The NYC Mayor's Race: A Socialist vs. Andrew Cuomo
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As New Yorkers cast early ballots for next week's Democratic primary in the election to be their next mayor, the polls say there are two clear frontrunners. First, socialist Assemblyman Zoran Mamdami, who's promising to freeze the rent and open government-run grocery stores. And second, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, in spite of the political baggage that prompted his resignation from office four years ago.

Welcome, I'm Kyle Peterson with The Wall Street Journal. We're joined today by my colleagues, columnist Mary Anastasia O'Grady and editorial board member Mene Ukeburuwa. The mayoral primary next week for the Democratic nomination is a ranked choice election, with voters given the option to pick five candidates in order of preference. That makes it somewhat hard to predict, and there are a slew of candidates competing for those votes.

There's a Marist poll this week, and here is a snapshot of the first round choices in the poll. Andrew Cuomo with 43%, Zoran Mamdami with 31%, and then a slew of also-rans in these single digits. According to this poll, in the seventh round, Andrew Cuomo would finally reach a majority threshold to win the election over Mamdami,

Let's listen to those two frontrunners going after each other in a New York One debate last Thursday. Experience matters. And I think inexperience is dangerous in this case. Mr. Mondami has had a staff of five people. You're not going to run a staff of 300,000 employees. He's never dealt with the city council. He's never dealt with the Congress. He's never dealt with the state legislature. He's never negotiated with the union. He's never built anything.

He's never dealt with a natural emergency. He's never dealt with a hurricane, with a flood, etc. He's never done any of the essentials. And now you have Donald Trump on top of all of that. And he's never dealt with what I think is the greatest national threat that we face in this president.

Mary, what a way to clarify the choice here now facing New Yorkers.

Yeah, normally I would go with the idea that an outsider might be better than somebody with a long list of experience. But Zoran Mamdani is really a nightmare in terms of his socialist policies. He says now that he's not in favor of defunding the police, but he certainly comes from that

background of thinking that crime is a colonialist construct. So I think that the reason why Andrew Cuomo, despite all his baggage, and it's pretty bad, is still the frontrunner is because Mom Domini is so bad. And he would be really bad for New York, I think.

Many listeners probably know some about Andrew Cuomo's record, and he is a pretty experienced politician who knows how to go to where his party base is standing at any given moment. Tell us a little bit more about who Mamdani is and what is he saying as he tries to woo the votes of Democratic New Yorkers in this primary? Sure. Well, Zoran Mamdani is a 33-year-old state assemblyman, and he represents a district in Queens, I believe.

And essentially, he has tried to corner the lane of Democratic voters in New York City who are looking for a very progressive candidate to chart a new direction for the city. Part of this is because of the current moment of reacting to the reelection of Donald Trump. I think that there's a lot of

unformed progressive anger among the Democratic base in New York City, especially a very liberal city. And people want to find an outlet for someone who would represent essentially the opposite of what they see Donald Trump as representing. Mamdani

being someone who is extremely vocal about, for example, protecting illegal immigrants. Probably his first viral moment came when he was trying to confront Tom Homan. That's President Trump's border czar in charge of the deportation campaign who's been conducting raids in New York City.

And Mamdani essentially was pushing through security to try to get in the face of Tom Holman and got restrained. And that was when I first heard of him. And I think that's when a lot of people following the race first noticed him. But as Mary mentioned, you can go down the line and the whole slew of very progressive causes Mamdani is describing, and he has detailed policy proposals for how to apply them in New York City. So very similar to an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in his outlook.

