Former three-term New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo has decided to stay in the New York City mayoral race, but is debating whether to actively campaign after suffering a stunning loss last week in the Democrat primary race to Zohran Mamdani, an upstart member of AOC’s Democratic Socialist Party. Mamdani is a 33-year-old New York State Assemblyman from northwestern Queens who has long been an outspoken supporter of the BDS boycott movement against Israel, and has repeatedly refused to condemn the antisemitic calls by his fellow pro-Palestinian Muslims for a “global intifada” clearly directed against New York City’s 1.3 million Jewish population.
Justifying his decision to remain on the ballot on an independent “Fight and Deliver” party line in the November 4 general election for mayor, despite his embarrassing primary loss, Cuomo observed, “There are about 5 million voters in New York City. There are about 8 million people in New York City, and about 1 million people vote in the Democratic primary. So it’s not necessarily representative of the city at large.” Cuomo also suggested that Mamdani, if elected, would not be able to deliver on his campaign promises, “offering a lot of free services… is that feasible? Is that realistic? Can that be done?”
President Trump railed against Democratic voters who made Mamdani their presumptive nominee for mayor.
“This communist from New York. Somebody gets elected, I can’t believe that’s happening. That’s a terrible thing for our country, by the way. He’s a communist. We’re gonna go to a communist? That’s so bad for New York,” Trump said, and then added, “They [Democrats] say ‘we [Republicans] will raise your taxes,’ and [then] they elect people like this guy in New York,” who campaigned on raising taxes.
CUOMO’S DEFEAT GIVES NYC MAYOR ERIC ADAMS A SECOND CHANCE
Meanwhile, incumbent NYC Mayor Eric Adams, who dropped out before last week’s Democrat primary, mostly because he has been criticized by Democrat party leaders for cooperating with the Trump administration, relaunched his independent re-election campaign for the general election in light of Cuomo’s poor showing in the primary.
“I believe Andrew ran, and his numbers are clear on how he lost to Mamdani. And I think that we’re going to come out with a very clear message, a very direct message. And he doesn’t have a record. I have a record. I could run on my record, and that’s what I’m excited about, to let New Yorkers know about the record,” Mayor Adams said.
He criticized Mamdani’s unrealistic promises to provide free bus rides, city-run grocery stores, and a rent freeze for stabilized tenants in New York City.
“This is not a city where you use idealism to state you’re giving everything to everyone for free. There’s no dignity in someone giving you everything for free. There’s dignity in giving you a job,” Mayor Adams said.
Looking forward to the November general election for mayor, a poll of New York City voters by the Honan Strategy Group released two days after the primary had Mamdani and Cuomo statistically tied at 39%, with Mayor Adams far behind the two frontrunners at only 13%, followed by Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa at just 7%.
WHY ANDREW CUOMO’S COMEBACK CAMPAIGN COLLAPSED
Meanwhile, CNN and the New York Times published major articles examining why Andrew Cuomo, who entered the Democrat mayoral primary campaign in March as the clear front-runner, with a commanding more than 20-point lead in the polls, lost so badly to Mamdani.
The CNN story described a conference call less than two weeks before the primary held by the unofficial head of Cuomo’s campaign, Melissa DeRosa, with other senior leaders of Cuomo’s campaign who vented their frustration at Cuomo’s reluctance to get out and meet with more New York City voters, especially in light of the early-voting results showing that support for previously unknown Mamdani was surging.
But by that point, it was probably already too late for Cuomo to reverse the downward trajectory of his campaign. In addition, according to state Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, who runs the Brooklyn branch of the Democrat party, Cuomo had surrounded himself with “a lot of people who were probably protecting him” from the bitter realization that his campaign was floundering.
In fact, according to the CNN analysis, the signs of Mamdani’s surge in popularity were already apparent by May 28, almost a month before primary day. By that time, Mamdani had already gone from an unknown newcomer to become Cuomo’s chief rival in the race, steadily reducing the former governor’s wide initial lead with every new poll. Mamdani’s unconventional campaign had started to catch the interest of progressives nationwide, as well as a flood of small-dollar campaign contributions.
MAMDANI’S ANTI-ISRAEL POSITIONS
When he was a member of the New York State Assembly, Mamdani promoted, together with his Syrian-American wife, the “Not On Our Dime” bill, which sought to remove the New York State tax-exempt non-profit status of between $200 million and $500 million annually in philanthropic donations to Israeli charities which the couple accuses of supporting “Israeli state violence against Palestinians” and “illegal West Bank settlement expansion.”
