Opinion | New York City’s mayoral primary is a microcosm of Democratic party chaos
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Diverging Reports Breakdown
New York City’s mayor election results spotlight the Democratic Party’s chaos
Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo is running for re-election as a Democrat. He’s facing off against Zain Verjee, who is running as an independent. The race is a test of whether the city is ready for a new generation of leaders. It’s also a test to see if voters are willing to give up on the status quo. It could be a bellwether race for the next presidential election in 2016, which is likely to be won by Democrat Hillary Clinton, who has been criticized for her handling of the health care reform debate in the past few years. The question is whether voters want a new leader or a new way of doing things, as they did in the 1990s when President George W. Bush was in the White House and the New York City subway system was in disarray. It’s a test for whether New Yorkers are ready for another change in the way they’re governed, or if they want to wait until the next election to make a change, which could be years from now.
While Democrats tend to see the mayor’s race — always the marquee contest in the year after the presidential election — as a bellwether for the party nationally, the story here ahead of Tuesday’s Democratic primary has really been the collapse of the local party, to the point where its contest is pitting a candidate it purged from office just a few years ago against a socialist who’s simply using it as his electoral vehicle.
Populists break through when the status quo fails.
The stakes in that contest, though, are a little lower than they seem as both Andrew Cuomo and Zohran Mamdani will most likely be on the ballot again in November, with whichever one losing the Democratic nomination running on another ballot line in a crowded general election that also includes Mayor Eric Adams (who won the Democratic nomination last time around but has cozied up to Trump since then and is running as an independent now).
Populists break through when the status quo fails. And the big question for registered Democrats in Tuesday’s closed primary is which direction they want the city to turn toward: a local government that delivers much more, somehow, or one that defends and improves what it’s already doing.
It’s hard to imagine a better exemplar of a center that hasn’t held than Cuomo, the exhausting and exhausted son of a three-term governor who then served nearly three terms himself before resigning in disgrace in the midst of the city’s last mayoral campaign.
The former governor, whose campaign still refers to him as “the governor,” is running in the mayor’s race for a position he plainly thinks is beneath him, in the hopes his universal name recognition and backroom power moves would let him cruise to the Democratic Party’s nomination and then Gracie Mansion and then a presidential run in 2028 to cap his political resurrection.
That plan jumped right past his ongoing legal battles aggressively targeting several of the women who accused him of sexual harassment, as well as the many open questions about his Covid response and nursing home death counts that have him in the crosshairs of Trump’s Justice Department.
The one big idea that launched Cuomo’s campaign is that a “city in crisis” — a local twist on another Queens native’s “American carnage” — needed its own bully and that the political establishment, including the very people who demanded he step down, would have no choice but to get in line behind him or at the least grit their teeth and accept him. Cuomo bet on his name recognition and held the attitude that no one wants to get on the wrong side of a famously vindictive leader.
Cuomo was right that the party’s “leaders” in New York — including Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirstin Gillibrand and Gov. Kathy Hochul — would mostly roll over and get out of his way, but it’s not clear that voters are following their example.
Instead, polls show them moving toward state Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, the smiling young socialist whose promises are even bigger than his accomplishments and experience are vanishingly small.
That’s the match-up Cuomo wanted, as he essentially ignored the other Democrats on the ballot while encouraging voters and pundits to see the race as a hard choice between him and Mamdani.
The one big idea that launched Cuomo’s campaign is that a ‘city in crisis’ — a local twist on another Queens native’s ‘American carnage.’
But Cuomo ought to be careful what he wishes for. While it sometimes seems as though Cuomo is going through the motions, Mamdani is running through the tape, making a show this weekend of walking the length of Manhattan talking to New Yorkers excited to meet him, while tens of thousands of motivated volunteers have knocked on more than a million doors on his behalf.
Meanwhile, the Cuomo camp is trying to counterpunch with paid canvassers and an obscene torrent of late spending, including $8.3 million from former Mayor Mike Bloomberg to flood the airwaves with warnings about a candidate they’re trying to paint as essentially a barbarian at the gate.
After early voting began, the former governor trotted out an emergency endorsement from his former boss President Bill Clinton — another powerful old man who didn’t behave honorably toward women.
That comes, though, after Mamdani has spent months beautifully and relentlessly campaigning — introducing himself to New Yorkers and making his case. For his part, Cuomo drives himself around the city, keeping his engagement with the media, the public and the other candidates to a minimum.
But Mamdani, too, is offering an appeal with Trumpy tones, in his case circa 2016.
He’s a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — a group that advocates radical positions like nationalizing private industries and boycotting and isolating the Jewish state, however much Mamdani has preferred to stress affordability and his signature promises to provide free buses and child care and freeze stabilized rents. Mamdani has avoided answering direct questions about how his agenda would line up with or diverge from DSA’s.
It’s unclear how a candidate sympathetic to calls to “globalize the intifada” would order the NYPD to handle protests — including anarchic and disruptive ones — by groups with whom he’s in ideological sympathy. Nor is it clear how he’d have the NYPD deal with ICE agents in New York City and protesters aiming to stop them from operating here.
Still, Mamdani’s surging as Cuomo sags. The candidate offering himself as an avatar of generational change is effectively offering the same question Trump did nearly a decade ago onstage with the avatars of an establishment that, nearly everyone agreed, had led the country in the wrong direction, starting with his Republican rivals and then turning to Hillary Clinton: How much worse could I be?