer for 32 years, you know the system inside out. I want you to give the press conference and explain how this works.’ Wouldn’t that be a novel idea?”
It was well past midnight on Sunday when Eric Adams finally walked down the echoing stairs of Gracie Mansion and, carrying a blown-up portrait of his mother, sat on a bottom step and looked into a camera to finally tell New Yorkers that he was dropping out of the mayoral race.
The late hour was reflective of a mayor who always kept odd hours, but also of someone who was, aides and allies say, genuinely torn over whether or not he should keep campaigning, losing sleep and unable to come to a final decision.
“He was just really struggling, really doing some soul-searching,” says John Catsimatidis, the supermarket magnate and a longtime Adams ally. “He just finally reached a ‘fuck you’ level and realized that he couldn’t turn it around.”
In the end, there was no one moment that made the mayor finally wake up and see what everyone else has seen for a long time: that he has no better chance of being reelected than I do, or you do, or the ghost of Abe Beame does. Nearly every day brought a new round of rumors that his exit was imminent; the mayor dug his heels in farther, continuing to insist that he wasn’t going anywhere. Even as donors and allies privately prodded him to leave the race, Adams seemed to believe that once New Yorkers heard his story, compared his record on crime and the economy to anyone else’s, they would come around.
But as September came to a close, Adams ceased campaigning. When asked on Saturday by Reverend Al Sharpton on MSNBC if there weren’t any circumstances upon which he would drop out, Adams for the first time demurred: “No, I can’t say that,” he told Sharpton, whose daughter endorsed Adams four years ago. “I’ve been sitting down with my team, having our pathways, finding out how we get the money into the coffers to do the commercials, to do the mailers, to pay for our team and staff,” he said. “We’ve got to make the right decision. I’ll make the right decision for the city of New York, a city I love.”
There had been a moment when it looked as if Adams could have been a serious contender in this campaign. Just after the June primary, money was pouring into his campaign coffers as it looked unlikely that Andrew Cuomo could mount a comeback after his disastrous 13-point loss to Zohran Mamdani. There was talk in elite business circles of making a hostile takeover of the Adams operation, installing professional-grade political operatives and rallying Republicans and Democratic moderates around the mayor as the best “Stop Mamdani” option.
But none of that came to pass. Eugene Noh, a political operative with a history of controversial behavior who had been removed from social media for inflammatory and racially inflected posts, was named campaign manager, and the rest of the operation remained bare-bones. Former staffers say that Frank Carone, the mayor’s former chief of staff and the official campaign chairman, was never much involved. Adams was denied matching funds by the city’s Campaign Finance Board ever since he was indicted on corruption charges last year, and he never seemed to want to spend the money he did have. Talks about joining the Trump administration in exchange for quitting the race went nowhere.
Adams has been polling in the single digits throughout the campaign. He never hired his own pollster and maintained that public polls showing him in a distant fourth were rigged against him by pollsters secretly working for Cuomo. He believed that his numbers would change in August and September, but just as the campaign was preparing for a last push, longtime ally Ingrid Lewis-Martin was indicted in a lurid bribery scandal that involved allegedly trading away traffic-calming measures for a brief cameo in a Hulu TV show. Winnie Greco, another longtime aide, was busted for handing a reporter cash inside a potato-chip bag. “Everything was just a mess,” says one Adams campaign staffer. “The chaos kept on coming and coming, and there was no way to get past it.”
It remains an open question how much Adams’s exit will impact the contours of the race. Private polling for the Cuomo campaign has shown that Adams supporters break 80 percent for the former governor, with the remaining going to Republican Curtis Sliwa, but public polling shows Cuomo getting closer to half of the Adams vote and the remaining going to Sliwa, Mamdani, or undecided. Wealthy donors who have largely sat out the campaign until now are expected to come out in a major way for Cuomo in the coming days. And a race that has been consumed by the question of “Is the mayor in or out?” now has space for other media narratives.
Meanwhile, remaining Adams loyalists consider yesterday’s announcement to be not so much a retirement” but, as one aide put it, “a reset.” They believe the mayor’s record will look better in four years, especially if a Mayor Mamdani tries to bring his brand of democratic socialism to the capital of capitalism.
“Look at Donald Trump,” says one aide. “He left in disgrace, and four years later, he is president of the United States. Anything can happen. This isn’t the end of Eric Adams.”
Adams had next to no chance of winning. His languishing independent bid was marred by middling poll numbers, lackluster fundraising, and an often-present air of controversy.
It’s an anti-climactic end to what once seemed to be a promising political story that began in 2021 as the then–Brooklyn borough president Adams defeated his party rivals handily in the mayoral primary, later declaring himself the “the face of the Democratic Party.” When he was sworn in on New Year’s Day in 2022, Adams became only the second Black mayor in the city’s history.
But Adams’s sole term in office was marked by a seemingly endless stream of controversies, including federal raids on some of his top aides and appointees and a revolving door of resignations that saw the mayor name four police commissioners in the span of two years. The turmoil in City Hall reached a fever pitch last year when federal prosecutors unveiled an indictment against Adams, accusing the mayor of intentionally soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations and luxury travel benefits in exchange for favors in a scheme that extended back to Adams’s tenure as Brooklyn borough president in 2014. Adams long denied the allegations against him and resisted calls to resign from his seat.
Adams’s exit from the race helps to thin the general-election field in a likely boon to former governor Andrew Cuomo, who is eyeing a rematch with Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, who defeated him in the primary in June. Also in the race is Republican Party nominee and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, who has said he intends to stay in the race, even if offered another role.
The New York Times reported in early September that associates of Adams had been in touch with top Trump advisers, discussing a possible role for the mayor in the administration in lieu of continuing his reelection bid. But Adams had long denied the speculation that he was under consideration for a federal-government position, telling reporters, “I have a job. I’m running for my reelection, and I’m still doing that, and I’m looking forward to getting reelected.”
