With early voting having begun in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, the race looks to be between Andrew Cuomo, the freshly de-disgraced former governor, and Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist state assemblyman who is running to dispense expensive new entitlements.
But it didn’t have to be that way.
As part of a journalist collective called the New York Editorial Board, I met with every major candidate over the past six months, except Mr. Cuomo, who declined to join us. The candidates who are struggling to capture the attention that Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Mamdani have gotten all expressed thoughtful ideas about the possibilities and limits of city government. (You can read the transcripts of the interviews here.)
So it’s a shame that the two candidates who could have given Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Mamdani more of a challenge — Comptroller Brad Lander and his predecessor Scott Stringer — put themselves in a no man’s land by turning left during Bill de Blasio’s mayoralty and the “defund the police” movement and then following voters’ shift to the middle when crime rose. When Mr. Lander and Mr. Stringer undercut their credibility on a vital issue to voters, their other smart proposals, which I get into below, got lost in the campaign.
And as has proved true in other municipal elections over the past few years, public safety remains a dominant issue for voters, along with affordability. Though homicides have fallen to pre-2020 record lows, felonies remain 31.2 percent above 2019’s level. Voters remain nearly as concerned about safety as they were in 2021, when they overlooked warning signs about ethics and management to elect Eric Adams, a former police captain who ran on restoring order, as mayor. (The still-disgraced Mr. Adams has skipped the primary to run as an independent in the general election.)
These days no candidate talks about “defund the police.”
That makes the moves by Mr. Lander and Mr. Stringer from the left to the center on policing seem even more clumsy.
In 2020, Mr. Lander pushed for “defund.” But he told our journalist group that “progressives, including myself, were slow to respond to the growing sense of disorder coming out of the pandemic.” He praised Mr. Adams’s police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, who has focused, in her six months in the post, on quality-of-life infractions as well as felonies.
Mr. Stringer similarly embraced “defund” in 2020. Today, though, he proposes to add 3,000 officers to the New York Police Department. He also said he would have taken a preventive, not a reactive, approach to protesters’ lawbreaking at Columbia University. “I would have said to Columbia, ‘Look, if you look at the history of protest at Columbia, you will know that Hamilton Hall is the building most likely to be taken, going back to the Vietnam War. So put two undercovers in the building,” he told us. Both men readily say that they would arrest protesters who commit nonviolent civil disobedience.
This turnaround, though, has harmed the credibility of the two men who had the best chance to challenge Mr. Cuomo from the center. And Mr. Lander is moving back toward the left, having gotten himself arrested this week in civil disobedience against a Trump immigration action, and cross-endorsing with Mr. Mamdani.
It’s a pity, because Mr. Lander and Mr. Stringer do have good ideas, and the depth of their proposals contrasts with Mr. Mamdani’s impractical ideas. He wants the state to enact a $9 billion annual tax hike on corporations and high earners to fund free buses; free day care for all children, as young as 6 weeks old; and a government-run grocery store experiment.
Mr. Lander talks fluently about city agencies and understands data. “The most important thing to do for economic development is make the city run better,” he said. In a race where attention to fiscal issues has been near nil, he even has a politically risky idea of how to save money: When schools are losing students, merge them. “Once you get below 400 kids in an elementary school, it is really hard to operate,” he said.
On mental health, Mr. Lander acknowledges that the city must treat a small percentage of treatment-resistant people in secure facilities in addition to simply offering housing. Mr. Mamdani calls for specially trained teams of mental-health responders and homeless outreach, though the city is already doing that.
Mr. Lander and Mr. Stringer would take a more limited approach on child care than Mr. Mamdani’s universal program — which would cost an estimated $5 billion annually. Mr. Lander would expand care to include all 3-year-olds, and Mr. Stringer would ask parents to pay on a sliding scale according to income, sharing costs with the city and their employers. Mr. Stringer would also extend the school day.
Paradoxically, on public safety Mr. Lander’s granular understanding of the city brings him closer than Mr. Cuomo to acknowledging what New York can quickly achieve on police hiring: “We have had a hard time retaining officers and even keeping the level of head count that we’ve got” — the city budgeted for 35,001 officers this year — “and that is what I would focus on,” he said. Mr. Stringer, too, called Mr. Cuomo’s idea of adding 5,000 cops “nonsense” — more of a campaign signal than an immediate proposal.
The failure on the part of either veteran candidate to instill voter confidence on the city’s core issue let Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Mamdani dominate the race.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Cuomo avoids dealing with the sorts of details in which Mr. Lander and Mr. Stringer excel, asking voters to suspend their concerns about his past and personality and bet that he, and only he, can be a sturdy leader. When even many liberal-leaning New York voters don’t feel safe, they are less concerned about a candidate’s character and happier that they feel he could keep them safe.
Mr. Mamdani’s answer on managing the city was that he’d deputize people more qualified than he is to do it. “You need to understand where your knowledge goes up until and who you need to help you to go beyond that,” he said. His role, he told us, would be as a “messenger.”
Both Mr. Mamdani and Mr. Cuomo are betting that instinct will prevail. Mr. Cuomo counts on voters to seek comfort in the flawed but familiar during a time of anxiety. Mr. Mamdani counts on voters to desire a mayor who transcends workaday management for a grander scheme.
In other words, another election in which vibes prevail. How can candidates with earnestly crafted policy documents and careful insights about city governance compete?
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
The post Candidates’ Shift on Crime Turned the Mayor’s Race Upside Down appeared first on New York Times.
