The second and final debate before early voting in New York City’s mayoral race was a bitter affair, with sharp exchanges and few courtesies.
Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, worked to defend his polling lead while his chief rival, Andrew Cuomo, sought to puncture his credibility – dismissing the 34-year-old state lawmaker as a “kid” who, he said, Donald Trump would knock on his “tuchus”.
Over the course of the hour and a half forum, the deep seated-rivalry between Mamdani and Cuomo – the 67-year-old former governor now running as an independent after losing the Democratic primary – dominated the stage.
“Like two kids in a schoolyard,” said the swaggering Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa, who has defied pleas by Cuomo, wealthy donors and even his own former employer to drop out of the race.
They clashed over education reform, transportation funding, Israel policy and whether to close the notorious prison on Rikers Island. But Wednesday’s showdown offered few breakthroughs that would shift the race’s trajectory.
Both Cuomo and Sliwa argued that Mamdani lacked the experience required to lead the nation’s largest city, a familiar charge for the assemblyman, who is roughly half their age.
“The issue is your inexperience,” Cuomo said of Mamdani, highlighting his own lengthy service in government at the state and federal level.
“The issue,” Mamdani retorted later, “is that we’ve all experienced your experience.”
To draw attention to Cuomo’s record as governor, the Mamdani campaign brought several guests to the debate, including Charlotte Bennett, one of the women to publicly accuse Cuomo of sexual harassment. Cuomo resigned during his third term as governor amid the scandal, which he has described as “political”. He has denied the allegations and on Wednesday noted that a portion of Bennett’s lawsuit was dismissed by a judge.
Stepping into the fray, Sliwa – whom moderators described as “more of a New York character than a policy expert” – supplied some of the evening’s sharpest zingers: “Zohran, your résumé could fit on a cocktail napkin, and Andrew, your failures could fill a public school library.”
Mamdani leads Cuomo in nearly every recent poll by at least a dozen points. Unless Sliwa drops out, Cuomo seems unlikely to close the gap before the 4 November election.
Mamdani’s rise has excited progressives across the country, offering a fresh model of leadership at a time when the Democratic party’s old guard is under pressure to exit stage left.
Throughout the evening, Mamdani sought to cast himself as the candidate of generational and political change. Cuomo and Sliwa, he said, “speak only in the past because that is all they know”.
“I am the sole candidate running with a vision for the future of this city,” he continued, harshly denouncing Cuomo as “a desperate man, lashing out because he knows that the one thing he cares about, power, is slipping away from him” and “Donald Trump’s puppet”.
Trump has not endorsed a candidate for mayor of his home town, but suggested on Tuesday that he’d prefer Cuomo to Mamdani.
“You have never had a job, you’ve never accomplished anything,” Cuomo said, during one heated exchange with Mamdani. “There’s no reason to believe you have any merit or qualification for eight and a half million lives.”
Yet the president loomed large over the race, as the candidates each insisted they were best equipped to handle the president.
Cuomo, who is courting Republicans and Trump voters, returned repeatedly to his record of confronting the president, invoking the pandemic and their public feuds as proof that he alone has the mettle and experience to stand up to Trump’s threats. A Mamdani win, he warned, would be Trump’s “dream” scenario, arguing that the president would use his opponent’s progressive policies as a pretext for taking over the city.
Mamdani pledged to “end the chapter of collaboration between City Hall and the federal government” and said he would oppose federal interventions in the city, calling ICE a “reckless entity that cares little for the law” in response to a question about an immigration enforcement raid that targeted Canal street vendors in Manhattan this week.
But to Cuomo’s claims, Mamdani accused the former governor of fear-mongering.
“I know what actually keeps you up,” Mamdani said, speaking directly to New Yorkers. “It’s whether or not you can afford to live a safe and dignified life in this city. I have plans for our future. My opponents only have fear.”
Sliwa criticized his opponents’ approach, warning against antagonizing the famously mercurial president, whom he said holds “most of the cards”.
“My adversaries have decided to bump chests with President Trump to prove who’s more macho,” Sliwa said. “You can’t beat Trump.”
The bickering continued until the end, when the candidates were asked to name one thing that New York got right during the pandemic.
Sliwa, who before taking the stage said he would rather be impaled Braveheart-style than work for Cuomo, said the former governor got nothing right.
Mamdani recalled that it only took him 15 minutes to get his Covid-19 vaccine shot. “That was an efficient experience,” he said.
“Thank you for the compliment,” Cuomo said, with a broad smile.
Mamdani deadpanned that it was a “city-run vaccine site”.
“No, it wasn’t,” Cuomo insisted.
