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Tuesday’s Democratic mayoral primary is a pivotal marker in the race to lead New York City.
One candidate who is polling well, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, 67, would be the oldest elected mayor in the city’s modern history. Another front-runner, Zohran Mamdani, 33, a state lawmaker, would be the youngest in a century. Mr. Cuomo has a long track record laid with a style of governance that rubs many the wrong way. Mr. Mamdani was unknown to most people before his media-savvy campaign.
There are other prominent candidates who are trailing in the polls but who may still affect the outcome as voters use a ranked-choice ballot system for the second time.
In an interview with Times Insider, Emma G. Fitzsimmons, the city hall bureau chief for the Metro desk at The New York Times, explained the contours of the race. This conversation has been edited.
One of your colleagues described the final weeks of the race as “chaotic.” How so?
First, the race is close. Different polls say different things, but Andrew Cuomo, the former governor, has been leading for months. Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist lawmaker from Queens, has been rising in the polls. The current mayor, Eric Adams, decided not to run in the Democratic primary and is running as an independent in the November general election.
The race has gotten pretty nasty in the final weeks. Cuomo is attacking Mamdani; a super PAC that is supporting Cuomo is running millions of dollars’ worth of advertisements calling Mamdani radical, and some people believe those advertisements are Islamophobic because Mamdani is Muslim. Mamdani is hitting Cuomo pretty hard, saying he’s the candidate of the billionaire class and that he’s a disgraced former politician who doesn’t deserve a second chance.
A year ago, for different reasons, it seemed unlikely that Mamdani and Cuomo would be in the positions they are in today. How did they get here?
Cuomo has made a coalition that includes a lot of elected officials and union leaders who had called on him to resign after he was accused of sexual harassment.
He’s made the case that he has experience, that he’s the sensible alternative to Mayor Eric Adams, whose first term has been turbulent, and that he’s the alternative to the left-leaning candidates in the race.
A lot of voters say they have positive memories of Cuomo’s daily news briefing during the coronavirus pandemic. New York City was the epicenter, and those briefings comforted them. And the #MeToo movement does not appear to be as central of an issue for voters as it was in 2021, when Cuomo resigned.
Cuomo has said, I did all of these things as governor: I opened the Second Avenue subway line; I rebuilt LaGuardia Airport; I raised the minimum wage; and I’m going to get things done as mayor. A lot of voters are buying that argument and view him as someone who might stand up to President Trump.
Mamdani has focused on affordability. He has populist ideas that have taken off. He wants to make buses free; freeze the rent on rent-stabilized apartments; make universal child care a reality; and create subsidized city-owned grocery stores.
This is the second mayoral election using ranked-choice voting. What have you heard from voters and candidates preparing to use this system for a second time?
I was out with one of Mamdani’s canvassing teams while they were door-knocking. Voters still don’t entirely understand the system. The campaigns are educating voters about the process. I think it really comes from the lesson of the 2021 race. Mayor Eric Adams ended up beating the second-place candidate, Kathryn Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner, by less than 8,000 votes. The takeaway from the campaigns was that if she and Maya Wiley, the third-place candidate, had cross-endorsed each other, one of them would have beaten Adams.
Mamdani and Brad Lander, the city comptroller, did the city’s first ever cross-endorsement under this system. They’re trying to combine their voters.
In recent elections, whoever emerged from the Democratic primary was likely to be the city’s next mayor. This year, that is less certain. Why?
In the November general election, we could have five major candidates on the ballot. There is no ranked-choice voting in the general election, so the vote could be split five different ways, and you could win the race with 30 percent of support.
Mayor Eric Adams is running as an independent. You’d have the winner of the Democratic primary. Curtis Sliwa is running again as a Republican. Jim Walden, a prominent lawyer who has raised a lot of money, is running as an independent. If Cuomo wins the primary and is on the ballot as a Democrat, there is a chance that the Working Families Party will list Mamdani or another candidate on their ballot line. If Mamdani wins the Democratic primary, Cuomo could run as an independent on his own ballot line.
Talk to me about the Democratic electorate in this city and the voting groups that will decide the primary.
It’s helpful to look at the 2021 race. There were different coalitions. Eric Adams that year got a lot of support from Black, Latino and Asian voters. He won a lot of the neighborhoods outside of Manhattan. Maya Wiley, a civil rights attorney, won many progressive voters. Then you had Kathryn Garcia, who won voters who were looking for a candidate who could do the nuts and bolts of governance.
There are different voting blocks, and the candidates are vying for them in different ways. Mamdani has risen recently with Latino voters, which is important. He’s trying to expand his coalition beyond just progressive voters. He is a Muslim; he’s an immigrant; his parents are from India, so he’s been reaching out to South Asian voters. Cuomo has been securing support among Orthodox Jewish leaders, an important voting bloc in New York City. Black voters are up for grabs. Cuomo is quite popular among women voters and older voters, so there’s also an age divide.
As part of Metro’s coverage, you asked each of the top candidates 10 questions. You asked them to share their typical bagel orders, and readers have gotten a kick out of it. So, what’s yours?
I live in northern Manhattan and go to Inwood Bagels. I’m getting an everything bagel with plain cream cheese, not toasted. If it’s a good warm bagel, it doesn’t need to be toasted.
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