Central paradoxes of the NYC mayoral primary

June 1, 2025 — To those not following the campaign for the Democratic Party nomination for mayor – which, I’d wager, is quite a large percentage of New Yorkers — it may seem like the only questions getting attention are the obvious horse-race ones: How high can Zohran Mamdani climb? Will Andrew Cuomo’s ducking-the-press strategy continue to be a magic elixir right through to victory on June 24? But there’s been a lot more going on under the hood. 

1. What about me as your first choice? 

Prevailing wisdom (and it’s hard to argue with that wisdom on a theoretical level) is that, in a ranked-choice election, one avoids antagonizing first-round supporters of another candidate who might be inclined to place you as their second choice (or even lower down on their ballot). This season, that has translated into the anti-Cuomo candidates (Brad Lander, Adrienne Adams, Scott Stringer, Zellnor Myrie, and Jessica Ramos – in addition to Mamdani) thus far honoring an all-but-official non-aggression pact, summarized neatly by the acronym DREAM (initially standing for Don’t Rank Eric or Andrew for Mayor; now, after Mayor Adams bowed out of the Democratic primary, standing for Don’t Rank Evil Andrew for Mayor). 

Hasn’t been working out so well for the anti-Cuomo candidates other than Mamdani. 

Now some of these candidates are surely already resigned to losing, are thinking ahead to what comes next, either in or out of electoral politics, and are calculating that there’s no advantage in gratuitously alienating either their rivals or the supporters of their rivals. The rest (no more than Lander, A. Adams, and Stringer) may figure that there is still a lot of work to do to get Cuomo down to a beatable number and that Cuomo’s well-financed and nominally independent expenditure committee and other supporters will take care of carpet-bombing the Mamdani boomlet with a flood of advertisements focused on his anti-Zionism, his taxation and spending plans, and, more generally, the old workhorse, “He’s a socialist … run for your lives.” 

But however much that might open the door for a late-campaign surge, it doesn’t make that surge happen. To varying degrees, Lander, Stringer, and A. Adams are each well suited to argue, “I have more relevant experience than Mamdani, I have a more realistic plan to make concrete progress for New Yorkers during the misery of the Trump presidency than he does [see next section], and [especially for the editorial boards and general election, see sections 6 and 7] I’m not going to burn the place down.” 

Lander and Stringer have the policy detail set out in their platforms to make explicit comparison with both Mamdani and Cuomo; whether they do so is more significant than has been generally recognized.

2. A socialist case that the role of the federal government doesn’t matter?

It is altogether inconsistent with any serious theory of democratic socialism that municipalities can be islands unto themselves, operating freely without the help (or in the face of active hostility from) the federal government. Yes, a city can be in the vanguard of offering certain services1 and can enact a more steeply progressive system of taxation than others,2 but only the federal government has the potential to bring a scale of assistance than no municipality can match.3

It is altogether inconsistent with any serious theory of democratic socialism that the Trump administration’s all-out assault on the administrative state and on social welfare spending; its contempt for the rule of law; and its desired system of cronyism, corruption, and social Darwinism (except for socializing the risks taken by wealthy individual and businesses) would not have devastating impacts. 

Yet the Mamdani campaign’s approach apparently proceeds from the assumption that it will be essentially business as usual at the federal level, that new programs can be built on the foundation of what now exists. That would be wonderful if true and, over a long period of time, I have argued that Democratic politicians are insufficiently ambitious. 

But the Trump administration – with the enthusiastic assistance of a Republican Congress – is determined to dismantle not only what we have traditionally referred to as the social safety-net, but, more broadly, to dismantle what we have traditionally referred to as a society. Recognizing that some of these may not be signed off on by Congress, a few illustrations of the details of proposed budget cuts: cutting project-based rental assistance by 95 percent; a nearly 40 percent cut in the discretionary budget of the National Institutes of Health; targeting nutritional programs for women, infants, and children; and eliminating the Legal Services Corporation, which is the country’s single largest provider of civil legal aid and which has a significant presence in New York City.

Candidates prefer to talk about “fighting back” (see next section), but this is no rhetorical game. The overwhelming likelihood is that there will be on-the-ground devastation. New York City has more wealth co-existing with hardship than perhaps any city in the country, so it’s not without resources to staunch the bleeding that is to come and even to develop some of the new initiatives we need. But all of that requires very serious prioritizing and triaging. Where are the candidates on confronting that reality?  