but all focused on ways that the city could be transformed. So that means grocery stores that are managed by the city where they would determine the price levels and the items in stock. That means free transit. He says he wants to make bus rides completely free. He wants to direct massive new funding and subsidies to businesses

the subway. When it comes to crime, it's true that he has walked back his stance on being for defunding the police, but he says he doesn't want to increase the funds anymore and instead would devote additional resources to unarmed criminals

essentially social service squads that would go in if you called, for example, for assistance if a homeless person was harassing you, getting in your face. The city, instead of sending an armed cop, might send an unarmed social servant who would essentially try to de-escalate the situation. So all of this is in keeping with

the school of uber progressive social thinking that we've seen since 2020. A lot of New Yorkers, I think, wanted to move past that when they saw the chaos that followed the George Floyd riots and that moment of rage in American political society. But there is a big contingent of people who do want to essentially give that a test run again. And Mamdani is cornering voters of that kind. Hang tight. We'll be right back in a moment.

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Welcome back. Let me read a few snippets from Mamdani's official website, his platform proposals. One of the key ones, the one that has got him plenty of attention, is this rent freeze for stabilized apartments. He says there are more than two million of New Yorkers who live in such apartments.

How about this? Zoran will implement free child care for every New Yorker aged six weeks to five years, ensuring high quality programming for all families. And he will bring up wages for child care workers as Mary Hill permanently eliminate the fare on every city bus and make them faster. Here's the grocery stores. Zoran will create a network of

city-owned grocery stores focused on keeping prices low, not making a profit without having to pay rent or property taxes, they will reduce overhead and pass on savings to shoppers. Let's listen to a clip of Mamdani on CNN this week describing how he intends to pay for these proposals and many more.

So there are a number of ways. The first is that freezing the rent does not actually require the city to spend any additional money. The city has a board called the Rent Guidelines Board, which determines whether or not rents for rent-stabilized tenants increase. And the previous mayoral administration froze those rents three times. What we are proposing is to build on that precedent.

and to make buses free it costs about 700 million dollars to deliver universal childcare looking at a cost about five to six billion dollars we've put forward an economic plan that would raise actually 10 billion to not only pay for our agenda but start to Trump proof our city and we do so in two key ways we match New York state's top corporate tax rate to that of New Jersey at 11.5 percent that raises five billion dollars and we increase personal income taxes on the top one percent of New Yorkers these are New Yorkers who make

a million dollars a year or more, and we increase it by just 2%, $20,000, which is effectively a rounding error when you're making that much money. The notion of that freezing rent is a free proposal. I mean, that's a bit amusing to anyone who has taken an economics class and knows that the outcome of that would be less building, less renovating, harder to find apartments, supply crimps in living space in New York City, which does not have an abundance of supplies to begin with.

But then on this point about we're just raising taxes on New Yorkers a little bit more, I mean, I think that whooshing sound you're going to hear is all the people going to check out real estate in Florida and other states. Well, you know, he's made the point that he checked with high-income people and they say that they leave the city not

because of high taxes, but because of quality of life issues. So he's trying to make the argument that he's going to improve the quality of life, even though he's going to raise their taxes just a little, and they'll end up staying. But I don't think there's much evidence for that. And I think the main weak spot in

all of what he talks about is the failure to recognize what prices are about. Prices are information in the economy. If you freeze, for example, rents in regulated properties, what you're going to get, number one, is shortages, as you mentioned, but you're also going to get misallocations. People are not going to move out of those big apartments that they don't need to a smaller apartment because they'll lose that rent freeze that they've gotten by being in a rent-controlled apartment. And what happens...

What happens is unregulated housing goes up in price because you end up having shortages. People have to get out of the regulated apartments, which are shrinking in supply, and they're looking for unregulated apartments. And so there's more demand there and prices go up.

