Few would have predicted a year ago that a week out from New York City’s Democratic primary, a thirty-three-year-old democratic socialist state assemblymember named Zohran Mamdani would be in striking distance of the city’s mayoralty, closing in on disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. But here we are. Now that Mamdani has narrowed the gap with Cuomo — one recent poll even shows the assemblyman in the lead — the political establishment’s paper of record, the New York Times, has weighed in. In its “Advice to Voters in a Vexing Race for New York Mayor,” the editorial board avers that it “do[es] not believe that Mr. Mamdani deserves a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots.”

The ed board is rather circumspect, on the other hand, in its criticism of Cuomo. After lauding the former governor as having “the strongest policy record” of all the candidates, the editors say that they have “have serious objections to his ethics and conduct” because of the many sexual harassment allegations against him — “even if he would be better for New York’s future than Mr. Mamdani.”

None of this is exactly shocking stuff from a pillar of the status quo like the Times. But it’s worth digging into the specifics of the Times’ case here. The paper of record cares surprisingly little about Cuomo’s sorry history of governance and fails to grasp the promise that Mamdani’s campaign is holding out — a promise of a fundamentally different way of doing politics for the working-class majority of a city facing an out-of-control crisis in the cost of living.

First, the question of Cuomo’s record. The former governor’s legacy, as Branko Marcetic wrote recently in Jacobin, is one of scandal after scandal after scandal, mentioned but not explored in detail in the Times piece.

Ironically, the city itself was a major victim of Cuomo during his 2011–21 tenure as New York’s governor. He subjected New York City to harsh austerity, starving public schools of funding, and cutting Medicaid multiple times, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Times glancingly acknowledges Cuomo’s underfunding of New York City’s public transit for years, degrading the quality of one of the world’s greatest subway systems.

That’s not even to touch the various corruption scandals, his well-documented responsibility for the deaths of thousands of elderly New York residents when he forced nursing homes to admit people infected with COVID, or his administration’s attempts to cover up the resulting death toll — a scandal of truly shocking proportions that, in a sane world, would not only disqualify Cuomo from running for mayor but permanently exile him from public life as a whole.

Or, of course, the credible accusations of sexual harassment against Cuomo stretching into the double digits. Nor is it to mention the brazen pay-to-play corruption schemes of which he was accused — and that he seems poised to resume should he be elected mayor, as judged by the massive super PAC spending on his behalf by people and companies currently doing business with the city or trying to.

The New York Times’ editorial writers know that Cuomo’s campaign can’t be written about without taking these scandals into consideration, and that such scandals are so egregious that an institution that claims to value good governance can’t endorse a candidate with such a record.

Which is why the paper takes the approach of not officially endorsing the governor while basically giving a wink and nod to him because of their overwhelming disdain for the alternative, Mamdani. One line of attack is that the assemblymember is endorsing an allegedly discredited approach to public safety that “minimizes the importance of policing.” Mamdani, the editors charge, “shows little concern about the disorder of the past decade.”

These criticisms are off base on multiple levels. Progressive approaches to public safety are certainly worthy of critical scrutiny, and it’s true that the costs of crime “[fall] hardest on the city’s working-class and poor residents.” But the rise in the city’s violent crime the editors decry seems largely to have been part of a national pandemic-driven crime wave that has since been receding. And the editorial board’s argument that “progressive city management” is to blame for higher crime rates doesn’t pass the smell test.

The Times singles out Chicago’s mayor Brandon Johnson as an exemplar of the bad progressive approach to crime — but violent crime has actually fallen on Johnson’s watch, with murders and robberies this year on track to reach their lowest levels in decades.

The board also claims that current New York City mayor Eric Adams’s “more moderate approach” to governing “has stopped the decline in some areas” for which his predecessor, Bill de Blasio, is responsible. Yet the crime trends for New York since Adams took office look noticeably worse than those for the rest of the country, with violent crime having increased for most of Adams’s tenure and remaining well above pre-COVID levels. This makes for a striking contrast with the United States overall, which has seen such crime decline to where it was before the pandemic. The reality of crime in New York and elsewhere belies the Times’ simplistic “progressives bad, moderates good” narrative.

