On Thursday night the candidates for New York City mayor — Andrew Cuomo, Zohran Mamdani and Curtis Sliwa — squared off for their first debate ahead of Election Day, Nov. 4.
John Guida, an editor in Times Opinion, moderated a written online conversation to assess the debate and the candidates with Mara Gay, who writes about politics for Opinion, and the contributing Opinion writers Nicole Gelinas and Josh Barro.
John Guida: The debate covered a lot of ground about life in New York City: affordability, education, quality of life, transportation, debates over Israel and Hamas, President Trump. Who won and why?
Mara Gay: What a night for New York City Hall nerds. Mamdani’s performance was just OK but he won anyway, because Cuomo and Sliwa looked out of touch and badly dated. They were talking about Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton and relitigating the 1991 Crown Heights riots. Mamdani looked and sounded like someone who lives in and understands New York City in 2025. He stayed on the message a majority of New Yorkers care about the most, which is affordability.
Nicole Gelinas: Sliwa, oddly, won. He showed easy fluency on issues and demonstrated empathy with voters; he was the only candidate to acknowledge two specific violent subway crimes — stuff that happens in the real world. This does not mean that Sliwa will be mayor, but it does mean that Cuomo lost. Cuomo didn’t perform disastrously; he was more relaxed than he was in the primary debates and he made some strong points, particularly on education and domestic violence. But Sliwa made too many of the quick rebuttals to Mamdani that Cuomo should have made. Cuomo was stuck on the defensive, fighting off both Mamdani and Sliwa, and he never effectively presented his own theme of governing experience.
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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. John Guida is an editor in Times Opinion. Mara Gay is a staff writer at New York Times Opinion who writes about politics. Josh Barro, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the newsletter Very Serious and is the host of the podcast “Serious Trouble.”
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