An Extremely Detailed Explanation of My NYC 2025 Mayoral Ballot
(1) Ezra Klein, (2) Joe Neguse, (3) Kirsten Gilibrand, (4) Bill Ackman, (5) Indira Gandhi
Last week, we learned the final results of the New York mayoral primary election. They confirmed what we already knew: Zohran Mamdani, who six months ago was as obscure as his current job title and resume would suggest, is now the most dazzlingly successful politician in America. Mamdani’s victory means, as the New York Times suggests, that he has a claim to be a model for the future direction of his party nationwide. Or, maybe he’s just someone who figured out how to woo New York City Democrats, an accomplishment that tells us nothing about what would be needed to win in Michigan or Texas or Tennessee. Perhaps that’s how it should be. New York is consistently ranked the world’s most important city, the closest thing that exists to a global capital. But it’s also a place where eight million ordinary people live, in circumstances quite incommensurable with those of their 330 million countrymen.
In any case, Mamdani won, stunningly and comprehensively. We even have some idea of how he did it: He won with the young. He won with the Latinos and Asians, who have lately drifted away from the Democratic Party. He won because people like pithy slogans promising free stuff. He won because he only had to win over Democrats, who constitute about half of the city’s voting-age population. He won because he correctly diagnosed that, in New York of 2025, the cost of living is the ur-issue that surpasses all others. He won because he knows how to use TikTok. And he won by connecting with that broad swath of New York’s “middle classes” who are defined by the conviction of having nothing to lose. Picture these voters: under-35, college-educated, devoid of assets or savings, rent-burdened, gainfully employed, debt-riddled, not on government welfare. In short, they paradoxically combine the genuinely-felt experience of economic hardship—in their New York context—with an objective level of what, in any other context, would constitute economic privilege. This is a paradox they are not necessarily well-placed to grasp. They are a million-strong, and they have found their avatar.
Finally, Zohran Mamdani won via the assist of two of his opponents. One, Andrew Cuomo, obliged by being a uniquely loathsome public figure who ran a uniquely poor campaign. The other, Brad Lander, obliged in a far more sympathetic, and ultimately decisive, way.
For those needing a refresher, let’s remind ourselves of the candidates:
Andrew Mark Cuomo (Westchester, NY) — ex-Governor of New York (resigned); political nepobaby; Israel booster. The favorite until election day.
Zohran Kwame Mamdani (Astoria, Queens) — socialist wunderkind; academia/art nepobaby; current State Assemblyman; Israel skeptic.
Brad Lander (Park Slope, Brooklyn) — pragmatic left-wing technocrat; career urbanist; Comptroller of New York City.
Adrienne Adams (Jamaica, Queens) — Speaker of the New York City Council; career "corporate trainer”; pro-libraries.
Scott Stringer (Upper West Side, Manhattan) — former city Comptroller; Nadlerite; zhlubby mensch.
Zellnor Myrie (Central Brooklyn) — State Senator; Yglesian; MetroCard owner.
Whitney Tillson (Upper East Side, Manhattan) — hedge fund manager; fit.
Michael Blake (South Bronx) — former Obama aide; sassy.
Jessica Ramos (Jackson Heights, Queens) — State Senator; turncoat.
Eric Adams (Brooklyn) — ex-cop, author, nightlife connoisseur, aspiring theocrat, rat pogromist, woke-MAHA vegan, anti-bike, soft black nationalist, beneficiary of Turkish state largess, former Justice Department indictee (five counts) (case dismissed); incumbent Mayor (not running; will contest general election as an independent).
I’ll reveal my own absentee ballot in a moment. But first, a few words on the voting system. In New York City, we chose our leaders using a ranked-choice ballot that lets voters list up to five choices in order of preference. It’s a great system because New York is a one-party state effectively containing a multiparty system. The ranked ballot allows the numerous sociological and ideological currents within the population of Democrats to express themselves, while also ensuring majority assent for the winner.
