Zohran Mamdani Is Pivoting. So Is Andrew Cuomo.
Think you know where the candidates for New York mayor are coming from? Think again. With less than 90 days to go before Election Day, the candidates are all migrating toward the political center, dropping old positions and adopting new ones, freely copying one another’s policies and style along the way.
Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, is downplaying and disavowing years-old social media posts about the NYPD, now claiming “I am not defunding the police; I am not running to defund the police” and describing himself as a “candidate who is not fixed in time, one that learns and one that leads, and part of that means admitting as I have grown.” Andrew Cuomo, whose unsuccessful Democratic primary campaign began with a clunky seven-minute video followed by months of conventional campaign ads, has begun borrowing from Mamdani’s playbook by shifting to snappy, short video clips with the aid of what the campaign calls “new people helping us with social media.”
Republican Curtis Sliwa, at 71 the oldest candidate in the race, told me his team is nearly all Gen-X and millennial staffers and that he’s targeting young voters who supported Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris for president and asking the leader of his party, President Donald Trump, to stay out of the race altogether. Mayor Eric Adams, after years of insisting that “Social media does not pick a candidate, people on Social Security pick a candidate,” has taken to releasing © Daily Intelligencer