Election day is rapidly approaching, and Andrew Cuomo is losing. But the Cuomo camp still has a long-shot plan to defeat Democrat Zohran Mamdani in November. It requires several things to come together: The field must shrink, then shrink further. Then deep-pocketed donors must make a last-minute pivot to Cuomo, who will use their money to peel off part of the Democratic voter base from the front-runner.
“I am not going to blow smoke. It is a narrow path,” said Cornell Belcher, a pollster for Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns who recently joined Cuomo’s campaign. “But I haven’t worked for a candidate in the past decade who didn’t have a narrow path to victory.”
The polls, to be sure, are bad, showing Cuomo trailing Mamdani by an average of 19 points. The labor unions and elected officials who endorsed the former governor in the Democratic primary have almost entirely abandoned him. Cuomo is losing the money race, and the national media has all but anointed the 33-year-old democratic socialist as the Next Big Thing.
Longtime aides and allies concede it’s a daunting challenge, especially given that Cuoma will be running on a third-party line in a city where almost two-thirds of registered voters are Democrats.
It doesn’t help that the Cuomo campaign’s multipronged approach rests on something happening that keeps not happening, despite constant rumors that it might. “There is very much a path here for us,” said one Cuomo official. “But the first step is that Eric Adams has to get the fuck out of this race.” But Adams, running a distant fourth, insists that he is not dropping out and that Cuomo is at fault for suggesting he will.
As a result, members of the Cuomo camp have been treating Adams cautiously, fearful not just that he will attack them more but also that any efforts to nudge him out will backfire. When billionaire hedge-funder and onetime Adams supporter Bill Ackman tweeted, “It is time for Mayor Adams to step aside,” some close to Cuomo cringed, knowing the mayor would be less likely to leave if he felt pushed.
Adams’s exit wouldn’t have a major impact on the polls. But, for Team Cuomo, consolidating the race from four candidates to three would unlock the second part of the plan: resetting the political chessboard in the race’s final weeks and getting anti-Mamdani donors to start shelling out money again. “If Eric gets out, there is going to be a gush of money coming Andrew’s way, $20 million to $30 million in a matter of weeks,” said one supporter of Cuomo’s.
Once that happens, Cuomo’s advisers see part three playing out: the sidelining of Curtis Sliwa. The Republican, now running third, has been even more adamant than Adams about staying in the race. But a sample of what could be in store for Sliwa came recently, when Trump made an appearance on the Fox & Friends couch and proceeded to belittle the perpetually bereted Guardian Angels founder and radio host.
“I’m a Republican, but Curtis is not exactly prime time,” Trump said. “He wants cats to be in Gracie Mansion. That’s the magnificent home of the mayor. It’s beautiful. We don’t need to have thousands of cats there.”
Sure, Sliwa is a Republican, Trump transmitted to the MAGA faithful. But he’s also something of a weirdo — more a character than a mayor.
Cuomo’s people were thrilled by Trump’s remarks, hoping they give other Republicans permission to dismiss Sliwa too. One adviser to Cuomo told me they believe as much as half of Sliwa’s vote — currently hovering around 15 percent — would be gettable for Cuomo. Add that to the share of the Adams vote Cuomo would be likely to receive and it could put him within five points of Mamdani.
“I think this is going to come down to a two-person race at the end of the day, and I don’t think people are going to waste their vote,” Cuomo said when asked about the possibility of Adams (or even Sliwa) staying in the contest. “That would be the natural resolution, as it was in the primary. And in the primary, there were candidates who had 14 points, and they wound up with three. Why? People see who’s viable and who’s not, and there are only going to be two viable candidates in my opinion.”
Getting over the top would involve reclaiming some working-class Democratic voters who supported Cuomo in the primary while trying to dampen enthusiasm for Mamdani among his most fervent fans: young voters on the left (who historically have not turned out en masse).
For his part, Mamdani is engaged in a similar, if reversed, two-step: trying to keep his left-wing base energized while also expanding his tent to include Democratic moderates. In one day, Mamdani both doubled down on his pledge to arrest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and expressed regret for his 2020 tweet that called the NYPD “racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety.” (Social-media posts from voices on the left angry over Mamdani’s backpedaling on some progressive rhetoric have been gleefully passed around on pro-Cuomo group chats.)
Cuomo needs around 30 percent of Democrats to support him in the general. There is a belief in his camp that the Democratic primary, even in this heavily Democratic city, is not reflective of the general electorate. One person involved in a potential outside spending effort on Cuomo’s behalf said that according to their metrics, more than half of Democratic voters in November won’t have voted in the primary and that they tilt far more moderate than the primary electorate.
“If you narrow this down to a two-person race and you look at the voters that are the most fluid on everything from crime to affordability to who can do the job, Cuomo has a significant lead with those voters,” said Belcher.
Current polls show that in a four-person field, Cuomo is trailing in nearly every demographic subgroup. But the campaign believes he can win loyal Democratic constituencies like Black, Hispanic, and Jewish voters, who tend to vote straight down the ticket for the Democratic nominee but may be persuadable that Mamdani is too much of a risk.
Many Cuomo advisers have discussed Rudy Giuliani’s 1993 victory, when half of the city’s electorate turned out to defeat David Dinkins. “You have to frighten people to give them a reason to go to the polls,” said one close Cuomo ally. “There is just a lot there,” said another. “There is public safety, there is the whole communist thing, there is the fact that if we elect this 33-year-old, then the city is going to go to shit. It will be de Blasio 2.0, and who wants that?”
With Mamdani nationalizing the race, bringing in figures like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on his behalf, the Cuomo camp thinks it can do a version of the same. “What is a Mayor Mamdani going to mean for our efforts to take back the House? What is a Mayor Mamdani going to mean for Kathy Hochul’s reelection or for the 2028 race?” said one person close to Cuomo. The race, in this vision, would be a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party — one in which democratic socialists are preparingto mount a takeover and Cuomo, who has been dogged by his close association with Trump throughout this race, manages to flip the narrative and become the person who is going save the city from the Trumpian menace.