The paper’s narrative about Mamdani himself is similarly unfair. Far from “show[ing] little concern” about crime, public safety has been a prominent part of his platform. Mamdani’s ambitious plan for a Department of Community Safety pledges to build out social services and mental health care to help humanely address the root causes of crime. And Mamdani has notably broken with the rhetoric of defunding or abolishing the police that has been prominent on parts of the Left. He instead insists that “police have a critical role to play,” and that building out the city’s safety net will free them up to better do their actual jobs.

“Sixty-five percent of crimes in the first quarter of this year are still not solved,” Mamdani said in the mayoral debate last week. “We need to ensure that police can focus on those crimes, and we have mental health professionals and social workers to address and tackle and resolve the mental health crisis and homelessness.”

The Times’ blithe dismissal of Mamdani’s public safety proposals is of a piece with its broader refusal to look seriously at his platform or his accomplishments as a young assemblyman. The editors write that Mamdani’s plan for a rent freeze in rent-stabilized units would restrict housing supply and make housing less affordable for new arrivals to the city. Yet recent empirical research does not support the argument (a favorite, of course, of landlords themselves) that rent control decreases the supply of new housing. And the Times simply ignores the rest of Mamdani’s housing platform, which includes plans to supercharge public development of affordable housing — aiming for 200,000 new units over the next decade — and loosening zoning restrictions to facilitate private sector development as well.

The Times also takes a cheap shot at Mamdani’s proposal for city-owned grocery stores — “as if customer service and retail sales were strengths of the public sector,” it sneers. To state the obvious: the only reason Mamdani is making this proposal a key part of his campaign is because the free market has failed to deliver affordable groceries for working-class people. Beyond that, part of Mamdani’s aim with this proposal and others (around public safety, housing, and free childcare) is to build out the capacities of the public sector and challenge the dominant common sense, after decades of neoliberalism, that the private sector is better at providing goods and services. The political imagination required to appreciate the ambition of Mamdani’s platform is apparently in short supply at the Times.

The editors lambast Mamdani for a lack of experience and a supposedly shoddy record as a third-term state assemblyman. Yet Mamdani’s record as a state legislator who has been in office for only a little over four years is actually quite substantial, as Zephyr Teachout summarized in a thread on Twitter/X. In 2021, he played an important role in helping New York City taxi drivers, who were victimized by taxi medallion sellers and predatory lenders, win $450 million in debt relief. In 2022, he helped stop the construction of a heavily polluting fracked gas power plant in Astoria. He also helped pass the Build Public Renewables Act that empowers New York’s public power authority to build renewable energy and worked to expand childcare as well as subway and bus service.

Let's talk substance. The New York Times Editorial Board left out

1/ Zohran's actual experience delivering for working class New Yorkers. It was a tough fight when he successfully fought for $450 million of debt relief for tax drivers. I was there, his leadership mattered.

— Zephyr Teachout (@ZephyrTeachout) June 16, 2025

Mamdani is indeed very young and lacks the extensive resume of Cuomo. But that point cuts both ways. When the former governor attacked his younger rival for his lack of experience in last week’s debate, Mamdani replied:

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 thirteen 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.

This mayoral election is posing a stark choice to New Yorkers. We can take a gamble on a young, relatively untested but ambitious politician who is looking to break with politics as usual. Or we can go with Cuomo. Regrettably, we know exactly what a Cuomo mayoralty would look like: more corporate giveaways of public money, more corruption, more austerity, more misery for the city’s working class.

Given the New York Times’ role as defender of the status quo, it’s unsurprising that they would prefer this prospect to Mamdani’s pro-worker approach represented by Mamdani. But for the majority of ordinary New Yorkers who are struggling with overlapping crises around the cost of living, deteriorating public services, and Trumpian authoritarianism, a Mamdani mayoralty that is promising to actually address these crises is increasingly looking like the only sensible option.