Conventional wisdom holds that New York City mayoral races do not really begin until candidates start airing television ads. By that standard, this year’s campaign season is finally underway — giving candidates their best hope yet of taking down front-runner Andrew Cuomo.
Comptroller and City Hall contender Brad Lander released his first TV ad on Wednesday, spending $732,000 of his campaign’s $4.6 million cash-on-hand to air the spot on cable and streaming platforms. The 30-second video depicts Lander as a “corruption crusher,” showing him driving a forklift through a junkyard while a narrator recounts Cuomo’s use of taxpayer money for his legal cases and highlights the comptroller’s role in exposing the Trump administration’s seizure of $80 million in city funds.
“New York City needs a mayor who can focus on our problems, not their own,” a narrator intones. “We need Brad Lander.”
Lander is the third candidate to get on the airwaves, though his initial ad buy is the biggest so far. Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, who has solidified second-place status behind Cuomo, spent $100,000 to air his populist introductory ad last month, in which he tied Cuomo to the unpopular incumbent by saying the ex-governor was “running for [Eric] Adams’ second term.” State Sen. Zellnor Myrie paid $500,000 to spend a week airing an upbeat biographical video narrated by his former teacher.
Myrie has re-upped that outlay for a second week, his campaign said, and Lander will do the same for each of the six weeks that remain before the June 24 Democratic primary.
Then there’s Cuomo, whose campaign has not aired its own ads but will benefit from at least $5 million in ad spending from Fix the City, the outside super PAC boosting him. But the former governor is under scrutiny after rivals suggested Cuomo’s campaign violated city rules by creating a webpage instructing the PAC on the messages it wanted included in advertisements — directions that the PAC appears to have followed closely. (The city’s Campaign Finance Board reminded all campaigns this week about rules barring that level of coordination, but Cuomo’s campaign says it has not been accused of any violations.)
The latest polls from March and April showed Cuomo maintaining a roughly 20-point lead, with support approaching 40% as Mamdani trailed in the mid-teens and third-place Lander remained in the single digits. With the primary approaching, Cuomo’s eight rivals have failed to shrink his early lead despite doing their best to remind voters about his sexual harassment allegations, handling of Covid-19 in nursing homes or less-than-deep ties to New York City.
Trip Yang, a Democratic strategist, said ads are necessary to reach voters who pay little attention to the primary until the late stages of the race.
“You need media ads to communicate a candidate’s name and their message to voters,” he said. Still, he noted, ads are only part of the equation, and any candidate with a shot of winning the primary must have already laid the groundwork by hiring the right staff and securing key endorsements.
To the chagrin of his rivals, many of those endorsements have gone Cuomo’s way, including from influential labor unions such as the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, building workers’ union 32BJ SEIU and the health care union 1199SEIU. But some key groups have backed other candidates: city workers’ union DC37 issued a ranked-choice endorsement of Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, Mamdani and Myrie; Speaker Adams also won support from the hospitality union Unite Here and the social service union Communications Workers of America Local 1180.
Other candidates will start airing their own ads soon: former Comptroller Scott Stringer’s campaign will get on TV later this month, a representative said.
But it will take a lot to overcome Cuomo, especially given the cash advantage he enjoys through the PAC run by his allies — which, unlike campaign accounts, is unhindered by contribution or spending limits. The Fix the City PAC has raised $7 million, with its latest donors including billionaire William Lauder (who gave $250,000), Vornado CEO Steven Roth ($150,000) and his wife Daryl ($50,000).
Fix the City has spent $3.1 million, far more than any campaign, entirely on TV ads.
Cuomo, meanwhile, revealed a new strategic gambit on Tuesday by announcing he was gathering signatures to run on an additional third-party ballot line in the November general election. Cuomo, who has a history of creating parties for his own gain, said the new “Fight and Deliver” ballot line was meant to give voters unhappy with the modern Democratic Party another way to support him — but rivals immediately attacked the move as a sign that Cuomo was hedging his bets in case he loses the primary.
