Meddles in NYC mayor’s race

Top Democrats pressed to back Mamdani as Trump meddles in NYC mayor’s race

Democratic leaders are yet to embrace the democratic socialist as their party’s mayoral nominee.

By Nick Reisman, Jeff Coltin and Emily Ngo

 Zohran Mamdani’s allies have a message for top Empire State Democrats as President Donald Trump works to block the democratic socialist’s path to City Hall: Get off the sidelines. Now.

Pressure is mounting on Gov. Kathy Hochul, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to publicly endorse the 33-year-old candidate’s mayoral run after Trump’s team dangled jobs in front of the deeply unpopular incumbent Eric Adams to get him to drop out — in an effort to ease the path to victory for ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

“We have a Democratic nominee,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told reporters. “Are we a party that rallies behind our nominee, or not?”

A quiet effort to remove Adams from the race and consolidate the field burst into public view this week after the scandal-scarred sitting mayor, mounting an independent bid, met with the president’s team in Florida. Soft landings in the Trump administration are being discussed for Adams, including a post at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, two people familiar with the conversations said.

The mayor, who is polling in the single digits, has denied being offered a job even as he equivocated this week when asked about leaving the race.

Adams’ departure would shake up the field significantly and boost Cuomo, who shares a base of moderate, blue collar and older voters with the city’s second Black mayor. The former governor has insisted the Republican president — with whom he has a long history — doesn’t want him leading City Hall. But Mamdani’s allies are pushing the opposite narrative — and using it to redouble their pressure campaign to win support from more moderate Democrats like Hochul, Schumer and Jeffries.

Trump remains anathema to most voters in his deep blue hometown, where Democratic officials are bracing for health care and food assistance cuts from the president’s sweeping tax-and-spend package. Mamdani’s allies believe any effort by Trump to upend the Big Apple’s already fractious politics adds a new level of urgency to uniting behind the upstart mayoral nominee.

“We have Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans trying to put their thumb on the scale and decide who is the mayor of New York City,” said Jasmine Gripper, co-director of the Mamdani-allied Working Families Party. “The Democratic leaders have a choice: They can either allow Trump to choose the next mayor of New York City or they can support the candidate of working class New Yorkers.”

Efforts to clear the field and complicate Mamdani’s political future have currency among New York’s financial and political elite, who fear his hard-left politics will plunge the city into an existential crisis. Those concerns have led some wealthy New York donors and GOP officials to speak with Trump about the need to halt his momentum by culling low-polling candidates. Republican Curtis Sliwa, who has been polling in third place behind Cuomo and has a cool relationship with the president, has insisted he would not leave the race.

Adams on Thursday decried the reporting about the behind-the-scenes discussions and insisted he was concentrating on his job.

“What I must do is what I always have said: stay focused, don’t be distracted by all the sensationalism, run our city, keep it safe and run for reelection,” he said.

Trump said he doesn’t want to “see a communist become mayor” and supports a winnowed field.

“I would like to see two people drop out and have it be one on one,” he said Thursday. “I think that’s a race.”

Efforts to consolidate the field of candidates vying to lead the nation’s largest city come at a critical time for Mamdani.

The upstart Democratic nominee has been the front-running candidate since his upset June primary victory. His disciplined focus on affordability in that campaign — free bus fare and child care, along with a rent freeze — resonated with a broad swath of voters in the highly expensive city.

Mamdani’s primary win came without traditional pillars of support for successful mayoral candidates, though. Crucial unions, including those that backed Cuomo’s failed bid, did not endorse the state assemblymember until days after he won the nomination.

Mamdani, an Israel critic who wants Albany to raise taxes on rich people to pay for many of his campaign promises, remains controversial for many moderate Democrats, especially those in swing-seat, suburban districts that will play a key role in the fight for power in the House next year.

Trump’s apparent effort to stop Mamdani hasn’t changed that political calculus for top New York Democrats.

“I’d suggest that we don’t allow the machinations of Donald Trump to dictate what our own electoral preferences or actions are,” New York Democratic Chair Jay Jacobs, a Hochul ally, said. “That’s not the way smart political decisions are made. They’re made on the basis of their best judgment as it relates to their constituents and whether you think it’s right. Reactive behavior is very often the wrong way to go.”

