Former New York Gov. David Paterson says New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is taking a page from President Donald Trump’s playbook.
Speaking to 77 WABC The Cat’s Roundtable Sunday, Paterson said Mamdani’s success so far in New York’s mayoral elections reminded him of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
“It is demonstrating a kind of new campaign style, where you speak as verbosely as possible, where you demean your opponents as much as you can, and Donald Trump invented this,” Paterson said.
Though Paterson acknowledged that Trump’s “political ideology is the polar opposite” of Mamdani’s—Mamdani is a self-avowed democratic socialist—he said that there are undeniable similarities between the two.
He cited, for example, “the support that Mamdani is receiving and the continuation of it, the number of people he’s registering, and the number of people that go to his rallies.”
“If I blinked my eyes, ten years ago, there was another person who was able to do that, and his name is Donald Trump,” Paterson said.
Like Trump, Mamdani does not shy away from going after his opponents. During the mayoral debate, Mamdani told challenger and former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo that he “never had to resign in disgrace,” referring to Cuomo being forced to step down as governor in 2021 following multiple sexual assault allegations.
Patterson recalled Trump’s feud with the late Sen. John McCain of Arizona. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, Trump claimed that the late Senator was “not a war hero.”
“He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump said at the time.
“Trump somehow turned that into a situation where a lot of people supported him,” Paterson remarked. “And I don’t know to what extent Mamdani is going to attack his opponents in this general election, but it gives him a real plurality now that’s going to be hard to beat.”
Paterson revealed that he endorsed former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the mayoral primary but admitted that he realized just “a few days ago” how “difficult” it would be to beat Mamdani.
“I don’t want to jump ship, but you know …” Paterson said.
Mamdani bested Cuomo in the Democratic primary in June with 43.5 percent of the vote to Cuomo’s 36.4 percent.
The disgraced former governor of New York ultimately decided to concede defeat, saying that Mamdani “deserved it.”
Yet Cuomo has said that he might still remain in the mayoral race by running as an independent.
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