Today, Explained - Five boroughs. One mayor. Mad drama.

Episode Date: June 18, 2025

New York Public Radio icon Brian Lehrer breaks down the New York City mayor's race and New York magazine's David Freedlander explains what Democrats nationally can learn from the two leading candidates. This episode was produced by Peter Balonon-Rosen and Denise Guerra, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Democratic mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo shaking hands with Zohran Mamdani. Photo by Yuki Iwamura-Pool/Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There are nine people credibly running in New York City's Democratic mayoral primary. The city's deranged rank choice voting ensures every New Yorker gets to vote for five of them. Yesterday, candidate Brad Lander briefly made headlines when he got arrested by ICE. But the smart money says this race comes down to two. Andrew Cuomo and Zoran Mamdani. Let's see what the tabs are saying. The Post.

Zoran Mamdani has barely ever had a job with just three years in the workforce, including his rap career and a gig for his mom. The Times. Mamdani narrows Cuomo's lead in New York City Mayor's race, New Pole Finds. The Daily News. Accused New Jersey killer used fake police lights

to pull over wife's lover. Cops say it's New York's most exciting vote since Jimmy Fallon asked Robert De Niro to pick a movie coming up on Today Explained. The Old Guard versus young cardamom. Do you feel like you have a clear sense of what that goal is? I mean, do you really think it's regime change? Yeah, I think it's full consolidation of power in his own hands.

The ability to act unfettered, the ability to control and corral the opposition. And the opposition here is broadly construed. It's not just the Democratic Party, it's the press, it's cultural liberals. I mean, he recently called for an investigation into Bruce Springsteen. This week on the gray area. How much has President Trump changed America? Listen to the gray area with me, Sean Elling. New episodes every Monday

available everywhere. I'm Brian Lehrer. I host the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC New York Public Radio from 10 a.m. to noon Eastern Time Monday through Friday. Everybody in New York City calls into your show. What's the wildest call you've taken about the mayoral race? Just this morning, it's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good Monday morning, everyone. I open the phones just for people who call themselves late deciders. And I had no trouble finding people who have voted for any of the top four candidates.

I think it's got to be Cuomo for me. Brad Lander. I did Adrian Adams because I'm from Queens. Even had somebody call who I was wondering if they were a unicorn because one of my callers said, I was team Cuomo for the longest and I was going with his experience and all what he did for New York State. But then I saw Mondani on the debate stage. So I voted and I ranked Mondani first and then Cuomo second because I'll be fine with Cuomo. And those are the two bitter competitors who you would think nobody in this rank-choice voting

system would rank both of them, but it's a crazy election, especially with this rank-choice voting system where you can list up to five in your order of preference. Okay, so as you alluded, Brian, the two candidates who everybody sort of seems to think it will come down to are Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo. Tell us about these two men. So Mamdani, think young Bernie Sanders as a starting point. I'm once again asking for your financial support. He's a 33-year-old state assembly member from Queens.

The name is Mamdani. M-A-M-D-A-N-I. You should learn how to say it. member from Queens. The name is Mamdani. M-A-M-D-A-N-I. You should learn how to say it. His assembly district overlaps with the congressional district of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has endorsed him. He is a democratic socialist promising a lot of free stuff to make life more affordable for the working class.

I am running to be your next mayor to make this city affordable. I will do so by freezing the rent for more than two million rent stabilized tenants, by making the slowest buses in the country fast and free, and by delivering universal child care. And I will pay for this by taxing the 1%. As a young progressive, Mamdani also shows the fight that many Democrats have said is lacking in the party since the reelection of Donald Trump. I am Donald Trump's worst nightmare as a progressive Muslim immigrant who actually fights for the things that I believe in. And the difference between myself and Andrew Cuomo is that my campaign is not funded by

the very billionaires who put Donald Trump in D.C. And some people may know that Mamdani's mother is the renowned Indian American filmmaker Mira Nair. And Donnie's mother is the renowned Indian American filmmaker, Mira Nayyar. Andrew Cuomo also doesn't exactly come from an unknown family. Tell us about him. Well, his father was a three term governor. Governor Mario Cuomo rebuilding New York for the future. So he grew up in this.