Here’s what ranked choice doesn’t change: we can still read the polls. And for many months before the election, the polls conclusively showed that one of two candidates would win the election: Andrew Cuomo or Zohran Mamadani. No one else had a chance. The victor would be the one who did a better job absorbing the rest of the electorate: who could make themselves palatable enough to be the second (or third, or fifth) choice of erstwhile Brad Lander or Adrienne Adams voters. Which is to say, the only thing that mattered for influencing the actual result was where you ranked either of the two viable finalists. The choice to write any other name, anywhere on the ballot, was always going to be a matter of making peace with your private deity, and not of influencing the future public life of New York City.
I still filled out all five slots, of course. Here is how I went about it: I had a favorite overall (Brad Lander) and a “least-bad” option in the choice of Cuomo and Mamdani (guess who!). I put the latter in my fifth slot, knowing that this would be the ultimate and decisive destiny of my vote. I knew Lander was going to be eliminated, but I wanted him to have the highest possible vote total when he did, so I ranked him first. I also knew from the polls that Lander would be the last eliminated before the final round. That meant that the middle three slots on my ballot were truly symbolic, a private record of my preferences and nothing more. If, instead of what I actually put on my ballot, I had written
[Brad Lander—inevitable third-place finisher]
Philippe Petit (write-in)
E. M. S. Namboodiripad (write-in)
Louis the Fat, King the Franks (1108–1137) (write-in)
[My preferred choice out of the final two]
it would have had the same effect: a vote for Lander in the first round, destined to be transferred in the final round. Keep this in mind as you read my ballot and my explanations, if you care to. We all have to be able to sleep at night.
Wolf’s Ballot:
Brad Lander
Zellnor Myrie
Adrienne Adams
Whitney Tilson
Zohran Mamdani
If there is someone else in New York City who had this exact ranking, I’d really like to meet them.
~Apologia~
1) Brad Lander, Comptroller
Unfortunately, I believe in Brad Lander. I believe in him to an uncharacteristic, undignified degree. He is a left-inflected radical, a liberal idealist, a political pragmatist, and a learned technocrat all in one. He was, and is, immensely, uniquely qualified for the mayoralty.
But if I had to sum up my deep love for Brad Lander, I would do so in one fact: before politics, he was an urban planner. This never happens in city politics. People who achieve high office in American cities are usually lawyers or activists by trade, which helps to explain why the rate of feckless hacks in city government approaches 100%. Lander is the opposite: he has devoted his life to quietly studying the physical clay out of which urban communities, not clients or interest groups, are shaped. (No doubt he developed these good instincts as an undergraduate Fundamentals major at the University of Chicago. Up the Maroon!)
At 24, Lander’s first job was running the Fifth Avenue Committee, a Park Slope nonprofit dedicated to affordable housing. He stayed until he was 34, scraping away at this most calcific of problems in a neighborhood where he was a new arrival. Yet the goodwill he accumulated over that decade was enough to send him to the City Council in 2009, after an interregnum at the Pratt Institute. It’s easy to imagine someone in his position accumulating the opposite of goodwill, and decamping instead to a breezy, unscrutinized life in the private sector.
The other reason Lander’s background matters is that, if the 2025 election has a substantive core—over and above empty tribalism, arguments about a country 6,000 miles away, or insensate public perceptions of crime—it is housing. The affordability and availability of housing are the central motif of the cost-of-living debate. They also stands in for more inchoate questions and fears about who the city is for and who gets to live in it. Housing happens to be the cause of Lander’s life, and he has something real to show for it in the Gowanus canal rezoning.
Haven’t been to Gowanus? See it to believe it. It’s an ex-nihilo neighborhood on a former superfund site. It now boasts 8,500 new units of housing, 3,000 of them “affordable,” alongside a renovated public housing complex, shared green space, new businesses, and an arts campus. Lander shepherded the whole project, overcoming initial resistance from the surrounding neighborhoods. To my understanding, the Gowanus project is exactly the model we need to solve the American housing crisis, at least in cities. The formula is this: First, obtain some land. Then rewrite the land-use rules and parcel out the plots to developers on strict conditions. Go for the highest practicable density, mixed-income residents, and mixed-use buildings. Set an ambitious threshold for the portion of units that have to be affordable. Extract other concessions on the side—environmental infrastructure, preservation work, shared community spaces—and supplement with public money where necessary. Consult the locals but don’t allow tedious lawsuits or environmental reviews. “Align incentives,” as they say in the business world. At one point, Lander persuaded the local Community Board to allow a higher tower on one of the plots, in exchange for which the developer agreed to preserve a block of affordable artist studios. Everyone wins. It’s not quite Red Vienna or pre-1980’s Singapore—but what is anymore, really?