The grocery stores is ridiculous. I mean, it's just amazing that here we are 40 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, and he's got the same idea that he's somehow going to provide food at some kind of subsidized price, and it's not going to cause shortages and distortions, and there's not going to be any consumption.

great supply of government run. Plus you're going to have bureaucrats making the decision about what to buy and how much inventory to hold and all of that. And profit margins are already very slim in the grocery store business. So I don't anticipate that that would be a great thing. I had to laugh at the transit union. The head of the transit union was out and he said that it was great that he was going to make buses free because if he made buses free, ridership would soar

And of course, ridership will soar. If you make something free, you're going to get more demand for that. But demand is going to outstrip supply, obviously. So prices are so important in an economy. And he just completely dismisses all of that and talks about this kind of utopian city he's going to create by taking from the rich, giving to the poor, and having the government regulate and control everything that everyone does. I mean,

Have we been here before? All of this does help explain why there is a rallying, it seems to me, around Andrew Cuomo by voters who may be registered as Democrats in the state of New York because they want to be able to vote in these primaries where these elections are often decided. Yeah, he's also going to add $70 billion of votes.

city debt for more housing. I mean, we already have a big debt crisis in New York City, and he's going to pile on top of that as if it's going to have no effect on the credit rating of the city or the ability to finance the budget year after year. But I do think some of these voters, Manay, who are rallying as an alternative to Andrew Cuomo are probably doing so reluctantly. And it's worth remembering some of the details of

of what forced Cuomo from office. There was a attorney general report done by outside lawyers, 165 pages on sexual harassment allegations against Cuomo. Here is a couple lines from the Wall Street Journal's editorial at the time on one of these

Menae

Cuomo had denied some of the allegations that were in this report. He had said some of them were misinterpreted. He's an old school guy. And so I think the seriousness of these charges against him may have faded from people's memories. There was a reason that he ended up resigning. Yeah, absolutely. I do think that

There was a rallying around Cuomo when he entered the race because of how bleak the Adams administration has been, frankly, and how bleak things have been in a lot of big cities around the country since 2020. People wanted to have an experienced hand back at the tiller. And Andrew Cuomo was certainly that. He's been in government for a long time. He comes from a New York political dynasty. He was always believed to

by most New Yorkers to be someone who had a basic level of competence and experience, even if there are a lot of errors in his record to point to. And I do think that the way that he left office, left the governorship was very fast. These allegations came out, it was one after another. I think a total of 11 women ended up accusing him of some kind of impropriety or another.

The accusations, if true, were certainly very damning and I think would be worthy of his resignation. But there also wasn't really an extended period where there was a hearing and contestation of the facts. There certainly was no due process of any kind. There was just a consensus among Democrats that

a person who was accused of all these things couldn't possibly remain in office and be the standard bearer. So I think a lot of the public didn't really have time to fully absorb the accusations made against him. So now that they're being surfaced by Zoran Mamdani and the rest of Cuomo's competitors in the mayoral primary, people are, I think, really...

absorbing them much more now. And that's part of the reason why Mamdani has been able to eat into Cuomo's lead over time. I think, you know, just to add to what Miné is saying, the other problems with Cuomo have to do with his personality. He sort of has a reputation for being arrogant. And I think with the COVID pandemic, he has

had a kind of a very arrogant and sort of dictatorial way to try to get the pandemic under control. And it turned out to be a bad series of decisions where he ended up putting COVID patients in nursing homes and a lot of the nursing home patients died. And there are people who are still very bitter about the way that he managed that crisis. The other thing is that he has a reputation for being vindictive.

And there is some fear that if he comes back, he's going to get revenge against people who basically were part of his downfall as governor. And I think there's some fear of that. His positives, I think, besides not being Mamdani...

are that he has promised to make safety and public security a priority. He says he's going to hire 5,000 more cops, and he's going to pay for that by reducing the overtime opportunities because it's overtime that really eats into that budget. So I think that's music to a lot of New Yorkers' ears because the city was once a lot safer than it is right now. Hang tight. We'll be right back in a moment.

