Zohran Mamdani meteoric rise from obscurity as a backbench New York State assemblyman representing the Astoria area of Queens to become the clear favorite to be elected the next mayor of New York City was propelled by natural political talent, a progressive agenda of socialist style government giveaway programs, a youthful and enthusiastic image, and his understanding that many of his fellow, upwardly mobile young adults are struggling with the high cost of living in New York City.
But many other New Yorkers are struggling with a fundamental weakness with his candidacy: As someone whose management experience begins and ends with the last four years of running his legislative office with a total paid staff of only five employees, is Mamdani ready to lead the nation’s largest city, with a workforce of more than 300,000 people and a $112 billion annual budget?
To Mamdani’s supporters, his age and youthful energy are as central to his appeal as his promises of free bus rides and child care, and a freeze on rents for 1 million regulated apartments in New York City. Yet in a pre-election article published by the pro-Mamdani New York Times, many of the more than 50 Mamdani supporters interviewed admitted that they are more worried about his inexperience than his socialist and anti-Israel policy agenda. They have serious doubts about his ability to take over as mayor of the country’s largest city, which has long been considered the second-most challenging elected office in American government, second only to the U.S. presidency.
New York City’s more realistic voters are also well aware that there is no guarantee that Mamdani’s impressive political skills will be matched by his ability to run New York City’s huge government bureaucracy, including the delivery of essential police, fire and sanitation services, as well as the largest and most expensive public school system in the United States, with more than one million students attending more than 1,800 schools.
EVALUATING THE CUOMO ALTERNATIVE
By contrast, Mamdani’s chief opponent, Andrew Cuomo, has emphasized his ten years of experience as New York State governor as well as four years as the federal Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the Clinton administration. For further support, the article cited the results of a Quinnipiac University poll conducted in early October, which found that out of more than 1,000 likely New York City voters, only 39% thought Mamdani had “the right kind of experience to be mayor of New York City,” while 47 percent did not think that he did. That compared to 73% (vs. 22%) of polled New Yorkers who said they thought that Cuomo did have the right experience.
However, the same poll found that a majority of New Yorkers (54% vs. 41%) did not think that Cuomo, who was forced to step down as governor in disgrace in 2021, was sufficiently ethical. In the same poll, a plurality of surveyed voters said that Mamdani would be more effective than Cuomo at lowering housing costs, managing the city’s public schools, and keeping their families safe, while only giving Cuomo the advantage over Mamdani in his ability to grow the city’s economy.
The last time a 34-year-old won the mayoralty was when John Purroy Mitchel was elected in 1913, as a Republican candidate running on a reform platform, and then became known as the “Boy Mayor of New York.” By contrast, at the age of 67, Cuomo was running to become the oldest first-term mayor in the city’s history. He was following in the footsteps of his father, Mario Cuomo, who ran for New York City mayor in 1977 and was defeated in a Democrat primary runoff election by then-Manhattan Congressman Ed Koch.
In response to the criticism of his lack of managerial experience, Mamdani sought to attribute the success of his mayoral campaign to his organizational abilities. He also sought to neutralize his stated support for defunding the police and called the New York Police Department (NYPD) “racist” and “a major threat to public safety,” by promising to ask the widely praised current police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, to stay on in her current post. Despite that promise, he admitted that he had not spoken to her throughout the campaign. In addition, when Mamdani was endorsed by New York State Governor Kathy Hochul in September, she promised to assist him in finding a “very seasoned team to help manage a wildly complicated city.”
MAMDANI PROPOSES TO SUBSTITUTE INTEGRITY FOR EXPERIENCE
In the mayoral campaign’s second and final debate, Mamdani sought to turn Cuomo’s decade of experience as governor from an asset into a liability by declaring, “What I don’t have in experience I make up for in integrity, and what you don’t have in integrity you could never make up for in experience.” He was referring to serious accusations that Cuomo was responsible for the 2020 deaths of 15,000 elderly New York City residents who contracted Covid in nursing homes after being forced by a Cuomo-approved order issued by the New York State Health Department requiring them to be removed from their beds in city hospitals, and returned to nursing homes, which were not equipped to deal with the Covid threat.
Even before he became governor, Cuomo was notorious as a political bully. He was ultimately forced to resign as governor in 2021 due to accusations by multiple people of unacceptably aggressive personal behavior. Cuomo vigorously denies those accusations and emphasizes that he was never criminally charged for his conduct. However, in April, President Trump’s Department of Justice opened an investigation into Cuomo’s nursing home policies during the first year of the pandemic.