All this Lander ran on, alongside other important and doable proposals including six-minute subway intervals, universal childcare and 3-K, a reform of the city’s inequitable property tax regime, and the pedestrianization of many streets. Less public, but equally prolix, were his plans for revamping the city’s 300,000-person bureaucracy, a behemoth of a problem that, as outgoing Comptroller, he was uniquely positioned to tackle.
Alas, the dream was not to be for Lander, despite a banner last week in which he was arrested by ICE, won the final debate, and was revealed as a consensus pick of the craven and useless New York Times (also of the not-craven, useful Ezra Klein). The sad truth is there just isn’t a lane in New York City for a left-leaning, technocratic, un-flashy white guy. And there may never be. (I look forward to cheerfully casting a doomed vote for Mark Levine in 2033.) Anyway, it was clear from the polls that Lander would be the final candidate eliminated. That made my next three ballot picks purely symbolic, starting with…
2) Zellnor Myrie, State Senator
I voted for Zellnor Myrie, the extremely affable and articulate son of Brooklyn, because he was anointed the YIMBY candidate. He ran on building masses of new housing, fast. What I think was slightly lost in the Myrie “discourse” was that he, along with Lander, was really a candidate of the YIMBY left. That particular ideological confluence is a recent and auspicious development. I can clearly remember a time—I was a teenager already—when seemingly everyone who claimed to be on the left was expected to be suspicious of developers and hyper-alert for gentrification and displacement. We took that stance because we thought it was correct, but it helped that it was also self-consciously anti-establishment and radical. Today, lots of people who still claim to be on the left (myself included) have instead become fixated on growing the housing supply by all means available. And we consider this to be a radical view, with all the right enemies, if that’s a relevant qualification.
Zellnor Myrie began life as a tenant rights lawyer. If anything, his was the more stereotypical lefty-NIMBY profile, especially compared to the urbanist-academic Lander. Now, Zellnor is a still a lefty, but one who wants to rip up the urban fabric of New York to add many hundreds of thousands of new places for people to live. On paper, his housing plan was the most ambitious of any candidate. One million units was the figure bandied about. The plan amounts to an “all of the above” approach that includes upzoning, eased building codes, new NYCHA investment, and a homelessness policy that is Housing First in all but name. At an earlier juncture of the campaign, Lander hinted that some of his rivals were suggesting they could conjure a million new homes out of thin air, and there may be something to that critique. Myrie had all the right headlines but was light on certain details and accomplishments. In any case, I wasn’t convinced his (exceptionally good) housing politics were meaningfully better than Lander’s.
In the end, Myrie got 10,000 votes, or 1%. He is 36 years old, a state legislator since 2019. Basically, he’s Zohran Mamdani in two years. There will be a time for him, later. I hope he runs for Congress, or Governor. Or Mayor again! After all, we may well be looking to start this nightmare over in 36 months or so.
3) Adrienne Adams, City Council Speaker
I have no interest in Adrienne Adams becoming Mayor. I don’t know why she ran, and she may not have known either, to judge from a fairly lackluster campaign.
An important fact about Adrienne Adams is that she is not a progressive, neither in the classic nor the current sense of the word. Sociologically, she is an outer-borough moderate who was all-in for (Eric) Adams last time around. Somehow, in the few months of her truncated mayoral run, she was rechristened a pillar of the pan-left stop-Cuomo coalition. I cannot for the life of me understand why Alexandria Occasio-Cortez, New York’s leading leftwing powerbroker, ranked Adams over Lander. I fear the walking corpse of identity politics.
