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**JUNE 6, 2025**

On the Prospect website

The Elon-Trump Feud Is Oligarchy in Action
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Two deranged megalomaniacs think they own the American government. Of course they end up fighting. BY RYAN COOPER

Red Line Season: Senators Lay Down Their Must-Haves for Mega-Bill [link removed]
Clean energy, state taxes, Medicaid, and much more are being debated. BY DAVID DAYEN

AI Surveillance Won't Stop Theft, but It Might Stop Unions [link removed]
The loss prevention industry is excited about using technology to combat shoplifting. But workers are getting caught up in the dragnet. BY CALEB BRENNAN

DOGE Wants to Make Your Baby's Crib Unsafe
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Three Democratic commissioners have been fired from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and Trump's team has its eye on dismantling the agency entirely. BY DANIEL BOGUSLAW

Kuttner on TAP

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**** Is Cuomo Going Down in NYC?

The improbable rise of Zohran Mamdani and the prospect of rare unity on the left

Until this week, it looked as if Andrew Cuomo was on track to be New York City's next mayor. The incumbent, Eric Adams, had collapsed in a haze of corruption and incompetence, and was not even contesting the Democratic primary.

The left, meanwhile, was fragmented. Several progressive candidates were running, and a number of unions were backing Cuomo on the assumption that he was a sure winner.

Cuomo, who has assiduously courted the Black community through appearances on Black talk shows and in Black
churches, stood to carry the base that put Adams in office four years ago-Black voters, whites worried about crime, conservative pro-Netanyahu Jews, and the always powerful real estate lobby, which is dropping millions of dollars [link removed] on ads for him.

Cuomo had also raised the most money. Cuomo was betting that after Adams, who was both corrupt and incompetent, New Yorkers would accept a little corruption in exchange for competence.

But then, one progressive candidate, Zohran Mamdani, broke out of the pack. This was more than a little improbable. Mamdani, 33, is a third-term assemblyman from Queens, as well as a Muslim and a stalwart of DSA. But he is a stunningly effective politician.

Last week, the Working Families Party gave Mamdani its endorsement. The party recommended that in New York's complex ranked-choice system, voters should rank Mamdani first.
They did not recommend ranking Cuomo at all. And yesterday, AOC, New York's most popular and effective progressive leader, endorsed Mamdani [link removed], the candidate most like AOC herself.

The most recent and most comprehensive poll [link removed], by Emerson College, released May 28, shows Cuomo with 35 percent of the vote in the first round, edging out Mamdani in the final round of vote redistribution, by just 54.4 to 45.6-less than nine points. And that was before the endorsements of the Working Families Party and AOC, or Wednesday's debate. The next poll is likely to be much closer.

While Cuomo still could narrowly win the June 24 Democratic primary, the November general election is likely to have four candidates, regardless of who wins the primary.
Cuomo and Adams have taken out ballot lines to run as independents, plus the expected Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa. And Mamdani will likely run either as a Democrat or on the Working Families line. The other three will all pull from Cuomo.

So while time is short between now and the Democratic primary, that won't end things. Cuomo has between now and November to play the role of pi??ata. I doubt he will wear well.

[link removed]

WHO IS ZOHRAN MAMDANI? He was born in Uganda. His parents are Mahmood Mamdani [link removed], an Indian-born social scientist now the Herbert Lehman Professor at Columbia, and Mira Nair [link removed], an Indian American
filmmaker whose award-winning movies include

**Mississippi Masala** and

**The Namesake**.

The family moved to New York when Mamdani was seven. He graduated from the famed Bronx High School of Science. He then got a degree from Bowdoin College and became a U.S. citizen in 2018.

In Wednesday's debate, the candidates piled on against Cuomo, and Mamdani was outstanding. Of all the contenders, Cuomo is the most like Trump, both in his bullying and his vindictiveness. Trump and Cuomo also share many of the same donors.

"The difference between Andrew Cuomo and myself," Mamdani said, "is that my campaign is not funded by many of the billionaires who put Donald Trump in D.C. I don't have to pick up the phone from Bill Ackman or Ken Langone."

His program includes making city buses free, freezing rents on rent-stabilized apartments, and establishing a pilot program of city-run grocery stores, one for each borough in supermarket deserts, funded by a $10 billion tax hike on the
ultra-rich. Mamdani also has an astute variant on the toxic slogan "Defund the police": keep the police well funded, but reserve them for going after real criminals and add mental health counselors for domestic disputes and similar situations often inflamed by cops.

As AOC said in her endorsement [link removed], "Assemblymember Mamdani has demonstrated a real ability on the ground to put together a coalition of working-class New Yorkers ... Even if the entire left coalesced around any one candidate, an ideological coalition is still insufficient for us to win. We have to have a true working-class coalition."

The demographics of who might vote for Mamdani are intriguing. About 30 percent of New York City voters are immigrants who became citizens. Queens, the home of both AOC and Mamdani, is the epicenter of immigrant New York.

There is also the tricky question of
the Jewish vote. A recent poll conducted for the Forward [link removed] found that among Jewish voters, Cuomo had 31 percent of Jewish voter support. Mamdani had a surprising 20 percent. New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who is Jewish, was in third place with 18 percent. Since Lander is a left-liberal and a critic of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's Gaza barbarism, many Jews who prefer Lander would likely back Mamdani over Cuomo.

This confirms my hunch that liberal Jews, who are ashamed of what Netanyahu has done in Israel's name, have had no place to go politically while the right has worked to conflate criticism of the Gaza war with antisemitism. Mamdani, who supports Israel's right to exist but criticizes the Gaza war, could receive a nontrivial share of liberal Jewish support.

If Mamdani narrowly loses the Democratic primary, he will still need to get the
WFP line to be able to run in November. The unions that might want to block that are a lot weaker in the WFP than they were in 2018 when they engineered a WFP endorsement of then-Gov. Cuomo [link removed].

Since then, the biggest unions that were once central to the WFP, such as SEIU (which endorsed Cuomo in the mayoral primary), have left, and those that remain are lukewarm on Cuomo. So if Mamdani needs the WFP line in November, he will probably get it.

On the other hand, other Democratic candidates may not go quietly. Some in the Working Families Party think that Adrienne Adams, Speaker of the New York City Council, who placed fourth in the Emerson poll, might do better against Cuomo than Mamdani in a November head-to-head matchup. The theory is that Adams, as an admired Black woman, would pull more of the Black vote than Mamdani, plus the white liberals.

That
was the finding of a confidential poll commissioned by the WFP before they made their endorsement. Only a few leaders had access to the poll, but someone leaked it to Politico [link removed].

However, Mamdani had such obvious momentum that the party decided to endorse him anyway. For now, there is a growing consensus among party leaders that Mamdani, with a very strong ground game of over 29,000 volunteers, can actually win the Democratic primary. "That's where our focus is," says New York WFP co-director Ana Mar??a Archila.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

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