Meanwhile, a slew of polls released late last week and over the weekend showed little movement in the mayoral race. Mamdani’s lead over Cuomo ranged from a low of 7 points in an Atlas/Intel poll to a high of 25 points in a Hill/ Emerson poll. They yielded an average lead of 14.7 points for Mamdani over Cuomo, according to the RealClearPolitics website. The Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa, who has refused many calls to drop out of the race to give Cuomo a better chance to beat Mamdani, was running a distant third, trailing Cuomo by 17 points and Mamdani by more than 30 points.
An update of the relatively little-known Atlas/Intel poll released the day before Election Day suggested that the race had tightened further, and that Mamdani’s lead over Cuomo, in a three-way race including Sliwa, had shrunk to just 4.5% (43.9% to 39.4%). The last-minute poll also suggested that if Sliwa had dropped out of the race, Cuomo would have picked up enough of the Republicans’ 15.5% of the vote to overtake Mamdani in a one-on-one faceoff election, and that Cuomo would have defeated the socialist candidate by a 5.6% margin (49.7% to 44.1%).
However, other pollsters criticized the accuracy of the Atlas/Intel poll because its sample underrepresented registered Democrat voters, who comprised only 59% of those who were surveyed, whereas in New York City elections, Democrats usually make up about 2/3 (67%) of the electorate. Nevertheless, the Cuomo campaign seized on the late Atlas/Intel poll as evidence that the race was tightening and that Cuomo had closed to within striking distance of Mamdani and a dramatic come-from-behind victory.
ELON MUSK CALLS MAMDANI A “CHARISMATIC SWINDLER”
Elon Musk, during an interview with popular podcaster Joe Rogan over the weekend, called Mamdani a “charismatic swindler” but also gave credit for being able “to light up a stage,” which is why Musk said he expects Mamdani is “likely to be [elected] mayor of New York City.”
Conservative commentator Liz Peek wrote in The Hill that “Mamdani is not a serious person… because none of [his] signature campaign proposals, estimated to cost $7 billion per year, will actually reduce the cost of living in New York.”
After noting that “You cannot freeze rents on subsidized housing. . . without driving landlords to abandon unprofitable buildings . . . You cannot make buses “free” without presumably extending the same benefit to other modes of public transportation. . . You cannot push green energy without seeing electricity costs soar. . . And you cannot hope to fund all the wonderful freebies with tax hikes on high earners and businesses without then watching many of them exit the city,” Peek concludes, “Mamdani’s platform is absurd, and every grown-up in New York knows it.”
In addition, Peek notes, Mamdani’s alleged dedication to making the cost-of-living in New York City more affordable and increasing the supply of affordable housing is not sincere, because if it were, he would have endorsed the three proposals that were also on the November 4 ballot that would loosen the City Council’s stranglehold over affordable real estate development throughout the city.
MAMDANI IS FOLLOWING THE FAILED PATH OF MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO
“But then,” Peek writes, “nearly everything about Mamdani’s candidacy, from his apparent antisemitism to his antagonism toward law enforcement, is appalling. New York has been down the progressive path before, under former Mayor Bill de Blasio; it did not turn out well.”
A Quinnipiac University poll, released on October 29, conveyed the most troubling finding of the campaign for New York City Jewry. After months of vigorous efforts by responsible community leaders to alert New York City’s Jewish voters to just how dangerous a Mamdani mayoralty would be, the Quinnipiac poll found that 16% (one out of every six), New York City Jews surveyed expected to vote for the socialist Israel-hater. Meanwhile, 55-60% of Jewish voters expressed a preference for Cuomo, which is a 20-25% improvement over Cuomo’s level of Jewish support in September, which implies that Cuomo picked up virtually all of those Jewish voters who said that they supported Mayor Eric Adams before he dropped out of the race. But even 60% of the Jewish vote still seemed inadequate to overcome Mamdani’s double-digit overall polling lead, unless a much larger percentage of voters, alarmed by the prospect of Mamdani as mayor, were to turn out at the polls on Election Day.
The antisemitism underlying Mamdani’s anti-Israel record and vicious rhetoric is now far beyond any reasonable doubt. These include his public record of support for the notoriously antisemitic Students for Justice in Palestine and the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). For months, he stubbornly refused to condemn incendiary anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian slogans such as “From the river to the sea” and “Globalize the intifada,” and his continued support for the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement against Israel, which goes back to his undergraduate years at Bowdoin College, more than a decade ago.
WHY SO MANY LIBERAL JEWS ARE BLIND TO MAMDANI’S ANTI-SEMITISM
According to Jonathan Tobin, the editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, the support by so many Jewish liberals for Mamdani’s candidacy should not be surprising, given their acceptance of “toxic” progressive leftist ideologies. These include Critical Race Theory (CRT), Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), the distorted, race-based version of America’s democratic heritage which the New York Times has promoted as the “1619 Project,” and the labeling by the liberal establishment of all Jews as “white oppressors” of “people of color,” as well as a broad spectrum of other victimized identity groups, as recognized by liberals, beginning with the Palestinians.