Nevertheless, during the Democrat mayoral primary campaign, Mamdani enjoyed the endorsement of some of New York City’s most prominent secular Jewish political leaders, including Congressman Jerry Nadler and New York City Comptroller Brad Lander.
While throughout the primary campaign, Mamdani repeatedly declared that he is opposed to antisemitism, he also threatened, as mayor, to place Israeli Prime Minister Binyomin Netanyahu under arrest the next time he visits New York City based on the criminal warrant that was issued against him by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes committed on his orders against Palestinians in Gaza.
MAMDANI’S SUPPORT FROM SELF-HATING LIBERAL JEWS
According to a Ynet article, Mamdani was also endorsed by a leftist, pro-Palestinian organization which calls itself “Jews for Racial and Economic Justice” (JFREJ). The story quoted the group’s spokeswoman defending Mamdani as the innocent victim of “a lot of wealthy interest groups tried to paint him as a Muslim man who hates Jews. But that image doesn’t reflect who Zohran really is,” she claimed.
The article also quoted an unnamed Reform Jew from Harlem who justified his vote for Mamdani by saying, “You don’t have to agree with him to feel like he’s telling the truth. My problem with the [Democrat] establishment is that it only calls out antisemitism when it’s politically convenient. If you support Israel, you’re okay. [But] if you support human rights, you’re dangerous. [That is why I believe that] Mamdani doesn’t hate me — he hates hypocrisy.”
The story also quoted an Israeli doctoral student named Yael, who lives in Brooklyn. She claims Mamdani is not feared because he is inciting antisemitism, but rather “because he’s a Muslim with power. That’s the whole story. In reality, I’ll feel safer as a Jewish New Yorker under a Mamdani administration.”
MAMDANI REJECTS ISRAEL’S UNIQUE JEWISH CHARACTER
On the other hand, the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York (JCRC-NY) has publicly opposed Mamdani’s candidacy because his views “deny the legitimacy of Jewish ties to Israel.” More specifically, whenever Mamdani was asked during the primary campaign whether he believes that Israel has a right to exist, his “yes” answer was always subject to the condition that “it is a state with equal rights for all its citizens,” and explicitly rejecting Israel’s unique identity as a homeland for the Jewish people.
In addition, the secular American Jewish Committee (AJC) responded to Mamdani’s primary victory by issuing a formal statement warning: “Many New York Jews fear — with good reason — the dramatic rise in antisemitism and the real threats to their daily safety. The next mayor must take these concerns seriously and must not contribute to an environment that tolerates or fosters antisemitism. We will continue to confront any words or actions from candidates or officials that undermine that responsibility.”
But it would also be inaccurate to believe that Mamdani’s primary campaign was totally disconnected from the Jewish community. For example, Mamdani did reach out to some of the Chassidic communities in the city, and specifically promised rabbis from the Satmar community that, as mayor, he would act to protect their yeshivos from New York State regulation requiring them to expand their secular curricula.
Mamdani has also claimed that the intent of his pro-Palestinian positions is to enforce human rights standards uniformly, rather than targeting Jews. It is also apparent from the primary election results that his campaign messages focused on social justice, accessibility, and equality did resonate with a significant number of secular liberal Jewish voters living in New York City, despite the strong and unmistakable taint of antisemitism in his positions in support of BDS and his refusal to acknowledge that Israel has been the victim and target of radical Islamic terrorism.
MAMDANI’S POTENTIAL THREAT TO ISRAEL AS NYC MAYOR
Mamdani’s Jewish critics also cite his sponsorship of the “Not On Our Dime” bill. Even though the legislation has been shelved by the Albany state legislature, Mamdani has pledged to reintroduce it on the city level if he is elected mayor. If such a bill were to be passed, it would cut New York City funding for groups that transfer funds to Israeli communities beyond the Green Line in the West Bank and East Yerushalayim.
The same Ynet article written by Daniel Edelson also gives good reasons for Jews in New York City to be uncomfortable with the prospect of Mamdani as their mayor: “He has already publicly opposed city-funded student delegations to Israel, calling them discriminatory against Muslim and Palestinian students. Mamdani also has consistently avoided using the word ‘terror’ in reference to attacks by Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis against Israel, even when asked directly. While a member of the New York State Assembly in Albany since 2021, he also refused to back legislative initiatives recognizing Israel’s independence, commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Day, or adopting the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of antisemitism, which classifies some forms of anti-Zionism as antisemitism.”
