Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo continues to be the frontrunner within the June 24 Democratic main to exchange Mayor Eric Adams amid early voting and with Election Day quick approaching.
Cuomo, who’s in search of a political revival after stepping down in 2021 following practically a dozen sexual misconduct allegations that he denies, has dominated the packed Democratic main subject since coming into the race on March 1. However he’s going through a critical problem from Queens Meeting Member Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic socialist polling who has been persistently polling in second place for weeks.
Mayor Adams isn’t collaborating within the Democratic main, opting to run as an impartial within the common election as a substitute. He and Cuomo are more likely to face off within the subsequent leg of the election.
The reasonable Cuomo has led by double digits in most private and non-private polls, swept up help amongst institutional elected officers and labor unions, and attracted hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in marketing campaign donations. Cuomo says he’s the one candidate with the expertise to “save a city in crisis,” usually pointing to his report of constructing huge infrastructure tasks, such because the redevelopment of LaGuardia Airport, over his 11 years as governor.
But Cuomo’s main opponents, together with many progressive politicians and organizations, say he has no enterprise being mayor. They argue that the scandals previous his resignation, which additionally embrace his dealing with of COVID-19 in nursing properties and lots of of his insurance policies as governor that they are saying harm slightly than helped the town, must be “disqualifying.”
Cuomo additionally confronted important criticism throughout his marketing campaign for under just lately transferring again to the town for the primary time in many years, accepting contributions from many deep-pocketed donors—a number of of whom additionally give to President Trump—and preliminary findings of unlawful coordination between his marketing campaign and the tremendous PAC supporting it, “Fix the City.” His marketing campaign says it adopted marketing campaign finance regulation.
A number of members of the New York News staff sat down with Cuomo on the Lafayette Grand Cafe for a June 16 interview to get a greater sense of how he would deal with a number of the key points affecting the town as mayor — from immigration to the town’s housing disaster.
Immigration and Trump
Amid the aggressive escalation in President Trump’s push to deport undocumented immigrants, and Mayor Adams’ pledge to work with the feds on prison probes involving new arrivals, Cuomo pledged to uphold the town’s Sanctuary legal guidelines. The statutes bar the town from cooperating with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on most non-criminal issues.
Cuomo stated he would eliminate Mayor Adams’ govt order permitting ICE to reestablish places of work on Rikers Island for prison investigations. The Metropolis Council challenged the order in court docket and has to date succeeded in stopping it from taking impact.
“You cannot pass an executive order that is inconsistent with the law,” Cuomo stated, referring to the order doubtlessly violating the town’s Sanctuary legal guidelines.
Cuomo repeated widespread allegations that Adams has “made a deal with Trump” — contending he agreed to cooperate with the president’s immigration crackdown in change for the Justice Division dropping his federal corruption case. Adams denies the allegation and insists he solely works with the Trump administration on prison probes and never most deportation circumstances, that are largely civil issues.
Trump’s administration has additionally begun arresting undocumented immigrants inside federal immigration courts within the metropolis when new arrivals attend mandated court docket hearings. Related ICE actions in Los Angeles have sparked principally peaceable protests there, prompting Trump to name within the Nationwide Guard and several other hundred US Marines to quell these demonstrations.
Trump has threatened to take comparable actions in New York and different Democratic-run cities the place protests in opposition to ICE detainments have escalated.
With out going into many specifics, Cuomo stated he doesn’t imagine Trump would be capable to do the identical factor in New York if he’s elected mayor. He charged that Trump is choosing fights with Democratic-run cities over immigration merely to attain “political points.”
However Cuomo insisted that if he’s elected mayor, Trump won’t be able to run roughshod over New York like he did with LA.
Cuomo argued that’s as a result of he is aware of how one can combat Trump from the occasions the 2 clashed amid the COVID-19 pandemic through the president’s first time period whereas he was nonetheless governor. Nevertheless, he stated it would require waging “a real legal, PR war” in opposition to the president.
“I had wars with him every day on COVID. I did that briefing in the morning. He would then call me up. ‘You did this, you said this, you said this,” Cuomo stated, referring to Trump calling him after his day by day televised briefings through the early months of the pandemic in 2020.
Cuomo’s rivals, nevertheless, contend that he wouldn’t stand as much as Trump, given the big contributions each his marketing campaign and Repair the Metropolis have obtained from Trump donors. Moreover, they criticize Cuomo for being extra reluctant to criticize Trump than most different candidates within the early days of the election.
Additionally they allege that Cuomo might be compromised in an analogous technique to Adams by a Trump DOJ investigation into whether or not he lied to Congress final fall about his position in enhancing a report that undercounted COVID-19 nursing house deaths.
Cuomo stated that might not occur as a result of it’s a “silly charge.”
Housing
Town is in a generational housing disaster that has seen rents skyrocket and left simply 1.4% of residences accessible to lease. The difficulty has grow to be one of many central focuses of native elected officers in recent times and has taken heart stage within the mayor’s race.
