Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo remains to be the frontrunner within the June 24 Democratic main to exchange Mayor Eric Adams amid early voting and with Election Day quick approaching.
Cuomo, who’s looking for a political revival after stepping down in 2021 following almost a dozen sexual misconduct allegations that he denies, has dominated the packed Democratic primary field since entering the race on March 1. However he’s going through a serious challenge from Queens Meeting Member Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic socialist polling who has been persistently polling in second place for weeks.
Mayor Adams is just not taking part within the Democratic main, opting to run as an independent in the general election instead. He and Cuomo are prone to face off within the subsequent leg of the election.
The average Cuomo has led by double digits in most private and non-private polls, swept up assist amongst institutional elected officials and labor unions, and attracted millions of dollars in campaign donations. Cuomo says he’s the one candidate with the expertise to “save a metropolis in disaster,” usually pointing to his report of constructing huge infrastructure tasks, such because the redevelopment of LaGuardia Airport, over his 11 years as governor.
But Cuomo’s main opponents, together with many progressive politicians and organizations, say he has no enterprise being mayor. They argue that the scandals preceding his resignation, which additionally embrace his dealing with of COVID-19 in nursing houses and plenty of of his policies as governor that they are saying damage moderately than helped town, must be “disqualifying.”
Cuomo additionally confronted important criticism throughout his marketing campaign for under recently moving back to the city for the primary time in many years, accepting contributions from many deep-pocketed donors—a number of of whom additionally give to President Trump—and preliminary findings of illegal coordination between his marketing campaign and the tremendous PAC supporting it, “Repair the Metropolis.” His marketing campaign says it adopted marketing campaign finance regulation.
A number of members of the amNewYork crew sat down with Cuomo on the Lafayette Grand Cafe for a June 16 interview to get a greater sense of how he would deal with a few of the key points affecting town as mayor — from immigration to town’s housing disaster.
Immigration and Trump
Amid the aggressive escalation in President Trump’s push to deport undocumented immigrants, and Mayor Adams’ pledge to work with the feds on criminal probes involving new arrivals, Cuomo pledged to uphold town’s Sanctuary legal guidelines. The statutes bar town from cooperating with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on most non-criminal issues.
Cuomo stated he would put off Mayor Adams’ executive order allowing ICE to reestablish offices on Rikers Island for prison investigations. The Metropolis Council challenged the order in courtroom and has to date succeeded in stopping it from taking effect.
“You can not go an government order that’s inconsistent with the regulation,” Cuomo stated, referring to the order doubtlessly violating town’s Sanctuary legal guidelines.
Cuomo repeated widespread allegations that Adams has “made a deal with Trump” — contending he agreed to cooperate with the president’s immigration crackdown in change for the Justice Division dropping his federal corruption case. Adams denies the allegation and insists he solely works with the Trump administration on prison probes and never most deportation instances, that are largely civil issues.
Trump’s administration has additionally begun arresting undocumented immigrants inside federal immigration courts within the metropolis when new arrivals attend mandated courtroom hearings. Related ICE actions in Los Angeles have sparked mostly peaceful protests there, prompting Trump to name within the Nationwide Guard and several other hundred US Marines to quell these demonstrations.
Trump has threatened to take comparable actions in New York and different Democratic-run cities the place protests in opposition to ICE detainments have escalated.
With out going into many specifics, Cuomo stated he doesn’t imagine Trump would be capable of do the identical factor in New York if he’s elected mayor. He charged that Trump is choosing fights with Democratic-run cities over immigration merely to attain “political factors.”
However Cuomo insisted that if he’s elected mayor, Trump won’t be able to run roughshod over New York like he did with LA.
Cuomo argued that’s as a result of he is aware of battle Trump from the occasions the 2 clashed amid the COVID-19 pandemic through the president’s first time period whereas he was nonetheless governor. Nevertheless, he stated it’ll require waging “an actual authorized, PR warfare” in opposition to the president.
“I had wars with him each day on COVID. I did that briefing within the morning. He would then name me up. ‘You probably did this, you stated this, you stated this,” Cuomo stated, referring to Trump calling him after his each day televised briefings through the early months of the pandemic in 2020.
Cuomo’s rivals, nevertheless, contend that he wouldn’t stand as much as Trump, given the big contributions each his campaign and Fix the City have acquired from Trump donors. Moreover, they criticize Cuomo for being more reluctant to criticize Trump than most different candidates within the early days of the election.
In addition they allege that Cuomo may very well be compromised in an analogous approach to Adams by a Trump DOJ investigation into whether or not he lied to Congress final fall about his function in enhancing a report that undercounted COVID-19 nursing home deaths.
Cuomo stated that will not occur as a result of it’s a “foolish cost.”
Housing
The town is in a generational housing crisis that has seen rents skyrocket and left simply 1.4% of apartments available to lease. The difficulty has change into one of many central focuses of native elected officers lately and has taken center stage in the mayor’s race.
