This is The Sprint for City Hall, a limited-run series on the critical Democratic primary race for mayor.
In seven weeks, New Yorkers will vote for the Democratic nominee for mayor. We’re not big on public predictions, but you can bet on one thing: The incumbent, Mayor Eric Adams, will not win the primary. He is running as an independent in November and will not be on the June 24 ballot. (More on that in a bit.) That still leaves 11 Democrats in the primary race, and a mountain of policy papers, endorsements, retail politicking and, eventually, two debates, to digest.
That’s what we’re here for. I’m Dean Chang, and I oversee a fantastic team of reporters covering the race. Each Tuesday through Primary Day, they’ll be sharing a mix of news, observations, trends and campaign ephemera that might otherwise be overlooked. We’ll start with a quick overview, move to some news, and get to Fran Lebowitz’s ranked choices a bit further down. No surprise: She has thoughts.
Things are starting to heat up.
After months of mostly under-the-radar jockeying for attention, endorsements and donations, the mayoral primary race is kicking into high gear. Campaign commercials are hitting the airwaves, adding to the wider array of online ads (we examine one of them below).
The ballot order has been randomly chosen, and you almost have to wonder if the lottery balls were momentum-weighted. Atop the ballot will be Zohran Mamdani, a state assemblyman who has quickly risen to second place in public polls. The front-runner, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, will be listed sixth. Does ballot order matter? It didn’t seem to in 2021, when Aaron Foldenauer nabbed the top spot, and the eventual winner, Eric Adams, was listed ninth.
The ballot has other familiar names, including the current and former city comptrollers, Brad Lander and Scott M. Stringer, and the City Council speaker, Adrienne Adams. And then there are the long-shots whose candidacies may even surprise close relatives. (Aunt Selma! You didn’t tell me you were running for mayor!)
For a more detailed look at the candidates, head over to our Who’s Running tracker. If you want to brush up on where the most prominent Democrats stand on various issues, we’ve got you covered. And if you want to find stories you may have missed, our mayor’s race landing page is right here.
Let’s get to it.
THE NEWS
Cuomo as a third-party candidate?
To run as an independent in November, Mayor Adams must collect petition signatures to run on his own ballot lines. He has chosen two names: EndAntisemitism, a reference to his ties to the Jewish community, and Safe&Affordable, the themes he is running on.
But he is not the only well-known candidate doing so.
Cuomo’s campaign is gathering signatures for a party called Fight and Deliver, which uses as a symbol a set of boxing gloves. A petitioner soliciting signatures on 125th Street in Harlem on Monday in the middle of a rainstorm said he was being paid $25 per hour to do so.
The move provides a measure of assurance for Cuomo. If he wins the Democratic primary, he could run on both the Democratic and the Fight and Deliver lines and have the votes tallied together, as New York law allows. If he were to lose the primary, he could still appear on his independent ballot line in the general election.
Cuomo said that last year’s presidential election and the most recent governor’s race show that Democrats are struggling to connect with voters.
“Over the last several months, as I’ve been out talking to New Yorkers, one thing has become clear,” he said in a statement. “There is a disillusionment with the Democratic Party by some — a feeling that the party has been hijacked, that it doesn’t produce real results, and that it doesn’t fight for working people anymore.”
In 2014, Cuomo’s allies created the Women’s Equality Party, partly as a snub to the left-leaning Working Families Party, with whom he was feuding. He gathered more than 50,000 votes for governor under that line that year.
CHaRtING THE RACE
We mapped the city’s donors
In politics, it’s always instructive to follow the money.
Keith Collins, a journalist who uses data and visuals to explore and explain complicated subjects, led a team of reporters to provide an extraordinarily detailed look at where all the donations to mayoral candidates are coming from.
Of the 11 Democrats in the primary, Cuomo had raised the most money by mid-March, slightly outpacing Mamdani and Lander through a slew of large contributions, many from out-of-towners. Mamdani has by far the most individual donors, most of them from New York City.
We asked Keith to expand a bit on what he found.
Will Mamdani’s huge edge in individual donors translate into actual votes, and be enough to overcome Cuomo’s lead in the polls?
