Last week Times Opinion published The Choice, a new project to help voters think through their options in high-stakes elections. We brought together 15 New Yorkers of varied backgrounds and expertise to assess the nine leading Democratic candidates for mayor of New York and choose which one would make the best leader for the city.
As part of the process, Opinion editors convened a round-table discussion among the panelists on May 27. The range of viewpoints stood out — to some, Andrew Cuomo offered a steady experienced hand and record of accomplishments; to others, he was a disgraced bully with old ideas who should be consigned to the past. There was wide divergence on Zohran Mamdani, the leading progressive in the race: Is he a fresh thinker who could infuse energy and ideas into a calcified bureaucracy, or a neophyte whose agenda as a democratic socialist would prove unaffordable and divisive?
And finally there was appreciation for Brad Lander, who emerged as a safe-harbor option, earning the respect of many panelists for his competence and integrity. He ended up as the top choice.
Following are excerpts from that round-table discussion, condensed and edited for clarity. The round table was moderated by Bill Brink, Mara Gay and Patrick Healy.
For biographies of the panelists, go to The Choice.
Q: Give us a phrase or a sentence that tells us what you think is the most critical challenge facing New York for this election. Fred?
Fred Davie: Advancing an agenda that really takes seriously the needs of all the sectors of the city, while doing so in a national context that’s actually hostile to New York City at the moment.
Danny Meyer: Yeah, I appreciate what I just heard within the context of the national discourse right now. It’s all too tempting for the mayor of New York to get engaged with that, when what the city really needs is somebody who can manage the many, many moving parts of the city.
Absent the foundation of a really strong tourism sector and a really strong financial sector, all bets are off. And I think the underpinning of tourism is safety. And the underpinning of financial industry is a forward-looking understanding of where the technology ball is going.
Mychal Johnson: The most critical thing is the income-wealth gap. Until we have a real “come to Jesus” around what that really means to this city in terms of a society that has been leaving a lot of people behind and children behind, then we’re going to have a continued cycle of things that keeps going wrong.
Iwen Chu: I think government accountability and fiscal transparency is crucial. It’s not like we don’t have the resources. It’s who puts what resource first and comes up with what kind of package? Who leads the team?
Integrity is another thing. It’s not just a top-down, one-man, woman, whatever, to dictate how the direction our city should go. It should be teamwork.
Mitchell Moss: The mayor of New York should first recognize he or she can only do a few things well and not try to do anything that is going to take 20 years. So the priority should be safety and schools. And housing. If we can make it a place to live, a place to learn, and a place to work, the city functions.
Whitney Toussaint: I’m a working-class person from rural Georgia trying to live here in the city. It needs to be more affordable. I’m only able to participate here today because there is someone who is taking care of my children.
We need people who really care about public schools and educating our children, making sure they have somewhere to go after school, and supporting programs again that support our low-income families, our vulnerable populations, L.G.B.T.Q. people, disabled people, elderly people.
Howard Wolfson: We’ve lost students in the school system post-Covid. And we were shedding students even before Covid. We are failing many hundreds of thousands more than that. Long-term, unless we are able to devise and implement a public school system that works for all New York families and all New York children, we will have, both morally and practically, failed another generation of kids.
Christina Greer: I think it needs to be someone who understands a holistic approach, to Mychal’s point — the wealth gap, housing, and economic disparities that are affecting a vast array of diverse New Yorkers. And we need to have someone who understands the intricate relationship between Albany and Washington, D.C., and whether or not they’re going to use carrots or sticks, honey versus vinegar.
Neil Blumenthal: We should be thinking about the population of the entire city. That’s probably the leading indicator of whether a city is thriving or not: whether we’re gaining folks or people are leaving.
I think this next mayor needs to really work to focus on the fundamentals that enable New York to thrive, whether that’s public safety, better education, and affordability. We have not been trending in the right direction on all of the most important metrics of the city. And I think that that’s been due to, frankly, a lack of competence.
Reihan Salam: My parents came to New York City in 1976 at the nadir of the city. I don’t have a driver’s license. I have nowhere else to go. I’m completely all in. What I’ll say, very unromantically, is that the critical question for the next mayor is value for money.
