With early voting having begun in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, the race looks to be between Andrew Cuomo, the freshly de-disgraced former governor, and Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist state assemblyman who is running to dispense expensive new entitlements.
But it didn’t have to be that way.
As part of a journalist collective called the New York Editorial Board, I met with every major candidate over the past six months, except Mr. Cuomo, who declined to join us. The candidates who are struggling to capture the attention that Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Mamdani have gotten all expressed thoughtful ideas about the possibilities and limits of city government. (You can read the transcripts of the interviews here.)
So it’s a shame that the two candidates who could have given Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Mamdani more of a challenge — Comptroller Brad Lander and his predecessor Scott Stringer — put themselves in a no man’s land by turning left during Bill de Blasio’s mayoralty and the “defund the police” movement and then following voters’ shift to the middle when crime rose. When Mr. Lander and Mr. Stringer undercut their credibility on a vital issue to voters, their other smart proposals, which I get into below, got lost in the campaign.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The New York Times (paywall)
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here. Nicole is the author of Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car, available now.
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