In New York City, there are 3,343,648 registered Democrats and 558,778 registered Republicans, which means that Democrats outnumber Republicans by almost exactly six-to-one (5.98-to-one to be more precise). From a purely mathematical standpoint, Democrat leaders don’t need any Republican support to build a stable governing coalition. For much of the past two decades, they’ve courted Republicans anyway so that they can freeze out progressives, making outrageous concessions to conservatives on supposedly key issues like abortion rights, climate change, and transit in the process. But this has been largely a matter of taste. Now we’ve nominated a leader with significantly more distaste for Republicans than for progressives and on paper, that shouldn’t stop him from being able to form a majority coalition in the general election.
The last three general elections have been snoozes, in which only a quarter of the electorate shows up, and the Democratic nominee breezes by the Republican opposition with a three-to-one margin. Zohran Mamdani’s polarizing politics are likely to make this one a little bit more interesting, but he will enter with the firm support of around 55% of Democrats, doing some back of the napkin RCV math, which we’ll get more clarity about on Tuesday. He should only gain from there, as he’ll have the Democratic Party line on the ballot, likely to be worth a decent amount for the older, outer-borough machine types (i.e. a significant share of Black voters) who supported Cuomo in the primary. As the presumptive favorite, he should also expect to receive endorsements from the major unions sometime soon, which will also grow his Democratic coalition. If you add the remaining 25% of Democrats to the Republican side, and then also add the 1,223,583 registered independents (and ignore the fact that about a sixth of them are registered with the Working Families Party, and a bunch more are registered with other left-aligned groups), you technically end up with 51% of the electorate.
A general election candidate challenging Mamdani would need the firm support of all 51% (there can’t be any splitting among multiple candidates, which will be hard because there are already multiple challengers running), and inspire sky-high turnout (although not too high, because remember, Mamdani seems to do really well with low-propensity voters). They’ll need to form a coherent agenda everyone in this bizarro coalition can get behind, from the city’s half a million MAGA Trump-supporting Republicans, to the moderate, outer borough ethnic groups that nevertheless voted for Harris by 40 points last year, to the disaffected Maoists who believe that Mamdani has already sold out and is not far left enough. This candidate would need to be a miracle worker, or in Bill Ackman’s words, “a superhero.”
But hey, you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take. After Ackman promised and then immediately withdrew his promise of a secret superhero (“I have a superb candidate who I believe can win who meets all of the criteria, but if I were to say his name or even reach out to him, it would have a negative effect on his candidacy, as I am a supporter of President Trump, and that alone taints anyone I would recommend,” he explained), others leapt in to fill the void. Wednesday morning, New York Magazine columnist David Freedlander reported that real estate and business leaders would be joining a call at 2PM to “discuss the Zohran Situation.” That evening, hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb and incumbent mayor Eric Adams held an in-person meeting with political operatives, prominent donors, and for some reason, Whitney Tilson, to come up with their next move. “The question is,” Tilson asked the room, “who can stop him? One option is Mayor Eric Adams.” I imagine that Tilson has a different option in mind he’d like even more.
Who are the options? Let’s take a quick tour, and see who might be a good fit for the role of Last Minute Electoral Superhero Who Can Swoop In And Save the Real Estate Industry From The Scary Socialist.
Andrew Cuomo
His Case as an Electoral Superhero: Oh boy! Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone with decades of leadership experience, and many impressive, signature accomplishments (Laguardia Airport! The Second Avenue Subway! Gay Rights!)? Someone already on the ballot? Someone with 100% name recognition, who voters remember and instinctively trust? Someone who led us through the darkest crisis in the city’s recent history with a calm, soothing poise? Someone with deep, longstanding ties to all the major power-brokers in the city, especially the ones in the Black and outer-borough party leadership? Who can win as a Democrat, but also has proven moderate credentials, who can appeal to voters on both sides of the aisle? Who has a long and proud history taking on the progressive left in this city and winning? With a proven record of raising certifiable boatloads of money from the city’s business elite? Who allegedly had a 12 point lead among Democrats only a few weeks ago?
