NEW YORK — A very lively — and at points combative — final debate for New York City mayor underscored Andrew Cuomo’s last-ditch desperation as he seeks to halt frontrunner Zohran Mamdani’s efforts to win City Hall.
The former governor and the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa, teamed up to attack Mamdani on his inexperience, his dodging of questions and his criticism of Israel. But the democratic socialist counterpunched and drew viewers’ attention to the sexual harassment allegations that drove his rival from office four years ago.
Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, has been polling in double digits ahead of Cuomo, who’s running as an independent, and is on track to win the high-stakes, high-profile race to lead the country’s biggest city. But Mamdani, who has run on a platform to expand affordability, would be under a national microscope with the midterms looming.
Cuomo has been wooing Republican voters as he seeks every edge. The incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who dropped out of the race, endorsed the former governor Thursday.
POLITICO’s New York editor Michael Gartland and New York Playbook co-authors Jeff Coltin, Emily Ngo and Nick Reisman weigh in on whether the 11th-hour tactics will make a difference with early voting around the corner. They spoke a day after the final debate.
This roundtable has been edited for length and clarity.
Gartland: Zohran Mamdani did not deliver the same kind of performance he did in the first debate, which he won, but it also didn’t seem like a disaster for him. Andrew Cuomo appeared more lively, and Sliwa delivered a decent performance. What are your takeaways? How does last night’s debate impact the state of play as we move through the home stretch of this election?
Reisman: Andrew Cuomo had his most forceful debate performance to date. He did what he had failed to do up until last night: He picked apart Zohran Mamdani’s lefty ideas, linked him back to the Democratic Socialists of America and then pivoted to his own platform. Stylistically, he was looser and — believe it or not — seemed to be having a good time. Curtis Sliwa did what John Catsimatidis and others wanted: Start training some fire on Mamdani as well. And it was effective.
Ngo: Right. Agree, Nick. Cuomo was so much more effective as an attacker and a lot of that came from having more energy and stage presence AND having Sliwa as a tag team member.
Coltin: Yep, Cuomo kept hitting Mamdani and definitely put in a stronger performance this time. But it was the same arguments he’s been using against Mamdani — inexperienced, unrealistic, anti-Israel, took a photo with an anti-gay Ugandan lawmaker. And I’d be surprised if he was able to move a meaningful amount of voters to his side and away from Mamdani. At least — enough to make up what looks like a big, double-digit deficit in the polls.
Ngo: In terms of impact on the race, considering that incumbent Mayor Eric Adams is just now endorsing Cuomo right before early voting is starting, the anti-Mamdani coalition is getting it together too late. Especially with Mamdani so far ahead in polling.
Coltin: Adams’ endorsement is a sign of hope for Cuomo. Not so much that Adams will be able to personally move a lot of votes, but just the idea that if Cuomo wants to win, he needs to convince a lot of dyed-in-the-wool Cuomo haters to become his waiters and vote for him anyway. And Adams is a prime example.
Reisman: All that said, there was no proverbial knock out blow. Mamdani did not make any major mistakes.
Gartland: Agree on that point. Mamdani’s dodging on some of the questions also struck me. How much do you think that will penetrate with the average voter? Will it?
Ngo: There was a poignant TV moment in the debate where Mamdani stood on stage with a smile after dodging a question on whether he supports certain ballot initiatives, and Cuomo and Sliwa kept on dogging him. Cuomo did this hand motion that mimed talking out of both sides of your mount.
Reisman: Mamdani’s hedging on the ballot questions, declining to take a position on key policy issues, made him seem like any other politician. Which, of course, he is. But his strength is coming across as an un-politician, different from characters like Cuomo and Adams. When he equivocates or hedges, that takes away his main strength. And it showed last night.
Ngo: That mayyy penetrate with some voters. Btw, I thought a live audience at the debate made a huge difference.
Reisman: In this political era, authenticity is the coin of the realm. It’s a cliche at this point, but it’s true. Any loss of that perception of being authentic stands to hurt Mamdani’s enthusiasm with voters, which has been pretty solid so far.
Coltin: Of course, Mamdani is damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t. Because if he came out firmly in favor of the ballot questions, he’d instantly be in a fight with the New York City Council and unions like 32BJ.
Reisman: Sure, and that’s a political decision he’s made!
Ngo: Yeah, Nick, especially for a candidate who’s won broad support thanks to the perception that he’s authentic, a real one.