That’s true for low-income New Yorkers. That’s true for high-income New Yorkers. There are New Yorkers, middle-class New Yorkers who have left. They haven’t gone to other places that are more generous. They have moved to places, typically, that are more affordable, where you’re able to build savings, build a family, build a business. We need a better government than we had 15 years ago in order to stay level, to stay even and to stay competitive.
Eleanor Randolph: Oh, my gosh. I have to admit, personally, I don’t know who I’m going to vote for. And I have studied this.
For me, I think one of the really important questions is, who can actually run this city? It is a huge operation.
The Bloomberg people were really good about one aspect of this: They started out hiring the best possible people they could get. And that seems to me to be such a basic need for the person who’s going to be the mayor. And I haven’t heard enough from any of these candidates, basically, about this — how are you going to run the city?
Q: Is it clear which candidate or candidates can absolutely accomplish some of the things that you’re talking about? And is it clear who can’t?
Johnson: We’ve been posed with the question about who can run the city. And the city has been run before, but it hasn’t been run right for most people. A lot have been left behind, especially in the Bronx and other communities like ours.
So I’m not looking for someone who can just run it, but actually think about those who have not been given the opportunities that others have been. I’m only eight miles away from here, but our existence is totally different than what you see down here in most parts of the city.
Q: Do you see any of these candidates, Mychal, who you feel confident could do that?
Johnson: So we’re here now, huh?
Q: Yeah, we’re here.
Johnson: If I had to give you two people, I would say it would be Mamdani and Lander.
Q: Amit, is there anyone you don’t trust in the field?
Amit Singh Bagga: Under absolutely no circumstances do I trust Andrew Cuomo.
Q: OK. Why is that?
Bagga: Someone who has spent an entire career leveraging every single position they have had for their own personal political benefit, much to the detriment of the political system as well as New Yorkers themselves, to me, does not engender any trust. If you look at his record as governor in particular, there is a long list of, from my perspective, sins, if you will, that he is responsible for. And that includes the nursing home deaths during Covid. [Mr. Cuomo has denied wrongdoing and said he was following federal guidelines.]
On Mamdani and Cuomo
Victor Ng: I am a young voter in Brooklyn, but I came to New York to work for Hillary Clinton. I have canvassed for what I’ve been told is the safe choice in every job that I’ve had, even if sometimes those values don’t quite align with my own. And yet here I am today with only one choice, which is Mamdani.
I think about the kind of campaign he’s run, which for me feels incredibly competent — to scale up the campaign that quickly, to break fund-raising records, to organize that many volunteers in a historic way, in some ways, scandal free.
Greer: Can I just jump in real quick? I think there’s a two-stage process. There’s campaigning and there’s governance. And I don’t think anyone in this room can deny that Zohran Mamdani is a fantastic campaigner. The governance piece. You asked, who’s a nonstarter? Democratic socialist is a nonstarter for me, because I don’t like the way they talk to or at Black people. So Zohran’s off the table for me.
Because of the federal government conversations, someone like Brad Lander or Scott Stringer are attractive because of the comptroller background, and because they have had conversations about how they would move money around. Adrienne Adams, even though she says, “I know the job.” It’s like, you don’t know the job, actually, because you haven’t had the job.
But moving across the hall in City Hall does make her someone who is attractive. Had she gotten in earlier, I think we’d have a much better way to assess some of her policies. Andrew Cuomo is highly problematic for me. I still think that #MeToo should be a conversation that we have as a society.
Q: So Neil, did you want to present a counterargument?
Blumenthal: Sure.
Greer: Come on, jump up.
Blumenthal: It concerns me when hearing from folks that we need to fight. And while there is that human instinct to fight, I want a mayor who will deliver for me, for my kids, for my employees. And sometimes that means not fighting. So I want a mayor who’s going to be constructive, who’s going to fight and speak up when it’s strategic, and one that’s going to compromise and partner and negotiate and be effective the vast majority of the time.
When the federal government cuts SNAP funding, that’s going to have an incredible impact on the city. And to have somebody just screaming and waving their fists in the air is not going to solve it.
We have to make really difficult choices on who’s running. And sometimes that means voting for a flawed candidate. I look at Cuomo, and he is somebody who understands the inner workings of the federal government. He was a cabinet secretary. He was New York attorney general. He was governor.