And many listeners may remember he resigned in a sexual harassment scandal after 10 years in office in 2021. Governor Cuomo resigns under escalating political pressure after the bombshell report accusing him of sexual misconduct. The best way I can help now is if I step aside and let government get back to governing. At 67, he is more than twice Mamdani's age, and he did both liberal and conservative things in office. You know, he banned fracking and assault weapons and helped legalize gay marriage in New York with a bill passed in Albany, the capital before the Supreme Court did it for the nation. That's the power and the beauty of New York.

The other states look to New York for the progressive direction. He was also, however, not always seen as a friend of public higher education or mass transit by some critics. Cuomo is running on fewer specific policy things and more on this aura of experience and competence and strength in a troubled time.

Today, our New York City is in trouble. You feel it when you walk down the street and try not to make eye contact with a mentally ill homeless person, or when the anxiety rises up in your chest as you're walking down into the subway. Cuomo argues that he's the guy who can save New York from disorderly streets and subways. Rudy Giuliani sort of law-and-order conservatism, but at the same time he argues he would be the strongest Democrat to stand up to Trump on behalf of the city. He sent troops into cities all across this country, but he never sent them into New York

when I was there, and he never will when I am mayor. A job looks easy when you haven't done it. Experience matters. How are these two guys campaigning, both outwardly facing toward New York City residents, and then maybe even more broadly than that and how are they approaching each other? Cuomo is saying inexperience is dangerous in this case. Mr. Mondani has had a staff of five people.

You're not going to run a staff of 300,000 employees. He's never dealt with a city council. He's never dealt with the Congress. He's never dealt with the state legislature. He's never negotiated with the Congress. He's never dealt with the state legislature. He's never negotiated with the union. He's never built- Mondani points out Cuomo's scandals. To Mr. Cuomo, I have never had to resign in disgrace.

I have never cut Medicaid. I have never stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from the MTA. I have never hounded the 13 women who credibly accused me of sexual harassment. I have never sued for their gynecological records and I have never done those things because I am not you, Mr. Cuomo. And furthermore, the name is Mamdani, M-A-M-D-A-N-I. You should learn how to say it.

There also are overtones in this race of what's going on in Israel and Gaza. As a member of the DSA, he also identifies with the position in this race of what's going on in Israel and Gaza. As a member of the DSA, he also identifies with a position, and he has said this, that Israel should not exist as a Jewish state. He says it should be a pluralistic democracy. That's the DSA position, like the United States.

No religious or ethnic group should have automatic power in any country, he argues. Do you believe in a Jewish state of Israel? I believe Israel has the right to exist. Not as a Jewish state? No. As a state with equal rights. He won't say it has a right to exist.

A Jewish state be very clear on that. And his answer was no, he won't visit Israel. I said that before. That's what he was trying to say. No, no, no. Unlike you, I answer questions very directly. You never said no. Okay.

All right, I think we're clear. You answer. I believe every state should be a state of equal rights. Obviously, that's not going to be very acceptable to many Jewish voters who at least think Israel should exist as a Jewish state, even if they think that what Netanyahu is doing in Gaza is monstrous. And Cuomo is all the way on the other side of that.

He's trying to run hard on anti-Semitism and paint Mamdani as somebody Jews can't trust domestically. Cuomo signed on to be a lawyer to defend Netanyahu at the International Criminal Court against charges of war crimes. So that would put him all the way on the other side of anything having to do with the Middle East. Neither of those have anything to do with running New York directly, but those things are coming up in the campaign. Is this a typical tone for the New York City Mayor's race? Oh, it's a rough and tumble city in politics.

But yeah, it's going to be a rough campaign. You mentioned ranked choice voting, which I think once upon a time New York thought would really help it in elections. But right now, I cannot read a single op-ed without hearing that rank choice voting is destroying New York. Explain how it works and why it has become so controversial in this race in particular.

Okay. I would say rank choice voting is simple, not simple. It's simple in that all you have to do is list up to five candidates in your order of preference. It's not so simple, and the candidates have tough choices around who to say they might also list in ways that help their chances more than hurt. But a big piece of news on Friday was that Mamdani cross-endorsed with the third-place candidate in the polls, Brad Lander. Brad and I are officially telling our supporters.

Rank me number one. Rank Zoran number two. Let's send Andrew Cuomo. Back to the suburbs. They are both progressives. They both wanted to defeat Cuomo, but they both want to win themselves. You know, there are multiple ways to get to 50%, but you have to block your main rival somehow.