Coltin: The old Mamdani wouldn’t have cared — he loved a fight. But the new Mamdani is trying to become mayor and has to make compromises with powerful allies.
Ngo: That’s right, Jeff. Asking Jessica Tisch to stay on as NYPD commissioner is one of those olive branches.
Gartland: Mamdani had his share of hits. Cuomo’s sexual misconduct scandal has dogged him. Mamdani noted that one of Cuomo’s accusers, Charlotte Bennett, was in the audience last night. How did Cuomo adjust to an attack that he had to know was coming in one form or another?
Coltin: It’s remarkable that Cuomo doesn’t have a better answer on this, four years after he resigned. Every time he answers, he seems to be annoyed, and then gets pedantic about the facts. And I’m sure he IS annoyed. But from a political persuasion perspective, I don’t think it’s that effective.
Reisman: Throughout this campaign Cuomo has repeatedly explained away the findings that he sexually harassed women by pointing to the investigations of district attorneys. But that doesn’t take into account the attorney general report was a civil finding. Nor does it fully explain the aggressive legal tactics he’s employed against the women who have accused him of wrongdoing in the multiple lawsuits sprung out of the Cuomo-related scandals. This remains one of the biggest hindrances to a victory for him, underscored by his high negative ratings in polls. Many voters simply do not like him.
Ngo: There’s still a stubborn or arrogant sort of lack of humility about it all that I think is evident when he tries to explain all the allegations away.
Reisman: Cuomo believes his political enemies did him in — state Attorney General Letitia James, Republicans in Washington, the critics of his Covid policies. He’s never truly reckoned with the controversies and scandals in a meaningful way. Perhaps that’s why many of his answers on these issues come across so unsatisfying to voters.
Coltin: Reminder that Adams criticized Cuomo for being a quitter and resigning when he faced public pressure to step down. The mayor didn’t resign, but he has now quit the primary, and the general election. And now he’s endorsing Cuomo!
Gartland: Where did the candidates win or lose when it came to policy last night?
Coltin: It’s personnel, which could lead to policy, but I do think that Mamdani announcing before the election that he’d ask NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch to stay on was a smart political move that will calm a lot of folks that are worried about how he’d manage the NYPD. It suggests he wants continuity, not radical change in the department.
The decision will get a lot of blowback on the left. But DSA members aren’t swing voters in the way the city’s multi-millionaire class could be.
Cuomo wants to keep Tisch too, but for him, that’s expected. For Mamdani, it’s notable.
Gartland: I’m not so sure about that regarding Tisch. Mamdani has been dominating since the Democratic primary. Announcing that he wants to keep Tisch threatens to alienate parts of his base. So why do it now? I mean, I get it. But it also seems like a double-edged sword, and I’m not sure the reward outweighs the risk.
Reisman: For the vast majority of this campaign, Cuomo’s policy has mostly fallen back on the city’s a mess, Mamdani is going to usher in a hellscape, worse than de Blasio, etc. And that’s not how you win people over, necessarily. Cuomo lately has been able to cut through some of this by doing what he’s not accustomed to as an underdog: Criticizing the frontrunner and then pivoting to his own plan.
Mamdani came across the weakest on some of his biggest policy strengths, including housing. For the first time, Cuomo honed in on some of those promises and the details behind the building plan. It was an effective deconstruction even if it’s coming a little late in the game. I’ve argued that Mamdani’s affordability platform means he automatically has the advantage given voters’ cost-of-living concerns. But Cuomo arguably fought him to a draw last night.
Ngo: Interested to know if you all agree or disagree, but I think the candidates were matched on policy.
There was a protracted discussion on how they would handle ICE raids on the city as mayor in light of the very chaotic arrests of street vendors, all African migrants, on Canal Street earlier this week.
Cuomo said he would deploy the NYPD to ward off ICE, Mamdani discussed limiting cooperation between federal and local police and advancing street vendor reform legislation.
Reisman: Having the NYPD somehow counter ICE’s actions seems fraught, to say the least. And if Cuomo is mayor and dealing with Trump he better be prepared to back it up.
Gartland: That statement seemed potentially problematic in a major way. Maybe just saber rattling in Trump’s direction, but if he’s going to make that threat, he needs to be prepared to carry it out. And doing so could be very ugly.
Coltin: Yeah, Mamdani’s big policies like free buses, freeze the rent and a $30 minimum wage come across well on a debate stage. And then Cuomo and Sliwa are thrust in the roles of wet blankets, arguing it’s unrealistic or isn’t possible.
