At Epicenter, we’re taking some time off next week (like the rest of New York City). Maybe we’ll see you at the U.S. Open or a New York Liberty game or Shakespeare in the Park or the musical Operation Mincemeat, or just soaking up the remainder of summer on a park bench somewhere. But before that happens, we wanted to turn to our in-house expert on all things civic and do a status check on the upcoming New York City mayoral election. Here we go. . . again.
Edited excerpts:
OK, Felipe, catch us up on the general election. Who is running and on what parties?
The three big ones are incumbent Democratic Mayor Eric Adams, who did not participate in the primary and has been running purely as an independent; Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic socialist who now seems to be the clear front-runner in the race; and former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, also running as an independent after getting trounced by Mamdani in the primary.
The Republicans are fielding perennial candidate Curtis Sliwa, as wild a character as Trump is—but without the weird adoration that makes Trump an actual viable electoral candidate. That is to say Sliwa will once again be a gadfly here and is hardly worth even discussing in the context of the election itself (much more interesting in the context of the city’s trajectory from the 1980s until now, but that’s for another time).
It felt like a quiet summer after a blitz of a primary. Nobody knocked on our doors or called . . . yet. Why is that?
Everyone’s been busy regrouping and raising money, which you need a lot of to run a campaign at this level. Mamdani’s unexpectedly decisive, 12-point victory in the primary was a significant development that all the campaigns (including Mamdani’s) had to digest fully before moving forward. At first, it seemed like Cuomo’s embarrassing loss might have ended his effort to reach City Hall, though the former governor quickly signaled that he was simply shifting into general election mode.
There’s still a lot of uncertainty around the race dynamics, mainly because the two centrist candidates—Cuomo and Adams—are competing for essentially the same pool of voters while Mamdani cruises to victory. Neither seems to have quite figured out how to work around that. Recently, former Gov. David Paterson shifted his support to Adams and said Cuomo would be a “national hero” if he dropped out of the race.
For his part, in leaked audio from a Hamptons fundraiser, Cuomo told the assembled crowd of donors that he expected Trump and other top Republican leaders to tell their voters to support him instead of the dead-end Sliwa. He separately said Adams “won’t allow himself” to be a spoiler in the race, but would instead drop out, eliciting an angry response from the Adams campaign. It seems both are effectively playing chicken to see who will drop out first as they eye Mamdani’s comfortable path to a victory.
As for Mamdani’s campaign apparatus, he took something of a breather post-primary, including a trip to Uganda, where he was born, and has been running his campaign now less as an effort to establish himself—which he already has—and more as a closing argument. Voters no longer need outreach to tell them who Mamdani is and what he stands for; those who are going to turn out in November, already a minority of politically engaged voters, are familiar with him and his policies.
I think we’re going to see a ramp-up now going into the fall. Having inflated their coffers during the summer campaigning that actually matters for candidates without the small-donor muscle of Mamdani—which is to say, the high-dollar circuit of the Hamptons and other top tax-bracket enclaves—Adams and Cuomo are likely to ramp up their ad spend and ground game. Adams has been opening up new campaign offices, and both he and Cuomo seem like they want to represent themselves as steady hands amid the Trump turmoil.
How do you think a general election will differ from the primary? In what ways will the campaigns be different?
The Mamdani campaign seems to be staying the course, hitting at the candidate’s simple main themes: affordable housing and transit, city services, taxing the rich, and standing up to Trump to protect New York City. That message proved winning the first time around and there’s no real reason to change it now, especially since that represents Mamdani’s genuine political philosophy.
Cuomo, on the other hand, does seem to have reevaluated and taken on a new tack that is far less about him standing as a bulwark against chaos and disorder, the central thesis of his primary campaign. Instead, he’s come around to a more economic populist message, though one that has landed a bit flat (last week, I wrote that his Mamdani-bashing housing proposal mainly just confused people and even allies criticized him). Observers have wryly noted that he’s rolled out several videos attempting to replicate the easygoing walk-and-talk style of Mamdani’s social media presence, with mixed results.
The aforementioned Trump comment is also part and parcel of a strategy both Cuomo and Adams have embraced, which is to position themselves as the right people to safeguard the city under the authoritarian impulses of the Trump era.
Let’s talk about the current mayor. How is Eric Adams governing, and does his current perch help or hurt his campaign?
On the one hand, Adams has some claim to tangible successes during his mayoralty. Crime is indeed down, and he’s pushed through consequential legislation like the City of Yes proposals. None of it is particularly earth-shattering but there are some good ideas. On the other, this has been achieved despite a complete managerial disaster that has seen multiple waves of top officials resigning, at least the ones who were not raided or criminally indicted (before Trump took office and got to work using the Justice Department as a political weapon).