Adrienne Adams certainly had the requisite experience. She leads the city’s legislative branch, and is apparently quite good at it. She’s been a principled foil to the other Adams on various issues, including library funding. But I have my priors: Adams told the New York Times she hadn’t been on the subway in months. She plainly has no interest in urbanism. She was the face of the Council’s new regulatory process for outdoor dining, which all but killed off the program and left thousands of formerly vibrant street spaces to re-decompose into parking desolation. For that alone Adams deserves to be banished from future public office, which, in the end, she was.
Why, then, did I rank her? Remember, this is the symbolic section of the ballot. And there was one fact about Adams that I wished to recognize: she was a key driver of the “City of Yes” zoning reform that passed the Council last year. The City of Yes offers the first glimpse of a true city-wide densification agenda the likes of which haven’t been seen since the 1920’s. We will need more of the same from the next mayor, ideally something grander in scale and less riddled with carve-outs. Speaker Adams pushed the plan through over the objections of her own district’s Community Board and against the trend of far-outer-borough Council members, who almost universally oppose new density. Sure, she had the advantage of not being threatened by a Republican challenger, since her base is stolid black democrats. But those people can be NIMBYs, too! They care about preserving their property values and their on-street parking. Adams showed vision and courage on the most pressing issue of the day, and hence my second meaningless vote was for her, and not to Scott Stringer, whom I would be glad to see as Mayor. Sorry, Scott.
4) Whitney Tilson, financier
Now things are getting weird. Whitney Tilson is a hedge fund manager and financial analyst who also helped found AmeriCorps. He ran for Mayor as the second coming of Michael Bloomberg. This is funny, because (1) no one had heard of him, (2) he’s not that rich, and (3) anyone can see that the city was never interested in Bloomberg 2.0. New York in our time resembles Russia in the period 1867-1905: Terrorist radicals on one side, Monarchist reactionaries on the other. No room for neo-“libs.”
Yet Tilson talks like a Democrat: “my party,” he always called it. If anything, he’s reminiscent of Al Gore in the heyday of the so-called Atari Democrats. (True to the analogy, he is utterly lacking in charisma in-person.) But what I liked about Tilson were two things. First, he was the only true cyclist in the race, and was seriously-pro bike lanes and pedestrianization. Apparently, he rides his own bike everywhere! No silver Lyft e-bike crap.
Second and much more importantly, Tilson chose, uniquely, to make education the central issue of his campaign. The scandal of the Mayor’s race is how little education has come up, and how little the public has seemed to care. My personal view is that education is also the biggest blindspot for the American left. (Not its biggest liability, since, again, the public rarely seems to notice). Yet education is New York’s biggest expense, drawing twice as much money as public transit and five times as much as the police. New York spends more per student than anywhere else in the country, yet achieves mediocre outcomes for most students and abject ones for many. In the Bloomberg years, student math and reading proficiency slightly improved; since then, both have declined. That is a stain on our collective moral personality as New Yorkers.
Whitney Tilson ran on an education agenda that almost seems designed to rankle the ideological left. His central prescription was linking teacher pay to student outcomes as measured by test scores. “Pay-for-performance,” as this approach is called, is backed by a lot of evidence. It is indisputably better, both in terms of absolute outcomes and equity of distribution, than pay-for-tenure, which is what almost all teachers unions prefer. Better still is linking pay to hardship assignments, i.e., incentivizing the best teachers to go work at the worst-performing schools. Tilson never mentioned hardship pay as far as I know, but I’m sure he would be open to the idea. (I’m hoping Brad Lander might be, too.)
Tilson was also gung-ho on charter schools. In contemporary New York, in America, this is probably the right thing to do (gasp!). The evidence is unambiguous, albeit uneven, that charters improve student outcomes. That fact, which is a fact, doesn’t change other facts, like the fact that charters sometimes depress the quality of neighborhood schools by skimming off the best-performing kids. Or that many New York charters exist to funnel students towards private scholarships at places like my high school, effectively creating a two-track public system. Or that by far the best education reform would be to ban private and parochial schools and legally obligate all students to attend their local neighborhood public school. But even Tovarish Zohran cannot bring that about.
