A lot of New Yorkers have already voted, with just a few days to go in the mayoral primary– Tuesday, June 24. We have a few more questions in the eleventh hour compiled from Team Epicenter and some of our readers for Felipe De La Hoz. Here we go…
Basic question first: Tell us again, just WHO is eligible to vote in this primary?
After our highest state appellate court issued its final ruling this past March, noncitizen voting in New York is dead. That means only U.S. citizens over 18 years old are eligible to vote generally, and specifically only registered party voters can participate in primary elections in the state. Therefore, voting in the Democratic primary requires you to be a registered Democrat, and yes, sadly it is far too late for you to change your party registration if you aren’t.
The New York Times came out with a pretty scathing non-endorsement of Zohran Mamdani. What do you make of this?
I have to be honest and say I consider that piece to be an embarrassment to the board, frankly. After a splashy declaration last year that they would not be engaging in local endorsements, they about-face the very next election cycle but don’t have the grit to just own it and make an endorsement, instead issuing a de facto, mealy-mouthed endorsement of Cuomo.
As for the content itself, I found it awash in platitudes steeped in unfounded presumptions, of which the most infuriating was my personal bugbear of pearl-clutching over crime and disorder. The editorial begins with and constantly returns to the idea that the city is backsliding into “the bad old days of the 1970s and ‘80s” while mostly glossing over the fact that this is a perception issue detached from reality. It dings former Mayor Bill de Blasio for supposedly turning a blind eye on disorder without ever laying out what exactly this disorder is or what he was supposed to do about it, even as he presided over historic lows in the city’s crime rate.
I could go on, but the point is that it reads like a half-baked and hurriedly put-together response to Mamdani’s climbing popularity by a set of wealthier liberals concerned with his promises to stanch the middle-class bleeding with policies that they deem too ideologically socialistic. This, by the way, is not a response borne out of my own preferences — I can’t vote anyway — but a frustration with what seems like a shoddy piece of journalism.
We know you work for an editorial board too, over at the Daily News. How did you all decide who to endorse and what do you make of so many media establishment coming out with an Anyone-But-Mamdani stance?
I hate to do this but unfortunately I can’t speak in much detail about our internal deliberations except to say we spoke to all of the candidates in the race and grilled them on their records and policies. We pride ourselves at the NYDN ed board (unlike some other boards I could mention) on grounding our analyses and opinions fundamentally on a process of reporting instead of just spouting off.
As for the onslaught on Mamdani, there are a couple components to it, some more valid than others. His campaign has hand-waved away the question of experience but I think it’s a valid one. Yes, he’s young and energetic, yes, he’s got big ideas, but running a city of 8.4 million people with a 300,000-person municipal workforce at a time of crisis is a very different matter than being a state legislator of (let’s face it) middling legislative success. I don’t think it’s inconceivable for a less experienced candidate to step up and fill the role — let’s remember Obama was a state legislator four years before winning the presidency of the United States — but I haven’t really seen Mamdani answer the question fully.
Now, I don’t think that’s really the biggest concern for a lot of the anti-Mamdani contingent, whose concern about experience seems to often land them on Cuomo — a person whose failings in office are well-documented and extensive — and not, say, Lander, a current citywide elected official with a long record in the city. It boils down to Mamdani’s agenda of rent freezes, tax hikes on the wealthy, and so on, which are the same policies moderates have been fighting progressives on for years.
New York, it’s often said, is a big bureaucracy. So how much does experience in the state legislature and municipal government matter to effectively run New York City?
All things being equal I think I’d prefer someone with City Council experience versus an Albany record, but familiarity with the city budget and functions is pretty crucial for someone who wants to take the helm. We don’t have many “outsider” candidates in this race, aside from Whitney Tilson, so it’s less of a consideration. Conversely I think you can make a case that marinating in public life for a while, especially in less directly executive or policymaking roles, can make a would-be mayor less effective.
Look at Eric Adams himself; he was a state legislator and then borough president, a largely ceremonial role from which he brought a crowd of misfits and opportunists who ended up being the weakest point in his administration.
We’ve also seen a lot of stories about the Black vote in Southeast Queens. It’s an area we know well from years of work during the pandemic, and we’re thinking of heading out there to gauge voter sentiment. What should we be asking? What are we looking for?
Issue questions are a good place to start: What are your top issues? What do you know about each candidate and their record? How do you think each would address these issues that you care a lot about? Do you know anyone who doesn’t typically vote who is planning on turning out this time? How much are Trump’s actions a motivator? What’s going wrong in the city?
Let’s talk about ranked choice voting. Does the order matter?
Of course it matters! Your vote only goes to the next candidate down once the preceding candidate has been eliminated, meaning that you want to rank the candidates in the literal order of your preference; unlike first-past-the-post systems, you don’t really have to vote that strategically because even if you want to make a long-shot candidate your first choice, your vote will likely end up sliding down to another more viable and perhaps ultimately victorious candidate.
The order really matters here when it comes to the handful of top contenders. The reason that Lander and Mamdani cross-endorsed is because the extent to which Lander voters rank Mamdani above Cuomo and vice versa could easily be determinative of the race.
Which candidates do you think matter if these are our top issues:
- Good public schools for my children.
- The rent is too damn high.
- My family is a mix of immigration statuses and I want someone to fight for their right to stay here.
- I ride the subway every day and am scared of the panhandlers and people with clear mental health and substance abuse issues.
- I want to buy a house but can’t afford NYC.
- I feel unsafe in my neighborhood.