One space the place mayors can exert an excessive amount of affect over the price of housing is thru their appointments to the Lease Pointers Board, a nine-member impartial panel that votes yearly on lease will increase for the town’s roughly a million stabilized tenants. Mamdani, together with a few of Cuomo’s different progressive challengers, have dedicated to freezing rents for stabilized tenants if they’re elected by appointing board members who would vote in that path.
The RGB has voted for lease freezes 3 times, all beneath former Mayor Invoice de Blasio. The present principally Adams-picked board has opted to lift rents yearly that he has been in workplace.
Cuomo as a substitute stated he needs to nominate “fair people who understand the industry.” Whereas he has not but “thought through” who he would particularly appoint to the board, he indicated trying to housing specialists from tutorial establishments, who will make their choices primarily based on the prices for tenants and landlords.
“There are credible organizations that know housing and know economic development…that can make a fair determination,” Cuomo stated.
Cuomo, who served as US Secretary of Housing and City Growth beneath former President Invoice Clinton, has pledged to construct 500,000 new items of housing over the following decade as mayor with out specifying what number of could be “affordable.”
To satisfy that aim, Cuomo stated he’ll discover methods to avoid the town’s byzantine land-use course of. One avenue for doing so, he stated, could be bypassing the town Division of Housing Preservation and Growth (HPD)—an company charged with financing inexpensive housing building, imposing tenant protections, and administering some rental help applications—and as a substitute operating housing growth straight by the mayor’s workplace.
“I would just take control of it directly and make it a massive initiative,” Cuomo stated. “[For] every city-owned piece of property, put out an RFP (request for proposals) that says, ‘Whatever you have, come talk to me about it. Let’s see if we can make a deal.’”
He didn’t specify precisely how he would construct housing by the mayor’s workplace as a substitute of HPD, which he has argued has an excessive amount of crimson tape that slows the tempo of constructing desperately wanted items.
Tenants advocates are skeptical of Cuomo’s stance on housing.
Based on a printed report, he just lately drew the ire of some elected officers and advocates by saying he needs to considerably reconfigure HPD through the first Democratic mayoral debate earlier this month. They argue the transfer could be a present to the true property trade and will result in the erosion of tenant protections and lease laws.
The previous governor has additionally been slammed by housing advocates as “your landlord’s favorite mayoral candidate,” because of the giant sums that actual property titans and landlord teams have contributed to Repair the Metropolis.
Antisemitism
Antisemitism within the 5 boroughs, house to the biggest Jewish inhabitants exterior of Israel, has grow to be one other pivotal situation within the mayor’s race.
The subject has grow to be particularly distinguished within the wake of the practically two-year Israel-Hamas warfare. The battle, which has killed over 1,200 Israelis and not less than 50,000 Palestinians, has sparked quite a few protests in opposition to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. These demonstrations have, in flip, drawn accusations of antisemitism in opposition to pro-Palestine protesters.
Cuomo and Mayor Adams have each framed antisemitism as one of many biggest threats presently going through the town and are jockeying to be seen because the candidate preventing hardest on behalf of the town’s Jewish inhabitants. The previous governor referred to as antisemitism “the most serious and the most important issue” of the marketing campaign throughout an April speech at an Higher West Facet synagogue, and Adams is operating on the “EndAntisemitism” poll line in November.
Each have slammed Mamdani for his previous help of the “boycott divestment and sanctions” (BDS) motion in addition to his use of the time period “genocide” to explain Israel’s army offensive in Gaza. Mamdani has countered these assaults by saying he plans to take a position extra in combating hate crimes, together with antisemitic incidents, than every other candidate.
Relating to Adams, Cuomo argued the present mayor is all speak and has taken little motion on antisemitism. Adams just lately launched a brand new workplace, staffed by one particular person, devoted particularly to combating antisemitism and signed an govt order adopting the controversial Worldwide Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism.
However Cuomo waved away these actions as performative and stated Adams must be extra aggressively going after pro-Palestine protesters at Columbia College. He claimed that a few of their actions have risen to the extent of hate crimes that must be prosecuted, although prosecuting crimes isn’t an influence afforded to the mayor.
“Politically, it is very sensitive because there are mixed opinions on all of this, obviously, but it’s not about the politics; it’s about the law,” Cuomo stated.
“I think he says the right things, but it’s about what you do,” he stated of Adams. “And enforcing the law is a start.”
The previous governor pointed to his report on the problem as governor.
“I was the most aggressive governor in the United States on behalf of Israel,” Cuomo stated. “I passed an executive order saying, ‘if you boycott Israel, New York boycotts you.’ Every time Israel was attacked, I went. I passed the strictest hate crimes law in the United States.”
Cuomo, who has just lately obtained the backing of a number of distinguished Brooklyn and Queens Orthodox Jewish teams, stated he’s not involved about having to combat with Adams for his or her help within the common election if he wins the first.
“No, because I think Jewish New Yorkers get it,” Cuomo stated. “Yes, he (Adams) has said the right things, but what has he done?”