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Welcome back. If Cuomo now at the moment is looking like the less left alternative in this race, that may be due just to the framing effect of who he's running against. Because my recollection of his tenure in the governor's office was not an era of New York centrism. I mean, Cuomo as governor raised taxes. He signed a law that was eliminating, in many instances, cash bail, which

critics have said has contributed to the public safety problem in New York. And now he's also, in this campaign, nodding to the left, for example, talking about raising the minimum wage, says he supports undoing pension reforms. So how do you size up him as where he actually stands on the political spectrum within the Democratic Party? I think that a helpful shorthand for anyone trying to understand Andrew Cuomo, who isn't familiar with him,

in particular, would be to try to imagine Joe Biden as a New Yorker, because that's essentially Andrew Cuomo's political positioning and record.

Just like Joe Biden, he presents himself as a centrist kind of and an ordinary, as you put it, old school guy. I can work across the aisle. I have moderate instincts. I think, frankly, there's some truth to that with both of these politicians. They do have instincts that are somewhat moderate and are not actually inclined in themselves to side with the progressive wing of their parties.

The problem is that they don't really, and I'll speak specifically about Cuomo, doesn't really have a strong core. And so whenever there's pressure from the left, he's always going to

eventually fold. And we saw that during his governorship with the bail law in particular. This is something that he had kind of criticized in the state house, the idea that New York was going to not require cash bail for a variety of nonviolent crimes in particular. But eventually the pressure came on and he signed it because he knew that he was going to be criticized for the left for not doing so. And that led to a big increase in crime as more criminals were released back onto the streets.

The same thing with the tax hike. He said, I don't want to raise taxes on billionaires. We have too many people leaving New York City. We need that revenue. He offered to cook dinner for them personally. But when push came to shove, both for budget reasons and political reasons, pressure from the left, he signed it.

And you see him now doing the exact same thing in the 2025 campaign for mayor. He said that he would undo a reform that he did as governor, or he would push the statehouse to undo a reform that saved money on pensions going to union workers. He's become much more muted in his support for charter schools. He used to be

essentially open to increasing the number of charter schools in New York City. Now, because of pressure from the teachers unions, he essentially says he wants to maintain the status quo. And so I think just like Joe Biden campaigned as a moderate, but then once you get an office or once the pressure comes on, you end up folding to the left. And that's exactly what

Cuomo is doing to protect his small and narrowing lead over Zoran Mamdani. I think that's completely right. And I would just add to that that there are very few New Yorkers, I would guess, that would choose Andrew Cuomo for their next mayor. But compared to Mamdani, that's why he's in the lead. I mean, there's just no other choices. And whoever wins the Democratic Party is likely to win the general in November. So New Yorkers have to look at that and

I think another thing that has been very bad for the image of Mamdani is his support for what he calls international law. And that would mean like, you know, using New York City law to go after people like Benjamin Netanyahu, to do boycotts against Israel, all kinds of very extreme things.

Things that you would get out of the U.N., but he wants to implement those under New York law. And I think that's also a big red flag for a lot of New Yorkers. But, Mary, you do think that the winner of this Democratic primary next week is going to be the person who is most likely New York's next mayor, because after this primary, then we go to the general election. Mayor Eric Adams is competing as an independent candidate.

New York also has this system where people can run on minor party ballot lines and multiple ballot lines. So even if Cuomo defeats Mamdani, Mamdani could still run in the general election under the Working Families Party and vice versa for Andrew Cuomo. So whoever loses this ranked choice voting on Tuesday is not necessarily finished, could keep going on all the way to November. No, that's completely right. I mean, it's not over. But I would say that the odds are

The candidate for the Democratic Party will be the one that will win if the election were today. I don't know. I guess a lot of things can happen between now and November. Thank you, Mary and Manet. Thank you all for listening. You can email us at pwpodcast at wsj.com. If you like the show, please hit that subscribe button. And we'll be back tomorrow with another edition of Potomac Watch.

The spirit of innovation is deeply ingrained in America, and Google is helping Americans innovate in ways both big and small. The Air Force Research Laboratory is partnering with Google Cloud, using AI to accelerate defense research for air, space, and cyberspace forces. This is a new era of American innovation. Find out more at g.co slash American innovation.