Much like the assimilated Jews of pre-war Nazi Germany who were so proud of their German citizenship, their unquestioning acceptance of these liberal myths has blinded today’s left-wing American Jews to the danger from the underlying antisemitism of leading progressive socialists, including self-hating secular Jews such as Senator Bernie Sanders, and antisemitic, pro-Palestinian American Muslims like Mamdani.
These liberal Jews have accepted the false analogy between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the struggle to secure civil rights for American Blacks during the 1960s, and the idea that support for Israel as a Jewish state is somehow racist, even though many other countries around the world have long accepted Islam or Christianity as their official state religion. These Jews also see nothing wrong with supporting the cause of Palestinian nationalism, as practiced by both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, even though its chief objective seems to be the mass murder of Jews and the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state, regardless of the cost in terms of civilian Palestinian lives lost.
That willful blindness has undermined the loyalty of these liberal Jews to their own people and fueled their intolerance for Israel, serving as the sole sanctuary and defender of last resort for oppressed Jews around the world.
MAMDANI’S THREAT TO THE SAFETY OF NEW YORK CITY’S JEWS
Tobin observes that, “All of these pro-Mamdani Jews are under the mistaken impression that a [New York] City run by someone hostile to Jewish life in Israel wouldn’t impact their existence. . .
“[They fail to recognize that] putting City Hall in the hands of a Democratic Socialist would marginalize Jewish security, especially when you consider Mamdani’s support for the pro-Hamas mobs that targeted Jews on the city’s college campuses.”
Tobin also condemns “the apathy of [Jewish] leaders who prefer to be silent about this threat at a moment of genuine crisis for the Jewish community.” He is referring to the non-Orthodox American “rabbis” who refused to sign onto a public letter entitled “The Rabbinic Call to Action: Defending the Jewish Future,” which condemns Mamdani’s mayoral candidacy. This letter was signed by more than 1,100 Reform, Conservative, and [Modern] Orthodox “rabbis” and “cantors” from communities throughout the country.
The letter calls upon “all Americans who value peace and equality. . . to stand up for candidates [without mentioning Cuomo by name] who reject antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric, and who affirm Israel’s right to exist in peace and security. . .”
It concludes that, “Now is the time for everyone to unite across political and moral divides, and to reject the language that seeks to delegitimize our Jewish identity and our community.”
Those rabbis who refused to sign the letter no longer have the excuse that religious institutions risk losing their non-profit tax-exempt status if they engage in partisan politics. That is because the IRS announced on July 7 of this year that it will no longer enforce the Johnson amendment, which was introduced by then-Texas Senator Lyndon B. Johnson in 1954.
365 LIBERAL RABBIS SIGN A LETTER DEFENDING MAMDANI
In response to “The Rabbinic Call to Action,” Mamdani’s campaign has published its own letter, entitled “Jews for a Shared Future,” which has been signed by 365 liberal American “rabbis,” “cantors,” and “rabbinical students” and more than 120 self-described “Jewish leaders.” It declares that “Zohran Mamdani’s support for Palestinian self-determination [and presumably his harsh condemnations of Israel] stems not from hate, but from his deep moral convictions.” It also labels the opposition to Mamdani’s candidacy as a manifestation of Islamophobia, which the letter claims is as much of a threat to the safety of the Jewish community as the eruption of antisemitic attacks on Jews across the country since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.
Mamdani has also benefited from the problematic record of his chief electoral opponent, Cuomo, who has a well-earned reputation as a political bully, and the nursing home fatalities he was responsible for during the peak of the Covid pandemic. On the other hand, Cuomo, like most mainstream Democrats of his generation, has a long record of support for Israel and opposition to antisemitism, as well as a belief in American free market capitalism rather than socialism, which should have made him, even in the eyes of his longtime political opponents, the lesser of two evils in this mayoral election.
MORE DEMOCRATS PREFER SOCIALISM TO CAPITALISM
The rising popularity of socialism, especially with younger American registered voters, was verified by the results of a new NBC News poll. It found that support for capitalism among all voters has dropped below 50% for the first time in the seven years that NBC has been polling on the issue. It found that overall, 44% of voters say they support capitalism vs. 28% who view it negatively. When the survey was tabulated by political affiliation, it found that Republicans support capitalism by a ratio of 2-1, and independents also support capitalism by a margin of 44% to 28%. But self-identified Democrats told the pollsters that they now disapprove of capitalism by a margin of 45% to 25%, which represents a reversal from last year’s NBC poll, in which Democrats said that they approved of capitalism by a margin of 39% to 34%.