Kryptonite: Empirically, it turns out that none of this is sufficient to beat Zohran Mamdani, or even come particularly close. This may have been due to the former Governor’s significant baggage, his lackluster campaigning chops, or the fact that even his allies really don’t like him personally, and are willing to say so mere hours after his primary loss. In any case, all other potential superheroes can claim that they are untested, that “anything can happen,” that we don’t know how well they’ll do in a one-on-on against Zohran Mamdani until we see it happen. Andrew Cuomo is literally the one person in the city or anywhere else who cannot claim this. We know how he’d do. He got his ass kicked. This seems to have sunk in with many of his donors, if not with Cuomo himself. Yesterday, the New York Post’s Charlie Gasparino reported that Cuomo and his team had been circulating a Honan Strategy Group poll that showed Cuomo and Mamdani tied among general election voters if they were the only two candidates in the field. Of course, Honan Strategy Group’s primary polls from last month seem to have overestimated Cuomo’s margin by about 20 points, so it’s not surprising that these donors don’t seem to be buying his pitch.
Eric Adams
The Case: Eric Adams, in case you’ve forgotten, is our current mayor, and an incumbent New York City Mayor has not lost a re-election bid for more than 30 years. Crime, his signature issue in his last election, is at record lows, and in normal circumstances this alone would be enough to lock up a second term. Like Cuomo, he’s already on the ballot, on the “Stop Antisemitism” line, and his close ties to the city’s Hasidic rabbis (at least the ones who are willing to look the other way when he invites openly anti-semitic YouTube streamers to Gracie mansion) give him a clear angle of attack on Mamdani and his anti-Zionist politics. He told Don Lemon this week that he believes Mamdani to be an anti-Semite, something that even Cuomo never quite said. You take that, and you mix in his deep roots in the same blocs of Black moderates and outer-borough homeowning party machine types that Cuomo dominated, his years of prostration towards the real estate industry (“I am real estate”), and his earnest efforts to reach across the aisle and win support with the city’s Republicans, and who knows. Unlike Cuomo, he’s certainly got a lot of energy. “Starting Thursday, Mayor Adams will be in full swing 24/7” his campaign spokesman said this week. “Like no campaign this city has ever seen.”
Kryptonite: We might start with the Quinnipiac poll last March that found that a majority of New Yorkers wanted Mayor Adams to resign, 78% were either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with his performance, and only 20% approved, the lowest approval rating ever recorded in Quinnipiac’s three decades polling New Yorkers. The dissatisfied 78% included 52% of Republicans. You could spot him 20 points and he’d still have nowhere near enough support to win, especially since New Yorkers who don’t support him really really hate him. They hate him for cozying up to Trump in a city where voters hate Trump (although they hate Adams even more at this point). They hate him for appointing under qualified personal friends to run key city agencies incredibly poorly. And they hate him for the storm cloud of corruption and criminality that surrounds everyone in his inner circle. This doesn’t seem to be changing. Just this week, Adams has received help with his campaign relaunch from federal corruption defendants Winnie Greco, Brianna Suggs, and Ingrid Lewis Martin, as well as consultant Trent Pool, who was charged with assaulting and strangling his girlfriend in a downtown hotel room last year. Voters hate Adams for hanging out with and relying on corrupt criminals, and they’ve made this clear, but he simply cannot stop himself.
Curtis Sliwa
The Case: He has the city’s Republican Party on lock. After soundly defeating former friend turned fierce rival Fernando Mateo in the 2021 Republican mayoral primary, Sliwa overperformed expectations in the general election (he still lost by almost forty points), and has coasted on that to an unopposed primary nomination this time around. Why do the city’s Republicans stand behind Sliwa so firmly? Well, he has a five decade history of standing up for law-and-order tough-on-crime politics in flashy ways, most notably as a founder of the Guardian Angels, an organized vigilante group that aims to interrupt violence and extrajudicially arrest criminals using karate. He also has some genuine street cred; in 1992, after he loudly and frequently criticized mob boss John Gotti on his popular talk radio show, Gotti’s son sent men to assassinate Sliwa. They stole a yellow cab, picked up Sliwa outside his apartment in the East Village, and then shot him multiple times from the front seat, and Sliwa survived by dramatically propelling himself through the passenger window and onto the street into oncoming traffic. Thirty two years later, this is still a pretty badass anecdote for an aspiring, tough-on-crime politician. Finally, while Sliwa firmly endorsed Trump in 2024 and especially supports his increasingly unpopular abduction-and-illegal-deportation policy, he did not support his election denialism in 2020. He has some other traits that might help him with crossover appeal, including the universal basic income pilot he pitched as part of his 2021 run, the many eating competitions he has competed in, and his fervent support for animal rights, perhaps motivated by the fact that he owns fifteen cats.
