NEW YORK — Two independent candidates in the New York City mayoral election — incumbent Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo — have been trying to get each other to drop their campaigns in the hopes of beating Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani.
So far, neither is budging.
Adams said Monday that Cuomo is the number one obstacle standing in the way of his reelection and called for him to step aside.
“I think he really should do an analysis and say: Give Eric an opportunity to run against [Zohran],” Adams said during an interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box.
The mayor also revealed Cuomo had called him to ask the same thing.
“I’m the sitting mayor of the City of New York, and you expect for me to step aside when you just lost to Zohran by 12 points?” Adams asked in the CNBC interview, citing the nearly $30 million in outside spending on behalf of Cuomo by super PACs and the candidate’s own warchest.
“They heard your message. You lost … that’s the highest level of arrogance,” he added, accusing Cuomo of having a long history of undermining Black candidates, including former Gov. David Paterson, former state Comptroller H. Carl McCall and Charlie King. (Paterson and McCall endorsed Cuomo’s mayoral run earlier this year and King has been a key player in Cuomo’s campaign.)
The inclusion of Cuomo and Adams on independent lines on the November ballot is making the general election more competitive than any in recent memory. Attorney Jim Walden is also running on an independent line, while Curtis Sliwa is running under the Republican banner.
Last week, Walden proposed an independent survey to determine which of the four candidates would be best suited to stop Mamdani. He argued the weaker candidates should then pledge to support the strongest challenger, even though it is too late for anyone to remove their names from the ballot.
On Monday, Cuomo’s team acknowledged the tough math facing the pack of moderates and the GOP candidate: On their current trajectories, they are set to carve up the non-Mamdani vote into several inconsequential pieces. Cuomo and Adams in particular stand to split their shared base of Black voters.
Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi reiterated his team’s belief that Adams does not have a path, but said his candidate is considering Walden’s pitch.
“This is the time to put aside the usual political selfishness and agree to do what is truly best for all New Yorkers,” Azzopardi said in a statement. “While we review this proposal, we call on other candidates to do the same.”
Paterson sounded a similar alarm bell Monday.
At a press conference in midtown, he called for a single independent candidate to challenge Mamdani in the general election, but he declined to name who he thinks should drop out of the election or how they might be persuaded.
“We can do this, but it’s going to take a united effort, and it’s going to take some sacrifice that someone is going to have to make,” he said.
Mamdani’s victory in the primary has sent the city’s business and real estate circles into a panic, and the November election is unusually crowded for a city whose deep-blue electorate typically picks the next mayor during the Democratic primary.
Polls have consistently shown Cuomo out-perform Adams in a general election. Even a survey with questions that appeared to skew in favor of the incumbent still found Mamdani winning and Adams behind Cuomo by double digits — a dynamic that may make Cuomo more amenable to Walden’s proposal.
Adams laced into Mamdani on Monday as well, accusing him of peddling unrealistic plans and arguing the democratic socialist tapped into a readymade base of support from voters disaffected by President Donald Trump’s victory.
Mamdani’s campaign indeed captured a more traditional base of progressive New Yorkers. But he won over communities that typically vote more moderate, like Latino and south Asian neighborhoods in Queens, and expanded the electorate to capture younger voters.
Adams said Monday he was going to do something similar.
“We’re going to mobilize a million new voters who woke up on the day after the election, on the 25th, and said: Oh my god, let’s listen to what [Mamdani] is saying.”