Similarly, the current NBC poll found that a plurality of Democrats nationwide view socialism in a positive light, by a 35% to 20%, which is also a reversal from last year’s survey, in which Democrats disapproved of socialism by a 34% to 29% margin. In analyzing these polling trends, the NBC press release suggested that, “Views on capitalism and socialism, particularly among Democrats, are evolving as Mamdani and other self-described democratic socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), have become increasingly powerful in their party.”
The same poll found that the race for the New York City mayoralty has attracted so much attention that 22% of all registered voters polled nationwide say they support Mamdani, while 32% disapprove of him, and another 14% say that they are neutral. The remaining 32% say they didn’t know enough about Mamdani to form an opinion. On the other hand, every polled Republican around the country who recognized Mamdani’s name expressed their disapproval of him.
THE SOCIALIST NON-HOSTILE TAKEOVER OF THE DEMOCRAT PARTY
A New York Post op-ed written by self-declared moderate Democrat Adam Coleman claims that the endorsement of Mamdani by mainstream New York Democrat leaders, Governor Kathy Hochul and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, is the next step in the DSA’s “non-hostile takeover” of the national party.
Coleman claims that the DSA takeover began in 2018, when the old Democrat party leadership establishment accepted AOC and the radical progressive members of her “Squad” as a harmless far-left addition to the Democrat “big tent.” The moderates in the party believed that there was still some room left for their occasional expression of dissenting opinions out of step with the extreme left-wing worldview that was being imposed on the party by the socialist-inspired followers of Bernie Sanders.
But in fact, according to Coleman, with the acceptance of AOC’s Squad, the Democrat party leadership had granted permission for the entry of a “socialist Trojan Horse” into its midst. Even after the progressive foothold in the party’s leadership structure was established, the party’s old guard leadership refused to fight back. They were so obsessed with countering the perceived threat from Trump, Coleman writes, they “didn’t think it was possible [that a more dangerous] enemy was coming [at them] from within.”
It was no secret among party leaders that after Biden became president, he kept the bargain he made before the election with Bernie Sanders and AOC to hand over the ideological agenda of his administration to the extreme leftist progressives, at least with regard to domestic issues. According to Coleman, the leftists then captured and slaughtered “any remnants of political common sense,” which eventually led to the disastrous rejection of the Democrats by a clear majority of mainstream voters in the 2024 presidential election, from which the party has yet to recover.
Coleman writes that the remaining Democrat moderates “refused to fight back against the communist takeover” because they “couldn’t understand [that] progressivism is the [seemingly harmless] gateway drug that inevitably leads to [the addictive] cocaine [of] communism” underlying the DSA’s Marxist ideology.
He also notes that since the takeover, most of the remaining moderate Democrats who have not yet been pushed aside by progressive candidates have succumbed to “a political Stockholm syndrome.” They are “applauding their socialist conquerors for not executing them, and allowing themselves to fall in love with their [conquerors’ extreme leftist] ambitions. . .
“The [progressive] victors successfully leveraged the [moderate] Democrats’ loathing of Donald Trump by pushing the lie that the enemy of their enemy is their friend.”
SOCIALISTS ARE TRYING TO REPLACE DEMOCRATS TO DESTROY AMERICA
Meanwhile, Fox News reported on a new video produced by the Canary Mission, a watchdog organization and website dedicated to exposing and fighting antisemitism, as well as “hatred across the entire political spectrum, including the far right [and the] far left.” The video features clips of the leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the organization that counts both Mamdani and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) among its members. In fact, Mamdani served as the keynote speaker at the DSA’s national convention in 2023.
In those clips, the DSA leaders declare their “hatred” for the current Democrat Party and their intention to use their growing influence over the Democrats “as a ‘tool’ to push forward their aims of destroying [America’s] current capitalist society.”
The Canary Mission video also warns that the DSA is using a strategy to subvert the Democrats, which was borrowed from the behavior of the cuckoo bird. “In nature,” the soundtrack from the video claims, “the cuckoo survives by trickery. It lays its egg in another bird’s nest. The unsuspecting parent [birds] raise the impostor as their own [offspring] until the cuckoo grows strong enough to push the true chicks out [of the nest].” The video’s narrator then warns that “The DSA is the cuckoo inside the Democratic Party.”
Even more disturbing, instead of issuing a denial in response to the accusation in the Canary Mission video that the DSA intends to subvert and eventually replace the current Democrat Party, Brooklyn-based DSA leader Nicolás Vargas welcomed the video as a great recruitment ad, which he expects will persuade more people to join the DSA’s ranks.
Another DSA organizer, Miko Ludoviko, called the Canary Mission video “the best DSA ad I’ve ever seen. The DSA is an anti-capitalist organization with the long-term goal of taking state power. The Democratic Party is a tool we use for local elections, but it remains an enemy of the working class.”
