Zohran Mamdani dodged questions about his record Thursday as he tried to turn the tables on his mayoral opponents — who gave him a shellacking over his measly resume and lackluster legislative showing.
“I spent 90 minutes on stage with Andrew Cuomo and I, like many here, could tell you his critiques of me, his critiques of Curtis Sliwa, but I could not tell you what he was actually running on to deliver for this city,” Mamdani said, addressing Wednesday’s debate during an unrelated press conference in Murray Hill.
But the Queens state assemblyman avoided a Post reporter’s questions, refusing to confront the bruising attacks from independent candidate Cuomo and Republican nominee Sliwa over his paltry political cred.
“This man never even proposed a bill on housing or education. Never even proposed a bill,” Cuomo railed at the socialist front-runner at one point during the final mayoral election debate on Spectrum NY1.
“You never accomplished anything. There’s no reason to believe you have any merit or qualification for 8.5 million lives,” Cuomo railed. “You don’t know how to run a government. You don’t know how to handle an emergency…
“You had the worst attendance record in the Assembly… Shame on you!”
The three-term socialist state lawmaker has been regularly knocked for only getting four bills passed in the Assembly over his half-decade in office.
Mamdani, 34, also grabbed his paycheck and fled Albany after the state budget passed in April — and hasn’t returned since.
He missed a whopping 50% of votes in the Assembly this year while campaigning for New York City mayor, The Post reported in June.
Mamdani fired back during the debate, getting in his own licks at the thrice-elected Democratic governor Cuomo’s decades-long political record.
“We just had a former governor, say in his own words, that the city has been getting screwed by the state,” he said from the stage.
“Who was leading the state? It was you!” he charged at Cuomo, 67, to roaring laughter from supporters in the audience. “You were leading the state for 10 years.”
A fiery exchange ensued, during which Sliwa snapped at Mamdani: “Your résumé could fit on a cocktail napkin.”
Cuomo also dinged at Mamdani after he complained that the state hasn’t delivered funding for programs meant to help juvenile offenders under the controversial Raise the Age law.
“If Zohran thought that there was money locked up in Albany, maybe he should have gone to Albany and proposed a bill to release it,” Cuomo sniped.
Mamdani, who was first elected in 2020, passed all of one bill this year, The Post previously reported — and he wasn’t even in Albany when his measure came up for a vote.
That’s the same number of bills signed into law as 88-year-old Assemblyman David McDonough (R-Nassau) who’d been entirely physically absent from Albany’s legislative session this year as he deals with health issues.
Even upstate Assemblyman Chris Tague (R-Schoharie) — an unabashed critic of Gov. Kathy Hochul who’s also clashed with his Democratic colleagues in the Legislature — managed to get nine bills, albeit on non-controversial local issues, signed this year.
“I show up! I’m there everyday doing my job,” Tague told The Post Thursday.
“I think he took up the wrong line of work. He should be an actor in Hollywood. Everything is theatrics and acting with him,” he said of Mamdani.
The number of standalone bills passed or enacted isn’t always the most comprehensive measure of a lawmaker’s effectiveness, given that a significant bulk of policy is crammed into the sprawling state budget.
But Mamdani has struggled to influence the massive spending package in the past as well over his three terms.
While he was successful in getting a pilot program for his signature free bus proposal included in the budget in 2023, the program was killed behind the scenes by Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-Bronx) the year after because Mamdani refused to vote in favor of the spending plan.
Still Heastie, who endorsed Mamdani shortly after Hochul did last month, has dismissed the notion that the Democratic Socialists of America pol was ineffective as an assembly member.
“When I tried to be speaker, you guys tried to do the same thing to me by saying I didn’t pass as many bills as other people who were running,” Heastie griped to reporters earlier this summer.
Over the last week, Mamdani was absent for legislative hearings in Albany about legal protections for renters and protecting ratepayers from soaring electrical costs – two of his hallmark policy issues.
“Thanks for stopping by,” a note on Mamdani’s closed Albany office door read Thursday, further instructing visitors to email a staffer to make an appointment.
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