Whatever Adams’ achievements, they have been overshadowed by scandal after scandal, beginning pretty early in his term, from flying around on Bitcoin billionaire Brock Pierce’s jet to crypto conferences to the Turkey debacle to allegations that NYPD leadership under the mayor operated as a corrupt cabal. All of it has been made worse by Adams’ reflective defensiveness to it all, which makes him often dismiss questions and concerns of any type as haters hating. While incumbency is generally a boon in elections, it seems to be a bit of an albatross for Adams, who is polling at a laughable 7 percent in a recent survey.
Is this really a Mamdani-Cuomo race or does Adams genuinely have a shot to be reelected?
Brass tacks? I think no, he’s toast, unless something really substantially changes in the next couple of months. In a Mamdani-Cuomo matchup, I feel pretty confident in saying that Mamdani would win comfortably if the election were held today.
Why has it taken so long for some Democrats to endorse Zohran Mamdani? Do endorsements matter? Who do we still have to hear from?
The most notable holdout so far is House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who has repeatedly been asked and repeatedly declined to endorse Mamdani directly. Gov. Kathy Hochul has herself also stopped short of endorsing the candidate, all pretty notable for the winner of the NYC Democratic mayoral primary.
The reason for this is all pretty simple: Mamdani fundamentally belongs to a different wing of the party than they do, and these wings have been warring forever. After a decisive Clintonian victory in the ‘90s that aligned the party firmly with a neoliberal approach, the progressive side has been building slowly over the past 10 years in particular while taking constant fire from not only the fight but the center-left. I could write another 2,000 words on these dynamics, but let’s just say that it’s unsurprising within the context of a longtime struggle to define what the national party is and what it stands for.
As for the impact of these endorsements, I think they matter more in the primary than the general. Once upon a time the endorsements would have helped Mamdani establish himself as a serious and legitimate candidate in voters’ eyes, but we’re past that now. In any case, it’s not like Mamdani hasn’t managed any big-ticket endorsements; he’s gotten Rep. Adriano Espaillat and other longtime Democratic local electeds as well as big unions.
Can we talk about the “Jewish vote”? Is there such a thing? Have heard on social media that some New Yorkers are considering leaving if Mamdani wins?
Insofar as there are plenty of Jewish people who vote in NYC elections, yes, there’s a Jewish vote. Relatedly but separately, there’s an Orthodox Jewish vote, which local politicians tend to value in particular because it tends to be a bit all-or-nothing and very committed — practically the entire voting-age community will turn out for one candidate, which in a relatively low-turnout race is a pretty big get.
Per some recent polling, Mamdani is cleaning up with Jewish voters in the city, though I don’t think he’s necessarily going to pick up specifically the latter bloc. As for the grousing about leaving the city, some community or another threatens to leave the city practically every election; I don’t see it happening.
How much will housing truly drive voters?
Housing is and will, for the foreseeable future, be one of the main issues driving voters because it is practically existential. It’s not that other issues aren’t important, but transit and sanitation and schools all matter a bit less if your ability to live in the city at all is in serious question. All the candidates are talking about housing; the main distinction is which of their proposals you feel makes the most sense.
The narrative continues to be that blue states have the highest crime (see National Guard takeover of D.C.). Will this impact who gets elected as NYC mayor?
I hope this narrative doesn’t take hold because it’s demonstrably false. As some have already pointed out, the states that have deployed their National Guards to D.C. over this supposed concern for crime have far higher homicide rates than D.C. itself, and often feature much more violent crime.
I think Democrats are often so terrified of being called soft on crime that they’ll offer little pushback on completely fabricated claims of rampant crime, often pointing to public perception of high crime without contending with the fact that this perception is fed by the very same narrative they’re helping foment; it’s cyclical. In any case, I have a bone to pick on whether it’s even worthwhile to engage this debate on the terms of crime rates at all. As I wrote recently, the crime thing is a pretext just like immigration is a pretext; this is about power, and about an anti-democratic takeover of bastions of political opposition.
On that front, the candidates could take a definitive stance. Federal officials including Trump have said rather explicitly that they are planning to roll out a paramilitary/military occupation in other cities including NYC. That is as existential a threat as anything else, so it’s worth pressing the would-be mayors about what they will do to defend the city in that way.
Have you ever been handed a wad of cash in an empty chips bag?
I, unlike my dear colleague Katie Honan, have not entered the canon of legendary journalism stories in this particular way. Yesterday, the longtime city reporter received a bag of chips with some cash in it after conversing with former Adams aide Winnie Greco — who had resigned last year while under federal investigation for bundling straw donations — after an Adams campaign event.
It’s unclear what exactly Greco was attempting though the spectrum of possibilities isn’t great; her lawyer later attempted the straight-off-the-boat schtick in saying this was just a gesture of friendship in Chinese culture, a defense that elicited some outrage from other Chinese and Chinese-American reporters and political observers. This was probably not coordinated in any way by the Adams campaign itself, but it’s just one more bizarre embarrassment for a mayor that has had a tough time shaking off the air of scandal, and the persistent implication that he’s hiring well-connected longtime friends and allies as opposed to serious people.
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