Salam: I want to be just very specific. New York City is in the midst of a housing emergency. The pace of rent increases is sharply increasing.
And one of Zohran Mamdani’s big, bold ideas is using $100 billion in public funds, to build 200,000 housing units. We need something like 500,000 to mitigate this crisis. Now, what Mamdani is proposing is he’s going to use public money — where it’s going to come from, we’ll see.
So what this means is that you’re basically driving out the people who actually are coming and saying, “I would like to build something.” We have to leverage the city’s dollars effectively so that other people, people in the private sector — believe it or not, people who want to make a profit, people who want to build and do all of these things — to make it actually attractive for them to do that.
Zohran Mamdani has a ton of very specific proposals, proposals that, in my view, are from outer space. It doesn’t actually make sense in terms of how the city’s economy works, how its labor market works.
Q: Ester, about the housing crisis, when you look at this slate of candidates, are you seeing anyone talking seriously about it?
Ester Fuchs: I find the whole issue around affordable housing and reading the candidates’ proposals on that to be pretty depressing and not targeted toward actually being able to solve the problem. I think part of this, and this is part of my issue with a lot of the candidates from the State Legislature, there’s not really a focus on where money comes from.
This whole idea that there’s a lot of empty property all over the city where no one’s built before, this is pie in the sky. Every single comptroller’s looked around for all this empty property all over the city. And some of it’s toxic waste dumps, frankly, that you can’t build on.
On Education and Charter Schools
Q: On education, a couple of the candidates are in favor of charter schools.
Toussaint: OK. Well, I’m a public school parent. I’m in the Community Education Council for my district in Western Queens. I am a parent of a child who needs special education services. He would have been counseled out of a lot of charter schools, because they have performance metrics. They want kids that pass the test. They want kids that don’t have behavioral problems.
You know the city pays charter school rent? You know that we help pay them to get the services that they give to the children they decide to give services to? I’m not going to knock a parent that chooses a charter school for their children, because we’re all trying to do the best for our kids. But what I am going to say is we need a strong mayor that’s going to do something for public schools.
Wolfson: I believe that charters are an answer. I don’t believe that they are the answer. Charters are still educating 15 percent of the kids in the city. The vast bulk of kids will be going to district schools and will be going to district schools far into the future.
I think we underestimate, at our enormous peril, the damage that Covid did to our children.
Fuchs: Mm-hmm.
Wolfson: I’m not against more money in the public system. Generally, it’s better to have more than less.
But how you spend the money matters more than how much you have. And with the exception of Andrew Cuomo, who I have real questions and concerns about, I thought that of all the education programs that I read, and unless I missed them on the website, some candidates didn’t even seem to have them.
Fuchs: That’s right.
Wolfson: I was really shocked and disappointed about.
Blumenthal: Can I say something about non-K-through-12 education? Because that’s core to the city. On universities, Mamdani is proposing in the State Legislature taxing our best research universities like Columbia and N.Y.U. to provide additional funding for CUNY. I think our public universities are fantastic. They deserve more funding. But we need to support our research universities that are going to help create jobs and enable the city to thrive economically.
On Housing and NIMBYism
Q: On the housing crisis, we’ve been talking about policies. But there’s also a question of political capital to get it done between the federal and state?
Davie: I’ll admit up front that my answer is going to be impractical and only leads me to more despair. And that is the need for serious federal investment in poverty housing.
Fuchs: Good luck.
Davie: “Good luck” is right. But I cut my teeth 40-some years ago on organizing faith communities to develop affordable housing, primarily in Brooklyn. And what I heard over and over again is, we don’t have enough money to subsidize poverty housing in New York. That money is only going to come from the federal government.
So I think what I would say to Cuomo or Adrienne Adams or Brad Lander or Scott Stringer or anyone else is, what are you going to do about getting the federal government to put more money in housing in New York?
Moss: The federal government is not competent to fund the city’s housing problem because it doesn’t believe in it. New York has to solve this problem.
Davie: But those dollars don’t exist in the state of New York.
Bagga: They don’t exist in the form of subsidies. But the biggest problem we have is that we have huge swaths of the city, voters, home-owning, middle-class voters — where people are not willing to have density added in their neighborhoods.
