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Round Table

By New York Times Opinion

​Last week Times Opinion published The Choice, a new project to help voters think through their options in high-stakes elections. We brought together 15 New Yorkers of varied backgrounds and expertise to assess the nine leading Democratic candidates for mayor of New York and choose which one would make the best leader for the city.

As part of the process, ​O​pinion editors convened a round-table discussion among the panelists on May 27. The range of viewpoints stood out — to some, Andrew Cuomo ​​offered a steady experienced hand ​and record of accomplishments; to others​, he was a disgraced bully ​with old ideas who should be consigned to ​the past. There was wide divergence on Zohran Mamdani, the ​leading progressive in the race: Is he ​a fresh thinker who could infuse energy and ideas into a calcified bureaucracy or a neophyte​ whose agenda as a democratic socialist would prove unaffordable and divisive?

​And finally there was appreciation for Brad Lander, who emerged as a safe-harbor option, earning the respect of ​m​any panel​ists for his competence and integrity. He ended up as the top choice.

Following are excerpts from that round-table discussion, condensed and edited for clarity. The round table was moderated by ​Bill Brink, Mara Gay and Patrick Healy.

For biographies of the panelists, go to The Choice.

Q: Give us a phrase or a sentence that tells us what you think is the most critical challenge facing New York for this election. Fred?

Fred Davie: Advancing an agenda that really takes seriously the needs of all the sectors of the city, while doing so in a national context that’s actually hostile to New York City at the moment.

Danny Meyer: Yeah, I appreciate what I just heard within the context of the national discourse right now. It’s all too tempting for the mayor of New York to get engaged with that, when what the city really needs is somebody who can manage the many, many moving parts of the city.

Absent the foundation of a really strong tourism sector and a really strong financial sector, all bets are off. And I think the underpinning of tourism is safety. And the underpinning of financial industry is a forward-looking understanding of where the technology ball is going.

Mychal Johnson: The most critical thing is the income-wealth gap. Until we have a real “come to Jesus” around what that really means to this city in terms of a society that has been leaving a lot of people behind and children behind, then we’re going to have a continued cycle of things that keeps going wrong.

Iwen Chu: I think government accountability and fiscal transparency is crucial. It’s not like we don’t have the resources. It’s who puts what resource first and comes up with what kind of package? Who leads the team?

Integrity is another thing. It’s not just a top-down, one-man, woman, whatever, to dictate how the direction our city should go. It should be teamwork.

Mitchell Moss: The mayor of New York should first recognize he or she can only do a few things well and not try to do anything that is going to take 20 years. So the priority should be safety. And schools. And housing. If we can make it a place to live, a place to learn and a place to work, the city functions.

Whitney Toussaint: I’m a working-class person from rural Georgia trying to live here in the city. It needs to be more affordable. I’m only able to participate here today because there is someone who is taking care of my children.

We need people who really care about public schools and educating our children, making sure they have somewhere to go after school and supporting programs again that support our low-income families, our vulnerable populations, L.G.B.T.Q. people, disabled people, elderly people.

Howard Wolfson: We’ve lost students in the school system post-Covid. And we were shedding students even before Covid. We are failing many hundreds of thousands more than that. Long-term, unless we are able to devise and implement a public school system that works for all New York families and all New York children, we will have, both morally and practically, failed another generation of kids.

Christina Greer: I think it needs to be someone who understands a holistic approach, to Mychal’s point — the wealth gap, housing and economic disparities that are affecting a vast array of diverse New Yorkers. And we need to have someone who understands the intricate relationship between Albany and Washington, D.C., and whether or not they’re going to use carrots or sticks, honey versus vinegar.

Neil Blumenthal: We should be thinking about the population of the entire city. That’s probably the leading indicator of whether a city is thriving or not: whether we’re gaining folks or people are leaving.

I think this next mayor needs to really work to focus on the fundamentals that enable New York to thrive, whether that’s public safety, better education and affordability. We have not been trending in the right direction on all of the most important metrics of the city. And I think that that’s been due to, frankly, a lack of competence.

Reihan Salam: My parents came to New York City in 1976 at the nadir of the city. I don’t have a driver’s license. I have nowhere else to go. I’m completely all in. What I’ll say, very unromantically, is that the critical question for the next mayor is value for money.

That’s true for low-income New Yorkers. That’s true for high-income New Yorkers. There are New Yorkers, middle-class New Yorkers who have left. They haven’t gone to other places that are more generous. They have moved to places, typically, that are more affordable, where you’re able to build savings, build a family, build a business. We need a better government than we had 15 years ago in order to stay level, to stay even and to stay competitive.

Eleanor Randolph: Oh, my gosh. I have to admit, personally, I don’t know who I’m going to vote for. And I have studied this.

For me, I think one of the really important questions is, who can actually run this city? It is a huge operation.

The Bloomberg people were really good about one aspect of this: They started out hiring the best possible people they could get. And that seems to me to be such a basic need for the person who’s going to be the mayor. And I haven’t heard enough from any of these candidates, basically, about this — how are you going to run the city?

Q: Is it clear which candidate or candidates can absolutely accomplish some of the things that you’re talking about? And is it clear who can’t?

Johnson: We’ve been posed with the question about who can run the city. And the city has been run before, but it hasn’t been run right for most people. A lot have been left behind, especially in the Bronx and other communities like ours.

So I’m not looking for someone who can........

© The New York Times