Kryptonite: Scroll up and re-read the first sentence of this blog: Democrats outnumber Republicans six-to-one. We could basically wrap it up there, as a MAGA Republican simply has no path to electoral victory in this city. But even if you were going to design a superhero Republican in a lab who was perfectly optimized to make it as close as possible, you might not choose someone with a fifty year history of vigilantism, a prolific, lurid, and extremely public sexual history that involved the destruction of multiple stable marriages amongst the city’s political elite (I’m not entirely sure this is a bad thing politically, but like, it can’t be good to get sued for missing child support payments by the Queens District Attorney? Right?), and, let’s repeat for good measure, at least fifteen cats. The most valuable thing Sliwa could do for the anti-Mamdani movement would be to drop out, and fork over his chunk of Republican New Yorkers to a candidate with more crossover appeal. Republican donor, former failed candidate, and CEO of the city’s very worst grocery store chain John Catsimatidis reportedly begged Sliwa to do this, and urged Trump to facilitate this move by appointing him to an attractive position within his administration. Sliwa quickly made it clear that he would be staying in, telling reporter Emily Ngo “I’m not getting out of this race unless they figure out a way to put me in a pine box and bury me six feet under.”
Jim Walden
The Case: He is going to be on the ballot, which is more than can be said about any of the other people from this point on. He’s raised six figures so far and will be the first independent candidate to qualify for matching funds. He is a middle-aged white man with circular glasses who appears non threatening and thoughtful in a suit, so he may provide the city’s more racist voters with a soothing contrast to the young, energetic Muslim, mixed-race Zohran Mamdani.
Kryptonite: He has no experience in public office, no name recognition, and most importantly, absolutely no insider political connections with the political establishments. What he has is seven years experience as a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, followed by twenty years in private practice, a bunch of wacky and unpopular ideas (this is a YIMBY blog but is there really a constituency for developing on the Hart Island municipal gravesite for the indigent?), and the aesthetic appeal of a white man in a suit and the aforementioned circular glasses. Also, he represented the failed bid from local community groups to delay and block the Prospect Park West bike lane that I raved about last week, which means that on a personal level I would literally vote for Vladimir Putin or David Ortiz over him. But putting my vote aside, a successful political campaign needs one of two ingredients to persuade and turnout voters at scale: either an alliance with the experienced, well-oiled political machine, ie high-profile endorsements, union support, and an infinite supply of super PAC money from mega-donors (the Cuomo strategy) or a grassroots volunteer army, hundreds of thousands of small donations, and complete domination of the attention economy to make up the deficit of paid advertisements with earned media (the Mamdani strategy). Walden will not have access to the machine for the former strategy, and if he wants to try his hand at going megaviral on TikTok for the latter strategy, I wish him the best of luck.
Michael Bloomberg
The Case: By far the most popular mayor of the last 30 years, at least as far as elite opinion is concerned. Has a functionally infinite amount of money and no compunction about incinerating huge amounts of it on failed politics boondoggles. Just last month he threw almost ten million more into the furnace to ensure that Cuomo could blanket the airwaves and stuff mailboxes with anti-Mamdani content. So he’s clearly still at least a little interested in city politics, and would like someone besides Mamdani to win.
