On Monday, the New York Times editorial board made waves when it issued a unique non-endorsement in the Democratic primary for mayor, urging voters to leave Zohran Mamdani unranked while expressing half-hearted praise for Andrew Cuomo. Notably, the board took aim at Bill de Blasio, writing that the two-term former mayor “bears significant responsibility for the city’s problems” and that Mamdani’s platform would represent a “turbocharged version” of his tenure in City Hall.

I spoke with de Blasio, who excoriated the Times for its editorial and got his impressions of the Democratic field for mayor, including his longtime political rival, Cuomo, who as governor taunted the progressive mayor for eight years.

The editorial board took numerous shots at you and your tenure as mayor. What’s your response?
It felt like the New York Times didn’t understand New York City. It was this strangely conservative law-and-order, traditionalist view that totally missed the reality of the city today. My view is people are hurting and affordability is the issue and the Times just does not understand what everyday people are going through. They’ve disconnected from New York City more and more with every passing year. Obviously, they decided they didn’t care enough about New York City to make an editorial endorsement and then they show up with this wimpy, disingenuous editorial basically justifying why people should vote for someone corrupt in Andrew Cuomo, and not even recognizing that other new leaders had worthy ideas. I mean, the whole thing was like, “Let’s invalidate new young leaders,” right? It was unbelievably ageist and out of touch.

I was immediately transported back to 2013 when they said in their editorial when I was running for mayor that my ideas, like Pre-K for All, were impossible. They were absolutely dismissive, and their whole attitude was, Big bold ideas can’t happen, so why vote for someone who wants to change things? And I feel what they have become is sort of a parody of the status quo. They, in their own curmudgeonly way, just tell people to swallow hard and accept the unacceptable. If you talk to everyday New Yorkers, as I do all the time, you know that people really, really can’t stand the status quo in the city. But it’s not because they want to go back to some good old days of strongman leaders. It’s that they think their leaders don’t care about them, aren’t helping address the extraordinary pain they’re going through and the challenge of making ends meet.

I just found it shocking that the Times, in a way, was trying to tell people to accept the guy who brought you a lot of these problems. Like they literally were saying, Well, Andrew Cuomo is corrupt and he’s inhumane and, sure, he’s been in power for a long time, but you should just accept it anyway because somehow that’s a vision of stability or making sure we don’t go back to the ’70s and ’80s. People who talk about going back to the ’70s and ’80s do not understand New York City. It is physically impossible in every sense: our economy, our level of public safety, et cetera. We have, thank God, changed in so many profound ways. So the minute you see that, it is a tell that the people doing the writing don’t even understand what’s going on. If that had come from the New York Post, I wouldn’t have been surprised. At least it’s consistent with a worldview that’s against progressive values and wants to venerate the power structure of the past. But coming from the New York Times, it was an indication that they’ve lost any claim to moral meaning in this city.

And then there were just vast inaccuracies. My administration, we drove down crime six years in a row to levels not seen since the 1950s. I had Bill Bratton, who was the most esteemed police commissioner in........

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