“They are going to have to go scorched earth,” said Adam Carlson, a pollster not involved in the race. “It will have to be different from the primary — something like, ‘I am the only thing standing between New York City and a complete Trump authoritarian takeover.’ And Cuomo then becomes the ‘Don’t rock the boat’ guy.”
Still, much of this hangs on Adams getting out of the race.
“The next two weeks are crunch time,” said Democratic operative Chris Coffey, who advised Cuomo in the primary. “Because if you don’t see movement from Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa, it just gets harder for Cuomo to put something together.”
Election day is rapidly approaching, and Andrew Cuomo is losing. But the Cuomo camp still has a long-shot plan to defeat Democrat Zohran Mamdani in November. It requires several things to come together: The field must shrink, then shrink further. Then deep-pocketed donors must make a last-minute pivot to Cuomo, who will use their money to peel off part of the Democratic voter base from the front-runner.
“I am not going to blow smoke. It is a narrow path,” said Cornell Belcher, a pollster for Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns who recently joined Cuomo’s campaign. “But I haven’t worked for a candidate in the past decade who didn’t have a narrow path to victory.”
The polls, to be sure, are bad, showing Cuomo trailing Mamdani by an average of 19 points. The labor unions and elected officials who endorsed the former governor in the Democratic primary have almost entirely abandoned him. Cuomo is losing the money race, and the national media has all but anointed the 33-year-old democratic socialist as the Next Big Thing.
Longtime aides and allies concede it’s a daunting challenge, especially given that Cuoma will be running on a third-party line in a city where almost two-thirds of registered voters are Democrats.
It doesn’t help that the Cuomo campaign’s multipronged approach rests on something happening that keeps not happening, despite constant rumors that it might. “There is very much a path here for us,” said one Cuomo official. “But the first step is that Eric Adams has to get the fuck out of this race.” But Adams, running a distant fourth, insists that he is not dropping out and that Cuomo is at fault for suggesting he will.
As a result, members of the Cuomo camp have been treating Adams cautiously, fearful not just that he will attack them more but also that any efforts to nudge him out will backfire. When billionaire hedge-funder and onetime Adams supporter Bill Ackman tweeted, “It is time for Mayor Adams to step aside,” some close to Cuomo cringed, knowing the mayor would be less likely to leave if he felt pushed.
Adams’s exit wouldn’t have a major impact on the polls. But, for Team Cuomo, consolidating the race from four candidates to three would unlock the second part of the plan: resetting the political chessboard in the race’s final weeks and getting anti-Mamdani donors to start shelling out money again. “If Eric gets out, there is going to be a gush of money coming Andrew’s way, $20 million to $30 million in a matter of weeks,” said one supporter of Cuomo’s.
Once that happens, Cuomo’s advisers see part three playing out: the sidelining of Curtis Sliwa. The Republican, now running third, has been even more adamant than Adams about staying in the race. But a sample of what could be in store for Sliwa came recently, when Trump made an appearance on the Fox & Friends couch and proceeded to belittle the perpetually bereted Guardian Angels founder and radio host.
“I’m a Republican, but Curtis is not exactly prime time,” Trump said. “He wants cats to be in Gracie Mansion. That’s the magnificent home of the mayor. It’s beautiful. We don’t need to have thousands of cats there.”
Sure, Sliwa is a Republican, Trump transmitted to the MAGA faithful. But he’s also something of a weirdo — more a character than a mayor.
Cuomo’s people were thrilled by Trump’s remarks, hoping they give other Republicans permission to dismiss Sliwa too. One adviser to Cuomo told me they believe as much as half of Sliwa’s vote — currently hovering around 15 percent — would be gettable for Cuomo. Add that to the share of the Adams vote Cuomo would be likely to receive and it could put him within five points of Mamdani.
“I think this is going to come down to a two-person race at the end of the day, and I don’t think people are going to waste their vote,” Cuomo said when asked about the possibility of Adams (or even Sliwa) staying in the contest. “That would be the natural resolution, as it was in the primary. And in the primary, there were candidates who had 14 points, and they wound up with three. Why? People see who’s viable and who’s not, and there are only going to be two viable candidates in my opinion.”
Getting over the top would involve reclaiming some working-class Democratic voters who supported Cuomo in the primary while trying to dampen enthusiasm for Mamdani among his most fervent fans: young voters on the left (who historically have not turned out en masse).
For his part, Mamdani is engaged in a similar, if reversed, two-step: trying to keep his left-wing base energized while also expanding his tent to include Democratic moderates. In one day, Mamdani both doubled down on his pledge to arrest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and expressed regret for his 2020 tweet that called the NYPD “racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety.” (Social-media posts from voices on the left angry over Mamdani’s backpedaling on some progressive rhetoric have been gleefully passed around on pro-Cuomo group chats.)
Cuomo needs around 30 percent of Democrats to support him in the general. There is a belief in his camp that the Democratic primary, even in this heavily Democratic city, is not reflective of the general electorate. One person involved in a potential outside spending effort on Cuomo’s behalf said that according to their metrics, more than half of Democratic voters in November won’t have voted in the primary and that they tilt far more moderate than the primary electorate.
“If you narrow this down to a two-person race and you look at the voters that are the most fluid on everything from crime to affordability to who can do the job, Cuomo has a significant lead with those voters,” said Belcher.
Current polls show that in a four-person field, Cuomo is trailing in nearly every demographic subgroup. But the campaign believes he can win loyal Democratic constituencies like Black, Hispanic, and Jewish voters, who tend to vote straight down the ticket for the Democratic nominee but may be persuadable that Mamdani is too much of a risk.
Many Cuomo advisers have discussed Rudy Giuliani’s 1993 victory, when half of the city’s electorate turned out to defeat David Dinkins. “You have to frighten people to give them a reason to go to the polls,” said one close Cuomo ally. “There is just a lot there,” said another. “There is public safety, there is the whole communist thing, there is the fact that if we elect this 33-year-old, then the city is going to go to shit. It will be de Blasio 2.0, and who wants that?”