Kryptonite: He has already served three terms, and is legally forbidden from serving a fourth term. Even if he gets around that somehow (he’s done it before), the electorate does not feel not particularly pro-billionaire right now. At the very least, his strategy of pouring money into anti-Zohran media did not work, and he’d have to try something else. I also wonder whether voters in either party are open to putting an 83-year-old man back in power at this particular moment.
Whitney Tilson
The Case: He clearly wants it (see his presence at Adams’s meeting last week), and is personally connected to Ackman so there’s a decent chance he actually is the “electoral superhero” that Ackman referred to in his cryptic thread. As for his politics, Matt Yglesias seems to like him, and maybe he’s not alone? “While I disagree with the places that this balancing act between reactionary rhetoric, liberal policy and progressive values leads him, I think there’s a constituency for it,” I wrote after interviewing Tilson in March.
Kryptonite: I might have been wrong about that. 7,828 people ranked Tilson first, or 0.8% of the total vote. You need more than 7,828 supporters in order to win an election in New York City, especially when you’re not on the ballot and they have to write you in. Tilson could gain more support between now and November, of course, but with no institutional support, he falls into the unfortunate Jim Walden zone of being a middle-aged white man who needs to go megaviral on TikTok to be viable. His attempts at this so far have not been encouraging.
Hillary Clinton
The Case: Her team stoked rumors that she would primary de Blasio in 2017 for long enough that they eventually prompted the Politico headline “Why Hillary Clinton Won’t Kill The NYC Mayor Rumors.” Eight years later, she’s still wildly popular among Democrats, especially the ones over 45 that make up the anti-Mamdani coalition. She’s a staunch-ish supporter of Israel, and a freaking former Secretary of State, which could be useful if the general election for mayor of New York turns into even more of a referendum on foreign policy than it already is for some reason. As for New York City credentials, in addition to being the state’s US Senator for eight years, Clinton recently co-produced Suffs: the Musical on Broadway with Malala Yousafzai.
Kryptonite: Her campaign staff better make damn sure she never has to actually set foot in a cramped NYC apartment of an actual voter. That went really poorly last time. Also she’s 77.
Donald Trump
The Case: Credit to Nate Silver for an excellent idea. Lifelong New Yorker, probably understands the city’s politics better than anyone alive, has faithfully maintained his gorgeous Queens accent decades after it would have been politically expedient to abandon it. I think that he wants to be mayor of New York much more than he ever wanted to be president, and that it would come much closer to filling the gaping emotional vacuum inside him than anything else he’s tried. Unlike Walden, Tilson, or Cuomo, he actually is a generational talent at generating earned media and viral attention on Tik Tok. He claims he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a voter, what better venue to test that theory than a mayoral race?
Kryptonite: Wildly unpopular among New Yorkers, always has been, always will be. The central indignity of his life is that snotty Manhattan elites don’t respect him and think he’s a clown, no matter how he tries to win our approval. Also there might be constitutional issues with the mayor also being the president (though there might not be?).
Juan Soto
The Case: He’s rounding into form nicely after a slow start. Incredible discipline, knows which pitches to swing at and which to let go by, which is an essential skill for a politician. Could self-fund his campaign with his $765 million contract, and also has ties to mega donor Steve Cohen. Would probably let Steve build his casino, and Steve is willing to do literally anything for a politician that will help him build that casino. Incredibly handsome and charismatic.
Kryptonite: Real New Yorkers root for the Yankees.
II.
Zohran Mamdani is not an 100% lock to win. At this juncture, Polymarket gives him a 70% of winning, which I see as being a little too low (I’d be closer to 85%). What this exercise is meant to show is not that it is a fait accompli, but rather that Mamdani can do nothing but tread water from here on out and win comfortably. He might do worse than tread water. A series of unsavory past tweets could emerge, he could become embroiled in some sort of corruption scandal with a foreign government, he could say something awful on a podcast interview, he could leak a sex tape (that one might not hurt him too much), or he could just decide he doesn’t actually want to be mayor. All of this is possible. But he has already built a winning coalition, all he has to do is keep it, and there is no one waiting in the wings who is capable of taking it away from him. If he doesn’t fumble it on his own, he’ll be our next mayor.