Fuchs: That’s right.
Bagga: This is where I think leadership really matters. You have to take a massive political risk to be able to fight people who are voters, to say the future of New York City is potentially very dark, unless you are willing to live alongside people who may not look like you.
So just going back to the issue of whom I trust to tackle this crisis, I do not trust the person who is polling No. 1 in the very same neighborhoods that are not willing to rezone.
Salam: I just really believe that if you want to unlock a coalition that is going to be open to multifamily development, you can’t do it by demonizing people who are concerned about the quality of life in their neighborhoods. Fundamentally, that is Black, brown, white, you name it, people from different neighborhoods who have lost their faith in a city where you’ve seen a surge in felony assaults and disorder.
If you believe in government, you need a government that instills trust. The reason for that NIMBYism, call it what you will, stems from a breakdown of trust.
On Crime and Quality of Life
Q: Reihan mentioned quality of life. What’s the top quality-of-life issue —
Chu: I’m going to chime in. Southern Brooklyn is all about quality of life, quality of education, safety, affordability, sanitation. In the district I used to serve, some areas are at least one mile away from the closest subway station. The seniors, they cannot wait for the bus during the winter storm. They have to have a car. Kings County also has the highest car insurance in the five boroughs.
So it’s actually higher cost of living in those areas. So when we talk about quality of life, it’s a complex issue. It’s not to demonize those homeowners or small property owners.
Because very likely, they are immigrants. Very likely, they have a mortgage. That means they are talking about thousands of dollars every month for the cost.
Greer: I would say that some elections are status quo elections and some elections are advancement elections.
When we’re talking about quality of life, there’s a certain level of risk that New Yorkers have. They know that they’re going to see unhoused people. They know that they’re going to see mentally ill people. Hearing that someone got stabbed in the subway isn’t going to prevent people from taking the subway. They still have to get to work. So unfortunately, we have built-in certain quality-of-life negatives that New Yorkers, by and large, are fine with on a status quo.
Is my life going to be better? Or is my life going to stay the same? And I think some New Yorkers right now are like, “I just need it to stay the same.” Because we have so much uncertainty on the federal level.
Davie: When people have to encounter people sitting on subway benches, surrounded by bags and trash, and you do that on a daily basis, you begin to think that there’s something really broken about the city. And there is.
Q: Fred, is there a candidate who you think is strong on that front?
Davie: I think there are probably four of these candidates that could amass the kind of staffing that they would need to do a good job of running the city.
Q: Which four?
Davie: I would say Adrienne, Brad, Scott, and I’d swallow hard and say Cuomo. I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t get my vote. But if I’m being objective, I would say that he can manage the city.
Adrienne, Brad, primarily, in my mind, will bring less of that drama and that baggage to this job. I think if we have Cuomo, we’re going to have baggage and drama, because that’s who he is.
Fuchs: I think the primary quality-of-life issue in New York is crime, and that all these other things flow from people’s fear of crime, around the transit issues, even around the mentally ill issues.
When crime is up, it sort of impacts everything else. Now, I know we’re on a period in which we’re coming down again. But it’s really interesting, the perception hasn’t changed yet to match the data.
Moss: Can I respond?
You can’t distinguish crime and mental illness. They go hand in hand.
The person who has, without a doubt, the best document about dealing with the homeless is Brad Lander. It’s like a Ph.D. report. And I want to say, he has covered all different issues. I may be the only guy who ever would read it. But mental illness and crime are interconnected like this.
Wolfson: I think that this question of quality-of-life crime is a little bit more nuanced. I think if you asked voters whether or not they were more concerned about a negative interaction with a mentally ill person on the subway or getting shot, most New Yorkers would say the first, not the second. I don’t actually think that most New Yorkers spend their days thinking about crime in the ’70s sense of it.
I think that most people are concerned when they see homeless people on the subway who seem mentally ill or disturbed. And the inability of our politics and our government to help those folks and to address that problem is a central question in this race.
I agree with you that Brad has a very comprehensive plan to deal with this.
Meyer: I think that whether we’re talking about leading the city, we’re talking about leading a company, or leading a nonprofit, leading a faith-based organization, your leadership is ultimately defined by your followership.