Not only is Mamdani’s longstanding public support for the BDS movement, calling for an economic boycott of Israel, unprecedented. If he is elected mayor, he might put the city in violation of a New York State law passed in 2016, which prohibits public funding or contracts with entities supporting boycotts of Israel.
According to controversial Modern Orthodox Rabbi Marc Schneier, one of Mamdani’s most outspoken opponents, there is good reason for the Jewish community to ask what might happen if Mamdani is the mayor of New York City the next time there is a violent anti-Israel protest on the Columbia University campus, or Prime Minister Netanyahu seeks to attend a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly in Manhattan.
“What will the mayor of New York do?” Schneier asks. “Where will he stand? With whom? This isn’t just about sentiment anymore — it’s about policy. If he [Mamdani] wins [the general election], the whole world will be watching and taking notes.”
IS THIS THE END OF JEWISH NEW YORK AS WE KNOW IT?
Mamdani’s decisive primary victory over Cuomo was also decried by veteran New York City Democrat strategist Hank Sheinkopf as “the end of Jewish New York as we know it.” If he is elected mayor, Sheinkopf predicted that many more New York City Jews will decide to leave the city for Florida, or one of the other fast-growing Jewish communities in the metropolitan region outside of the New York City limits, sparking a sharp decline in the city’s real estate market. Sheinkopf also expressed his amazement that a candidate as inexperienced and untested as Mamdani could be considered qualified to take on the mayoralty of New York, which has often been called the second most challenging job in the world, second only to the presidency of the United States.
Meanwhile, many of Cuomo’s supporters are now quite skeptical of his ability to learn the lessons from last week’s defeat and to make the changes to his campaign approach to stage a comeback in the November 4 general election for mayor, running as an independent with his own line on the ballot. Not only will Cuomo be running against Mamdani on the Democratic Party line, but also former Guardian Angels leader and conservative talk show host Curtis Sliwa on the Republican Party line, and incumbent mayor Eric Adams running on his independent party line.
Adams still hopes to stage his political comeback in the November election. The corruption charges, which were lodged against him after he began to complain about the impact of President Biden’s open border policies on New York City, were dropped by the Trump Justice Department after Adams began to cooperate with Trump’s immigration enforcement policies.
MAMDANI MAY BE THE NEW HOPE FOR DEMOCRAT PROGRESSIVES
Progressive Democrats across the country are hailing Mamdani’s impressive victory over the once formidable Andrew Cuomo as the debut of one of the most naturally talented Democrat politicians since Barack Obama.
During his primary night victory speech, delivered to his supporters at a lounge in Long Island City, Mamdani presented himself aa a possible solution to the Democrat Party’s difficulty in finding an effective progressive response to Donald Trump’s rising popularity with alienated young white and non-white working-class voters who, like most of their parents, used to consider themselves to be lifelong Democrats.
However, while congressional Democrat party leaders, including Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, congratulated Mamdani on his primary victory, both of them stopped short of formally endorsing him for mayor in New York City’s November general election. Jeffries also cautioned that Mamdani’s repeated refusal during campaign interviews to condemn progressive antisemitic calls for a “globalized intifada” against supporters of Israel worldwide was “unacceptable” to more moderate New York City voters. Other Democrats have also express fear that Mamdani’s high profile candidacy would make them, too, vulnerable to charges of turning a blind eye to the antisemitism of the progressive leaders of their party, including the members of AOC’s “Squad” including Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and who have now been joined in their single-minded hatred for Israel by Mamdani.
EXPOSING MAMDANI’S SELECTIVE ATTITUDE TOWARDS STATE RELIGIONS
In trying to justify his opposition to the concept of Israel as a Jewish state, Mamdani said in a recent interview that, “I am not comfortable supporting any state that has a hierarchy of citizenship on the basis of religion.” But if that really is his criterion, Mamdani’s critics ask, then why hasn’t he also spoken out against Muslim-religious states, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, which are far more intolerant of their citizens practicing any other religion?
While Mamdani’s political message has focused on the affordability struggles facing today’s generation of young adults, growing up, he enjoyed the many benefits of an economically privileged upbringing. In a Wall Street Journal report on Mamdani’s improbable rise, he was portrayed as emerging “from a world of privilege with radical politics and charm to spare… to rattle the Democratic establishment and [New York City’s] business elite.”
