Ahead of NYC mayor’s race debate, Cuomo hopes for a chance while Mamdani hopes for a mandate

By Edward-Isaac Dovere, CNN

(CNN) — In the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, Andrew Cuomo tried to run a campaign of inevitability. In these last few weeks of his general election bid as an independent, he is running a campaign of attrition, hoping to get enough voters to come to him through battered acquiescence as the choice they’re least unhappy with.

That isn’t the usual formula for a winning campaign. But this remains a strange race, with all the New Yorkers who don’t like Cuomo personally or politically overlapping at times with all the New Yorkers who can’t stomach Zohran Mamdani’s proud democratic socialism and opposition to Zionism, as well as all the New Yorkers struggling to see GOP nominee Curtis Sliwa as anything other than the wacky local character he’s spent a lifetime being.

For Mamdani, though, these final few weeks are less about winning — he and most outside observers believe he’s in good shape to — and more about how much he wins by. He could be elected mayor with a vote percentage in the mid-40s, which is where he’s been registering in most polls, but even committed aides worry that not getting at least 50 percent would complicate governing and winning the tax hikes he needs out of the state government, let alone asserting the dominance over the broader Democratic Party direction he is already claiming to have won.

“In order for the Mamdani administration to deliver on the platform, we need to demonstrate that the voters are with this agenda,” said Gustavo Gordillo, the co-chair of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, and a central supporter. “So we need a decisive victory.”

For Sliwa, meanwhile, it’s all about holding on to hope that there are enough Republican voters in this split Democratic city that he could actually become a contender, rather than just a factor.

Thursday night, the candidates meet for their first of two general election debates. Cuomo and his top aides are counting on a much different dynamic than the debates when he was running in the Democratic primary, which essentially played out as six-versus-one pile-ons. But they’re nervous enough that when nor’easter concerns forced the cancellation of the Columbus Day parade he was set to march in on Monday, that time was immediately claimed for more time practicing answers.

Mamdani has been locked in for days of his own prep, aware of just how much is riding on how he presents himself to voters still unsure whether a person with as little experience and as many radical ideas can actually run the city. They’re working over jabs and comebacks. They’re doing long mock sessions with stand-ins who’ve honed their faux lines and put-on accents.

In a race that has remained largely static, this might be the last chance to shift the dynamics — and that counts the potential late endorsement of Cuomo by incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who only a month ago was calling the former governor “a snake and a liar” but is now being courted by him.

Cuomo’s team argues that in a race with this many negative opinions circulating about all the candidates, he still has time to do it. After all, this far out from the primary in June, Mamdani was still behind in nearly every public poll, often by double-digit margins..

Cuomo aims to elbow out Sliwa; Sliwa says he’s not impressed

On Tuesday afternoon, pressed by a reporter about how Mamdani’s support seemed unstoppable, Cuomo pointed out that polls in the race to date haven’t shown the Democratic nominee with a majority.

“Then why isn’t he at 50%?” Cuomo said. He paused, and his voice turned into a high-pitched, smiling sound effect: “Boom!”

After holding for a beat, an amused-with-himself smile on his face, Cuomo launched into part of the case that he will make at the debate: Mamdani’s past and current positions on issues such as legalizing prostitution, opposing private ownership of property, and defunding or even abolishing the police are out of step with voters who may not have even realized that he holds them.

“They don’t believe in any of those things. And they just haven’t heard it yet. They don’t really know who he is and what he says he is going to do,” Cuomo said.

At the core of Cuomo’s final-stretch strategy is the belief that history will roughly repeat itself from what happened in the primary, when despite a ranked-choice voting system, support for all his then-opponents other than Mamdani collapsed in the final days. Now, Cuomo believes that could happen with Sliwa, and he is hoping to convince even stalwart Republicans that voting for the former Democratic governor is the only way to avoid living under Mamdani’s democratic socialism.

Cobble that together with Black voters and institutional support that had been sticking by Adams until he dropped out of the race last month, along with moderate Democrats who include a fair number of hard-no Mamdani voters, and Cuomo’s team can squint into seeing a plurality.

Asked how he would appeal to Sliwa voters, Cuomo said he is the law-and-order candidate and has been pushing for more police, launching into a long riff about how he is the only one in the race who knows how to make government work.

Aides are trying to get that to come out of him more succinctly: “A vote for Sliwa is a vote for Mamdani.”

Aides will be working the line into as much of what the campaign puts out in the final weeks as they can.

“This is the razor’s edge that Cuomo’s got to walk skillfully: You’ve both got to condense and compress Curtis’ vote and make them understand it’s a binary choice — and make this about, ‘You’re a Republican, so you’re not in love with Cuomo, but the alternative is a socialist who’s going to push policies that you’re absolutely against,’” said Cornell Belcher, the Cuomo campaign’s pollster.

