Three candidates for New York City mayor will square off on Thursday in the first of two general election debates ahead of the Nov. 4 election.
The candidates — Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani of Queens, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and the Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa — are vying to replace Mayor Eric Adams, who dropped his re-election bid last month amid sagging support.
New York’s mayor is in charge of a budget that tops $100 billion, and runs America’s largest school system, with nearly one million students, and biggest municipal police department, with around 33,000 officers.
Here’s what to know about the candidates and their platforms:
Zohran Mamdani
Mr. Mamdani, 33, is the Democratic nominee and the race’s front-runner. A democratic socialist and a State Assembly member from Queens, he was virtually unknown when he entered the race about a year ago.
Running a campaign centered on the city’s affordability crisis, Mr. Mamdani stunned Mr. Cuomo in the Democratic primary in June to capture his party’s nomination by a 13-point margin.
He won over progressives with populist ideas like free buses, rent freezes for rent-stabilized apartments and universal free child care.
Those policies would cost billions. Mr. Mamdani hopes to pay for them by raising the city’s income tax for those making over $1 million by 2 percent and by increasing the state’s top corporate tax rate to match New Jersey’s. Both plans would need approval from state lawmakers.
Mr. Mamdani has also proposed opening city-owned grocery stores, which supporters say could offer lower prices through the savings afforded by property tax exemptions and relying on city land or buildings.
In a move that could reshape education for some of the city’s youngest students, Mr. Mamdani has also said he would end the gifted and talented program for kindergarten students at public schools. The program has served as a pipeline to the city’s most desired public middle schools but has been widely criticized for exacerbating segregation and admitting few Black and Latino students.
To make the city safer, Mr. Mamdani has proposed a civilian-led Department of Community Safety that would deploy mental health teams in response to 911 calls. He has said his plan would free up resources in the Police Department, which received about 174,000 emergency calls last year involving people experiencing mental health crises.
Mr. Mamdani’s critics point to his relative lack of experience: Of 20-odd bills he has introduced during four years in Albany, just three relatively minor items have become law.
Mr. Mamdani’s rivals have also assailed him as excessively liberal. Mr. Cuomo said last week that a Mamdani victory would be a “gift” for President Trump that would provide him with “the excuse he needs to take over New York.”
Andrew M. Cuomo
Mr. Cuomo, 67, is running as an independent and is in second place in the polls. He served nearly 11 years as governor of New York before resigning in 2021 after more than a dozen women accused him of sexual harassment.
As governor, he oversaw major infrastructure projects that had stalled under previous leaders, like the opening of the Second Avenue subway on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the reconstruction of LaGuardia Airport and the opening of the Moynihan Train Hall in Midtown. In his mayoral campaign, he has highlighted his role in championing those projects, as well as his moves to raise the minimum wage and legalize gay marriage.
But the city also struggled to address a range of issues under Mr. Cuomo’s watch. Subway delays more than doubled between 2012 and 2017. The city’s homeless population surged after Mr. Cuomo withdrew state funding in 2011 for a rental voucher program called Advantage.
Mr. Cuomo has also faced scrutiny for his handling of nursing home deaths during the Covid pandemic. His administration initially undercounted those deaths by several thousand, according to the state attorney general. The New York Times also revealed that Mr. Cuomo and his top aides had edited a report to conceal how many nursing home residents died.
His history of flip-flopping on issues — including congestion pricing, which he approved in 2019 but then suggested should be shelved, and more recently, the closing of the Rikers Island jail complex — has also drawn criticism.
Mr. Cuomo has presented himself as a battle-tested chief executive who can stand up to Mr. Trump. He has proposed adding 5,000 new police officers, increasing the law enforcement presence in subway stations and raising the number of inpatient psychiatric beds for people in the criminal justice system.
Curtis Sliwa
Mr. Sliwa, 71, the Republican nominee, is in a distant third place in the polls. He is the founder of the Guardian Angels, a group of subway patrol vigilantes, and a host on the conservative WABC radio station.
Mr. Sliwa’s stances align with his party’s talking points. He wants more police officers patrolling the streets and subways and has called for an end to the city’s sanctuary policies for undocumented immigrants. But he has said he is not “MAGA,” condemning the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack and Mr. Trump’s Medicaid cuts, which he said would hurt the city “real bad.”
When asked what he would do if Mr. Trump sent the National Guard to New York, Mr. Sliwa told The Times that the Guard wasn’t necessary in the city but that he did not have a problem with it being dispatched to Washington or Chicago.
Mr. Sliwa has also said he believes the city should place more homeless people in psychiatric beds at hospitals, expand the gifted program in the city’s schools and overhaul the property tax system, including abolishing the property tax for seniors who make less than $100,000 a year.
This is Mr. Sliwa’s second bid for mayor; he was defeated by Mr. Adams in 2021.
A Brooklyn native, Mr. Sliwa rose to fame in the late 1970s as the leader of the Guardian Angels, a citizens group that patrolled the streets and subways in red berets during a crime wave. He parlayed his fame into lucrative radio and television contracts and continued to find ways to stay in the spotlight. He later confessed to faking heroics and making up stories to gain traction and boost the Angels’ image.
Ashley Ahn covers breaking news for The Times from New York.
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