Would I really prefer to live in Whitney Tilson’s city than Zohran Mamdani’s? Ply me for the answer after a few drinks. No, not really. Speaking of, Whitney Tilson’s other reason for being is his obsessive and unimpressive quest to convince the public that Zohran Mamdani is a virulent Jew-hater. Surely the most aggravating part of the recent election campaign was the fact that a substantial number of people, on both fringes of the electorate, were apparently voting solely based on what the candidates said about Israel. It’s demoralizing and inane. Only Lander, in the final debate, had the courage and good sense to point out the Mayor of New York has no power to resolve the present conflict in the Middle East.
Tilson likewise finished with a solitary percent. His campaign just didn’t take, even though the New York Times sort of endorsed him. Not even his neighbors on the Upper East Side are for him—for some mystifying reason, they all love Andrew Cuomo (haha).
5) Zohran Mamdani, State Assemblyman
So, this was my decisive vote. In Brad Lander we had a rare, genuinely brilliant choice for Mayor. Instead, we got this guy, and I voted for him.
I’m not too happy about it. I can’t stand people my age. If your worldview is remotely akin to mine, it strikes me as insane that you would look at the resume and political program of Zohran Mamdani next that of Brad Lander and think that the former is preferable. I’m tempted to say that intelligent Mamdani supporters, of whom I know so many, are people who earnestly, explicitly value ideological performance over and above political practice. But this too is senseless. Have we learned nothing? We are not 18 anymore.
I’m not being quite fair. Zohran Mamdani is a generational political talent, perhaps more so than AOC. His finest moment came in the days before the primary, when he walked thirteen miles from the top of Manhattan to the bottom, without agenda, simply greeting people on the way. With such a humble act, he perfectly captured the spirit of life in the city and channeled such forebears as John Lindsay, Ed Koch, Charles Baudelaire, and Ratso Rizzo. The benighted American press dubbed it a “Forrest Gump” walk, but the proper reference is, of course, the yatra, a staple gesture of Indian politics.
I’m fascinated, if not exactly moved, by Mamdani’s life. He grew up partly in Kampala, Uganda, and partly in my home neighborhood of Morningside Heights. His father is the brilliant post-colonial scholar Mahmood Mamdani; his mother is the wonderful filmmaker Mira Nair. Selfishly, I’m intrigued by Mamdani’s South Asian background, and what, if any, role it plays in his politics. I do have one discovery on that front: this video, in which Mamdani jovially explains, in perfect Hindi, how ranked-choice voting works. At one point, he declares that New Yorkers are struggling to afford “roti, kapra, aur makaan.” That phrase, which translates to “bread, clothing, and shelter,” was Indira Gandhi’s slogan in the 1967 Indian elections, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s slogan in the 1970 Pakistan elections, and the name of a popular contemporary Bollywood film. It’s impossible that this is a coincidence, though I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere else.
That’s the good. What about the bad? There are two important critiques to be made of Mamdani: inexperience and silly ideas.
1. Inexperience
Prior to becoming Mayor, if that’s what he becomes in November, Zohran Mamdani will have served three unnotable terms in the lower house of the New York State legislature. He also spent a bunch of time hanging around Gaza protests in 2023–24, which is how he became famous enough to run for Mayor in the first place. And he’s a member of DSA, that last bastion of American Stalinism. He did once go on a hunger strike in support of indebted taxi drivers, which is cool and vaguely Gandhian.
That’s it really. Mamdani is six years older than I am, also grew up in Morningside Heights, and also holds a snooty BA in Liberal Arts. When he was my age, he was a rapper called Mr. Cardamom. If I run for Mayor of anything six years from now, don’t discount the possibility of acute mental illness.
2. Silly Ideas
This is where it gets fun:
Making MTA buses free to ride. If Mamdani has a signature policy, this is it. It’s a refreshing and well-motivated proposal because the buses, as opposed to the subways, disproportionately serve the neediest, poorest New Yorkers. Investing more in the bus network would therefore be a boon to transit equity. But paying the MTA to abolish fares is the wrong way to do it. If there is money to be spent, it should go to improving service, which is terrible and the main obstacle to the system’s use. Now, the most effective way to improve bus service would be to make physically segregated bus lanes on all streets, but that’s a Department of Transportation line item, not an MTA one. The MTA could still buy more buses, create more routes, and add more runs on existing routes, none of which will happen by making current buses free. If, by a miracle, we suddenly have $600 million-plus in taxpayer monies to add to the transit system, throwing it all into eliminating bus fares would be slightly better than throwing it into New York harbor.