MAMDANI’S PRIVILEGED ANTI-AMERICAN BACKGROUND
Zohran Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda, and was brought to New York’s Upper West Side at the age of 7 when his father, Mahmood Mamdani, a devout Muslim, joined the faculty at Columbia University as a scholar of “post-colonial studies,” and then published many books analyzing “Western imperialism.” Meanwhile, Zohran’s mother, Mira Nair, successfully pursued her career as a renowned filmmaker working in India’s Bollywood Hindi motion picture industry.
Because money was no problem, his parents were able to send Zohran to the elite Bank Street private elementary school on the Upper West Side, after which he won the stiff academic competition for admission to the highly selective Bronx High School of Science. Then, as a student at Bowdoin College in Maine, Mamdani majored in Africana Studies, and began his long record as an anti-Israel activist by co-founding the school’s chapter of “Students for Justice in Palestine,” and publishing an opinion piece in the school’s student newspaper in support of an academic boycott of Israel.
Like his mother, Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, is also a successful secular career artist and illustrator based in the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) Like Zohran’s father, her artistic work, which has been published by the BBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, has also focused on criticism of “American imperialism.” Duwaji has also said that, despite having been born and raised in Texas, and educated in Virginia and New York City, she relates more strongly to her Arab identity than to the American heritage, and chose deliberately to play a minimal role in her husband’s primary campaign.
The Wall Street Journal profile also observes that “Mamdani appears to have brought to an end one epic New York political story — Cuomo’s — while writing the opening chapter of a new one — his own.”
When asked during a televised candidate debate how he would pay for the many expensive giveaways he was promising to New York City voters, he answered nimbly, “I will pay for this by taxing the 1% — the billionaires and the profitable companies that Mr. Cuomo cares more about than working-class New Yorkers.”
MAMDANI IS SHAKING UP THE DEMOCRAT PARTY ESTABLISHMENT
The same article notes that Mamdani’s sudden and wholly unexpected success “has panicked the Democratic Party’s aging establishment, who worry that the ground beneath their feet is shifting in the direction of a younger, more ideological wing of the party.
“He has frazzled the business elite in [New York City], the world capital of capitalism, who were unable to stop Mamdani’s rise despite spending millions on a barrage of attack ads portraying him as a dangerous [Muslim, antisemitic] extremist.”
But, the Journal profile concludes, “it turned out to be hard to demonize a charming and exuberant young man who raps about his beloved Indian grandmother… and displays an Obama-like magnetism that attracts young people [and] some old ones, too.”
The profile also concedes that despite his inexperience, even his “detractors acknowledge that Mamdani ran a brilliant campaign powered by an army of inspired foot soldiers…
“Above all, Mamdani demonstrated discipline beyond his years in hammering home his singular [winning] issue: affordability.” Most important to his fellow progressive, elitist Democrat candidates, Mamdani was able to win the New York City mayoral primary without being forced to walk back any of his woke social policy positions on race, gender, and green energy which have proven to be very unpopular with a large majority of more moderate American voters.
WHY MAMDANI’S PRIMARY VICTORY IS PROBABLY NOT REPEATABLE
But according to a highly respected Democrat demographic expert, Ruy Teixeira, writing in his Liberal Patriot newsletter, Mamdani’s victory in last week’s mayoral primary is not the solution to the political problem facing progressive Democrat socialists. Instead, Teixeira argues that it was a one-time political event, in which “an exceptionally good candidate [Mamdani] running against an exceptionally bad opponent [Cuomo] in a Democratic primary in an exceptionally left-leaning [New York City].”
Furthermore, Teixeira also believes that, under almost any other circumstances, most American voters would reject any progressive Democrat candidate less politically gifted than Mamdani trying to duplicate his primary victory last week “by enthusiastically backing every culturally radical cause under the sun and for running on an economically populist program long on bashing evil landlords and price-gougers but short on policy plausibility and any conceivable way to pay for it.”
MAMDANI AMPLIFIED HIS MESSAGE TO YOUNG VOTERS
Many aspiring young voters were inspired by Mamdani’s sunny economic message. His videos went viral across the social media platforms. They conveyed Mamdani’s promise to create a more affordable New York City by imposing a city-wide rent freeze, opening reduced-cost city-operated grocery stores, making rides on city buses “fast and free,” offering free child care for kids up to the age of five, and much more. Mamdani also promised to pay for all of it with further tax increases on the city’s steadily diminishing number of already overtaxed millionaires.
