New Yorkers are headed to the polls this November as the city gets ready for the most contentious mayoral election in decades. However, the real election may come up on 24 June. With the Democratic Party primary taking place then, the winner is all but guaranteed to win the election—with the party winning over two thirds of the vote in the 2021 mayoral election.
With incumbent Mayor Eric Adams’ decision to run as an independent following a huge corruption scandal, the Democratic Party is now looking for a new candidate. Currently leading the pack is former Governor Andrew Cuomo, the party establishment pick. The most experienced candidate, having run New York state from 2011-2021, Cuomo has high name recognition but is also mired in controversy both personally and politically. The son of former governor Mario Cuomo, he draws criticism for a perceived closeness to the politics of Mayor Adams. Additionally, he has been under fire for an alleged history of sexually harassing thirteen women, as well as a recent case where he settled with his former aide for $450,000.
Taking advantage of this is insurgent candidate Zohran Mamdani, a self-described ‘Democratic Socialist’, whose momentum is starting to scare the Cuomo campaign. Recent Emerson polling shows Mamdani is just nine percentage points behind Cuomo, and eleven points ahead of where he was at the beginning of the month. Headwinds are behind Mamdani, but with just a month to go, establishment Democrats hope they can simply wait out this upstart radical.
With nine democratic candidates, mostly progressives, Mamdani has managed to separate himself from the pack. Both through his canny use of social media and volunteers, but also with an electric campaign as the ‘affordability candidate’, he is now the obvious choice for New York progressives. Proposing rent freezes for all stabilised housing units, which would immediately lower costs for 40 percent of New York’s 2.3 million rental properties. Critics argue this might reduce overall housing supply on the New York market, driving up house prices. However, Mamdani plans to rectify this by building 200,000 new houses—though in a city not only renowned for its high construction prices, but also where space to build it is rather scarce.
While certainly not for everyone, Mamdani’s housing policy has been received better than Cuomo’s, whose 29-page housing plan contains clumsy, misspelt and incomplete prose, as well as a citation from ChatGPT. The Cuomo campaign has blamed aides for lazy editing, such as the oversight in leaving the word ‘Bbjectively’ within one of the outline’s headers. Strangely enough, spokesperson for the campaign Rich Azzopardi has pointed to these sections, stating that the policy was, in fact, not written with AI: “if it was written by ChatGPT, we wouldn’t have had the errors”. These amateur errors don’t seem good for the candidate running on his lengthy experience, and indicate a dangerous complacency within his campaign.
While this seems a sloppy and embarrassing mistake for Cuomo, his campaign might be better characterised by its lack rather than verve. Attempting to limit exposure, and prevent direct confrontation with his opposition, Cuomo is seemingly trying to “run out the clock” as executive director of Emerson College Polling Spencer Kimball argues. With the backing of the Democratic machine, Cuomo has been able to hoover up endorsements from major New York Unions, and has easier access to campaign funds. As the current man to beat, he has been slammed by all his opponents. Even Adams taunted that “all he’s doing is looking at Eric Adams’s playbook”, claiming that Cuomo is simply following his plans already set out on mental health and housing.
That is not to say that he has no flagship policies; his most publicised policy is to raise New York’s minimum wage to $20 an hour. This would raise the pay packet for the 800,000 New Yorkers currently working for minimum wage. It seems he has drawn from his time as governor, where in 2016 he had raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour.
Not to be outdone, Mamdani has unveiled his ambitious ‘$30 by ‘30’ initiative to continuously raise the minimum wage in the city year on year until 2030: raising the wage to $20 in 2027, $23.50 in 2028, $27 in 2029 and finally $30 in 2030. Not stopping there, Mamdani hopes to then start indexing the minimum wage so that it will automatically increase by either inflation or productivity increases, whichever are higher.
