NY Dems Face Choice Between Voters' Chosen Candidate and Disgraced Adams, Cuomo

New York’s Democratic Party establishment now has a choice: rally behind a rising political star being hailed as a once-in-a-generation talent who can expand the party’s voter base — or attempt to resurrect the political career of one of its disgraced executives.

The choice presented itself when Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old New York state assembly member, swept to an apparent victory on Tuesday in New York City’s Democratic primary for mayor. 

The city’s political class and the state Democratic Party had long since written off Mamdani due to his professed democratic socialism, and his victory came as a shock even to his campaign’s supporters. Results in the ranked-choice election won’t officially be called until next week, and the presumption was that unless any one candidate’s margins were big enough, New Yorkers would have to wait anxiously for voters’ second, third, fourth, and fifth choices to be counted.

On Tuesday night, however, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, considered the front-runner from before he entered the race until the votes started pouring in, did something he has always been loath to do: concede.

“Tonight is his night. He deserved it. He won,” Cuomo said, with a frankness and candor that was absent from his responses on the campaign trail about the 13 women who accused him of sexual harassment or his administration’s falsified reports of the Covid death toll in nursing homes. Though he didn’t sound optimistic, he left the door open to continue on with his previously planned third-party run in November. “We’re gonna take a look, we’ll make some decisions.”

As Cuomo conceded, another mayoral hopeful’s intentions were unambiguous: Eric Adams, the current New York City mayor, quickly began dropping campaign logos and attack posts implying that Mamdani, on a path to become New York City’s first Muslim mayor, is antisemitic.

Readers would be forgiven for forgetting that Adams, who nine months ago was indicted on federal corruption charges, is indeed running for reelection. 

The mayor has kept a relatively low national profile since Donald Trump barreled into office and his Department of Justice ordered Adams’s charges dismissed. The case conveniently dematerialized with the heavy implication that Adams would need to help the Trump administration with its brutal deportation regime.

Being out of the limelight, however, didn’t keep Adams away from work: kicking journalists out of press conferences, scrapping plans for affordable housing developments, and aligning his administration with Trump border czar Tom Homan to grease deportation operations in the supposed sanctuary city of New York.

Adams skipped the Democratic primary on the grounds that he was “abandoned” by the party — whose top state-level official twice declined to remove him from office. Like Cuomo, Adams announced months ago his plans to run third-party in the general election.

If both or either of these candidates remain set on running in November, the power center in New York’s Democratic Party will have to choose whether they’d rather carry Adams’s or Cuomo’s political baggage than follow the will of their primary voters to embrace a new face.

What’s the issue with a popular young candidate who has energized city voters like no one else in decades? Mamdani is known for political faux pas like calling for higher taxes on the wealthy and refusing to fold to the pro-Israel lobby. 

Pro-Israel Attacks

Mamdani’s stances on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, especially, are sure to draw ferocious attacks against the presumptive nominee. 

Israel has loomed over the race since before it began. Cuomo spent his time in the political wilderness burnishing his pro-Israel bona fides, last year going so far as to join the legal team defending Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from international war crimes charges. And Adams, for his part, is eyeing a ballot line for a party named “EndAntisemitism” — playing on the right-wing strategy that falsely conflates criticisms of Israel with anti-Jewish bigotry.

And the plans for pro-Israel attack against Mamdani have been falling into place for months. 

In the run-up to the primary, he was pressed repeatedly on whether he believed Israel had the right to exist as a Jewish ethnostate or whether he would condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada.” He responded, repeatedly, that he wanted to prioritize a politics of humanity for everyone that would leave people of all faiths safer from hateful attacks. 

This refusal to capitulate drew the ire of pro-Israel donors like billionaire Bill Ackman, who poured funding into a pro-Cuomo PAC, but the full weight of the Israel lobby has not yet been seen.

While the flagship national pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, hasn’t involved itself directly in New York’s municipal elections, the city and state have a pro-Israel spending group of their own: Solidarity PAC, which poured money into key, competitive New York City Council races ahead of the primary — and lost its highest-profile contests. Just days before the primary, the AIPAC-aligned Democratic Majority for Israel put out a statement urging voters to reject Mamdani.

These pro-Israel forces, along with the same major donors who propped up the former governor’s lackluster primary campaign, will almost certainly flood public airwaves with anti-Mamdani ads in the coming months.

Centrists for Mamdani?

In national political commentary, New York is both hailed and panned as a left-wing utopia divorced from the rest of the country’s political reality. The truth, however, is that New York’s Democratic leadership — and, the conventional political wisdom goes, much of its voter base — is firmly centrist. 

Can those leaders, who insist again and again that one of the world’s wealthiest places can’t pull a little more out of its top tax tier for its poorest residents, stomach welcoming a redistributionist like Mamdani into their ranks?

There are signs they might. Gov. Kathy Hochul, who once worked for Cuomo and, more recently, refrained from removing Adams from office, posted a congratulatory message for Mamdani last night. New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the top Democrat in the U.S. House, said on cable news that Mamdani had “outworked, outorganized, and outcommunicated” his competition. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer joined in Wednesday morning.

But it’s too early to know if the party apparatus will throw its weight behind Mamdani’s campaign. Congratulating a candidate is not the same as endorsing them. And the discomfort is palpable from some of New York’s swing-district Democrats, like Rep. Laura Gillen of Long Island, who declared Wednesday that “socialist Zohran Mamdani is too extreme to lead New York City.”

Declaring victory on election night, Mamdani projected an optimistic future of unity between the Democratic Party establishment and his more radical campaign.

“An hour ago, I spoke with Andrew Cuomo about the need to bring this city together as he called me to concede the race,” Mamdani told his supporters, raising a hand to quiet their boos at the former governor’s name. He thanked New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, a mayoral competitor who cross-endorsed with Mamdani, and credited their unified strategy for his success. “Together we have shown the power of politics of the future, one of partnership and sincerity.”

The rest of the party now has to decide if that’s their future too.

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