Freeze Rents on Rent-Stabilized Apartments. This is not a good idea, though of course many people with existing leases stand to benefit. The problem with the Rent Guidelines Board (RGB), which sets annual rent increases for New York’s one million rent-controlled apartments, has been that the Board allowed big hikes in the Bloomberg years, then almost none in the De Blasio years, and is now back to sizable increases in the era of Eric Adams and inflation. The result is that the net-growth in stabilized rents since Bloomberg left office is 17%, below inflation. Meanwhile, New York rents as a whole have exploded, growing 8% in 2023 alone. The solution is for the RGB to set rent hikes at or near the inflation level while the city builds much more new housing of all types, including social housing and rent-stabilized housing.
Speaking of which, $70 billion of public money for new housing sounds good. But it will have to deliver more than the 200,000 units he envisions, and to raise the amount in bonds as he proposes is currently unconstitutional. In general, Mamdani’s housing plans are under-developed. On this most leading issue of the day (not counting the latest developments in Gaza, haha) Mamdani is clearly out of his depth compared to Lander and Myrie, probably also to Stringer, Adams, and Tilson.
Unsurprisingly, Mamdani’s claim that he can fund his entire agenda only from new taxes on people earning over a million dollars per year does not add up, and I have not seen anyone seriously argue that it does.
Finally, opening city-run grocery stores is an interesting proposal to address food deserts, hunger, and the cost of living. Then again, the city has no experience in the retail business, private grocers already operate on minute margins, and food prices are largely set by forces far outside the Mayor’s control. I’m all for trying the public stores, but we should understand it’s a strictly experimental solution, and a potential boondoggle.
I still voted for Mamdani. Why?
For one thing, as a candidate, Mamdani has incurred any debts to interest groups (except Hezbollah, haha). Not even to unions, who are, after all, another interest group; most of them backed Cuomo. Mamdani is a genuine populist. He would owe his election to tens of thousands of small donors and to a devoted activist base. He has double-digit support in all five boroughs and in every racial group. His lack of debts in a town where machine politics rules all may be his single most appealing feature.
He also strikes me as a very smart person, and open to new ideas. Just in the closing stages of his campaign, he apparently came around to wonkish housing solutions like easing regulations on single-stair buildings. He told the NYT that he had changed his mind on the role of the private market in housing development. He moderated, slightly, on Israel. He talks about bureaucratic efficiency and public-sector waste, and about taking those issues back from the right. When Andrew Cuomo was asked what issue he’d changed his mind on, he said “I can’t think of one right now.”
And that’s the real reason I’m for Mamdani: I’m willing to take the risk on him over Cuomo. It’s not a hard choice. Personal qualities aside, Mamdani represents the politics of the exuberant youth, the middle-class renters, and, I suppose, the South Asian minority. Cuomo represents the politics of outer borough cranks, NIMBYs, car brain, the Hasidim, the food delivery lobby, the real estate lobby, fat labor unions, out-of-state donors. These things are not better than Zohran Mamdani; they are at the root of our ills. To oppose them is easy. At a certain point, one has to at least try to stand on the right side of history.
My great hope lies in the fact that Mamdani and Lander all but merged their campaigns in the final weeks. Mamdani has won, but only thanks to Lander cajoling his base of high-engagement white liberals to hold their noses and vote for the anti-Zionist man-child. That ultimate act of political selflessness will prove Lander’s greatest legacy. And if my instincts about Mamdani are correct, he may just assemble a grand coalition of the liberal left to supplement his inexperience once in office. I desperately hope so. They’ve all played so nicely on the campaign trail, it’s too tempting not to imagine them going full Team-of-Rivals if he wins. First Deputy Mayor Lander? Housing Czar Myrie? Left YIMBYism nascitur! Ave Left YIMBYism!
Andrew Cuomo
Finally, a parting word for Andrew Cuomo, who, apparently, could still be our next mayor.