Mamdani has met with Hochul, who seeks a second full term next year, as well as Jeffries, a potential House speaker-in-waiting if Democrats flip enough seats in the narrowly divided chamber. He’s also spoken by phone with Schumer.

Endorsements from these Democrats have not been ruled out, and in recent days Jeffries has teased a potential announcement by telling reporters to “stay tuned.”

“I just haven’t weighed in one way or the other, but stay tuned, and I’ll have more to say about it when I’m back home in New York City,” Jeffries told YouTube host Don Lemon on Thursday, adding that he’d be back in his Brooklyn district later this week.

Hochul said Monday she has had “candid conversations” with Mamdani about the direction of the city.

While Mamdani has won several key endorsements since his primary win, support from some key state and city Democratic leaders remains elusive, even as he refines his controversial positions on defunding the police and distances himself from the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America.

The rationale among top leaders to withhold their endorsements has frustrated his allies, who argue fence-sitting Democrats are foolhardy to not support a candidate who has excited voters amid the party’s own deep divisions in the Trump 2.0 era.

“I’d tell my Democratic colleagues who haven’t done this yet, ‘Come on in, folks, the water is fine,’” said Democratic state Sen. Gustavo Rivera. “Not only is it the right thing to do to stand with the Democratic nominee, even if you don’t like him, guess what? The voters do. It’s obviously clear that to not stand with Zohran is helping Trump.”

The president’s incursion into the race can also cut against Cuomo, a moderate Democrat who has known Trump for decades. The perception of being Trump’s preferred candidate in a city where 66 percent of voters hold an unfavorable view of him would do damage.

Rep. Ritchie Torres, a staunchly pro-Israel Democrat who backed Cuomo’s primary bid, said Trump’s “not-so-subtle endorsement in a New York City election is nothing short of the kiss of death.”

Jeffries appears to share that sentiment.

“I don’t fully understand the notion of the outside meddling and how it’s going to benefit anyone because Donald Trump and the Republican brand is toxic in New York City — as is the case in so many other parts of the country,” he told reporters Thursday. “It’s speculation as far as I’m concerned right now, but I don’t see it having any political benefit for any of the people who are allegedly connected to some effort led by Donald Trump and the administration to change the trajectory of the New York City mayoral race.”

A spokesperson for Cuomo said the former governor and his team have not talked with Schumer, Jeffries or their teams about the mayoral race and Trump’s involvement.

Cuomo has asserted more than once that Trump would rather see the inexperienced Mamdani win the race — and he continued to lean on that sentiment a day after news of Team Trump’s enticements to Adams and Sliwa broke.

“President Trump doesn’t want me,” he said Thursday. “Our interactions were not pleasant, and I stood up and I fought him every step of the way. So my speculation: If he wants anything, anyone, he wants Mamdani, because he would go through that kid like a Mack truck.”

But Cuomo’s history with Trump — and his recent rhetoric around the president — has been a bit fraught.

The former governor initially framed his experience with Trump as a positive, asserting that he would be able to work productively with a fellow “Queens boy.” His rhetoric has since shifted with Cuomo warning the president would be emboldened to send federal troops to patrol New York City, as he has done in Washington and Los Angeles, if Mamdani is elected mayor.

Privately, though, Cuomo told donors at a Hamptons fundraiser that he expects Trump will help him with the city’s scant Republican voters.

“You don’t want to be the guy Donald Trump is backing,” said Democratic consultant Morgan Hook, a former aide to ex-Gov. David Paterson. “At the same, if this is an election between Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo, that’s good for Andrew Cuomo.”

Mamdani’s campaign and supporters, meanwhile, are working to present him as a candidate for the whole city, not just his base of younger, left-leaning voters.

Ruth Messinger, who was the Democratic nominee for mayor in 1997, recalled that many party leaders also didn’t back her in the race against incumbent Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

“People are afraid of change. They’re afraid of rocking the boat,” she said. “When I won the primary, there were all kinds of people who went and hid, and they’re doing it again. And I think it’s very sad. I’d like to see the governor and our senior senator supporting Mamdani.”