3. Standing up to Trump 

The idea that the mayor needs to “stand up to Trump” has been a consistent and insistent theme of the candidates (with the notation exception of Cuomo, who initially spoke of working with Trump, was then late to the table in making any strong statements on this, and would still prefer to talk about other things). But what does “standing up to Trump” mean? There is the not-unimportant function of making plain what Trumpism means to the lives and prospects of New Yorkers. And, in some circumstances (made easier by the administration’s disdain for the law), there is meritorious litigation to be brought to block administration action (as with seizing of funds without lawful authority). 

From a broader perspective, though, there is less standing up to be done than one might hope. Across many areas of funding, taxation, and policy (as with gutting federal pandemic response so that, among other things, we’ll be deeply unprepared for the next pandemic that strikes), Congress will put its stamp of approval on the Trump / Project 2025 agenda. 

In other areas – immigration is the best example – there is an enormous gap between the intensity of substantive criticism of what the Trump administration is doing and wants to do and the limited means genuinely available to stop those plans. Regardless of the wisdom or folly of the different elements of Trump immigration policy, the notion that municipalities or states are “sanctuary” jurisdictions in the absence of at least tacit federal government consent is a fantasy.

 However bizarre it may seem, for example, to end “humanitarian parole” and return Haitians to a chaotic and violence-torn country, humanitarian parole was granted for only a two-year period and it is extraordinarily unlikely that the current Supreme Court – which just acted on an emergency basis to remove a stay that had been imposed on the Trump administration – will ultimately change its mind and block the administration. (It’s more likely that the majority will question the legitimacy of the broad scope of the Biden’s administration grant of humanitarian parole.)  

Likewise, while judicial relief may be forthcoming in a decisive way against the Trump administration’s plainly illegal invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, there is no litigation solution to widely ramped-up immigration enforcement that results in deportations, and less public opposition to the proposition that relatively recently arrived unauthorized migrants, including those migrants with non-meritorious asylum claims, should be deported than the field of mayoral candidates seems to believe. 

And all this is true before the Trump administration (which could, of course, continue to forego easily available legal means to accomplishes its ends) gets the GOP Congress to adopt a broader definition of what constitutes illegal interference with the efforts of federal immigration agents or (less likely because many business interests thrive on having material portions of their workforces living in the shadows) enacts a mandatory E-Verify system for any employment in the United States. 

Do you notice that these facts haven’t been discussed on the campaign trail? That there hasn’t been any prioritization made in terms of who, realistically can be helped? (The focus on Dreamers back in the Obama administration seems like an ancient memory.) 

Hence, another paradox: we get only rhetoric that has little to do with what the next mayor would be able to accomplish.

4. What about education? 

In the 2021 campaign, we heard a lot – not least from Eric Adams – about how the New York City school system was not meeting the needs of its students. This year, I would say that the discussion is oddly muted … except doing so would give the impression that there is a discussion. There have been useful proposals advanced about expanding after-school programs and 3-K, and the usual discussions about class size,4 but voters have not been hearing about poor outcomes during and after the K-12 experience, let alone the many underlying reasons. 

Part of this is because underlying reasons come under the banner of “the lost list of issues that are taboo to discuss in Democratic or progressive politics in New York City.” I compiled a sub-list of education-related questions earlier this year as part of a broader set of inquiries I wished candidates would answer. 

I think you’ll agree that they haven’t addressed these fundamental issues, and so, here too, voters will be selecting someone with little idea of where that candidate will lead us.

5. Could any candidate say “status quo” more than Andrew Cuomo?

In a May 2025 poll, Marist found that “81% of likely Democratic primary voters say the way things are going in New York City are going in the wrong direction.” How is it that more likely Democratic primary voters aren’t associating a wrong direction with the person who had the greatest governmental authority in New York State (and, hence, the greatest governmental authority over New York City) in the 10-year period from 2011 to 2021? 

Or maybe the better question is: “How is it that neither candidates nor the media have successfully explained that link?” 

Just as paradoxical is why the apparent desire for change in direction voiced by so many New Yorkers co-exists with strong support for a candidate that no one in New York would describe as a change agent. 

New is not necessarily better, but how much attention has been paid to what, if anything, Cuomo is proposing that doesn’t basically maintain current direction in policy or else tinker with that direction only to return to what had been the status quo until recent years. Are there proposals that would be true departures? Education? Health care? Government reform? None come to mind. 

