What the Mayoral Debate Missed

The Gracie Bunch, with a teeth-clenched Andrew Cuomo in the center square, finally debuted on Wednesday night, just 10 days before early voting begins in the Democratic primary that often functionally decides New York City’s mayor. (This year could be different.)

The debate didn’t make much of an impression, but it did highlight the yawning gap between the city’s politics and the concerns of its residents. 

For starters, only the first hour was actually on TV, with host WNBC relegating the second hour to streaming. (On broadcast, it suddenly and jarringly switched from a partially scripted drama to a totally scripted drama at 8.) There was no audience, and for some reason the press wasn’t allowed inside the venue. 

Even for viewers who watched the whole thing, there was little new here for anyone already paying attention and no break-out moments for low-information voters just now tuning into the race.

Andrew Cuomo, the former governor who resigned before lawmakers could remove him but who now regrets it and has led in every poll to date, continued slouching toward what he wants voters to see as his inevitable and necessary return to power as the one candidate who can redeem a city supposedly in crisis. Never mind the fact that crime is now declining pretty steeply and other things don’t feel as dire to many New Yorkers as they do to the candidate; polls still show New Yorkers in a grim mood, and he’s amplifying it.

The debate was the first time Cuomo has had to engage directly with the rivals his campaign has memorably dismissed as “the seven dwarves.” That was a good thing.

But there were eight rivals crowding the debate stage, each trying to cram too much into 30-second “answers” often without responding to the actual question while frequently speaking over each other and the moderators and with seven of them collectively aiming their fire at Cuomo.

They repeated well-worn campaign lines in the hopes of introducing themselves to a new audience and breaking through while also blasting Cuomo’s and his record on nursing home deaths and sexual harassment charges and budget cuts and ethics and things he said 17 years ago about Barack Obama and on and on. 

The collective idea is to convince voters not to rank Cuomo at all, but the range of attacks, some closer to the mark than others, made it hard to focus on any given one, and the whole exercise felt exhausting as he responded with counter-attacks, half-answers and evasions to run out the clock and move on.

As the night dragged on, the group texts I’m in with political pros and junkies got quieter and quieter as even they lost interest.

The whole thing felt like an argument against New York City’s over-elaborate elections system, with ranked-choiced contests for special elections and primaries like this one while general elections remain simple, most-votes-wins affairs. 

While there’s a lot to like about ranked-choice contests — they eliminate the need for run-offs and allow people to vote for candidates they actually like instead of getting caught up in considering who’s winning — it’s simply ridiculous to have two different systems apply in the same race, with one contest only open to registered party members and the other one to all voters. 

(It’s also ridiculous that the city’s primary, which is low-turnout to begin with, is in late June, but that’s a whole other story.) 

The ranked-choice primary, along with the city’s generous public matching-funds program, means that candidates with no path to victory have no reason to drop out and every reason to stay in the race, use their TV time and continue spending campaign funds. 

The system also means that candidates in broadly similar lanes — with the “dwarves” broadly representing the progressive left and Cuomo and Whitney Tilson the pro-police and pro-Israel centrists, to put it a little crudely — have no reason to go at each other. 

Which is a shame, because some of these candidates are smart and serious, though you wouldn’t have known it if you were just meeting them Wednesday night. 

Don’t hate the players, hate the game. Nine candidates stuffed on a debate stage with a minute or 30 seconds each toengage with specific questions and big topics is an overload of overboiled riffs. 

Part of my job as a journalist is to help digest information for voters, and make sure the map stays aligned to the territory. 

But as it happened, I was watching or listening while also editing a story about family members in agony on the streets of Manhattan Wednesday as ICE round-ups there get crueler and more aggressive by the day. That felt vastly more urgent than hearing candidates talk in generalities about the Trump administration’s assault on the city and their plans to resist it.

Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old socialist with limited accomplishments who’s put himself in second place by captivating younger voters and the media class with fresh messaging, told me last week that “the entire ethos of this campaign is seeking to have the bubble of New York City politics finally connect with the world of New York City itself.”

But he didn’t do much to distinguish himself to viewers just tuning in to the race and finding out who he is in one of the biggest remaining free media availabilities he has. (He did collect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s much-anticipated top-rank endorsement on Monday, with that presumably timed to help him ride post-debate momentum. But he really didn’t have much of it and her nod comes awfully late in the game, which is why I’m skeptical it helps sway many voters who weren’t already Mamdani fans.)

Cuomo, for his part, dismissed Mamdani early on with a clearly rehearsed attack line that had the benefit of being fresh, since he hasn’t felt enough pressure to use it until now.

“Donald Trump would go through Mr. Mamdani like a hot knife through butter,” Cuomo said. “He’s been in government 27 minutes. He passed three bills.”

Cuomo, who at one point actually said that “I was there every day, leading COVID,” was asked if he had any regrets from his many years in politics.

The Democratic candidate replied, ignoring the question as the rest of the candidates did, that “The Democratic Party got to a point that we allowed Mr. Trump to be elected — that we’ve gotten to a point where rhetoric has no connection with reality. The Democratic Party seems okay with that.”

Speaker Adrienne Adams, who’s tied Cuomo COVID response to her father’s death during the pandemic, interjected, bringing up his cuts to health and childcare spending and asking: “No regrets when it comes to slow-walking PPE and vaccinations in the season of COVID to Black and Brown communities? Really, no regrets? No regrets?”