DSA SOCIALISTS HOPE TO USE MAMDANI TO SEIZE STATE POWER
During a recorded DSA panel discussion in August, New York City-based DSA activist Daniel Goulden declared, “With Zohran, we’re in basically the best possible position to seize state power.” Goulden added that “one of the things that made Zohran really successful with his [mayoral] policy rollouts is specifically [his reliance] on DSA.”
“We wrote the [campaign] platform with him. The [Mamdani campaign] team was so happy to work with us on this.”
DSA leader Goulden then continued, “What we explicitly wanted to do [with Mamdani] was use the power of New York City to provide free [health] care. . . in case insurance companies decide to boot us off. . . not just to people in New York City, but across the country.”
In addition to its undisputed claim that the DSA seeks to replace the Democrat Party, another Canary Mission graphic accuses the DSA’s so-called “Red Star Caucus” of trying to “weaken and ultimately dismantle the U.S. empire.”
The endorsement of Mamdani by Governor Hochul in front of 3,000 supporters in Flushing, Queens, last week, in which she also signed on to his promises of free child care and a citywide rent freeze, and a similar surrender of his political independence by House Minority Leader Jeffries, amounted to the next step in the DSA’s takeover of the party.
Their endorsements of Mamdani signal that the “party’s political moderates have folded and given all power to DSA candidates, who hold policy positions incredibly unpopular among most Americans, especially independents.”
They have doubled down on these losing positions because they are elitist socialist types who look down on the needs of common Americans. That is why, Coleman explains, Democrats now have a 60% unfavorable rating in the eyes of American voters, a 30-year low.
NEW YORK CITY’S MAYORAL RACE IS DIVIDING FAMILIES
A New York Times story published a few days before the election noted that heated disagreements over the choice between Cuomo and Mamdani had divided many New York City families, often along generational lines. Many younger voters have been eager to support Mamdani because he is a candidate their age who has addressed their concerns about New York City’s affordability problem, while their parents are leery of Mamdani’s open support for socialism and his lack of practical experience in governmental management.
In a separate story, the New York Times also noted that many older Asians who came to New York City during the Cold War era view Mamdani’s socialism as a “curse” because of their personal experience, having fled from communist-ruled countries such as China to start their lives over in America, as a free democratic and capitalist country.
As an example, the New York Times article cites the story of Song Ying, age 72, and her husband, who came to this country penniless from mainland China in 1978. She became a reporter for a Chinese-language newspaper, and her husband founded a small telecom business. Their success enabled them to give their two children good college educations, leading to professional careers.
WHY OLDER ASIAN-AMERICANS OPPOSE MAMDANI’S SOCIALISM
But Song Ying now finds herself perplexed because of the enthusiasm that her children and their young Asian-American friends have for Mamdani’s socialism, which she views as a “disaster [because] everything I’ve seen and experienced points to that. It [socialism] breeds laziness and kills the motivation to strive.”
She claims that her children and their friends, whom she calls “Ivy League [college] types,” are attracted to Mamdani’s promises of improvements in affordability because they have been priced out of homes in their gentrified former working class neighborhoods, such as Sunset Park and Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, and Elmhurst in Queens, but they fail to see socialism’s destructive side which Song Ying and her husband experienced personally before coming to America.
The New York Times story also cited the story of Angela Li, age 26, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, who is frustrated with her mother, age 56, because she voted for President Trump last year, and planned to vote for Cuomo in this week’s mayoral election, while Angela was supporting Mamdani on the strength of his campaign promise to provide universal free child care in New York City, without explaining how he plans to pay for it.
Ms. Li, who still lives in her parents’ home in Kew Gardens, Queens, blames the recent increase in support for Trump and other Republican candidates in New York City’s Asian communities on the fact that many middle-aged and older Asian immigrants who have lived here for many years are still uncomfortable with the English language. They rely primarily on local Chinese-language news media, as well as the WeChat Chinese-language messaging app, which tend to carry a lot of pro-Trump and pro-Republican content.
As a result, the vote in the New York City Asian community for Republican Lee Zeldin in the 2022 gubernatorial election against Kathy Hochul increased by 23 points compared to the 2018 election, when Democrat incumbent governor Andrew Cuomo defeated his Republican opponent, Cynthia Nixon, by a margin of 65.5% to 34.5%. In the 2022 election, Zeldin was even able to carry the Chinese-American enclaves in Sunset Park and Bensonhurst against Hochul.