He has a ton of donors in New York City, nearly 15,000. That’s about eight times the number of New Yorkers who donated to Cuomo. The thing is, we’ve seen this before. Andrew Yang was in a similar position to Mamdani heading into the Democratic primary in 2021. About 11,000 New Yorkers had donated to his campaign, compared to about 7,000 for Adams.
We all know what happened there: Adams became mayor. Yang ran a strong campaign and had a lot of support, but ultimately finished the primary in fourth place. So, while the figures in this piece tell us a lot about how each candidate’s campaign is doing, they can’t predict the outcome of the election.
Cuomo raised a bunch of money pretty quickly, with the average donation higher than any other candidate. Is that a reliable predictor of strength or success?
Right, the average donation to Cuomo’s campaign was $559, compared to $78 for Mamdani and $217 for Lander. Like with the number of donors, we can’t predict his chances based only on the amount of money he’s raised — but it certainly doesn’t hurt.
What, if anything, surprised you as you pulled together the data?
Well, Mamdani’s numbers are obviously pretty eye-popping. It’s not just that he has a lot of donors, or that he’s raised a lot of money — he’s also managed to reach voters in seemingly every corner of the city. There are neighborhoods where almost everyone who made a donation to any campaign donated to Mamdani. Like in Bushwick, there were a total of 785 donors who gave to Democrats, and 692 of them were Mamdani donors.
The other number I had to recheck several times, to make sure it wasn’t a data error, was the amount Cuomo pulled in, quickly, after his belated entry into the race. $1.52 million is a lot of money to raise in less than two weeks.
The all-powerful transit lobby
During Cuomo’s time as governor, a group of transit riders known as Riders Alliance took to carting a cardboard cutout of him around the subway system he controlled, to highlight their argument that he was mismanaging it.
Now that Cuomo is running for mayor, the group, a traditional nonprofit, is taking a new tack. It has created a 501(c)(4), a type of social welfare organization that is allowed to engage in politicking.
This will enable Riders Alliance to attack Cuomo’s transit record during the Democratic primary, and Mayor Adams’s in the general election.
Under Cuomo, signal delays and car equipment failures on the subway system surged, even as the governor sought to distance himself from the problem.
“For riders, Cuomo’s comeback would be a disaster,” said Betsy Plum, the group’s executive director, noting that he had tried to block congestion pricing from going into effect.
“He’s never been a rider, but he’s always been eager to exploit the subway for headlines, power-washing trains and scapegoating vulnerable New Yorkers whenever it suits him,” she said.
A spokesman for Cuomo, Rich Azzopardi, highlighted the former governor’s funding for the transit system in a statement. The funding, he said, made possible “vital infrastructure like the Second Ave. Subway, East Side Access, and the Moynihan Train Hall.”
Ad Watch
No time for pulling punches
It’s seldom enough for mayoral candidates to say they will fight for New York City. Some inevitably feel the need to don boxing gloves to demonstrate their fighting skills.
In 2017, it was Representative Nicole Malliotakis, then a state lawmaker running for mayor. That same year, another candidate, Paul Massey, did a television interview from the boxing ring. Four years later, Loree Sutton, a retired Army brigadier general, did the same in an interview.
Now it’s Lander’s turn.
It’s easy to form a quick impression of Lander, the city comptroller with a know-it-all vibe. But in a digital ad last week, Lander tried out a different image. There he was, throwing punches with his trainer in a Park Slope boxing gym, his forehead glistening amid his left jabs.
The gym, Jukebox NYC, is around the corner from his home, and Lander, 55, can be found there three times per week. His boxing classes, which he began taking in 2016, start at 6:30 a.m., a far cry from the late-morning workouts favored by former Mayor Bill de Blasio.
His coach is Carrie Schecter, who owns Jukebox. She has a cameo in the 35-second video, saying that in the eight years she’s known Lander, he’s “always fighting for something.”
The ad will appear online; Lander has yet to begin placing television ads. Two other Democratic candidates, Mamdani and Zellnor Myrie, both state lawmakers, were the first to release television ads. A super PAC supporting Cuomo has also put out at least two.
They do not feature Cuomo jumping rope, as Lander does, or displaying what Lander says is his best punch: a left upper cut. “I’m one tough nerd,” he said.
