“Let’s make sure Andrew Cuomo gets nowhere near City Hall,” candidate and city Comptroller Brad Lander said Monday on WNYC radio, which interviewed the major candidates ahead of the election.
State Sen. Zellnor Myrie, another candidate, similarly asked voters not to vote for Cuomo, telling the station, “We need fresh leadership, we need to turn the page and we need bold solutions at this moment.”
The pitches came as Cuomo, who has been considered the frontrunner for months, has been trying to fend off a charge from Zohran Mamdani ahead of Tuesday's election.
Mamdani, a 33-year-old state assemblyman, would be the city's first Muslim and first Indian American mayor if elected. A democratic socialist who got elected to the Legislature in 2020, Mamdani started the campaign as a relative unknown but has won support with a energetic campaign centered on improving the cost of living.
He spent part the second-to-last day of the campaign visiting businesses and potential voters in northern Manhattan, followed by a crowd of supporters and a man banging a drum.
"This is the most expensive city in the United States of America and New Yorkers are tired of having to worry each and every hour of each and every day of whether they can afford to live here,” said Mamdani.
Cuomo spoke at a union hall, where he warned Democrats against both radicalism and picking a candidate without experience.
“This is not a job for a novice. This is not a job for a person who never really had a job before,” Cuomo said. “We need someone who knows what they are doing on day one, because your lives depend on it.”
Mamdani, meanwhile, exuded confidence, telling WNYC he is “one day from toppling a political dynasty.”
A party divided
Mamdani and Cuomo represent the Democratic Party’s ideological divides, with Cuomo as an older moderate and Mamdani a younger progressive.
Former President Bill Clinton endorsed Cuomo on Sunday, saying voters should not “underestimate the complexity” of the challenges faced by a mayor. The New York Times didn’t issue an endorsement this year, but wrote an editorial praising Lander and saying Cuomo would be a better choice than Mamdani, who it said was unworthy of being on people’s ballots.
Mamdani has been endorsed by U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The two candidates' reactions to the American bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites on Sunday offered more evidence of the party’s internal split.
Cuomo, in a statement, criticized “the way Trump went about this without consulting Congress, without consulting the normal congressional officials” but stressed that “Iran cannot have nuclear capability.”
Mamdani released a statement that slammed Trump but quickly shifted focus back to his key issues, saying “these actions are the result of a political establishment that would rather spend trillions of dollars on weapons than lift millions out of poverty, launch endless wars while silencing calls for peace, and fearmonger about outsiders while billionaires hollow out our democracy from within.”
Cuomo, who won three terms as governor, resigned in 2021 after a report from the state attorney general concluded that he sexually harassed 11 women. He has denied wrongdoing.
Ranked choice could decide winner
New York City is using ranked choice voting in its Democratic mayoral primary election Tuesday, a system that allows voters to rank up to five candidates in order of preference. If one candidate is the first choice of a majority of voters, that person wins the race outright. If nobody hits that threshold, the votes are then tabulated in multiple rounds. After each round, the candidate in last place is eliminated. Votes cast for that person are then redistributed to the candidates ranked next on the voter's ballot.
That continues until one candidate gets a majority.
Cuomo's opponents have urged voters not to rank him at all and therefore deprive him of support in later rounds of counting.
Eleven candidates are on the ballot in the Democratic mayoral primary. Incumbent Mayor Eric Adams isn’t one of them. He’s a Democrat but is running as an independent. The Republican Party has already picked its nominee, Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa.
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Associated Press video journalist David Martin contributed to this report.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP