Who would want to be mayor of New York City? The mayor must share power with a combative city council as well as a state government with disproportionate influence, and a strong disdain for the city.
The position has been a political graveyard for those aspiring to higher office. John Lindsay, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg all had presidential campaigns quickly flame out. The current mayor is the one-off Eric Adams, whose unpopularity and many legal troubles have left the field for a successor wide open.
Tomorrow will deliver the results of the Democratic primary, the winner of which usually triumphs in November’s mayoral election. The two front-runners in a crowded field are starkly different. Narrowly ahead in the polls is Andrew Cuomo, the one-time disgraced ex-governor. Just behind is Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old socialist state representative with a canny media team and an army of volunteers.
Mamdani’s rise from obscurity has been surprising to those who assumed Cuomo would win on name recognition against a fractured field on the centre-left and left.
When Mamdani entered the race, he was polling in single digits, more than 30 points below Cuomo. The latest polls show him down by only a few points. Mamdani can fairly claim to be in with a good chance, considering this is the city’s second election to be held under a ranked choice system, allowing voters to rank their top five preferences.
Mamdani is undeniably charismatic and handsome, with an easy, straight-to-camera style that his team has employed effectively from videos where he interviews New Yorkers about why they voted for Trump to appearances on popular influencers’ shows.
He is also possessed with ruthless message discipline. Though Mamdani largely refuses to water down his socialist politics to appeal to centrists, his campaign is laser-focused on the cost of living. His headline policies – a rent freeze, free buses and city-owned grocery stores – are simple, universal, and understandable, speaking to people’s direct economic needs.
His campaign has mobilised a reported 36,000 volunteers, and knocked on almost two million doors. He has also effectively built coalitions with non-socialist progressives, scoring endorsements from Brad Lander, the third-placed candidate in the race, and the Working Families Party.
A fractured left in 2021 allowed the right-wing Adams to win by a tiny margin, and four years of this benighted administration have bolstered determination that this not be allowed to happen again.
Mamdani is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who exploded in popularity during Bernie Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 runs and who have given the country politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
After winning high-profile races in the Trump years, the organisation, and the American left generally, went on a slow decline during the Biden presidency as the party establishment retrenched.
With the assistance of deep-pocketed donors, several DSA electeds were defeated in Democratic primaries. A victory, or even a narrow loss, for Mamdani would be something of a show of strength for the left, badly in need of victories.
Few expected Andrew Cuomo to make a political comeback after his resignation in late 2021. He faced not only investigations into his mishandling of nursing homes during the Covid 19 pandemic, but also a report from the attorney general that he had sexually harassed at least 11 women, and retaliated against them when complaints were made.
Cuomo’s miraculous recovery, and position as the standard bearer of the right wing of the party is remarkable on its face, but also speaks to the weaknesses of the party establishment. Lacking a credible candidate, party power-brokers have been forced to accept a flawed representative, lest the left triumph.
This distaste is reflected in the New York Times’ rather dour non-endorsement, a plague-on-both-their houses view of the race that nonetheless grudgingly picked the devil they knew: Cuomo.
Cuomo has been absent for months, running a campaign based on name recognition and memories of his daily press conferences during the pandemic. His platform is a law-and-order one, promising to increase funding to the New York Police Department, an organisation that spends more than $6 billion (€5.2 billion) a year.
His claim to be the best candidate to oppose Donald Trump has been undercut somewhat by the fact that he shares many of the US president’s biggest donors. Cuomo drew particular ire from Lander, himself Jewish, for what Lander said were attempts to cynically weaponise anti-Semitism to slander opponents.
Democratic primary voters have proven themselves to be risk-averse, preferring candidates more conservative than themselves, whom they perceive to be more electable. Yet the result of this strategy was the disastrous Biden era and consequently another four years of Trump.
There is widespread anger at the Democratic Party leadership not only among the socialist left, but liberals tired of a party that seems to many to be arrogant and keener to discipline their base than to fight in the face of a resurgent reactionary right. Surveys have shown excitement about Mamdani’s policies and energy as well as concerns about a lack of experience. Which of these wins out will be crucial in determining the winner.
New York City is a deeply troubled place. Hit first and hardest by Covid, it was one of the centres of Black Lives Matter protests that did not change city policing. The university uprisings against the Gaza genocide were brutally suppressed through heavy-handed policing, weaponisation of the immigration system and McCarthyite-style blacklisting.
Last year the city swung dramatically towards Republicans, driven by disillusionment with the Democratic Party, a sense of social disintegration and voter abstention. Voters are clearly unhappy with how the city is governed, but the nature of that unhappiness remains in flux.
The state Democratic Party has proven itself shambolic yet resilient enough to resist pressure from its left. This week will tell us if that still holds. Even if Mamdani triumphs, expect a vicious and well funded campaign against him in the general election.
Jack Sheehan is an Irish writer based in New York