With Mamdani nationalizing the race, bringing in figures like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on his behalf, the Cuomo camp thinks it can do a version of the same. “What is a Mayor Mamdani going to mean for our efforts to take back the House? What is a Mayor Mamdani going to mean for Kathy Hochul’s reelection or for the 2028 race?” said one person close to Cuomo. The race, in this vision, would be a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party — one in which democratic socialists are preparingto mount a takeover and Cuomo, who has been dogged by his close association with Trump throughout this race, manages to flip the narrative and become the person who is going save the city from the Trumpian menace.
“They are going to have to go scorched earth,” said Adam Carlson, a pollster not involved in the race. “It will have to be different from the primary — something like, ‘I am the only thing standing between New York City and a complete Trump authoritarian takeover.’ And Cuomo then becomes the ‘Don’t rock the boat’ guy.”
Still, much of this hangs on Adams getting out of the race.
“The next two weeks are crunch time,” said Democratic operative Chris Coffey, who advised Cuomo in the primary. “Because if you don’t see movement from Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa, it just gets harder for Cuomo to put something together.”
A win by Zohran Mamdani on November 4 would make the 33-year-old New York’s youngest mayor in a century. But even in a contest against men twice his age, Mamdani has begun to sound like the adult in the room on issues of public safety, offering detailed, thoughtful policy proposals while his opponents — Mayor Eric Adams, former governor Andrew Cuomo, and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa — continue to campaign on the traditional idea that channeling more money, manpower and technology to the NYPD is the only way to keep the city safe.
By contrast, Mamdani backs a slate of criminal-justice reforms and innovations from around the country that can be replicated or expanded in New York to deal with issues like gang violence and disorder in the subways involving homeless people. We talked about it in an hourlong conversation co-sponsored by Vital City and Columbia University’s School of Journalism.
“A lot of times for New Yorkers, what is experienced or understood as an example of social disorder is then tasked to the police as if it’s their responsibility,” he told me. “What we have ended up with is police officers responding to 200,000 mental-health calls a year, and that cannot be separated from the fact that response times have increased by 20 percent over the last few years, where now the average time is closer to 16 minutes.”
Mamdani wants to create a billion-dollar Department of Community Safety that would handle non-emergency calls. “Evidence and outcomes have to be the North Star of our administration and frankly of any administration,” he said. “What’s frustrating is that we have evidence of approaches that work, but they are not operating at the scale that they could be.” The new agency would become the home of the city’s violence-interrupter and crisis-management programs, along with an expanded version of the B-HEARD program, which dispatches counselors along with cops to emergency calls that have a low risk of violence.
“Thirty-five percent of calls that B-HEARD was eligible for, it did not respond to and the police responded to. And part of that is because it has been underfunded, part of it is because it has completely been deprioritized,” Mamdani explained. “The vision of B-HEARD has to be one where we have it present in every single neighborhood, and where in the 20 neighborhoods of the highest need we have two or three teams. And where we increase funding for it by about 150 percent.”
That is a world away from what the other candidates are saying. Cuomo promises to hire 5,000 new cops, while Sliwa says he’ll bring 7,000 onboard, and Adams recently launched quality-of-life policing that will send officers and other resources to high-crime neighborhoods. All three insist that crime is the top issue facing the city and frequently attack Mamdani for past social-media posts in support of reducing the NYPD’s budget. (He now disavows talk about defunding the police.)
But voters appear to be warming up to Mamdani’s approach: the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll shows Mamdani leading all candidates on the question of who would do the best job on tackling crime (Adams, the ex-NYPD captain, finished last). The openness to new approaches is a sign of New York’s long-overdue need for a substantive debate about crime and disorder. We’ve learned the hard way that medical and social-service professionals should be leading the response to more of the thousands of mental-health distress calls that routinely end up with the NYPD by default.
Mamdani deserves credit for educating himself about proven innovations like CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) a successful program in Eugene, Oregon, that has nonviolently resolved tens of thousands of cases without police intervention and inspired similar efforts around the nation. But he’s fighting an uphill battle against cynical voices of the status quo, including the New York Post editorial board, which recently dismissed the idea of shifting mental-health calls away from the NYPD as “barely even voodoo.”
“What has been so frustrating is that we’ve seen the complete lack of will from this executive means that so many of these kinds of programs have been prejudged to failure from the very beginning because they’ve never been given what they needed,” Mamdani told me, rattling off programs around the country that might work in New York.
“In Denver, they had a STAR program. This is a program that focuses on low-level crime. In the neighborhoods where they focused, crime went down by 34 percent. Over the period of a number of years, they had 12,000 clinical interactions. Of those, only 3 percent required a medical hold,” he said. On the subject of helping homeless New Yorkers in the subways, he name-checked a program in Philadelphia’s SEPTA mass-transit system that might work here.
While both men would surely object to the comparison, Mamdani’s willingness to bring new programs and a new mind-set reminds me of the long-ago 1993 campaign of Rudy Giuliani, an eager student of early theories of how focusing cops on low-level disorder could lead to major reductions in street violence. Notwithstanding later abuses of stop-and-frisk, in the early 1990s it was a smart and reasonable approach that saved lives and helped him win an election.
History may be about to repeat itself. “None of this is simple. None of it is going to be easy. But what has been so frustrating is it has seemed for many years as if there are many who are not even trying,” Mamdani told me. “They are simply at peace with a status quo that we know is broken for so many. And I am confident in our ability to actually deliver a new chapter.”
Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images (Cuomo), Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg (Mamdani).
When Andrew Cuomo decided to ignore the advice of many of his supporters and jump back into the New York City mayoral election after a bruising primary defeat, his campaign knew it needed to do one thing: turn the race into a two-person contest with Zohran Mamdani. And so Cuomo savaged Mamdani over his rent-stabilized apartment, ties to the Democratic Socialists of America, a vacation to Uganda, and his shifting positions on policing, while mostly ignoring the rest of the field.