I’m going to be annoying here again and say that it’s hard to prescriptively say that any given candidate matters for any one of these issues because each one has emphasized what they would tackle, just in different ways. So on the question of good public schools, for example, it depends on whether you’re of the opinion that an expansion of charter schools is functionally a boon or a threat to good public schools, or whether these even count as public schools; Tilson supports them, while none of the other candidates explicitly do.
Ditto rent; one of Mamdani’s signature proposals is freezing rents for the city’s hundreds of thousands of rent-stabilized apartments, which would in a literal and direct way keep rents low for a huge chunk of tenants, but which has undeniable second-order impacts ranging from impacting landlords’ ability to do repairs to squeezing the non-stabilized rental market. Every candidate has plans to address public safety; Cuomo wants to surge cops to the subways and sweep the homeless out every night while building mental health facilities, while Mamdani wants to create an entirely new Department of Public Safety to increase non-police approaches to things like gun violence and mental health crises.
Whether any given candidate’s proposals register as success to you or not sort of depends on what you personally consider to be success. Is it success to have your rent personally frozen even if it makes other rents more expensive? Perhaps. Is it success to have the homeless out of the subways even if that means removing them every night by force? Perhaps. It sort of depends on your priorities.
I will say, on the immigration question, almost all of the primary candidates seem to be largely on the same page, which is that the administration’s enforcement overreaches have to be controlled. Brad Lander grabbed national headlines this week after he was arrested by masked federal agents as he tried to escort someone out of the immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza. He was sprung only after Gov. Kathy Hochul showed up, and the whole episode seems to have further galvanized both his and the other candidates’ resolve to oppose ICE’s indiscriminate crackdowns.
What’s the Trump factor in this race? Will he target whomever the next mayor is and does their experience matter?
It’s hard not to have Trump loom over everything right now, especially since he seems pretty set on plunging the country into direct authoritarianism under his control. Obviously, the dismissal of charges against Eric Adams in exchange for cooperation on immigration enforcement — a decision I imagine Trump must have at least signed off on — has shifted the dynamics of the race, and I think Trump will come down on any Democrat that becomes NYC mayor. I don’t really believe anyone has a credible claim to being able to avoid Trump’s wrath, as even now the relatively sycophantic Adams is facing the potential of a surge of ICE operations.
What happens to the “anyone but Cuomo” camp if Cuomo wins the election? Will they reconcile or are they exiled politically?
I don’t think they’ll come around to voting for Cuomo, at least in part because there’s no real danger of a GOP victory and their alternative would be Adams running third-party, which also seems not particularly in keeping with this contingent’s preferences. Of course, Cuomo himself has already indicated that he would potentially run third party if he does not win the primary. There’s also a decent chance that, depending on his own strength coming out of the primary, Mamdani will run on the Working Families ticket if he loses.
Does charisma and being a great orator equate to being an effective leader?
My opinion is “unequivocally not.” We’ve seen a number of gifted orators that did not exactly stack up to their offices. Hell, you could argue that Trump himself owes his political career to his skill — one of his only real skills — at playing a character on TV, a character that is, let’s face it, kind of funny and a Business Genius™. This is all for show, of course, but enough people have bought in that he was twice elected president. Here in New York and New Jersey, we’ve had plenty of charismatic officials who’ve not only done subpar jobs in office but have left in handcuffs. It certainly doesn’t hurt to be able to communicate effectively with the public and be a reassuring voice in times of crisis, but it’s not the basics of the job.
One of the top candidates, Brad Lander, has leaned into his image as kind of a boring dad who can manage the city’s bureaucracy and inspire with message if not necessarily a bombastic personality, and I think that’s working for him (obviously, he’s had a very not-boring week this week).
Who has the best shot of working with the state to deal with the issues of the subway system?
It depends on whether you’re referring to the (I think overblown) safety issues or what I consider to be the most acute issue with the subway system: it is completely falling apart. On the latter point, Cuomo does have some credibility, having been credited with overruling his own experts to avoid an L-train shutdown in a way that many observers now agree was a better approach for riders. Yet he’s also well known for overbearing micro-management and bullying, which has led him to be hated in Albany — which the city needs for anything MTA — and, according to his surviving partner, drove Moynihan Train Hall project manager Michael Evans to suicide.
Myrie and Mamdani are both current state legislators (I’m leaving out Jessica Ramos because she’s functionally barely been running) but that doesn’t necessarily guarantee that they will have clout there as NYC’s mayor.
Are the campaigns doing an effective job in engaging passive voters and voters in underserved communities?
It seems like the person most making that effort is Mamdani, who has built an incredibly expansive ground game network. That said, making the effort and being successful are not exactly the same, and he’s been having a hard time reaching the Black and Latino base that seems to be Cuomo’s core constituency, in large part just as a result of his name recognition and establishment bona fides.
On the other hand, Mamdani seems to be shooting to activate younger nonvoters into casting their first ballots for the socialist candidate, and that’s a bit harder to measure as they are definitionally not necessarily captured by existing polling. That might be his path to victory.
How long does it actually take to reach a final candidate in the primary? It seems with the ranking vote, it would make the process a lot longer.
Is there a Republican primary this year? I’ve only been hearing about the Democratic nominees and debates, so some clarification on that would be helpful.
There is not. Curtis Sliwa is the Republican nominee for mayor (again).
We end on basic questions (again): Can I still register to vote, and if so what’s the deadline? Also what kinds of ID do I need?
The deadline for both in-person and mail registration was June 14, so no, you cannot register to vote anymore for this primary election. However, you can still register for the general election, up until October 25. You don’t necessarily have to provide any ID to register, but can provide the last four digits of an SSN or something like a utility bill (if you are eligible, which you should make sure you are).