HOW LIBERAL ATTITUDES HAVE CHANGED
Joey Zhang, age 44, who immigrated to the United States from mainland China in 2003 and now lives in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, admitted to a New York Times reporter that she and her 13-year-old daughter are divided over her intention to vote for Cuomo because she doesn’t believe in all of the “free stuff” that Mamdani is offering. Ms. Zhang, who works as a customer service representative, said that the attitude of liberals has changed since she arrived here 12 years ago. “[They now] want people to believe that everyone deserves the same, no matter the effort. But,” she observed, “life doesn’t work that way.”
Lisa Lau, whose parents fled from mainland China to Hong Kong and then immigrated to the United States in 1978, where they settled in Sunset Park, now works as a data analyst at the World Bank, after her parents made it possible for her to graduate from an Ivy League college. Lisa says she disagreed with her parents’ decision to start voting for Donald Trump in 2016 because he decided to challenge the trade policies of China’s communist government, as well as her now-widowed mother’s stated intention to vote for a mayoral candidate who will take New York City’s crime problem more seriously than Mamdani does. Her mother also believes that too many people are exploiting this country’s liberal social programs, and said, “There should be proper vetting [to prevent people from] tak[ing] unfair advantage of it.”
Lisa told the New York Times that she found it frustrating when her parents turned against the liberal social welfare programs, such as food stamps and free child care, from which they had benefitted when they first arrived in this country, but when she challenged them on that choice, she said, “they just pretended not to hear me.”
During the last weekend before the mayoral election, Mamdani launched a major effort to shore up his support among Cuomo’s traditional voter base in the Black and Latino neighborhoods of East Harlem by making public appearances with Black political leaders such as the notoriously antisemitic Al Sharpton, New York State Attorney General Letitia James, and Brooklyn Congressman as well as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
MAMDANI AND SHARPTON PLAY THE ISLAMOPHOBIA CARD
Speaking at a Harlem event sponsored by Sharpton’s National Action Network, Mamdani accused Cuomo of “unabashedly running” a campaign based upon “naked [anti-Islamic] bigotry and racism.” That accusation was promptly echoed by Sharpton, who told his followers, “I am outraged at the ugly Islamophobia that has been used in this campaign to act as though every Muslim is a terrorist.” He then said, in a thinly veiled dig against Cuomo, “If you can’t get a vote on your record, don’t play us against each other.”
Meanwhile, at a news conference crosstown in the economically deprived black neighborhood of Brownsville, Brooklyn, Cuomo declared that “There is no Islamophobia from me or my campaign. The divisiveness has come from Zohran Mamdani.” Cuomo also noted that, “We’re in a situation in this city where the Jewish community is frightened and upset, literally frightened to walk on the streets, and it’s Mr. Mamdani who won’t denounce [the widespread use by pro-Palestinian liberals of the threatening antisemitic phrase] ‘globalize the intifada.’”
At another weekend campaign event held in Southeast Queens, where Cuomo was joined by incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who recently endorsed Cuomo after dropping out of the race, Cuomo said that it was Mamdani who “has been divisive and offensive throughout this whole campaign.”
In a radio interview with conservative talk show host and successful businessman John Catsimatidis on WABC 770 AM (which Catsimatidis owns), Cuomo blasted Mamdani as “the most divisive candidate I have ever experienced in New York.”
CUOMO SAYS MAMDANI “HAS OFFENDED EVERYONE”
“He alienated the Jewish community,” Cuomo said. [He] alienated [Cuomo’s own] Italian community. . . [He called the NYPD] “racist, wicked, and corrupt.” [He called] “Barack Obama, ‘evil and a liar’ … He has offended everyone.”
In the radio interview, Cuomo also criticized Mamdani for his bogus promises to New Yorkers to make such things as child care and bus rides free, and said “the fact that Mamdani has zero qualifications [to serve as mayor] is actually quite dangerous.”
In an interview with a reporter from the liberal MSNBC cable news channel, Cuomo said that he “100 percent” condemned any Islamophobic comments against Mamdani, and declared that New York City’s ethnic and religious “diversity is our strength.” But he then added that “it can also be a weakness,” and promised that as mayor of New York City, he would “work very, very hard to make sure you’re always keeping people united, and [to avoid] flare-ups among different races, religions, [and] creeds.”
Meanwhile, President Trump threatened that if Mamdani, whom he called a communist, were elected the next mayor of New York City, he would use his discretionary powers as president to withhold federal funding from the city.
TRUMP’S STRENGTHENS HIS ENDORSEMENT FOR CUOMO
During a recorded interview, which was broadcast over the weekend by CBS News, President Trump said it would be “hard” for him to continue giving billions of dollars of federal funding to New York City if Mamdani becomes mayor: “All you’re doing is wasting the money you’re sending there,” Trump said.