Andrew Cuomo ran for Mayor because he says he possesses experience, cultivates relationships, and is a tough guy. Notice that this is just a list of qualities, not a statement of purpose. That’s because Cuomo the mayoral candidate has no purpose, and has been unable to articulate one despite doing this full-time for several months now. Really, I imagine he’s running out of the same motives that have always driven him: lust for power, personal vendettas, ambition for higher office, inability to sit on the sidelines, daddy issues. He must rank among the least principled politicians in America. Even Donald Trump can at least claim to be the figurehead of an ideological project.
Cuomo’s vision of New York, expressed in all his campaign ads and public statements, is one of untrammeled chaos demanding a return to order, which he alone can bring about. It’s inapt and insulting. There may have been a public appetite for this kind of thing for a brief time in 2021 (see Eric Adams), but the city Cuomo is really trying to evoke vanished in the 1980’s, which is also the last decade in which he was a city resident. A better analogy might be the infamous “Fear City” campaign of 1975, when the police and fire unions handed out pamphlets that depicted the city as a war zone and warned tourists that their safety could not be guaranteed unless the unions got their way in ongoing budget negotiations. Cuomo’s candidacy descends on the people of New York as a would-be protection racket. But the crisis of the city today isn’t gun fights and raging tire fires; crime is at historic lows. The crisis is rather the metaphorical slow-burn of unaffordability, inequality, and bureaucratic rot.
Cuomo banks on experience, but he has none in city government—only federal and state. I’m not going to rehearse the record of his Governorship here. Suffice it to say, it was mixed. But New York City was always his weak spot. He raided the MTA budget to bail out state-owned ski resorts. He oversaw the subway’s worst ever crisis and then drove out the only person who improved it. He talks a lot about capital projects, but the only one he wholly owned was a stupid proposal to build a backwards-running, redundant Laguardia airport connector, which was swiftly cancelled by his successor. He often seemed to go out of his way to spite the then-Mayor, Bill De Blasio.
That’s where the second part of Cuomo’s pitch, relationships, fails. Almost everyone who has ever worked with him seems to dislike him. Not just the young female assistants; I mean the politicos, the people who really matter in the business of governing, the erstwhile allies outside his own ever-shrinking inner circle. At no point during his mayoral run has Cuomo shown any interest in contrition, in cleaning up any of the toxic sludge he left in his wake. Instead, he announced he now regrets resigning as Governor. Haha.
Cuomo’s best argument is that he is a canny operator who can stand up to Trump better than another candidate. That’s probably true; point one for Cuomo, though there’s probably not much any mayor can do. It just doesn’t outweigh the myriad counts against him.
It doesn’t outweigh, for example, the fact that his campaign received very few small donations yet still had by far the largest effective budget thanks to his Super PAC, Fix the City, which Cuomo illegally coordinated with and was banned from public matching funds as punishment.
And it doesn’t outweigh his own policy plans. Remember those? They weren’t what he ran on, but I still perused them. Cuomo is uninterested in broad-based densification and hence has no solution to the housing crisis. He is uninterested in urban design and hence has no solution to transit. If there is a political current he really represents after parachuting into the race, and the city, at such a late hour, it’s the people who "literally do not want their neighborhood to change." This includes not only rich people selfishly protecting their gain, but poor people protecting what little they have to lose. Look closely at the map of the results and you’ll find that Cuomo won in almost every public housing project. This is something for Democrats to think about.
The arc of Andrew Cuomo’s life is a minor tragedy. He was the scowling son who shouldered all sin so that his father, Governor Mario Cuomo, could live as an angel. My dad always said he had fallen in love with three politicians in his life: Robert F. Kennedy, Mario Cuomo, and Barack Obama. I guess now I know how dad felt in 1968: Lander is my RFK, Mamdani will be my Eugene McCarthy, and all this to stop evil, baby-killing Hubert Humphry (Cuomo). Perhaps, as in 1968, we’re heading for the shock resurrection of the tenacious liberal Republican with a knack for criminality: enter Eric Adams.
Bowled over. And periodically hilarious.
Brilliant analysis !