And I think that especially in a city that’s as diverse as New York is, with so many people in so many different walks of life, all who chose to be here, it is a value for money, but it’s quality of life. It’s, “What are my opportunities, if I choose to deal with all this adversity?”
There’s a candidate who we’re starting to hear a little bit more about from you guys over the last five minutes. And that’s Brad Lander, who I’ve known for some time. I’ve watched him grow as a politician. And I think that no matter who any of us individually votes for or who any of us individually endorses, we’re taking a leap of faith.
And so the question I’m starting to ask myself is, who has shown a capacity to grow? If I think someone is a finished product, that’s not necessarily the greatest thing.
And I’ve watched Brad go from being way, way to the left — and we’ve had conversations about things I disagree with — I’ve just watched how he’s shown that he could potentially listen to a broader swath of this population and take his input not from this sector, not from this sector, not from this sector. But ultimately, I know where his heart is on many of the social issues that are crucial for the fabric of a city that I want to live in.
Jared Trujillo: So I’ll say that Brad is not my favorite candidate on policing. But he’s actually who I think I’ll rank first. And it’s because there’s a difference between people’s perception of crime, which really matters still, even if it’s not reality, and people’s reality.
Ng: I think what resonated with me and Professor Greer was I think I was a status quo voter. Mamdani actually shook me out of that status quo. And I think he’s shaken a lot of people out of that status quo of, we don’t have to accept it. And I think the energy behind him is proof of that.
Greer: Lander evokes some real strong feelings that I don’t know are necessarily warranted. And then Adrienne Adams. I do think Black women need a longer runway than most. And I think it’s a shame that, sadly, she has a short runway. Because she’s still articulating her vision, which I do think is there.
Chu: New York City is a spectrum, from Curtis Sliwa to Mamdani.
I personally admire the energy of Mamdani. But understanding I’m 40-something years old with a mortgage to pay, that ideology brings my heart close to him, but brings my head away from the practical part — how do you govern this city? And that’s why I believe Brad Lander could be my choice.
Johnson: But we have to look at what’s happening across the country. There’s mass protests going on. And youth are excited about standing up and fighting back against the atrocities that are taking place across our country. The same way, we have to be paying attention to what’s happening here in this city with who’s being left behind again — I keep going back to that.
Fuchs: I spend most of my time trying to encourage youth to get involved in politics. I wanted to like Mamdani. He is an excellent campaigner. He motivates people. But I’ve seen that book several times in my lifetime.
And those like that do not turn out to be able to manage the complexity of the city of New York in an effective way, particularly when they come from the State Legislature, where they have no executive experience at all.
I think maybe someday he’ll be a great political person. But right now, he is not experienced enough. And he divides New York. And I think we all have to be together to fight Trump.
Q: Who would be the candidate who you think could bring members together?
Fuchs: I have Scott, Adrienne, and Brad, ranking in that order.
Trujillo: One thing I do want to say, though, about Zohran’s authenticity. He’s still someone who has been very authentic in how he presents himself. That said, I would still rank Brad Lander first. I love Zohran on policy. But I think the reality of Zohran Mamdani as mayor is that he’s going to get so much pushback from the media, from the N.Y.P.D. unions, from you name it, that he’s only going to be able to get a sliver of what he wants to get done, done.
Salam: I think that Andrew Cuomo, for all his flaws, is someone who understands the levers of power. I disagree with many, many aspects of his platform. But I do think that at a moment where you really are facing a series of interlocking crises, I think he’s someone who has a ton of experience and frankly, is going to be motivated to make big changes fast, because I believe he has national political ambitions. And I think that Whitney Tilson is someone who stands out.
Fuchs: I probably will rank Cuomo at the end of the list.
Toussaint: Please don’t rank Cuomo. Ester, girl, I love you.
Fuchs: I don’t want to rank Cuomo. OK?
Toussaint: I’m gonna hang out with you, girl. Don’t rank him.
Fuchs: It’s a big trauma in my head, really.
Toussaint: Please, baby, I’m begging you.
The biographies of the panelists can be found by going to The Choice. This round table was condensed and edited for clarity by Times Opinion editors.
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