The president also made it clear that even though he is “not a fan of Cuomo,” who publicly clashed with Trump during the Covid pandemic, he would still prefer to deal with Cuomo rather than Mamdani as the next mayor of New York City. “If it’s going to be between a bad Democrat [Cuomo] and a Communist [Mamdani], I’m going to pick the bad Democrat all the time,” Trump declared.
However, when Mamdani seized on Trump’s interview remarks as proof that Cuomo is a representative of the failed Democrat Party establishment, Trump responded the next day by declaring on his Truth Social account, “Whether you personally like Andrew Cuomo or not, you really have no choice,” Trump wrote. “You must vote for him and hope he does a fantastic job. He is capable of it, Mamdani is not!”
Over the weekend, Mamdani tried to further ingratiate himself with Black voters by publicizing a 30-minute phone call he received from Barack Obama, though it was short of a full-fledged endorsement of Mamdani’s mayoral candidacy.
OBAMA AVOIDS AN OPEN ENDORSEMENT OF MAMDANI
Obama had spent the weekend attending rallies for Democrat gubernatorial candidates Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, who were both facing stronger-than-expected challenges from their Republican opponents, especially Jack Ciattarelli in New Jersey, who nearly upset then-incumbent New Jersey governor Phil Murphy four years ago.
But even though he was not very far from New York City, Obama did not make an appearance at a Mamdani rally, or to give his mayoral campaign the boost it would have gotten, especially with Black voters, from a picture of Obama and Mamdani standing together in mutual support.
Perhaps the reason for that snub was something that Cuomo recalled, when he referred to Mamdani’s comments on social media, while he was still a politically active college student, in which he called then-President Obama, “evil and a liar.”
According to Mamdani, Obama told him during the phone call that, “Your campaign has been impressive to watch,” and offered to serve as a “sounding board” for Mamdani, presumably as the mayor of New York City.
James Freeman, the assistant editor of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, blasted the former president for failing his duty as the elder statesman of his party. Obama’s ambiguous message of support by phoning Mamdani instead of endorsing him face-to-face no doubt disappointed and confused Obama’s many admirers in New York City who were hoping for clear guidance from him in casting their vote for mayor.
But instead of rejecting Mamdani’s radical Marxism, or fully endorsing Mamdani’s stated goal of making life in New York City more affordable, especially for young adults, Freeman criticized Obama for deliberately fudging the issue by adopting “a self-serving straddle.” According to Freeman, Obama has “executed a non-courageous hedge, offering encouragement to Mr. Mamdani while avoiding responsibility for the catastrophe that will likely occur if he is elected mayor.”
HOW MUCH HARM COULD MAMDANI DO TO NEW YORK CITY AS MAYOR?
While many New York city residents, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, are deeply worried about the effects of Mamdani’s socialist agenda if elected mayor, Carl Weisbord, who co-chaired former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s transition team writs that “There are very real structural, budgetary and legal limits on what the city’s chief executive can accomplish without the cooperation and support of other branches of city or state government.”
More specifically, to raise taxes in order to pay the estimated $7 billion cost of Mamdani’s promised giveaway programs, he will need the support of Governor Hochul and the legislature in Albany. He will also need to spend a significant amount of his political capital with the members of the City Council and the many other stakeholders and powerbrokers whose interests will be impacted by Mamdani’s ambitious and broad-ranging policy agenda.
Matt Shuham, a senior reporter for the liberal HuffPost website, suggests that some of Mamdani’s campaign promises will be more difficult to fulfill than others.
FULFILLING MAMDANI’S RENT FREEZE PROMISE
The easiest promise for Mamdani to fulfill will be freezing the rent on around 1 million “rent-stabilized” apartments in the city, because they are controlled by the city’s Rent Guidelines Board, whose nine members are all mayoral appointees. The board makes its citywide rent percentage increase decisions once a year, in June, which take effect the next October.
The Rent Guidelines Board has been in operation since 1969. It has its origins in the rent control legislation, which was passed to deal with the city’s housing “emergency” during World War II.
Imposing a rent freeze on the stabilized apartments in New York City is not a new idea. In fact, such freezes were put in place three times when Bill de Blasio was mayor between 2014 and 2021.
Mamdani announced that one of the top priorities for his first 100 days as mayor will be to appoint new members to the Rent Guidelines Board “who understand that landlords are doing just fine,” and don’t need a rent increase. The only limitation of the mayor’s power is a limit of no more than four new members that he can appoint to the board during the first year of his administration. That means that if he wants to impose a rent freeze next year, Mamdani will need to convince at least some of the current board members who were appointed by Mayor Eric Adams to go along with it. Otherwise, his rent freeze will not go into effect before October 2027. Furthermore, the rent freeze will not cost the city any money, in contrast to many of Mamdani’s other campaign promises.