With some eight weeks till Election Day, it looks as if Cuomo is finally going to get the two-man race he wants. But the terms of the contest have been completely upended. In a city that has seen its share of bizarre political moments over the past couple of decades, from a congressman’s penis pictures to the election of a congressional fabulist, the 2025 mayoral race is somehow still breaking new boundaries in political weirdness. Cuomo, the resistance hero who was once seen as a potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, has been talking up his close ties to Donald Trump. Mamdani, the democratic socialist who won the primary despite statements about how the NYPD is a rogue organization that should be abolished and capitalism equals theft, has been meeting with business leaders and racking up endorsements from rank-and-file Democrats. Eric Adams inherited a rush of enthusiasm (and donor money) after the primary but failed to translate any of that into a polling bump. Republican Curtis Sliwa’s proposal to unleash a feral-cat brigade to clean up the city’s rat population was somehow the least-surreal thing happening.
And then, the week after Labor Day, news broke that Trump was trying to edge Adams and Sliwa out of the race, floating administration jobs or plush sinecures for each of them if they dropped out to make a lane for Cuomo. Supporters of both the president and the former governor, including billionaire supermarket magnate John Catsimatidis, had been pressing the case that Mamdani would be a disaster for the city. When asked at a press conference about his involvement in the race, Trump said, “I’d prefer not to have a communist mayor of New York City.”
Mamdani immediately accused Cuomo of behind-the-scenes machinations. “I’ve heard rumors of this for months,” Mamdani told me on September 3 after an “emergency” press conference he held on the news. The president, he said, “knows that Andrew Cuomo represents the very kind of politics that he practices. He knows that he could pick up the phone and have a conversation with him without even having to consider the impact it would have on New Yorkers and that the entire conversation would be about the two of them and their interests.” Cuomo denied he had any involvement in Trump’s meddling, though he recently told a crowd of Hamptons donors he knows Trump well and believes “there’s a big piece of him that actually wants redemption in New York.”
Both Sliwa and Adams denied having any intention of leaving the race. Adams held a press conference in which he took aim at Cuomo, calling him a snake and a liar, asserting that only the sitting mayor could beat Mamdani. But the damage was done. For Adams, it was made worse when the New York Timesreported that he had flown to Florida to meet secretly with Steve Witkoff, one of Trump’s advisers, a sign the mayor was at least not totally oblivious to the realities of his struggling campaign.
It was a swift fall after a dizzying rebound. In June, Wall Street and real-estate titans were apoplectic over the notion that the Democratic nominee would install Trotskyite cadres across city government. Cuomo still hadn’t said if he was running in the general election. So in the mad scramble among the donor class to find someone to stop Mamdani, money poured into Adams’s coffers. One wealthy financier reached out with an offer to host a $50,000 fundraiser, and the Adams campaign turned him down. At that time, a mere $50,000 fundraiser simply wasn’t worth it.
By the end of the summer, Adams would have taken whatever change could be shaken out of the seat cushions. He was caught in a new swirl of scandal, baroque even by often-embattled mayors’ standards: One aide slipped a wad of cash concealed in a bag of potato chips to a reporter, and another was indicted (for a second time) for trading a cameo on a Hulu show for scrapping a planned bike lane in Brooklyn, among other allegations. No fewer than five senior police officials sued the administration for creating a culture of corruption and favor-trading at the NYPD. Polls showed Adams in the single digits, just a few points above Jim Walden, an all but unknown wealthy attorney who dropped out of the mayoral race at the start of September. Sliwa was polling higher in the mid-teens.
Still, Cuomo needed all other candidates besides the front-runner fully sidelined because he was polling around 15 points behind Mamdani. In a head-to-head race, however, the same surveys showed the possibility for a dead heat or, in one instance from a July poll, a double-digit Cuomo lead.
Mamdani has had mixed success breaking 40 percent in the polls, and the fear among his supporters is that he has a ceiling somewhere below 50. All summer he worked to consolidate the Democratic Party behind him, assuaging the concerns of sympathetic business leaders and disavowing some of his earlier, more radical statements. He also won the support of Democratic officials and labor unions that had backed Cuomo in the primary.
But campaigning as a regular Democrat was an uncomfortable fit for someone who only a few years ago was trying to make it in the music and entertainment industries. Mamdani has privately lamented that the trappings of being the Democratic nominee, with its chauffeured SUVs and security, take him away from the hand-to-hand contact that propelled his primary win. And the campaign has wrestled internally with the question of whether or not Mamdani should position himself as more of a normie Democrat in a city where Democrats out-number Republicans six to one or lean into the youthful outsider idealism that got him where he is in the first place. After all, it’s not as if Democrats are incredibly popular right now, and the entire universe of Democratic institutional support did Cuomo close to no good in the primary.
Then came the news that Trump wanted to intervene on Cuomo’s behalf. Had Adams or Sliwa simply quietly dropped out and ended up with an administration appointment months down the line, the link between them and Trump wouldn’t have been as clear. But the ham-handed and nearly public machinations by Trump and people supportive of Cuomo have been so shameless that it’s fair to wonder if the whole thing is a psyop, a scheme to secretly boost Mamdani so that Trump can have him as a foil. Regardless, Trump casting himself as Cuomo’s virtual running mate lit a fire for the Mamdani campaign.
At his emergency press conference, Mamdani spoke with the kind of passion that he hasn’t much harnessed since winning the primary in June, calling Trump’s parachuting into the race “an affront to what makes so many of us proud to be Americans: that we choose our own leaders, not that they get to pick themselves.” His campaign sees this as an opportunity to reignite youth interest as well as energize the center-left Democrats Mamdani needs to attract.
“This is no longer a race between Zohran and an opponent trying to cobble together a coalition of voters who don’t like him,” said Morris Katz, a senior Mamdani adviser. “It’s a race between Zohran and Donald Trump.”