And I think it's this complexity that is causing it to be controversial. But, you know, there are many advocates of ranked choice voting who think that it's good for building coalitions like we're seeing in some of these cross endorsements so that not everything in politics becomes binary polarized. You moderated the final Democratic-Mayoral debate. You've also interviewed both of these men before. What's given you the best sense of who they are and what their ambitions are? Well, I would say Cuomo is trying to run in much the way Trump ran last year. How did Trump run last year? He ran, America is going to hell, I'm the person

to rescue it, and by the way, don't think about my scandals, they're witch hunts. Andrew Cuomo is running on, New York City is going to hell, I'm the person to rescue it, and oh, by the way, don't think much about my scandals, they're witch hunts. So part of the issue there is whether New Yorkers accept the premise that New York is going to hell. Mamdani is running on being not just a fresh face because he's young, but somebody who's going to turn the page in New York City politics from like anywhere else, being beholden to a lot of corporate and wealthy special interests.

And that that's why a lot of people are hurting economically in New York City. So that's a lot of the case that he's making. And we're gonna have to see eventually which of those cases people buy into more. But let me say this Noel, the final part of the story for now is that after all of this Cuomo and Mamdani might both be on the ballot in the fall for the general election. Governor Cuomo, former Governor Cuomo, is

going to run now as an independent, regardless of whether he wins the Democratic primary. He's forming a third party, the Fight and Deliver Party, so he can be on the ballot whether or not he wins the Democratic primary. The Working Families Party has said that if Cuomo wins the Democratic nomination, it's prepared to run a candidate on its own ballot line. That would likely be Mom Donnie. They both have other party lines that they can run on,

but I guess New York City will cross that bridge or tunnel if we get to it. Brian Lehrer, you can find the Brian Lehrer show at wnyc.org. Brian, thank you so much for taking the time. We appreciate it. Very welcome, Ella. [♪ music playing, fades out, music continues to Violence, the New York City Mayor's race is giving the Democrats agita and some ideas. There are two big trends happening in tech right now.

I mean, fine, there are a lot of trends happening in tech right now, but there are two that we're talking about on the Vergecast this week. The first is Apple redesigning all of its software to make it glassy and see-through and basically designed for a very different world than the one that we live in. The second is Nintendo and Xbox and others, thinking that maybe the future of consoles is not giant boxes next to your television,

but smaller things that you can hold. We talk about why and whether any of that is a good idea all this week on The Vergecast, wherever you get podcasts. David Friedlander is a features writer with New York Magazine, often covers politics and we called him to ask, is it fair to map New York's mayor's race onto national politics? I mean, it is and it isn't. You know, obviously, like it can kind of be a little bit of an awkward fit, as is true anytime you sort of pull out one race in a large and diverse nation. But that said, I mean, this sort of like fits the divide

fairly neatly, I think, in terms of like, a lot of people who think, wonder about where the Democratic Party should go. And should the Democratic Party make more of an effort to kind of like win back voters who may be Trump curious? Of all the confounding results in this past election, perhaps the strangest phenomenon was the surprising number of people who voted for Democrats'

down ballot and then checked off Donald Trump for president. The Democrats forgot that they had people who needed work here too. They let in other people who took jobs from Americans. What we still need is lowering the cost of living. Or should the party kind of energize its base, be, you know, activate social media users, that kind of thing. Because, you know, Manani, like he sort of rose in this race really by social media and by some eye popping ads. I think that really caught the public's attention and imagination. Did it catch the young public's imagination or did it catch everybody's imagination?

I think mostly the young. He's a real phenom. I've been covering, you know, New York politics for 20 years. I've never seen anything quite like this in this city. The size of the rallies he's getting, the number of volunteers on his campaign. And yeah, like they're mostly young. A lot of them are probably like not from New York City,

but are transplants elsewhere. You know, Mondani is really doing well among college educated voters. Well Cuomo's strength is on working class voters of color. To speak to some of those striations within the party, you wrote in New York Magazine about the rise of the liberal Tea Party. Who's included in that movement and what do they want?

I think the biggest example was David Hogg. I think what I'm doing that's different from before is I'm challenging the status quo in a direct way and head on. And that really scares people. But frankly, I think right now, nobody should be comfortable when our country is in a moment of crisis. There's another couple of other candidates across the country, you know, running for congressional seats.

