Were do Democrats Go with Mamdani…Adams and Cuomo?

Triangulating the upcoming New York Mayor’s Elecrtion with the Mamdani ‘factor’…..

Could Adams and Cuomo make SURE Mamdani gets the job despite the majority of voters NOT going for him as the other two split the vote?

Adams has already come out swinging…

As Democrats nervously eye their party’s nominee for New York mayor, they find themselves in the same situation withZohran Mamdani that Republicans for two decades have faced with their own far-out populists: How to avoid guilt by association in the eyes of swing voters without further alienating already disaffected voters from their own base.

It’s pretty straightforward for people like Long Island Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.), a canary in the coal mine for swing-district Democrats. Mamdani is exactly the kind of Democrat that Suozzi’s constituents are trying to avoid by living in the ‘burbs. Suozzi won’t be helped by a narrative that his party is falling off a cliff, so he wasted no time in putting space between himself and Mamdani.

But for Democrats with wider constituencies or national ambitions, it’s a tougher question. If you were California Gov. Gavin Newsom, you might be looking at the youthquake in New York with some concern. This is a big win for the democratic socialist insurgency and, by extension, its charismatic leader and likely Newsom’s 2028 presidential rival, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y). On the upside for mainstream Democrats, the more energy there is on the radical left, the more likely it is to spawn Ocasio-Cortez imitators and divide that vote in the 2028 nominating process.

But the best thing for most Democrats would be if Mamdani did not actually become New York’s next mayor. The more the party’s brand is associated with self-described socialist, anti-Zionist, transgender-inclusivity enthusiasts from New York City, the worse it is for Democrats in competitive races. So how likely is it that Mamdani could be a summertime fad and not a boogeyman for every Republican candidate to try to associate with their Democratic opponents next year?

That probably depends most of all on what incumbent Mayor Eric Adams and former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) do next.

In the immediate aftermath of his stunner of a defeat Tuesday, Cuomo was keeping his options open. When he declared for mayor, Cuomo took out an insurance policy for just such an outcome by filing as both an independent and a Democrat, so he’s already on the November ballot. Cuomo was cagey this week, telling the local CBS affiliate that “there are a lot of people who have a lot of concerns” about the direction of the city and that he would “take it one step at a time.”

Not taking things slowly is Adams, who has gotten exactly what he wanted out of his former party’s primary. He left the Democratic primary to run as an independent after it became clear that he could not beat Cuomo. Cuomo’s campaign against Adams was shaping up to be one of lesser evils, with Cuomo arguing that while his own scandalized departure from the governorship was no picnic, he’d still be better than Adams. Now, the scandal-soaked Adams is ready to make exactly the same argument against Mamdani.

Two things make Adams’s situation different, though. First, he’s an incumbent and has a mixed bag of a record to run on. His own administration has been derailed by the corruption charges against him and his team, nor has he delivered on promises to crack down on crime from four years ago. And second, Donald Trump.

Trump let Adams off the hook on the corruption case, and Adams has moved into the MAGA World without much hesitation. That’s good for soaking up votes from perennial candidate Curtis Sliwa, who won the typically useless Republican nomination by default, but bad for building a broader coalition in a city where Trump got just 30 percent of the vote last year.

In a sign that Adams may not be thinking about building a new coalition, he kicked off his general election campaign with a chummy chat on Fox News, where he lit into Mamdani as a “snake oil salesman.” Compounding the problem, local Republicans are making an appeal to Trump to deport the Democratic nominee. If this is a race between the Trump-backed candidate and the anti-Trump candidate, Mamdani is a shoo-in.

What Adams would need to do instead is let the Republican minority in the city (Sliwa got 28 percent of the vote in the general election four years ago) migrate naturally to Adams while Adams focuses on winning over the Cuomo Democrats: basically to rebuild as much of his own 2021 coalition as possible. If Adams focuses on addition while super PACs and the right-wing media home in on Mamdani’s weaknesses, Adams could actually win. Looking just at how poorly Mamdani did with voters from New York’s nonwhite majority, especially Black voters, the opportunity is there. But whether Trump will stay out of the race or if Adams has the good sense to shift his focus are both very open questions.

That leaves Wall Street and the Democratic establishment anxiously wondering where to put their bets: on the volatile Trump-adjacent incumbent or on the guy who just took a beating from the nominee they’re trying to stop.

And that points to the other way Mamdani wins in a walk: that Adams and Cuomo are both in the race. Two flawed independent candidates with lots of stubborn pride would be the dream scenario for the 33-year-old outsider….

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