Photo: Christian Monterrosa/Bloomberg/Getty Images
The upcoming vote for mayor and other municipal offices is the main event on Election Day, but New Yorkers will also weigh in on a ballot question that, if approved, would start the process of revising the City Charter and the State Constitution to move city elections from the current odd-numbered-year schedule and make them coincide with the year we pick presidential candidates. If that happens, we’ll be joining cities like Baltimore and Los Angeles that recently changed their calendars.
Lots of well-intentioned political leaders, including Governor Kathy Hochul, think it’s a great idea. I don’t.
“There’s not the voter participation that we should have in a country like the United States of America,” Hochul told me recently. “It is a privilege to vote, people shed blood for this right, it was denied to people of color for so many decades — for a hundred years — and people won that right. I want more people to exercise. And what happens is in a non-presidential election, non-governor’s election year, there’s not as much attention.”
No argument there; the numbers show that lots more New Yorkers come out to vote for president than for mayor or any other local office. Last year, according to city figures, just over 60 percent of the city’s 4.7 million active registered voters turned out in the race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. That’s not far behind the national average of around 64 percent, and much higher than the 23 percent who voted in the 2021 general election for New York City offices.
Overall, turnout in city elections has been trending downward for decades. Just over 32 percent of voters came out in 2001, and that number dropped in 2005 and 2009, reaching an all-time low of only 20 percent of registered voters casting ballots in the 2013 election, with slight upticks in 2017 and 2021. New York’s quarter-century of steadily declining participation is what worries Hochul.
“We wish everybody would participate all four years, but they don’t, so let’s acknowledge human nature,” she told me. “I also think there’s something that goes on — it’s election fatigue. People need a break; otherwise, it’s nonstop campaigning all year round for four straight years. And I think when you sometimes have special elections, and vacancies, and the mayor — we have school-board races at different times — it’s very confusing to people. So let’s just simplify it and have one big election.”
The main problem with “one big election” is that national political dynamics would inevitably cause vital city issues unique to New York to get swallowed, distorted, or ignored. Take the issue of congestion pricing: After more than a decade of study, struggle, and the creation of an unlikely alliance among environmentalists, transportation advocates, and big businesses, Manhattan below 60th Street is currently the only place in America with a general toll on vehicles. It’s safe to assume that most voters in car-dominant swing states like Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan don’t understand or care about New York’s innovative experiment — and might decide to attack it, as Trump vowed to do before the election (and, thankfully, has thus far been blocked from doing by a federal court). New York is better off deciding local issues without a lot of political noise coming from — or intended for — other places.
And imagine trying to help voters focus on strictly local matters — like when to close Rikers Island, how to fund public housing, or whether to boost money for our parks — while national candidates are spending hundreds of millions of dollars flooding the airwaves with ads for and against sweeping issues like the 900-page Project 2025 agenda. The last thing we need is local candidates bloviating about funding Social Security or supporting NATO instead of telling us how they plan to improve trash pickups, improve the schools, or hire more social workers to help the homeless.
This is not a hypothetical concern. Back in 1894, reformers changed the State Constitution to hold city elections in a so-called “off year” specifically so that decisions would be made by people concerned about local issues without the distraction of national issues like war and peace. More than a century later, for some reason, today’s reformers see that intentional narrowing of focus as a bad thing.
“I think New Yorkers can walk and chew gum at the same time,” says Richard Buery, who chaired the Charter Revision Commission supporting a change in the election calendar. “Right now, in the middle of this mayoral election, it’s not like people aren’t talking and dealing with the issues at the federal level and national level,” he told me. “I think people can figure out what matters.”
I’m not so sure about that. Year after year, researchers and pollsters find that most Americans don’t know who represents them in Congress and can’t name the three branches of government. A University of Pennsylvania survey recently found that “over half of Americans (51 percent) continue to assert incorrectly that Facebook is required to let all Americans express themselves freely on its platform under the First Amendment.” It’s hard enough trying to inform the public about hyperlocal issues like neighborhood rezonings or installing bike lanes; trying to simultaneously discuss farm subsidies, funding for health research, and other issues would be all but impossible.
If New York is going to be hell-bent on increasing participation, we should be at least a little bit concerned about making sure it’s informed participation.
Beyond the policy questions, New York’s local political scene can only benefit from keeping some distance and difference from the national parties. One reason Republicans in New York have been pushed to the edge of extinction over the last decade — no GOP candidate has won a statewide office since 2002 — is that voters associate them with a national party that has become stridently conservative and wholly subservient to President Trump. Curtis Sliwa, the current Republican candidate for mayor, told me he can’t win without getting support from disaffected Democrats — and that his already uphill battle for City Hall would become almost impossible if Trump endorsed him or otherwise got involved in the race.
On the other side of the aisle, city Democrats skew significantly more to the left than the national party — witness the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani — and it’s not clear that older, centrist national Democrats, who rallied around Joe Biden even after it was clear that he should retire, have the energy to lead, absorb, or suppress the youth-powered political movement surging through New York. Which is one more reason we should make sure city elections remain by and for New Yorkers only.
The first signs of trouble for Adams came on November 2, 2023, with an ominous round of raids targeting people close to City Hall. While he was traveling to Washington, D.C., for a White House meeting with mayors about the migrant crisis, FBI agents were executing search warrants at the homes of three Adams associates, including his chief fundraiser, Brianna Suggs, for dealings involving the Turkish government.
In New Jersey, agents took cell phones and other materials from the homes of Rana Abbasova, director of protocol in the Mayor’s Office for International Affairs, and Cenk Öcal, a former Turkish Airlines executive who served on the mayor-elect’s transition committee. Agents left Suggs’s home in Crown Heights with three iPhones, two laptops, and a manila folder labeled “Eric Adams,” the New York Timesreported.