One space the place mayors can exert a substantial amount of affect over the price of housing is thru their appointments to the Rent Guidelines Board, a nine-member impartial panel that votes annually on lease will increase for town’s roughly a million stabilized tenants. Mamdani, together with a few of Cuomo’s different progressive challengers, have committed to freezing rents for stabilized tenants if they’re elected by appointing board members who would vote in that route.
The RGB has voted for lease freezes thrice, all below former Mayor Invoice de Blasio. The present largely Adams-picked board has opted to lift rents yearly that he has been in workplace.
Cuomo as an alternative stated he desires to nominate “honest individuals who perceive the business.” Whereas he has not but “thought by” who he would particularly appoint to the board, he indicated seeking to housing specialists from tutorial establishments, who will make their choices primarily based on the prices for tenants and landlords.
“There are credible organizations that know housing and know financial improvement…that may make a good willpower,” Cuomo stated.
Cuomo, who served as US Secretary of Housing and City Improvement below former President Invoice Clinton, has pledged to construct 500,000 new units of housing over the next decade as mayor with out specifying what number of could be “reasonably priced.”
To fulfill that aim, Cuomo stated he’ll discover methods to bypass town’s byzantine land-use course of. One avenue for doing so, he stated, could be bypassing town Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD)—an company charged with financing reasonably priced housing development, imposing tenant protections, and administering some rental help packages—and as an alternative operating housing improvement straight by the mayor’s workplace.
“I’d simply take management of it straight and make it an enormous initiative,” Cuomo stated. “[For] each city-owned piece of property, put out an RFP (request for proposals) that claims, ‘No matter you may have, come speak to me about it. Let’s see if we will make a deal.’”
He didn’t specify precisely how he would construct housing by the mayor’s workplace as an alternative of HPD, which he has argued has an excessive amount of purple tape that slows the tempo of constructing desperately wanted items.
Tenants advocates are skeptical of Cuomo’s stance on housing.
In accordance with a broadcast report, he not too long ago drew the ire of some elected officers and advocates by saying he desires to considerably reconfigure HPD through the first Democratic mayoral debate earlier this month. They argue the transfer could be a present to the actual property business and will result in the erosion of tenant protections and lease rules.
The previous governor has additionally been slammed by housing advocates as “your landlord’s favorite mayoral candidate,” because of the giant sums that real estate titans and landlord groups have contributed to Repair the Metropolis.
Antisemitism
Antisemitism within the 5 boroughs, house to the most important Jewish inhabitants exterior of Israel, has change into one other pivotal problem within the mayor’s race.
The subject has change into particularly outstanding within the wake of the almost two-year Israel-Hamas warfare. The battle, which has killed over 1,200 Israelis and a minimum of 50,000 Palestinians, has sparked quite a few protests in opposition to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. These demonstrations have, in flip, drawn accusations of antisemitism in opposition to pro-Palestine protesters.
Cuomo and Mayor Adams have each framed antisemitism as one of many best threats at present going through town and are jockeying to be seen because the candidate combating hardest on behalf of town’s Jewish inhabitants. The previous governor known as antisemitism “the most serious and the most important issue” of the marketing campaign throughout an April speech at an Higher West Aspect synagogue, and Adams is running on the “EndAntisemitism” ballot line in November.
Each have slammed Mamdani for his previous assist of the “boycott divestment and sanctions” (BDS) motion in addition to his use of the time period “genocide” to explain Israel’s army offensive in Gaza. Mamdani has countered these assaults by saying he plans to invest more in combating hate crimes, together with antisemitic incidents, than some other candidate.
In relation to Adams, Cuomo argued the present mayor is all speak and has taken little motion on antisemitism. Adams not too long ago launched a new office, staffed by one individual, devoted particularly to combating antisemitism and signed an government order adopting the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism.
However Cuomo waved away these actions as performative and stated Adams must be extra aggressively going after pro-Palestine protesters at Columbia College. He claimed that a few of their actions have risen to the extent of hate crimes that must be prosecuted, despite the fact that prosecuting crimes is just not an influence afforded to the mayor.
“Politically, it is rather delicate as a result of there are blended opinions on all of this, clearly, but it surely’s not concerning the politics; it’s concerning the regulation,” Cuomo stated.
“I feel he says the proper issues, but it surely’s about what you do,” he stated of Adams. “And imposing the regulation is a begin.”
The previous governor pointed to his report on the problem as governor.
“I used to be essentially the most aggressive governor in the US on behalf of Israel,” Cuomo stated. “I handed an government order saying, ‘for those who boycott Israel, New York boycotts you.’ Each time Israel was attacked, I went. I handed the strictest hate crimes regulation in the US.”
Cuomo, who has not too long ago acquired the backing of a number of outstanding Brooklyn and Queens Orthodox Jewish teams, stated he isn’t involved about having to battle with Adams for his or her assist within the normal election if he wins the first.
“No, as a result of I feel Jewish New Yorkers get it,” Cuomo stated. “Sure, he (Adams) has stated the proper issues, however what has he achieved?”