Ngo: To an extent re: Cuomo’s pivoting to where he’d act versus focusing on attacking Mamdani. One of Mamdani’s better lines of attack was saying Cuomo is telling voters all the things the government can’t do while he (Mamdani) wants to focus on where it should and can deliver for New Yorkers.
Ngo: Sliwa and his enormous personality got a bit lost in all the policy discussion, huh? (Not to basically contradict my earlier statement that the three folks were somewhat matched on the policy questions.)
Gartland: I thought Sliwa’s line was effective on that though. Basically, who’s going to pay for it?
Coltin: Slightly smaller personality this week, compared to the debate last week!
Gartland: Let’s talk about Curtis. He went all Braveheart before the debate yesterday.
Reisman: He was clearly advised to rise above it all, compare Cuomo and Mamdani to two kids in a school yard. Which is a fine approach in small doses. But a buttoned-up Curtis (or a beret-less Curtis) is simply not as fun. And, might I just add, quitting your radio station gig on your own radio station in spectacular fashion is a very, very New York thing to do.
Ngo: Sliwa has been understandably bristling at calls by megadonor John Catsimatidis and fellow WABC 77 shock jock Sid Rosenberg calling on him to drop out and clear the path for Cuomo.
Gartland: He seems to be having a “moment” as they say. But does it change anything in this race?
Ngo: I didn’t know there were so many ways for a candidate to say “over my dead body” re: exiting the race.
Coltin: Sliwa’s supporters were fired up outside the debate last night. He had the biggest, loudest cheering section, and they stuck around even after Mamdani’s folks left. The way he’s refusing to leave the race despite enormous pressure has given his diehard supporters something to rally around, and that’s hard when you’re polling in a distant third.
Reisman: There’s a world where Curtis gets the job back on Nov. 5. Or goes to YouTube. Every four years or so now social media discovers him and has a lot of fun with him since he’s really an “Only in New York” character.
Gartland: It seems highly unlikely that he drops out. If he did, it would be like publicly murdering a persona he’s cultivated over decades. Where does that leave Cuomo?
Ngo: Does Sliwa being Sliwa in an outsized spotlight change anything in this race, like Mike asked? Not really. Just fewer Republican votes for Cuomo.
Coltin: Cuomo didn’t have a knockout blow on Mamdani. There’s still time for an October surprise, but if there will be one, it didn’t come out on the stage last night.
Reisman: The math here simply doesn’t work for Cuomo. He needs nearly all of Sliwa’s voters to vote for him. We wrote this week that while Cuomo has some Republican supporters, many GOP voters know his record on the cashless bail law, gun control, abortion and Covid. They do not like it. He’s got a long, fraught history with Republicans. In this age of polarization, I’m hard pressed to see enough GOP voters in a big blue city like New York go for him in significant numbers, even if Sliwa quits.
Gartland: How much does Adams actually endorsing Cuomo today mitigate that? Does it?
Reisman: Let’s see. A guy who was polling in the single digits and is deeply unpopular with New York City voters. That and a soon-to-be-vintage MetroCard gets you a subway ride.
Coltin: Maybe this moves Adams from getting 1.5 percent to 1 percent? But I’m sure the Mamdani and Sliwa campaigns are preparing vicious responses right now. An Eric Adams endorsement comes with a lot of baggage.
Ngo: How much weight does your endorsement carry if you called the dude a snake and a liar like a second ago?
Reisman: Adams and Cuomo sitting court side at the Knicks game last night really drove home how this is a race between an old guard in New York City’s political world and what very well may be the future in Mamdani.
Coltin: And this comes after Cuomo slammed Mamdani for being a “Bill de Blasio Mini Me.” You know who had a lower approval rating than de Blasio ever did? Eric Adams.
Reisman: I mean, here you have two guys whose base of older, moderate voters, blue collar New Yorkers appears to be eroding and shifting, maybe even leaving the city entirely. This is a coalition that’s been the skeleton key to winning citywide elections and it did not work for Cuomo in the primary. It doesn’t appear to be working for the general election.
Gartland: In the words of Ingrid Lewis Martin, Cuomo appears to be digging for oil right now. The other AI ad supporting him, which depicted Mamdani “supporters” was an interesting look. And he had this exchange with Sid Rosenberg today:
“God forbid, another 9/11—can you imagine Mamdani in the seat?” Cuomo asked.
