Mayoral candidates Meeting Member Zohran Mamdani and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Photographs by Lloyd Mitchell
The 2 main Democratic mayoral candidates, Andrew Cuomo and Zohran Mamdani, traded blows throughout a collection of radio interviews on Monday morning, with simply hours earlier than the June 24 main.
The 2 candidates launched their broadsides throughout a blitz of interviews with WNYC host Brian Lehrer, wherein the 9 main Democratic mayoral contenders made their closing arguments to voters.
Cuomo: ‘My record is indisputable’
Cuomo, the previous governor and frontrunner for a lot of the race, argued that the town is in “real trouble” — dealing with points like crime and homelessness — and that he’s the one candidate with the federal government expertise to do the job.
“Who can actually make government work?” Cuomo requested rhetorically. “Who can get the garbage picked up? Who can get the mentally ill off the streets? Who can make the city safe? My record is indisputable for making government work.”
Cuomo, who resigned practically 4 years in the past amid a number of sexual misconduct allegations that he denies, pointed to the infrastructure initiatives he pushed via as governor and his nationally televised COVID-19 press briefings as proof of his management prowess.
When Cuomo was requested how he would work with Gov. Kathy Hochul and Albany lawmakers, a lot of whom nonetheless have dangerous blood with him from his days as governor, he pointed to all that he bought completed with the legislature throughout these years. Hochul was Cuomo’s lieutenant governor and took over after he resigned in 2021.
“As mayor, you’re going to have to fight with Albany,” Cuomo mentioned. “There is a tension between the mayor of New York and the governor of New York.”
Nonetheless, the governor and the state legislature maintain way more energy in that relationship than the mayor does — energy that Cuomo usually exercised over former Mayor Invoice de Blasio when he was in workplace.
Cuomo additionally sought to hit Mamdani, his best competitor, over his relative lack of expertise in authorities. He blasted Mamdani, who has served within the Meeting for 3 years, as somebody extra fascinated about messaging than governing.
“He thinks the job of being a mayor is being a messenger,” Cuomo mentioned, referring to a remark Mamdani made to the New York Editorial Board. “He’s about public relations. And these jobs are operating CEO jobs.”
Mamdani: New Yorkers ‘done with cynical politics’
In the meantime, Mamdani — a Democratic socialist — touted the success of his long-shot bid in energizing younger voters along with his affordability-focused message. His marketing campaign is constructed on core pledges akin to freezing the hire for the town’s a million stabilized tenants, making public buses free and sooner, and implementing common free little one care.
“This agenda has mobilized the greatest grassroots campaign the city has ever seen,” Mamdani mentioned. “Nearly 50,000 volunteers, 1.4 million doors knocked, 20,000 donors who gave an average of 80 bucks. But New Yorkers are done with the cynical politics of the past. They want a future they can afford.”
In current weeks, Mamdani has gained on Cuomo within the polls, even eclipsing his lead by 4 factors in an Emerson Faculty survey launched on Monday.
The Meeting member addressed mounting questions, pushed by Cuomo, over how reasonable his platform is, provided that it depends on funding from elevating taxes on the state’s highest earners. Hochul advised Pix11 final week that she has little urge for food for that.
“I’ve seen in the legislature, year after year, an appetite within the Assembly and the Senate to do exactly that, to raise those corporate taxes, to raise income taxes on the top 1%,” Mamdani mentioned.
In current days, Mamdani has taken warmth from Cuomo, different elected officers, and the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC for declining to sentence the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which many Jewish New Yorkers see as inciting violence in opposition to them. When requested by Lehrer to make clear the state of affairs, Mamdani repeated his argument that the phrase has a “variety of meanings for a variety of people.”
“That is not language that I use,” Mamdani mentioned. “The language that I use is that of clarity, and I do not believe it is the mayor’s position to the policing language. … However, I know that this is a moment when many Jewish New Yorkers are fearful and are concerned, and I’ve had many of those conversations.”
Mamdani additionally took Cuomo and an excellent PAC supporting his marketing campaign — “Fix the City” — to process for flooding the airwaves with advertisements that he mentioned demonize him.
“What Andrew Cuomo is doing is weaponizing this very real crisis and using billionaire money to spew hate,” he mentioned. “He and other candidates have used words describing me as a monster as dangerous as being at the gates, language that is more befitting of a beast than a person.”