Undoubtedly an ambitious proposal, Mamdani hopes to balance these wage rises with a new tax credit for small businesses which are likely to be the most affected. Moreover, he is set to create a ‘mom and pop czar’, to address the concerns of small businesses across the city, while also slashing fees and regulations that he argues tie these small businesses down and advantage large corporations. With a far more ambitious, yet risky platform compared to Cuomo, Mamdani seeks to set up experimental city-owned grocery stores in order to provide cheap access to food for all New Yorkers. Many however, especially within the right of the Democratic Party, are sceptical about how the lack of profit motive will avert this experiment from not just being an expensive waste.
While Cuomo may have the endorsement of more of the Democratic establishment, Mamdani has managed to get the endorsement not only of other candidates against Cuomo, but also the critically important Working Families Party which has an outsized influence in the urban east-coast left.
While late in the race, on 5 June Mamdani gained the most important endorsement that his campaign has been chasing for months. Alesandria Occasio-Cortez (AOC), seen as the leaders of the ‘radical left’ within the Democratic Party, threw her weight behind the anti-Cuomo campaign. Having also run with the Working Families Party, as well as being a previous member of the Democratic Socialists of America, her seeming absence up until now had garnered the interest of commentators. With the name recognition she has across the city, her endorsement is sure to increase support for Mamdani among women and Latino voters where he is currently lagging behind Cuomo. Can this push Mamdani the lengthy way he needs to cross the finish line, or will the centre hold?
The elephant in the room for this race is Israel, and the war in Gaza. New York has the largest Jewish population of any city outside of Israel. With the war in the Middle East raging on, as well as rising antisemitism in America, issues in Gaza have come to the forefront of the election. Cuomo has put antisemitism as his ‘most important issue’, and claimed that his opponents are in league with the ‘forces of antisemitism’. Opposition leader Brad Lander, who is Jewish, claims Cuomo is merely using “Jews as pawns”. Meanwhile Mamdani, who is a long-standing critic of Israel and supporter of “boycotts, divestment and sanctions”, has called this “weaponis[ing] the issue”, and “lying” for political gain.
Cuomo’s plan to tackle the antisemitism crisis is for greater law enforcement crackdowns on perpetrators, passing ‘unmasking laws’ to ban masks at certain protests, and adopting educational measures to combat hate. Mandani, on the other hand, aims to form a new ‘Department of Community Safety’, not only to tackle antisocial behaviour, but also work with the various communities of New York to tackle hate crimes on a local level.
However, all this focus on the Democrats—likely as they are to win—overlooks the other two major candidates throwing their hat in the ring. Firstly, there is the aforementioned independent incumbent mayor Eric Adams. However, while he may be able to scrape a few votes from the Democrats, his chances are extremely slim. The corruption scandal which he was recently embroiled in, and his perceived closeness to Trump following his pardon have made him enormously unpopular. He now has a favourability of just 19 percent.
From the opposition Republican party comes former mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa. A controversial figure, even within his own party, Sliwa attempts to position himself as the anti-Trump, anti-Democrat, tough-on-crime candidate. He has declared Mayor Adams to be the ‘Trump candidate’, saying that when the president says “Eric jump”, the only response would be “How high, Mr President”. He has likewise called Cuomo a “coward”, and has been wildly critical of his record as governor of New York. Sliwa is recognisable, always wearing a red beret, the uniform of the ‘guardian angels’. This vigilante group, set up by Silwa during the height of the city’s crime problems in 1979, patrols the streets of New York, aiming to crack down on antisocial behaviour. This has been the focus of Sliwa’s campaign, rallying against what he claims is a wave of ‘migrant crime’. However, his tough stance has brought him into controversy. On 6 Feb 2024, a migrant who he claimed had been shoplifting live on Fox News was assaulted in a ‘citizen’s arrest’. The man was misidentified as a migrant by the ‘guardian angels’ because he was “speaking Spanish”, and there was no evidence that he was shoplifting.
Still, with election day far off in November, there is a lot of time for the race to develop, and new candidates to run. However, it is likely the race will really be decided next month when the Democratic Party primary is set to take place. With the result being anything but decided, can Cuomo’s establishment credentials hold off Mamdani’s momentum, or are the New York Democrats about to vote in their first ‘socialist’ candidate?