Even when Cuomo sought to compete on economic policy by announcing his support for raising the state’s minimum wage to $20 an hour, he was again outdone by Mamdani, who was promoting an increase to $30 an hour by the year 2030.
Several political analysts attributed Mamdani’s primary victory to his strong appeal to young, college-educated liberal New Yorkers, including the children of Hispanic and Asian immigrants, who are frustrated by the high cost of living in New York City and the failure of the more traditional would-be Democrat candidates for mayor to address their pressing economic concerns.
Mamdani’s charisma and the energy of his campaign were major pluses, along with his willingness to go everywhere and talk to everyone, which reached new voters with his optimistic economic message. That stood in sharp contrast to Cuomo’s pessimistic rhetoric about the current conditions in New York City, his limited number of personal campaign appearances, and his over-reliance on endorsements from old-line New York State Democrat party leaders and union heads.
Cuomo decided to campaign primarily on his long record as a successful three-term New York State governor. Meanwhile, he did not undertake a full schedule of live campaign events with voters because he feared that they would be disrupted by protests from the many people who still blame him for the death of thousands of their elderly loved ones during the initial surge of the Covid pandemic and for the draconian measures he put them through during that period.
CUOMO STILL DODGING HIS NURSING HOME COVID PANDEMIC PROBLEM
On March 25, 2020, then-Governor Cuomo signed an order that forced 4,500 seniors who had been infected with Covid to leave New York City hospitals in order to free up more beds for new patients. That order sent them back to their nursing homes, which were forced to accept them even though the New York State Health Department had been warned that most of those nursing homes were not capable of properly isolating the returning Covid-infected patients to protect other nursing home residents, as well as visitors and staff members. Later, Cuomo was also accused of ordering the state Health Department to cover up the scale of the nursing home scandal by failing to count the 9,250 residents who were infected by Covid in their nursing homes, but did not die of the disease until after they were transferred to a hospital.
The issue of Cuomo’s March 25 nursing home order was raised during the second debate of Democrat mayoral candidates by City Comptroller Brad Lander. But when Lander asked Cuomo to respond to criticism from a man whose father was one of the thousands who died of Covid in a nursing home, Cuomo responded defensively by denying any personal responsibility. He even failed to express any sympathy for the man’s loss. Cuomo later angrily accused Lander of acting like a “kamikaze (suicidal) political candidate” for being the first to raise the issue during the campaign, and for working in cooperation with Mamdani. They cross-endorsed one another by urging their supporters to list them both in their ranked-choice New York City mayoral primary ballots.
CUOMO STILL IN DENIAL OVER HIS 2021 RESIGNATION SCANDAL
Throughout the primary campaign, Cuomo frequently skipped public forums and rarely spoke with or submitted to interviews with reporters from New York media outlets. He feared that most of their questions would remind voters about the scandals and accusations of improper personal conduct, which ultimately forced Cuomo to step down as governor in August 2021 under threat of impeachment by the state legislature, and overshadow his mayoral campaign message.
Cuomo has never admitted to those accusations and has repeatedly refused to apologize for signing the March 2020 nursing home order. Instead, he has continued to insist that he had done nothing wrong, and to say, according to the New York Times, that his greatest regret was that he resigned as governor without putting up more of a fight to prove his innocence.
Cuomo also told his supporters and campaign staff that those voters who still blamed him for those things were a “lost cause,” because nothing he could say during the campaign would change their opinion of him.
In the mayoral primary campaign, Cuomo promoted his record as a capable and experienced manager of government in sharp stark contrast to Mamdani’s thin political resume as a state assemblyman and his total lack of any managerial or executive experience.
In the face of urgent calls from his supporters for Cuomo to change the direction of his campaign, he hemmed and hawed, but in the end made no major changes, except for a last-minute emphasis on Mamdani’s long record of opposition to Israel and his support for a “global intifada.” Cuomo also took solace from polls in the final days of the primary campaign, showing him still in the lead, but with Mamdani quickly closing the gap. In addition, those late polls failed to reflect the surge of support for Mamdani from young, first-time voters inspired by his vibrant campaign.
