United States Republican President Donald Trump says he will restrict federal funds for New York City if Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani wins the city’s mayoral elections, to be held on Tuesday.
Trump said on his Truth Social platform on Monday that “it is highly unlikely that I will be contributing Federal Funds, other than the very minimum as required”, if Mamdani wins the race.
Polls show Mamdani leading against former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent after losing to Mamdani in the Democratic primary, and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, who is the Republican nominee.
According to the latest RealClearPolitics polls on Monday, Mamdani led with 45.8 percent, maintaining a 14.7-point advantage over Cuomo’s 31.1 percent and a 28.5-point lead over Sliwa’s 17.3 percent.
On the final day of campaigning on Monday, the mayoral candidates raced across New York City’s five boroughs after months of back-and-forth barbs, social media hits and saucy debates.
As the closely-watched election day edged closer, Mamdani led a sunrise walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, flanked by hundreds of supporters, before kicking off the day with a speech at City Hall.
Cuomo, on his part, denounced socialism in the Bronx, visited seniors in Chinatown, and popped off an X post calling Mamdani a “poser”.
And Republican candidate Sliwa greeted supporters in the Coney Island neighbourhood of Brooklyn in his signature red hat, as he spoke at a subway station where a woman was killed on a train last year.
Mamdani and Cuomo’s duelling campaigns have reflected their positions in the New York race: the son of another former New York governor, steeped in the liberal Democratic political establishment, versus a young and little-known assemblyman who would be the city’s first Muslim, first person born in Africa and the first person of South Asian descent to lead New York City.
The mayoral race, which has captured outsized global attention, has seen a record 735,317 early votes cast over the past nine days, more than four times the total for the 2021 election, according to the New York City Board of Elections.
‘Our time is now’
Mamdani, a 34-year-old New York state assemblyman, has galvanised New Yorkers with an optimistic, multilingual campaign that promised free buses, rent freezes and universal childcare, partially paid for by taxing the city’s wealthiest residents.
He reiterated that Trump had signalled his support for Cuomo in a 60 Minutes interview. In recent weeks, Cuomo has appealed to conservatives as a way to up his polling numbers.
“If [Cuomo is] elected as mayor, our city will descend deeper into the darkness that has forced too many of our neighbours to flee, and made it impossible for working people to live lives of dignity,” Mamdani said.
In his City Hall speech on Monday, Mamdani seemed to embrace the seismic shift that his campaign has represented for New York’s politics.
“There were few in this city who dared to imagine that we could win, and what it would mean for a city that has – for too long – served only the wealthy and powerful, at the expense of those who work through sunrises and sunsets,” Mamdani said.
Moments later, the crowd broke out in cheers of, “Our time is now!”
Cuomo, who resigned as governor in 2021 after an independent state probe found he had engaged in a pattern of sexually harassing women, took aim at Mamdani’s democratic socialist promises in his final hours of campaigning, likening them to left-wing governments in Latin America.
“Socialism didn’t work in Venezuela. Socialism didn’t work in Cuba. Socialism is not going to work in New York City,” Cuomo said. Mamdani, however, is a self-described “democratic socialist”.
New York’s most prominent billionaires, including hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, have supported Cuomo’s campaign, with Ackman doling out a total of $750,000 through donation vehicles known as super PACs, CNBC reported last week.
The post Trump says he will restrict federal funds for New York City if Mamdani wins appeared first on Al Jazeera.
