Soon, with fresh polling, we will know where the Democratic primary for New York City mayor stands. Perhaps the vaunted frontrunner, Andrew Cuomo, will have wobbled since the last polls were released a month ago, and another candidate will have shot up to nip on his heels.
Or nothing will have changed at all: it will be Cuomo’s race to lose with Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old democratic socialist assemblyman, running in second, albeit twenty points behind.
The state of the primary, which will be decided on June 24, is a strange one. As a candidate, Cuomo has massive vulnerabilities — he resigned in disgrace as governor after being accused of sexual harassment, and he badly mismanaged the state during the pandemic — but none of the candidates has been able to exploit them. It would be easy to say New Yorkers just don’t care and that might be true, but the bigger story of this race is just how relatively weak and listless the rest of the Democratic field has been — the exception being Mamdani, who has a fervent following and is still the only contender to have maxed out in the public matching funds system.
Mamdani, of course, has glaring weaknesses that are both ideological in nature and related to his relative inexperience. There are many New Yorkers who won’t support a candidate who has identified as an anti-Zionist. There are others who are worried that a 33-year-old who entered the state Legislature in 2021 isn’t fit to govern America’s largest city.
And there are those who’d rather not support a scandal-scarred ex-governor who has spent most of the campaign hiding from the media. There isn’t exactly enthusiasm in the streets for Cuomo.
What’s missing in this mayoral race is a Democrat who can find that third way: a non-Cuomo, non-Mamdani contender who offers some of the experience of the former governor sans scandal, and might be a centrist or even center-left candidate who has no ties to the Democratic Socialists of America.
It’s easy enough to imagine who this person might be. In fact, at least two candidates would fit the bill, and they’re both women: Kathryn Garcia and Letitia James.
James, the attorney general, is backing City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams for mayor. Adams, of no relation to the formerly indicted mayor now running as an independent, could have been this candidate, but she only got into the primary in March and still hasn’t qualified for matching funds. In two months, her campaign has barely registered.
James would have been a very strong candidate against Cuomo. She’s a well-known liberal who is celebrated for standing up to Donald Trump and has a base in working-class Black Brooklyn. She’d rather keep her current perch, though, and not head back to a tougher gig in municipal politics.
Garcia’s reasons for passing on another mayoral race aren’t publicly known. She seems comfortable in state government, serving as a high-ranking official under Gov. Kathy Hochul. Garcia, who was Bill de Blasio’s sanitation commissioner and interim head of the New York City Public Housing Authority, was a surprise contender in 2021, coming within 10,000 votes of beating Eric Adams.
Garcia campaigned as a wonky, no-nonsense bureaucrat, which she was. Her politics were relatively moderate but she attracted support from many progressive voters in brownstone Brooklyn and Manhattan. She won an endorsement from the New York Times when the newspaper was still backing candidates in local races.
In this particular primary, Garcia could have done well. She has more name recognition than she did four years ago. Her government experience, after the chaos of the Adams years, would be attractive.
And her politics might hit that Goldilocks zone for Democrats citywide: not too-left but also not too-right. She never seemed overly hostile to the left, unlike Cuomo. And she’s led a career in government free of scandal.
Democrats uneasy with both Cuomo and Mamdani could have flocked to Garcia. She would be, in every sense, a compromise candidate.
But she’s not here right now, and won’t ever be. The compromise lane will have to be filled by either Adrienne Adams, Brad Lander, Scott Stringer or Zellnor Myrie. So far, none of them has moved in the polls very much — nor has Whitney Tilson, a centrist investor who has even less momentum than the elected officials in the race. There’s still time for things to change, but the clock is ticking down fast.
Ross Barkan is a journalist and author in New York City.
