{"id":313226,"date":"2025-10-18T11:03:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-18T11:03:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/313226\/"},"modified":"2025-10-18T11:03:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-18T11:03:10","slug":"nycs-mayoral-race-is-anything-but-over","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/313226\/","title":{"rendered":"NYC’s mayoral race is anything but over"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s a generous tip. It\u2019s the stage name of a Tanzanian musician. It\u2019s the increase in U.S. retail coffee prices in the last year.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also the portion of New York City\u2019s registered voters who turned out for the mayoral Democratic primary back in June.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s right \u2014 just more than 1 million New Yorkers voted in the primary, out of more than 5 million registered voters. There are about 8.5 million New Yorkers total, which means only one-eighth participated in that election.<\/p>\n

Of that one-eighth, 573,169 New Yorkers voted for democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani<\/a>. In other words, he won just 1\/16 of the total population of the city. The rest voted for someone else or stayed home.<\/p>\n

It was obviously enough for Mamdani, a previously unknown state assemblyman, to catapult over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo<\/a>, incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, Republican Curtis Sliwa<\/a> and several other lower-ranked candidates. Since then, he\u2019s maintained a steady and commanding lead.<\/p>\n

Thursday night\u2019s debate<\/a>, the first since that primary, could have been a decisive blow to Cuomo and Sliwa, the only two remaining candidates with enough voters and cash to make it onto the stage. But it wasn\u2019t \u2014 this race is anything but over.<\/p>\n

Scores of national and local Democrats, as well as media figures, have touted Mamdani\u2019s seeming inevitability and probably saw in the debate another slam dunk. After all, he\u2019s ahead of Cuomo, his nearest competitor, by double digits in the latest polls.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s important to remember, the polls also had Cuomo handily winning the primary. Cuomo has also gained 10 points since Adams dropped out. And this debate was the first time many New Yorkers even tuned in to this election.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been covering the mayor\u2019s race since the primary, and Mamdani\u2019s unexpected rise has been much of the focus, as has his comfortable lead over his opponents.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been a race of big personalities and egos, themes of scandals and corruption, issues of affordability and crime. And it\u2019s not just a local election \u2014 this race has been nationalized by Democrats as well as Republicans all the way up to President Donald Trump, who\u2019s been lobbing threats against Mamdani on an almost daily basis<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So presumably, lots of people all over the country tuned in to the debate, where Cuomo and Mamdani sparred on everything from Israel to sexual harassment, rent freezes to free buses. And where Sliwa got his attacks in on both candidates \u2014 the architect and the apprentice, as he repeatedly referred to Cuomo and Mamdani, respectively.<\/p>\n

All three candidates landed some good zingers. Cuomo accused Mamdani of inexperience, quite fairly, saying his only job has been interning for his mother. Mamdani turned the experience issue back on Cuomo, saying, \u201cIf we have a health pandemic, then why would New Yorkers turn back to the governor who sent seniors to their deaths in nursing homes? That\u2019s the kind of experience that\u2019s on offer here today.\u201d<\/p>\n

And Sliwa painted both candidates as out-of-touch politicians who don\u2019t know New York as well as he does.<\/p>\n

But no candidate was vanquished.<\/p>\n

Mamdani showed some weakness on issues of policing and Israel, admitting he was learning \u2014 seemingly for the first time \u2014 about historic attacks on Jews and the job cops have to do in a city as big as New York.<\/p>\n

Cuomo\u2019s history of scandals was front and center, reminding New Yorkers he was far from a perfect leader, and he doesn\u2019t seem to feel any remorse for his very public failings.<\/p>\n

And Sliwa, running in third place, at times seemed like an afterthought, even chiding the moderators for ignoring him.<\/p>\n

If we\u2019re being generous, Mamdani may have done no harm in his debate performance, but he\u2019s no shoo-in either.<\/p>\n

For one, New York City is liberal, yes. But it\u2019s not Portland-liberal. If voters were tuning in for the first time, they heard about socialism, free handouts, no real plan to pay for giant subsidies, social workers where cops should be and decriminalizing a number of societal ills. We already know the financial, real estate and business sectors are wary of Mamdani\u2019s socialism \u2014 plenty of voters are, too.<\/p>\n

For another, New York Jews, many of whom are staunch supporters of Israel, are a huge voting population, and Cuomo did a good job reminding them Mamdani has at times refused to denounce Hamas.<\/p>\n

Both Cuomo and Sliwa also did a good job of laying out the stakes of electing someone to run the biggest city in the country who hasn\u2019t run, well, anything \u2026calling out Mamdani\u2019s proposals as na\u00efve fantasies.<\/p>\n

There are a bit more than two weeks left until New Yorkers decide their fate. In politics, that\u2019s both a blink of an eye and a lifetime. Anything can happen \u2014 and knowing New York, it probably will.<\/p>\n

S.E. Cupp is the host of \u201cS.E. Cupp Unfiltered\u201d on CNN.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s a generous tip. It\u2019s the stage name of a Tanzanian musician. It\u2019s the increase in U.S. retail…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":313227,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-313226","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-newyork","12":"tag-newyorkcity","13":"tag-ny","14":"tag-nyc","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-united-states-of-america","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115394838845630614","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313226\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/313227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}