Decency is more important than policy. Rank Mamdani.
Why is this even a question?
Tomorrow, Democrat-registered New Yorkers will go to the polling booths to rank their choices for the next New York Mayor in the Dem primary.
For obvious reasons, the NYC mayoral race is perhaps the most important mayoral race in the country. New York is the center of global finance — virtually all money passes through SDNY, which means New York has a startling amount of reach. It is an extremely important worldwide culture hub, with world class art, fashion, and creative industries. It is a bastion of liberal ideals, a place where millions of ethnically, religiously, and culturally diverse people can come together to create a thriving metropolis, a city that is living proof that the MAGA ethno-nationalist wing is dead wrong about everything.1
NYC is iconic. Everyone on the entire damn planet knows about New York City. The city carries so much import on the world stage that its mayors have gone on to have important roles in national and international politics. For better or worse, everyone knows Giuliani, Bloomberg, de Blasio, and Adams.
Against this backdrop, two candidates have surged to the forefront of the Dem primary.
The first is former NY State Governor, Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo is a man for whom public power has always been a means to personal ends, someone who naturally wields authority like a tyrant. He was famous for threatening those who worked against him. He was famous for threatening those who worked with him. He treated the public coffers as his personal playground, frequently stealing from the MTA to fund his pet projects for years. He was caught covering up his own misplays in COVID-related nursing home deaths throughout the state. His government was rife with corruption. Many of his political appointees had donated to his campaigns. He has been accused of using state resources to write and publish a book that made him millions. Several of his close aides have been indicted or convicted for bribery and fraud. He himself has been under investigation on and off since 2014. In 2022, Cuomo resigned from his post in disgrace, following credible accusations from more than a dozen women of sexual harassment and further accusations of using the office of the Governor to retaliate against those who brought up his abuses. Cuomo, a man for whom optics means nothing and might makes right, sued to access the gynecological records of the women accusing him.
The main competitor is a man named Zohran Mamdani. He is a state assemblyman from Queens, representing his district (Astoria and LIC) since 2021. Before that, he was a housing counselor, where he helped low-income homeowners fight eviction. He's less than half Cuomo's age. He's eloquent on camera and speaks with passion and conviction. The most embarrassing thing I could say about Mamdani is that he raps under the name "Young Cardamom," though apparently he made ~$1200 last year from royalties.
This race should be a slaughter. And, in some sense, it is. Just not in the direction you'd expect.
According to the New York Times, Cuomo has on average a nearly 10 point lead on Mamdani.
The Dem primary uses ranked choice voting, so these polls are a bit deceptive. Quoting from NBC:
Ranked choice voting is a method of voting in which people rank candidates in order of preference. The number of candidates voters can rank depends on the specific rules in an area. In New York City, voters can rank up to five in one race.
Voters don’t have to fill their ballots, though. A voter whose heart is set on only one candidate can just pick one. But if that candidate doesn’t get the most votes, that voter won’t have a say in later rounds of counting.
After the votes are tabulated, the last-place candidate is eliminated. Ballots from voters who supported that candidate then have the next choice counted. If no candidate has hit 50%, then counting continues, eliminating another last-place candidate and counting the next-ranked choices on all those ballots in the next round.
The process continues until a candidate reaches majority support and wins.
Most of the polling is about the first choice ranking. But Mamdani has a fighting chance if many of those who would rank other competitors first rank Mamdani as their second choice — and leave Cuomo off the ballot entirely. And, of course, there is good reason to believe that that is exactly what will happen. Many of those voting for not-Cuomo hate Cuomo.
Still, data crunching aside, I want to ask a more important and fundamental question: what the fuck is wrong with us?
Why is this a race at all? Why does the multi-time corrupt sex-pest bully with a penchant for fraud and coverups of said fraud have any shot at all against Mamdani, who by all accounts is a hardworking young man with a strong moral compass and a desire to help his community?
In one of the more shameful articles I've read in the New York Times, the paper explicitly argues that Cuomo would be 'better for New York's future than Mr. Mamdani'.2 Even though they acknowledge the disgraceful conduct of the ex-governor, they simply cannot get around Mamdani's policy preferences. "Well, you see, we agree that Cuomo is a serial sexual abuser who is likely to use the office to line his own pockets, but Mamdani likes rent freezes."
This perspective is, bluntly, fucking horseshit. When I am hiring for my current company, or when I was doing the same at Google, the first thing I consider before anything else is whether or not the person in front of me is a decent human being. Everything else is less important than that question. If they are not a decent human being, I will not work with them, because I have no confidence that they are even accurately representing every other part of themselves. The New York Times seems to have a lower standard than this for critical public office roles.
The simple reality is that any job — from custodian to president — requires learning on the job. It is absolutely true that Cuomo has more experience; it is totally wrong to assume that that experience is so ironclad that Mamdani cannot pick it up quickly; it is pants-on-head asinine to ignore that Cuomo, who joined politics before Google was founded and who will be over 70 before the end of the next mayoral term, may have more inertia and baggage than actually useful experience in 2025. Do we really expect that Andrew Cuomo is going to use the power of the mayor’s office responsibly?
We are in an unprecedented era. Our politics has been thoroughly degraded by the Trump / MAGA faction, who seem to be pursuing a scorched-earth our-policy-at-any-cost approach to governance. Trump, too, is a profoundly indecent man. His government is filled with liars and cheats who reek of moral decay. Many of his voters either openly revel in his excess, or hold their nose and vote for him anyway.
This cannot be the model for the Democratic Party. If the Dems follow Trump down this path, they will lose every time, because the Democratic voting base will not accept the level of tawdry debasement that Trump uses to win over his base. The Democrats absolutely need fighters. But those fighters must be as virtuous and honorable as they are aggressive, people who are so clean that nothing sticks to them so they have full ability to go after everyone else, people whose very presence on the debate stage shines a light on the hypocrisy of those who would seek to use public office for anything other than the good of the country.
To be clear, I disagree with aspects of both Cuomo's and Mamdani's political platforms (though you may be surprised how similar their platforms actually are!). But of the two of them, I think only Mamdani is interested and motivated to improve over time. In my limited experience, people like that surround themselves with trusted experts instead of yes-men. Everyone knows that the platforms on the campaign never end up being the policy outcomes in reality. When faced with the inherent contradictions of the NYC mayorship, I have every expectation that Mamdani will iterate to get to the best version of New York City governance, starting from a position of authenticity and service. The contrast to Trump will be startling. By comparison, with Cuomo, it'll just be two old windbags hypocritically accusing the other of corruption while they fight their own scandals at home.
If you are someone who revels in Cuomo's worst excesses — if you like that he is a dick, that he wields power like a tyrant, that he is corrupt — I cannot reach you. Our values are too different.
But if you are thinking about voting for Cuomo despite your misgivings about him as a person, reconsider. Our public servants work for all of our futures. They work for my future. They work for my kids' futures. They do not, cannot, and should not work for themselves.
Decency is more important than policy. Rank Mamdani.
I suspect that this is partially why the Trump admin has engaged in a systematic and continuous assault on the city's institutions since coming to power.
No, I’m not linking it.