On the topic of Mamdani, Belcher said Cuomo needs to “make the argument that New York hasn’t had a strong manager of this city since (Michael) Bloomberg. We’ve got to tackle these problems, but these problems aren’t going to tackled by inexperience and wild socialist policies.”

Sliwa told CNN on Tuesday he wasn’t impressed by any of Cuomo’s arguments.

“You’re the last guy in the world who should talk. You mailed it in during the primary. You could have beaten Zohran Mamdani. You even admitted that, ‘Oh, I didn’t try,’” Sliwa told CNN. “So I can tell Andrew Cuomo, ‘You’re a failed governor, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to move aside for you to put the final nail in the coffin in New York City so you can finish the job of destroying New York City.’ Absolutely not.”

Sliwa said he doesn’t believe his voters will slip away.

“Look, I trust the people. That’s why I want the people to vote for the next mayor. I don’t want the billionaires who have given us all vertigo, running back and forth: First, Cuomo, then Adams, then Cuomo,” Sliwa said. “And I don’t want the professional political class to try to pick the next mayor.”

Mamdani leans into energy to pick off holdouts

Cuomo’s biggest problem is the massive enthusiasm gap between him and Mamdani, who has assembled the most multiethnic coalition in the city’s history, and given the number of languages spoken on the subway, arguably one of the most diverse anywhere. While Cuomo has a collection of volunteers and campaign workers who lackadaisically hold up reused campaign signs at his still-rare events, Mamdani has made a cultural mark with viral videos, tote bags and new yellow caps the campaign rolled out in the lobby for his booming “Our Time Has Come” rally at an art deco theater in upper Manhattan on Monday night.

“I want for everyone to have the same feeling that it is a close race, that they need to do what they need do to win,” said Rep. Nydia Velázquez, Mamdani’s first major supporter among elected officials.

Not that she feels any doubts.

“I can tell you, the kind of energy and commitment that you see not only among young voters of all ages, I think that we are going to be surprised by the turnout that we’re going to have here,” Velázquez said.

Mamdani will lean in to that energy in the final weeks while continuing to hammer Cuomo as a tool of his rich donors and Trump. Anchored in large part by his home base of support with the Democratic Socialists of America, this weekend will feature a burst of organizing events tied to celebration of the candidate’s 34th birthday. He’ll host a soccer tournament on Sunday, trying to replicate nontraditional political outreach like his mass scavenger hunt at the end of the summer. Plans are underway for more rallies and a series of midnight press conferences, all leaning into a show of energy and momentum meant to keep his voters going and win over holdouts.

Helen Rosenthal, a former city councilwoman from the Upper West Side who attended Mamdani’s rally on Monday, told CNN that she is seeing support shifting to him among her friends and peers.

“The moms are saying it’s time for the next generation to lead — and this is who they think can lead,” Rosenthal said.

Even so, Rosenthal acknowledged that many of her former constituents will never vote for Mamdani.

Evan Roth Smith, a New York-based pollster not affiliated with any of the current campaigns, told CNN, “There are otherwise quite loyal Democrats who aren’t prepared to vote for him — where that’s coming from is largely Black voters and Jewish voters.”

Cuomo’s ability to grab them could be limited by how few there are, and how hard it would be to actually get them to vote for anyone other than the Democratic nominee. “These two groups are the most loyal demographic groups for Democrats in the country,” Smith said. “It is really, really hard to get them to break from their party.”

Cuomo on his chances: “We’ll see.”

Cuomo and his inner circle have fallen back on their own sense of scoring at least a moral victory for the final stretch: a mix of the idea that he shouldn’t have been able to get this far with an independent campaign he relaunched with a video fully shot in and around a park on the Upper East Side; that he’s keeping Mamdani challenged on his big promises; that at least someone is standing up as the city mainstreams democratic socialism and anti-Israel sentiment into the Democratic Party.

While Mamdani’s campaign believes that polls are likely under-sampling younger voters who are leaning more toward him, Cuomo’s campaign thinks there’s a chance that the hostage release and ceasefire in Gaza may have taken some of the air out of Mamdani supporters who flocked to him because of his opposition to Israel, even as Mamdani has continued to lean in, including participating in a fundraising run for Gaza over the weekend.

Asked during his only public appearance on Tuesday — where he dropped by a union headquarters to announce an affordable housing plan — if he is surprised he hasn’t generated more enthusiasm or passion for his candidacy so far, Cuomo demurred.

“So far. So far. So far,” he said. “We’ll see.”

A Cuomo campaign adviser acknowledged that moving voters will take work: “We gotta show them there’s a chance.”

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