CUOMO WAS NEVER GOING TO CHANGE
One Cuomo advisor told CNN that it was always unrealistic to expect Cuomo to reinvent himself for the current mayoral campaign. Some political analysts also believe that Cuomo was running for a job that he really didn’t want, and saw the mayoralty of New York City primarily as the first available step for a national political comeback.
Referring to Cuomo’s reputation throughout his long political career as a ruthless and tough political operative, the advisor said. “You are not going to turn Andrew Cuomo into the new Andrew Cuomo. Andrew Cuomo is Andrew Cuomo. He’s exactly the person he always was. He was not going to build alliances. Not clear he could anyway. He wasn’t all of a sudden going to be warm and friendly. And his operation wasn’t all of a sudden going to be warm and friendly.”
However, in a defiant, forward-looking statement following his primary night concession to Mamdani, Cuomo declared, “My campaign team did a tremendous job at many things, and I was proud to have the support of the majority of the Democratic elected officials and labor unions. To the extent there were strategic errors, the buck stops with me. There’s no question a fall [general election] campaign would need to be a different effort informed by the lessons of this one.”
Derosa insisted that Cuomo’s campaign had met its voter turnout goals that had “targeted key districts and constituencies,” and that as a result, Cuomo “got more [primary] votes [by 6 points] than Eric Adams did four years ago.” Cuomo also carried both the Upper East and West sides of Manhattan and Staten Island, although by a smaller margin than his campaign had expected, as well as several working-class neighborhoods across the outer boroughs, particularly in the Bronx.
Cuomo also won strong support in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods across New York City due to concerns about Mamdani’s outspoken opposition to Israel, although, shockingly, Mamdani did get about 20% of the total Jewish vote in the city, apparently based upon his youthful charisma and his emphasis on New York City’s need for greater “affordability.” Cuomo also received an endorsement from Michael Bloomberg, along with an $8 million donation from the former NYC mayor to a pro-Cuomo super PAC.
CUOMO’S LOSS CAUGHT HIM BY SURPRISE
Up until 9 p.m., when the polls closed on primary night, Cuomo and his campaign staff, believing that they had achieved the voter turnout numbers that they were shooting for, were still confident of victory. But that quickly changed when the results started to come in, showing Cuomo trailing Mamdani by seven points, and revealing a very different picture of the city’s Democrat electorate.
According to a detailed vote analysis by Michael Lange published by the New York Times, Mamdani’s victory was the result of winning support from three newly emerging voter groups in the city. These include young, well-educated, and upwardly mobile people who are gentrifying historically Black and Latino populated communities in Upper Manhattan and Central Brooklyn, such as Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Mamdani also won among the residents of upper-middle-class, progressive areas in Brownstone Brooklyn [the neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill] and on Manhattan’s West Side. According to Lange, they were united in their “disdain for President Trump and Mr. Cuomo.”
HOW MAMDANI CLEANED UP IN THE “COMMIE CORRIDOR”
Mamdani did best among the voters living in a strip of Queens and Brooklyn neighborhoods running north to south from the Astoria to Sunset Park neighborhoods, which Lange calls “The Commie [Communist] Corridor” because its politics have been reshaped by a newly arrived “young and hungry leftist [voting] base.”
Mamdani carried the neighborhoods of Astoria by 52 points and Long Island City by 40 points, both of which he represented in the New York State Assembly. To the immediate south, he also won the gentrified neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Williamsburg, north of the bridge by overwhelming margins, but just south of the Williamsburg bridge, Cuomo won the votes of the Jewish Orthodox community by an equally impressive margin, based upon concerns about Mamdani’s long record of opposition to Israel and his refusal to denounce antisemitism.
Lange notes that Mamdani also did particularly well in neighborhoods across the outer borough neighborhoods with large populations from South and East Asian backgrounds like his own. He carried the diverse immigrant-populated Queens neighborhood of Woodside, Queens, by 34 points, and also did very well in the neighborhoods of Inwood and Washington Heights in upper Manhattan, where Trump did especially well in last November’s presidential election.
CUOMO APPEALED PRIMARILY TO OLDER AND JEWISH MIDDLE-CLASS VOTERS
On the other hand, Cuomo carried neighborhoods with older populations like Co-op City in the Bronx by 46 points, as well as the majority-Black and middle-class neighborhood of Canarsie, Brooklyn, and the Russian-speaking and Sefardic Jewish neighborhoods in South Brooklyn.
