Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s camp Friday said the fact that mayoral foe Zohran Mamdani claimed to be black on a college application could be “just the tip of the iceberg” in terms of potential “fraud.’’
The socialist Mamdani marked both “Black or African American” and “Asian” on his 2009 app to Columbia University, which had affirmative-action policies at the time. Both of Mamdani’s parents are of Asian Indian descent — and the pol even admitted to the New York Times when it outed him that he does not consider himself black or African American.
“This should come as no surprise as Mamdani, his proposals, his funding, and his background received absolutely no scrutiny from the press,” Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi seethed of the leading mayoral candidate’s old college application.
“This issue must be fully investigated, because, if true, it could be fraud and just the tip of the iceberg,” the rep said.
Mamdani, 33, who was born in Uganda, told the Times he didn’t make the selections on his application to try to get a competitive advantage but rather because he didn’t feel what was available fully captured his racial makeup.
Either way, his application ended up getting rejected.
“Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans, so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background,” said the pol from Astoria, Queens.
“Even though these boxes are constraining, I wanted my college application to reflect who I was.”
He said he considers himself “an American who was born in Africa.”
Cuomo and Mamdani were the front-runners in the mayoral Democratic primary for months, with the ex-governor consistently leading in the polls. That didn’t stop Mamdani from pulling off a stunning upset, crushing the career pol in a landslide win of 56% to 44% in the third round of the city’s ranked-choice voting.
But Cuomo did exponentially better with black voters throughout his campaign, a demographic with which Mamdani struggled to make inroads.
In the primaries, Cuomo dominated in precincts where at least 70% of the residents were black, grabbing 56% of the votes while Mamdani took just 26%. Exact voter data will be available July 15.
Cuomo remains on the general election ballot as an independent candidate.
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