Alerted to the Suggs raid by a staff member, Adams turned around after landing in D.C. and boarded a flight back to New York. He told reporters the following week that he had skipped the migrant summit out of concern for 25-year-old Suggs. On the following Monday, FBI agents approached Adams as he left an event at New York University and confiscated two cell phones and an iPad that were in his possession.
“As a former member of law enforcement, I expect all members of my staff to follow the law … I have nothing to hide,” the mayor said afterward, a refrain he used repeatedly, with variations, as the Turkey probe advanced and other investigations materialized.
Another sweep came on September 4. Federal agents conducted early-morning raids at the homes of senior city officials including NYPD commissioner Edward Caban; Deputy Mayor for public safety Philip Banks III; his brother, schools chancellor David Banks; first deputy mayor Sheena Wright, David Banks’s fiancée; and a top mayoral adviser, Timothy Pearson. Caban’s identical twin brother, James, and a younger Banks sibling, Terence, also had phones confiscated.
The coordinated raids came in support of two investigations unrelated to Turkey but run primarily out of the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office. One probe is looking into a consulting firm run by Terence Banks, whose fortunes rose when his older brothers joined the Adams administration, and the other is focused on whether James Caban had used his family ties to the police commissioner to gain work for his security business, according to news reports.
Edward Caban resigned ten days after the raid. His brother and the Banks siblings have all denied wrongdoing. David Banks later resigned as schools chancellor.
One of the most striking themes of the Democratic National Convention was the way the message flipped back and forth between grim warnings that democracy is under attack and playful invitations to engage in a politics of joy. Democrats at times seemed to be attempting a tricky tightrope act, akin to inviting people to dance their way out of a burning house.
For most of the convention, the message seemed to be: Join the fight to save democracy–and let’s have some fun while we do it. It’s an audacious strategy that President Biden could have never pulled off.
The address by ex-President Bill Clinton was a perfect example. “We’ve seen more than one election slip away from us when we thought it couldn’t happen, when people got distracted by phony issues or overconfident. This is a brutal, tough business,” he told the crowd, before concluding a few minutes later: “We need Kamala Harris, the president of joy, to lead us.”
Over and over, joy and happiness were the theme of cheerful celebrities and upbeat optimists who took the stage at the United Center in Chicago, including comedians Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Kennan Thompson and Mindy Kahling, poet Amanda Gorman and songsters John Legend, Stevie Wonder and Sheila E. But alongside the fun and funny artistic voices were plenty of speakers like Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, who solemnly invoked the January 6 insurrection and the need to take seriously threats by Donald Trump to terminate the Constitution, be a dictator on Day One and pardon convicted January 6 rioters if elected.
“In this life, my father never cast a vote because of Jim Crow, so I dedicated my career to protecting the votes against violence and discrimination. You can imagine what I felt on Jan. 6 when I saw with my own eyes those insurrectionists trying to take that away,” Thompson told the crowd. “They did it to rob millions of Americans of their votes.”
“Trump tried to destroy our democracy by lying about the election and inciting a violent mob to attack the Capitol,” Rep. Hakeem Jeffries said from the podium, before shifting into a preacher’s cadence and drawing cheers: “In the Old Testament Book of Psalms, the scripture tells us that weeping may endure during the long night, but joy will come in the morning.”
The Rev. Al Sharpton quoted the same Biblical passage in his remarks. “We’ve endured lies and areas of darkness,” he said. “But if we stay together, Black, white, Latina, Asian, Indian American, if we stay together, joy, joy, joy, joy coming in the morning.”
And surprise guest Oprah Winfrey saluted podium speakers who’d told wrenching personal stories about rape, incest and medical trauma caused by restricted access to abortion before doing the pivot. “We won’t go back. We won’t be sent back, pushed back, bullied back, kicked back. We’re not going back, “ she said, before singing out the J-word: “So let us choose. Let us choose truth, let us choose honor, and let us choose joooooooy!”
So which is it? Are Democrats waging a desperate fight against a would-be dictator, or trying to have a good time? “It’s not a campaign theme,” Quentin Fulks, deputy campaign manager for the Harris-Walz ticket, told columnist Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times about the j-word. “It’s just something that they’re doing, that they’re bringing to the table. I think if you try to manufacture something like joy, it can go wrong because it’s fake. I think the reason why it’s resonating with people is because it’s authentic.”
Harris notably did not utter the world “joy” even once in her prime-time address that concluded the convention. Instead, she listed Trump’s attacks on democracy. “Consider not only the chaos and calamity when he was in office, but also the gravity of what has happened since he lost the last election,” Harris said in the stern, persuasive tones of the courtroom prosecutor she once was. “Donald Trump tried to throw away your votes. When he failed, he sent an armed mob to the U.S. Capitol, where they assaulted law enforcement officers. When politicians in his own party begged him to call off the mob and send help, he did the opposite — he fanned the flames.”
Harris, it seems, is not going to downplay or ignore the reality that America in the age of Trump has been flirting with open attacks on democracy. But she should consider embracing the politics of joy—not only because her followers like it, but because expressions of love and happiness have a proven track record of dissolving the dark power of dictatorship.
I recently talked about the phenomenon with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at New York University whose book Strongmen examines how authoritarian strongmen gain power — and how they lose it. While Trump is an uncomfortably good fit with the likes of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, India’s Narendra Modi and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, says Ben-Ghiat, many of today’s strongmen are encountering a wave of popular resistance around the world.
“There’s a big movement of anti-authoritarianism building around the world, and we are in the middle of a renaissance of nonviolent protest around the world. And there are places that have had the biggest protests they’ve ever had, or in the last 40 years, like in Poland, in Chile, in Israel,” she told me. “You could name 10 other countries that have the biggest protests they’ve ever had, because there is something changing in the world. And so one of my maxims is to always have hope.”
In Turkey, says Ben-Ghiat, the politics of love was the most potent weapon available to push back against the creeping authoritarianism of that country’s strongman, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. “One of my Democratic heroes is Ekrem İmamoğlu,” she said, referring to the Mayor of Istanbul. “He ran for office in 2019 on a platform of love. And instead of having rallies, he walked around and hugged people. The total opposite of Erdogan. And he won.”