As Derosa later explained, “Mamdani ran a campaign that managed to expand the electorate in such a way that no turnout model or poll was able to capture, while the rest of the field [of Democrat mayoral candidates] collapsed.”
CUOMO LOST BECAUSE HE RAN AN OBSOLETE CAMPAIGN
According to an analysis by Nick Reisman and Sally Goldenberg writing for Politico, Cuomo lost the mayoral primary, even though he remained the frontrunner in the polls to the very end, because he campaigned like “a cable TV candidate in a TikTok [dominated] world.”
They also cited the sharp differences in the tone of the two campaigns. “Cuomo evinced little optimism, scowling as he portrayed New York City as a scary, dangerous [place], while a smiling Mamdani orated hopefully about a better future,” Reisman and Goldenberg wrote.
The Politico analysis also cited Democrat strategist Trip Yang, who said, “This [Mamdani’s] definitely felt like a 2025 fully optimized campaign versus a 1988 [Cuomo] campaign. Cuomo looked like he was campaigning in black and white [in a color world]… [and] was never formidable because this wasn’t Andrew Cuomo in his prime.”
THE MAMDANI CAMPAIGN’S SUPERIOR GROUND GAME
Mamdani also won because he ran a superior grass-roots get-out-the-vote campaign. He inspired thousands of young volunteers to go from door to door in neighborhoods across the city. They reached out to hundreds of thousands of infrequent and first-time young voters, motivating them to go to the polls by selling Mamdani’s upbeat economic message. Even though historically young people vote at lower rates, last week they flocked to the polls, many won over not just by Mamdani’s persuasive and entertaining videos, but also by his vast canvassing operation. His campaign knocked on over 1.5 million doors across New York City. In addition, many of Mamdani’s campaign events doubled as picnics and other kinds of social occasions where his supporters could easily make contact and engage in political conversations with new voters.
By contrast, Cuomo’s campaign ran a lackluster get-out-the-vote operation that was outsourced to the labor unions that endorsed him, professional canvassers paid $25-an-hour, as well as conventional phone-banking and texting operations. His ground operation made no serious effort to reach out to low-propensity or new voters or to create any excitement about their candidate.
CUOMO NEVER TOLD THE VOTERS WHY HE WANTED TO BE MAYOR
Jasmine Gripper, a “quality education” activist and the co-director of the New York State Working Families Party, told Politico that Cuomo lost the primary because, “He over-relied on money and TV and mail. What he didn’t do with all that money was actually convey a vision for New York City. He didn’t convey what he would do as mayor and failed to capture the hearts and minds of voters.”
Other disappointed Cuomo supporters who worked on his behalf were not so kind. In comments to the New York Times, they described Cuomo’s attitude during the campaign with derogatory terms such as “entitled,” “arrogant,” “aloof,” and “astonishingly incompetent.”
PATERSON IDENTIFIES CUOMO’S “BLIND SPOT”
Perhaps the most ironic post-mortem on Cuomo’s failed primary campaign was delivered by former New York State Governor David Paterson, who endorsed Cuomo in the primary race and who is legally blind. Nevertheless, Paterson declared that while “all of us have a blind spot, his [Cuomo’s] blind spot is that he doesn’t really connect particularly well with, just, people.”
Paterson also revealed to the New York Times his resentment at the way he was treated by the Cuomo campaign after he gave his endorsement. “Once I endorsed him, some of his campaign workers called me like I was an employee of his,” Paterson said. On one occasion, they demanded that Paterson show up in the spin room of the final primary debate to promote Cuomo, even though the candidate himself would not be there.
“I said, ‘this is not my role,’” Paterson recalled, followed by “‘Thank you. Good night.’”
CUOMO SEEN AS A SYMBOL OF THE DEMOCRAT POLITICAL ESTABLISHMENT
For many New York voters, Cuomo is also seen as a prime example of everything that was wrong with the city’s Democrat Party establishment, even though he attempted to rebrand himself as a “pragmatic progressive” during the primary campaign. Nevertheless, it was painfully clear that Cuomo’s main supporters were the same old-style Democrat labor union leaders, real estate developers, and financial elites who have controlled politics in New York City since the end of World War II.
By contrast, Zohran Mamdani’s enthusiastic, youthful progressive supporters like to boast about their “Zo-mentum.”
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of last week’s mayoral primary outcome is the tortured rationale of the roughly 20% of Jewish voters in New York City who willfully ignored Mamdani’s blatantly pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel record.