Issue of the Week
Viewing schools as communities
It’s often tough for New Yorkers to wrap their heads around just how big the city’s public school system truly is. It has more students than the combined populations of Baltimore, Salt Lake City and Albany. But no Democrats in the race have come up with a real K-12 agenda.
Lander, who often proudly tells voters that he and his two children are public school graduates, is releasing a new 12-page schools plan that he hopes will help him position himself as the leading candidate on education.
He’s pitching several fresh ideas. He describes a system where parents have greater say. He promises to hire more workers to make home visits to absent students, and create hundreds of new centers to help teachers improve.
He also wants to turn every public school into a “community school,” where nonprofits and businesses are embedded into campus. A dentist might make monthly rounds. An optometrist could stop by to give out eye exams.
It’s a model that can help boost graduation rates and attendance — and it would include universal after-school for all K-8 students.
“There’s no institution more important to me than New York City’s public schools,” Lander said in an interview. “For too long, we’ve approached it as though there’s an ‘average student’ and that’s who we aim at. That’s not working.”
The plan lacks specifics on some perennial problems like transportation. But it does focus on issues that seem mundane, but that experts say are crucial. They include making high school more interesting by exposing teenagers to real careers, giving high-achievers opportunities for more rigorous work and rethinking how schools are held accountable for outcomes.
Notably, Lander doesn’t spend much time on desegregation. He was one of the biggest boosters of a landmark integration plan in Brooklyn, and floated huge changes to admissions as a city councilman.
It’s not surprising, though, that he isn’t making the issue central to his plan. Mayor Bill de Blasio’s integration plans created a lasting rift with groups of Asian immigrants in Brooklyn and Queens, voters who could help shape the primary’s outcome.
What’s Your Ranked-Choice Ballot Look Like?
Fran Lebowitz, social commentator and humorist
Fran Lebowitz was far from effusive about the crop of potential leaders. But she said she intends to rank two on her Democratic primary ballot: Stringer, the former city comptroller, then Lander, his successor.
Her case for Stringer is straightforward. After Mayor Adams’s chaotic tenure, she argued, who better to put in City Hall but a lifelong student of government.
“It’s my impression — I don’t know him — that he has wanted to be mayor his whole life,” she said. “He knows how to run the city, and he’s not going to spend all his time in nightclubs.”
Sure, the writer has heard plenty doubts about whether Stringer, a short, middle-aged Jewish man in glasses, looks the part. But she has an answer to that.
“I say, ‘yes, I agree, he’s not the young Gary Cooper,’” Lebowitz said. “But New York is full of tall, handsome, charismatic men — they don’t have to be the mayor.”
As for the rest of the field?
She sees the appeal of Mamdani (“the other guy whose name I can never remember”) and his proposal to open city-owned grocery stores. But, she said, “I am way too to old to vote for someone that far to the left.”
“He is very smart. He is actually handsome,” Lebowitz said. “But some of these ideas, they are adolescent. Yes, it’s a lovely idea for grocery stores, but it does not conform to the human species!”
Lebowitz reserved the most disgust for Cuomo (“a thug”), who she fears will win.
“The most surprising thing about this race is the number of people I know — and by know, I mean like — who are going to vote for Cuomo,” she said.
“They have this imaginary idea of how the world works, and they think we should have a bully go up against Trump, the other bully. I don’t think that would be fruitful, or that it’s going to work.”
Photo of the week
Buzz in Brooklyn for Mamdani
The energy at the Brooklyn Steel music venue on Sunday seemed concert-worthy, with an adoring crowd of roughly 1,500 at rapt attention, waiting for Mamdani to appear onstage and waving signs that listed his promises to freeze the rent for stabilized apartments and make buses free.
The actor Kal Penn served as the master of ceremonies, introducing a diverse set of young leaders who support Mamdani’s campaign. Ella Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s stepdaughter, posted an endorsement video from the event.
Then Mamdani delivered a fiery speech attacking Cuomo and arguing that victory was within reach. Even after it was over, the crowd lingered, waiting to take photos with him.
Some other dates to watch: The first Democratic primary debate will be on Wednesday, June 4, at 7 p.m., hosted by WNBC-TV. The second, restricted to leading contenders, will be on Thursday, June 12, at 7 p.m., hosted by NY1.
Early voting begins June 14 and ends June 22. Primary Day is Tuesday, June 24; polls will be open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.
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