It’s possible that the new politics of joy will continue the activism of the recent past – the women’s march in 2017, the Black Lives Matter demonstrations following the killing of George Floyd in 2020, and this year’s elections – as part of a larger movement to invigorate democracy. “Never give up on the American people. There’s a lot of decency. There’s a lot of people we don’t hear,” Ben-Ghiat says. “A lot of it’s behind the scenes. There are a lot of people working to safeguard our democracy right now.”
In the end, it was Manhattan’s plodding and plainspoken district attorney, Alvin Bragg, who proved the pundits wrong and delivered what all the big-talking power brokers could not: the criminal conviction of ex-president Donald Trump for the corrupt and illegal business practices that helped him win the 2016 race for president.
Bragg does not swagger into a room the way so many New York lawyers and politicians do. He does not preen, pose, shout, or boast. Even when traveling with an armed security detail, he tends to arrive quietly, with the friendly, open and approachable style of a Sunday school teacher, which Bragg has been for years.
It is typical for New York’s men of power to huddle in dark bars and boozy back rooms, swapping gossip, cutting deals, and sipping booze. You’re more likely to find Bragg in Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church chatting about values, scripture, and how to make one’s way in the world with honesty and integrity. That, alone, makes him a different kind of fish in the shark tank of New York politics, which is stocked with bullies, boasters, bluster, and bullshit.
“This type of white collar prosecution is core to what we do at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office,” Bragg said after the conviction, repeating almost word for word what he’d said last April after Trump’s indictment and arrest. He was telling the truth: An investigation by NBC News showed that during Bragg’s first 15 months as DA, the office charged 166 felony counts for falsifying business records against 34 different people or corporations. As Bragg put it: “While this defendant may be unlike any other in American history, we arrived at this trial, and ultimately today at this verdict, in the same manner as every other case that comes through the courtroom doors — by following the facts and the law, and doing so without fear or favor.”
Fear and favor have been floating around People v. Trump from the start. The defendant himself, a former president of the United States who instigated the January 6 riot at the Capitol, publicly predicted that “death and destruction” would be the result of his being tried on criminal charges by Bragg. That didn’t happen, even when Trump posted the word “PROTEST” on social media and only a handful of people turned out. But Bragg did receive at least 89 death threats, including a note that said “Alvin — I’ll kill you,” included with a package containing a suspicious white powder. Another ominous note read: “Remember we are everywhere and we have guns.”
In addition to dodging pro-Trump death threats, Bragg had to fend off attacks from men like Carey Dunne and Mark Pomerantz, two seasoned prosecutors brought in as special assistant district attorneys by Bragg’s predecessor, Cy Vance. Dunne and Pomerantz quit the D.A.’s office when, shortly after taking office, Bragg refused to bring sweeping racketeering charges against the Trump Organization.
“I believe that your decision not to prosecute Donald Trump now, and on the existing record, is misguided and completely contrary to the public interest. I therefore cannot continue in my current position,” Pomerantz wrote in a resignation letter. “I have worked too hard as a lawyer, and for too long, now to become a passive participant in what I believe to be a grave failure of justice.” Pomerantz went on to write a self-aggrandizing book attacking Bragg and disparaging the case against Trump as “the legal equivalent of a plane crash” due to “pilot error.”
In legal terms, many attorneys, including my friend Elie Honig, were bothered by Bragg’s use of New York’s clunky two-step law that makes it a felony to file false business records. Trump has been convicted of using false records — disguising his hush-money payments as a “legal fee” paid to his fixer/lawyer Michael Cohen — with the intent of concealing or advancing additional crimes. The quirk under New York law is that those additional crimes do not need to be proved or even specified. We don’t know whether the jurors believed Trump intended to violate campaign finance laws, tax laws, or some other statute.
The legal objections were accompanied by complaints from the pundit class that condemned Bragg for bringing a case that they called trivial or a distraction; the critics included Jonathan Chait, Peggy Noonan, Richard Hasen and Van Jones. The main complaint seemed to be that falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments to a porn star was small potatoes compared to sweeping charges of election fraud in Georgia or the mishandling of top secret documents in Florida.
“The players in the drama aren’t people of import who stand for big things, they’re not fate-of-the-republic people, they don’t have any size. They’re tacky lowlifes doing tacky lowlife things,” Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “The case involves a questionable legal theory that depends on the testimony of Michael Cohen, who is half-mad in his own right.”
Fair enough. But Ron Kuby, a well-known left-leaning attorney, pointed out in the Daily News that the tackiness of the witnesses and the complexity of the law do not constitute a valid defense. “It is true that the application of these laws has never been used to criminalize attempted campaign finance violations, but that is because most candidates for president keep better books,” Kuby wrote earlier this year. “It is no more novel than arresting a presidential candidate for DWI; it has never happened before but the law is unambiguous.”
That sounds about right to me: if Trump or any other candidate was charged with driving while intoxicated, few people would say the matter should be ignored. Bragg, operating at the steady, methodical pace of the courts, stood up for the principle that using business records to hide additional crimes should not be ignored or dismissed for Trump or anybody else. And he convinced a jury, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the former president violated the law.
Bragg now gets the last laugh against his critics in the legal profession. Pomerantz got a book contract and made money; Bragg got a conviction and made history. And politically, he has made more of the dent in Trump’s attempted comeback than any of the louder, flashier Democrats that frequent the cable news shows, liberal think tanks, and the big-donor speaking circuit. It almost reads like the kind of lesson from scripture that gets taught in Sunday school: that sometimes, the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong
A 4.8 magnitude earthquake shook New Jersey and New York City on Friday morning, followed by a 4.0 magnitude aftershock in the evening — surprising and confusing area residents not used to seismic phenomena. Below are the latest updates and everything we know about the quake, aftershock, and aftermath.