HELP FROM ALBANY NEEDED TO PAY FOR FREE CHILD CARE
According to estimates by various sources, including Mamdani’s own campaign, his most expensive campaign promise is providing universal no-cost child care for children between 6 weeks to 5 years old in the city, which would cost at least $6 billion. This is probably more than could be comfortably squeezed into the city’s current $115 billion annual budget. It will probably require a new source of tax income, which must be passed by the state legislature in Albany and signed into law by Governor Hochul.
Mamdani has proposed to raise $10 billion through a new 2% income tax on New York City residents making more than $1 million per year, which would raise $4 billion; increasing the top state corporate tax rate to 11.5%, from 7.25%, to raise $5 billion; and a mix of government procurement reforms and stepped-up fine and tax collections to generate the last $1 billion needed to reach the desired total.
OVERCOMING HOCHUL’S NO NEW TAX PROMISE
According to HuffPost reporter Shuham, Mamdani already has enough support from the Democrats in the Albany legislature, with whom he spent the last four years, to pass the legislation needed for a new income tax and to increase the top corporate tax rate. Governor Hochul has declared that she is “not raising taxes at a time when affordability is the big issue,” and her spokesman recently confirmed she is “not open to raising income taxes” at this time, which means that New York City voters will probably have to wait a while (probably not until after Hochul wins re-election as governor next November), before Mayor Mamdani can delivers on his free child care promise to them.
However, at the recent Mamdani rally in Queens attended by Senator Bernie Sanders and AOC, the Mamdani supporters in the audience made it clear to Governor Hochul that they didn’t want to wait that long for his promise of free child care by starting to chant “Tax the rich!” After initially attempting the chants, Governor Hochul responded, saying, “I can hear you,” indicating support for the demand.
When confronted about that the next day, she said she thought the crowd was cheering the Buffalo Bills football team.
Another big-ticket Mamdani campaign promise to New York City voters is his pledge to build 200,000 new, “permanently affordable, union-built, rent-stabilized homes” over the next decade. It will cost an estimated $100 billion, which can also only be financed if the state legislature and Governor Hochul permit the city to raise its current debt limit.
As mayor, Mamdani will also need Albany approval to make good on his pledge to raise the city’s minimum wage to $30 an hour by 2030.
On the other hand, the city does have enough slack in its current budget to cover the cost of about $700 million a year to make riding on city buses free, as well as the estimated $60 million it will cost to open a not-for-profit city-run grocery store in each of the five boroughs. So while Mamdani will need a significant amount of help from the state government in Albany to fulfill key parts of his agenda, he will be able to deliver at least some of it on his own.
THE CHALLENGE OF TRUMP’S OPPOSITION
But other significant challenges will face Mamdani as mayor of New York City. One of them will be the hostility of President Trump, who has called Mamdani a “communist.” Some of the funding cuts in Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” that he signed into law on July 4 will cost New York City and New York State dearly. According to the leftist, organized labor-supported think tank called the Fiscal Policy Institute, those cuts “will cost the state of New York over $15 billion per year, kick 1.5 million New Yorkers off their health insurance, eliminate benefits for up to 1 million food stamp recipients, cause the loss of over 200,000 jobs, and threaten nearly half of all hospitals throughout the state with financial collapse.”
Trump also recently announced that he has canceled an $18 billion federal funding grant for two major New York City infrastructure projects, including the construction of a long-delayed second commuter railway tunnel running under the Hudson River, connecting New York City to New Jersey, and the extension north to 125th Street in Manhattan of the Second Avenue subway line.
Trump could also cause problems for Mamdani’s promise to make major renovations to city-owned public housing projects by canceling the federal funding for the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA).
MAMDANI’S MANAGEMENT CHALLENGE
Presumably, these problems could be solved should Mamdani be able to come up with an alternate source for the federal funding that Trump has cut off. But a more serious ongoing challenge that will face Mamdani as New York City’s mayor is the need to pick the right people to run New York City’s various departments and oversee its huge bureaucracy.
According to Jessica Katz, who served in three New York City mayoral administrations, including as Mayor Adams’ housing chief in 2022 and 2023, “Government insiders are looking to see the names of who he [Mamdani] appoints. . . He’s going to be running an operation at a scale that requires an amount of oversight and delegation [of authority] that is a very gentle balance. So picking the right people, and letting them do their job, is going to be the number one thing that everyone’s looking for who’s been in these kinds of positions before.”
In other words, running New York City properly as mayor, even if he has put an outstanding management team in place, will be no easy task for the young, brash, and talented but inexperienced Zohran Mamdani.
The Washington Post editorial board also concedes that a pro-Palestinian Muslim socialist mayor could cause longtime Jewish residents to “begin to flee in droves,” and the future of the Democratic Party as a mainstream American political party will be very much “up for grabs, now and in [the] 2028 [presidential election].