“He’d be cheering,” Rosenberg said.
“That’s another problem,” Cuomo responded.
Does any of this help Cuomo? Seems like there’s a pretty good chance it might backfire….
Coltin: It’s definitely working to fire up Mamdani’s base. Many felt like the video featured anti-Black racist stereotypes and that the Rosenberg exchange was thinly veiled Islamophobia.
Reisman: Amazing that we have this burgeoning artificial intelligence technology at our fingerprints, on the precipice of making a major advancement for civilization and it’s being used by the Cuomo campaign to depict de Blasio and Mamdani as Dr. Evil and Mini Me.
Ngo: The 9/11 exchange on Rosenberg especially will not go over well with South Asian voters who Cuomo is trying to court. (Remember he mistakenly called them Southeast Asian?)
Cuomo may have been on to something when he visited some mosques to discuss how Mamdani is not socially conservative.
But any gains in the Muslim and South Asian community could be well erased as the AI video and the Rosenberg interview make the rounds.
Reisman: Cuomo, of course, ought to be a bit careful with invoking Sept. 11 after his 2002 gaffe suggesting that George Pataki held Rudy Giuliani’s coat. That said, the memory of the attacks has turned into a generation gap. Many New Yorkers, of course, have raw feelings about the worst day in living memory for the city. Many younger voters, some of whom were born well after those attacks, do not mark it the same way.
Ngo: Nick, I’m so grateful for your institutional knowledge.
Coltin: Cuomo has been running a campaign based — in part — on fear, talking about how Mamdani is a dangerous choice while he’s a safe bet. He’s just gotten more explicit in the last few days in playing up the fear. Some of his arguments are more logical, talking about Mamdani’s potential relationship with Trump. Others are more emotionally-driven — like that ad.
Gartland: The most logical of those arguments seems to be based on experience, but Mamdani has been effective in countering that by pointing to how fraught Cuomo’s experience in Albany was.
On the 9/11 statement Cuomo made today, who does that appeal to? And are there enough of those voters to make a difference? It does seem to point to a generation gap…. and a shifting demographics gap.
Reisman: It appears Cuomo wants low-propensity, blue collar voters and to expand the electorate in the process. Doing so would prove the polls wrong. He needs to find new voters much in the same way Mamdani successfully did during the primary. That’s awesomely hard to do as I’m sure the Mamdani campaign can attest.
And that’s a pretty small universe of folks.
Gartland: Is he essentially trying to capture Trump voters who might sit out an odd-year election?
Coltin: Right, Cuomo needs to turn out voters by making this election seem like a five alarm fire. Trying to inspire the kind of voters who maybe only vote in presidential years, or maybe not at all.
Ngo: An odd way to go about courting Trump voters. Say you’d send the NYPD after ICE on one day and allow a conservative-leaning shock jock to “joke” that your Muslim rival would celebrate 9/11 on the next day.
Reisman: You’ve got to find Republican voters who voted for a populist president who are willing to vote for a moderate Democrat running on a law-and-order platform. Voters like this exist. Quinnipiac had a recent poll showing Cuomo getting about 37 percent of Republicans. That’s pretty good, but as the former governor is fond of saying, this ain’t horseshoes.
Coltin: Mamdani has said his real opponent is apathy. And I think that’s true too. The only way Mamdani loses is if he doesn’t inspire the same kind of turnout and energy we saw in the primary.
Ngo: Turning out new, disaffected or sidelined voters is a steep uphill climb that begins months and years ago with meeting them where they are and registering them to vote, not a line on the radio two days before early voting.
Coltin: Great point, Emily. And Cuomo’s ground game has been lacking, ESPECIALLY when you compare it to Mamdani’s army of volunteers.
Reisman: That’s right, Jeff. The Cuomo strategy is clearly to suppress turnout from any wavering Mamdani voters and drive up turnout among moderate-to-conservative New Yorkers who may not be captured in polling. As we’ve noted, the math is tricky.
Ngo: Listen, Cuomo has been tapping into a not-small universe of New Yorkers who are very wary of Mamdani, but idk if it’s enough. The vibe is very too little, too late.
Gartland: Excellent point, Emily. It all feels like a little too late.
On that note….
Ngo: On that note…let’s go Knicks?
Coltin: *Cue Jojo’s 2006 pop hit “Too Little Too Late”
Gartland: lol. Thanks all for doing this. It’s been real.