And not only do they want to pull the party leftward, but they also want to sort of pull the party downward and make it make it younger, I think. My name is Kat Abugazale. I'm running for Congress in the 9th District of Illinois, and Democratic leaders need to be talking about what's happening right now and actively working to stop it. Running for Congress against Nancy Pelosi here in San Francisco. My name is Choi Kachakrabarti, and I wanted to do a quick campaign update to tell y'all how things are going. I'm Donovan McKinney, and I'm running for Congress to take back this seat for us, always with the people. And you know, there's this idea that just a Democratic Party has been sort of ruled by baby boomers for a generation or so.

And I think they're really trying to change that. From the headlines, you might think that the trend is young Democrats are winning seats over old incumbents, old democratic incumbents. It's a good headline. Does it actually reflect the times that we're living in though? No, not at all. Okay. I mean, no, the old guard is like, they're holding on. And like there have been a few that have sort of announced kind of voluntary retirements, but they're not going anywhere. And they're frankly, like a larger faction of the party than these young upstarts. I

think, you know, we'll see some success from these folks, but I don't think there's going to be a sort of wholesale, you know, generation toward changing up the dial that we're looking at. There's been a lot of talk about what went wrong for the Democrats in 2024. And so much talk, right? Do you think the party should look at this race to kind of test what they might want for 2028 or to look at it as an opportunity to further learn a lesson that was learned in 2024?

Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that this, you know, I think New York City mayor races always tend to like invite these kinds of narratives. And I remind, you know, everyone that four years ago, this week or next week, Eric Adams won the Mayores race, you know, he came out the next day and said, I'm the new face of the Democratic Party. If the Democratic Party fails to recognize what we did here in New York, they're going to have a problem in the midterm elections, and they're going to have a problem in the presidential election. I think that's like invited some mockery now because he has so much sort of corruption

and chaos swirling around him. But it really seemed like that was going to be the case that he was sort of the kind of figure the Democratic Party needed. And I think that like this will be another test of that. I mean, it is like I think you will sort of figure out some direction of the party based on the results in a week, whether or not the party is going to like skew younger, you know, embrace social media, embrace kind of virality and embrace the enthusiasm of the young. Or, you know, whether or not it's a kind of more, like brute force march to the middle, you know, to win

over voters like who, who may be Trump curious. You know, I mean, Andrew Cuomo, like he's been sort of for a while in this race, like he was kind of reluctant to criticize Donald Trump. And I think that in part that was like because, you know, the city really swung to the right in the 2024 election. In New York's 14th district, a number of voters cast their ballot for both Trump and one of the House's most progressive Democrats, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. According to the CBS News data team, Democrats have been losing ground in the Bronx, Brooklyn,

Manhattan, and Queens since 2016. You had a lot of, you know, Democratic precincts voting for Trump in ways that we haven't seen them vote for Republicans before. And so I think there's a real focus on sort of peeling those voters back. Based on what I've seen of their campaigning, these two men in particular seem to understand that populism is the mood of the moment. They are appealing to populist sentiment in different ways. At the end of the day, you have the son of a movie director and a respected academic,

and Mario Cuomo's kid, as my mother would call him. How are New Yorkers viewing these men as avatars of populism? Are they buying it? I don't know if it's populism, frankly, as much as it is a sort of frustration with the direction of the city or frustration with the direction of the country and a feeling like the political class hasn't been there for me and isn't addressing my concerns and that it is just too hard to live here and too hard to get by. And I think they're both approaching that on very different ways, but they're sort of

it's coming from the same place in a way. Like Andrew Cuomo, I think the sort of thrust of his campaign is that you go on the subway and there's people with mental illness or there's homelessness or the subway doesn't come. So we're going to clean that up. And Mondani is kind of saying, he talks about free subways and free buses and city-owned grocery stores. And it's a way of saying that the city has gotten too expensive and too hard to live in. And so we're gonna make it easier for you

and deal with the issue that most makes you feel that way, which is affordability. I think they're both coming out of the same instinct in a funny way. I think especially you're gonna see a lot of Mondani knockoffs. If he wins, even if he comes close to winning, I think that here's a candidate who is authentic to themselves, who does not apologize for previous stances they may have held, who really like sticks to their guns on a lot of these key issues and doesn't sort of negotiate them away when running for higher office.

David Friedlander of New York Magazine. Peter Bellinon-on Rosen and Denise Guerra produced today's show, Amanelle Saadi edited, Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christen's daughter engineered, Laura Bullard checks the facts. Today Explained is taking Thursday off, Happy Juneteenth, we'll have a rerun on Friday, and we're back with a new episode on Sunday. Till then. I'm going to go ahead and turn it off. Thank you.