Max Rivlin-Nadler on the NYC Mayoral Election
| Good morning! Today is the primary election for candidates running for municipal offices across New York state, including, most prominently, mayor of New York City. As Max Rivlin-Nadler writes in the NYR Online, what several months ago looked to be an easy win for former governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary has narrowed to a dead heat with the young socialist Zohran Mamdani, who has drawn together a multiethnic coalition united around his efforts to address the cost of living crisis in the city. (Perennial candidate Curtis Sliwa is running uncontested for the Republican nomination.) Mamdani’s long-shot campaign has proven popular by putting progressive policy proposals back at the center of Democratic politics, even as the Cuomo campaign—backed by “pro-Trump donors like Bill Ackman and Ken Langone”—has tried to paint him as a far-left extremist. “In one sense,” Rivlin-Nadler writes, the primary epitomizes a phenomenon of the past decade: the Democratic Party’s perverse determination, in the face of record-low approval ratings, to self-immolate rather than empower its youngest members and constituencies, who see that its only way back to sustained popularity and power runs through a redistributive left politics. But in another sense the election represents something more traditional. For many New Yorkers, Mamdani’s campaign has clearly become a place to share priorities, call out their enemies, and try to take power back to the neighborhoods they hail from.
Below, alongside Rivlin-Nadler’s essay, are seven articles from our archive about New York’s mayors—and one of its governors. Zohran Mamdani, the thirty-three-year-old democratic socialist assemblymember, has been steadily gaining ground over Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s mayoral primary. Can he close the gap? “For most of us, there’s a point at which personal identity prescribes the far reaches of our reason and empathy. It’s fair to say that Mayor Bloomberg had hit his limit when he compared living-wage advocates to communists of the late Soviet Union, or opined that whites were subjected to stop-and-frisk in disproportionately larger numbers compared to minorities, or claimed that the sharp rise in the population of the city’s homeless shelters was due to improvements in service, which made life there ‘a much more pleasurable experience.’” —May 23, 2019 “In getting his way, [Cuomo] has time and again amplified the power of standard legal tactics such as audits, subpoenas, and investigative commissions with bluster, shrewd instincts for the vulnerabilities of others, and public relations gimmickry. He sweet-talks and he bludgeons.” —August 13, 2015 “[Bill de Blasio] represents an almost fairy-tale idea of how many New Yorkers wish to see their city: racially harmonious, enlightened, empathetic—a wish that finds assurance, perhaps, in de Blasio’s ever-so-vaguely patrician demeanor.” —October 24, 2013 “La Guardia remains New York’s greatest mayor. It seems implausible today that a person could be both demagogue and hero. But the contradiction was at the heart of La Guardia’s character.” —February 12, 2004 “Watching the mayor govern has, at times, been a sickening spectacle, like a one-sided schoolyard fight. Giuliani has rarely been satisfied merely to defeat his foes; he seems to need to crush them, humiliate them, leave them no room for honorable withdrawal. There is some spirit of excess in the man, some force of unreason, that has made him fascinating.” —October 19, 2000 “[Ed] Koch has strong points as mayor. He loves the city, especially the outer boroughs. He loves the job and would like, he told Richard Heffner, to keep it forever (which didn’t stop him from running for governor in 1982). He is resourceful and untiring in promoting the cause of the city and in seeking solutions to its fiscal problems. But he has been a dismal failure in the most vital of his responsibilities: holding the city together.” —April 12, 1984 “[John] Lindsay has failed as a Mayor; and there are facts about his situation and streaks in his temperament which make it doubtful that he will ever succeed. To take just one example, I know no detached witness who does not think that the city hospitals are at least as bad now as they were when he found them; and no Mayor is a success if he cannot show some small general improvement in the medical care of the poor.” —November 20, 1969 Special Offer
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