Indeed, in some areas, Cuomo has gone out of his way to give assurance that there won’t be any change. Unfortunately, this comes into clearest focus in terms of land use and associated segregation issues. Low-density (generally White) neighborhoods that have been exclusionary? Won’t make change there? Trying to restore the old status quo of a robust outsider-restriction policy in affordable housing lotteries, at least in minority-dominated neighborhoods so that it is easier for Black neighborhoods to remain Black and Hispanic neighborhoods to remain Hispanic (regardless of where real-life New York City families want to move as shown by their lottery applications)? Cuomo has made sure in his campaign materials and in multiple campaign appearances to promise to try.5 This is consistent with his record as governor of not taking any action to fight the suburban exclusionary zoning that intensifies the regional housing and segregation crises that bear heavily on New York City. 

The idea of Cuomo as the status quo candidate is reinforced further by his strong success in attracting union endorsements – far more than any other candidate, including nods from 32BJ SEIU, the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, and 1199 SEIU.6 

Not all of this is union leadership thinking “we can work with him” (some is “we’re going to have to work with him), but a lot of it is. And that is a reflection not of a desire for change but for a desire to keep things as they had been when Cuomo was last in power. That is very different from the question of what would be best in the lives of union members outside of the workplace, let alone the question of what would be best for New Yorkers in general in terms of whether some changes in the relations between city government and some or all its unions would be beneficial. And it is not of a piece with New Yorkers overwhelmingly seeing the city on the wrong track.

 6. What will the editorial boards do?

A lot of attention has been paid to the decision of The New York Times earlier this year to eschew a basic element of its civic responsibility and end the practice of political endorsements in local races. That’s a decision that can only have come from someone deciding that, from a marketing point of view, local endorsements were now off-brand. (The Times has since said that it hasn’t ruled out such endorsements.) 

It is widely agreed that such an endorsement would still carry weight, and it should be agreed that endorsements from the Daily News and the New York Post carry influence, too. 

As best as one can tell, none of the three have much use for Cuomo … or Mamdani. The Post generally prefaces the names of the other candidates with “lefty,” so it’s not easy to guess who it would hold its nose for – although A. Adams is in fact what would be called the most “moderate” of the bunch. The News would also be holding its nose, but one could see it getting behind Lander (without a tremendous amount of enthusiasm, and with reference to the fact that he had brought himself back from the positions he had taken in 2020-22). 

Back to The Times. It might like to go in the direction of A. Adams, but is unlikely to be satisfied by the squishy answers she tends to give (and the absence – at least to judge by her campaign website – of any guide to the policies she would pursue, let alone any policy papers).

My guess: If a Times endorsement were to come, it would be Lander’s to lose.

7. What about the Kathryn Garcia general election lane? 

Presuming Cuomo hangs on and wins the Democratic primary, the general would feature Cuomo, Sliwa (R), Eric Adams (I), Jim Walden (I), and the candidate of the Working Families Party. If Mamdani stayed in the number two spot, WFP would certainly go to him. 

With that line-up, Cuomo would be the prohibitive favorite, but the field would all be candidates to Kathryn Garcia’s right, apart from Mamdani, well to her left. Her lane would be unfilled. 

Here, again, Lander — who must feel mightily betrayed by the Working Family Party’s decision to give its first-place ranking to Mamdani over him — might have an opportunity. That is, if he were able to close the gap with Mamdani for number two and if he did it in a way that did not burn bridges with the WFP. (Not easy for WFP to decline to put its number two on its line when that number two beat its number one.) 

Cuomo would still start with a huge advantage, but the Garcia lane would come closest to being filled. 

That lane nearly won last time, and here that lane’s candidate would be vying with four candidates splitting the center-right-to-right vote. 

8. You think it’s over?

Election prime time is just about to begin.

I keep reminding others about this, and I sometimes need to remind myself. Lots of New Yorkers will just now be tuning in (even though early voting starts in less than two weeks, on June 14). For many, the Cuomo years were a long time ago and much of the substance has been forgotten. For at least as many, the kinds of issues I’ve described here as not having been addressed by any of the candidates need to be addressed for voters to make informed choices. That puts a lot of pressure on reporters, editors, and forum moderators to maximize their probing over the course of the next three weeks.