Podcast: We are never ever getting back together

Another layer of intrigue was added to the political rivalry between Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio this week when the Wall Street Journal reported that Cuomo was weighing whether to back a potential opponent to de Blasio when he runs for re-election in 2017.

The two Journal reporters who wrote this story, Josh Dawsey and Mike Vilensky, joined us this week on The Slant Podcast to run through the confluence of recent events that have apparently influenced Cuomo to play the puppet master – most notably de Blasio’s declining approval ratings among New York City residents (versus increasingly positive approval ratings for Cuomo), which has led the governor to believe that the mayor is vulnerable to a challenge.

“People consistently told us reporting this story that the governor had said to them that the mayor was wounded and that he thinks he’s in big trouble,” Dawsey told us on the podcast. “The question comes in a few months – who gets in the field? Is it a race where there are three, four, five candidates? Is it a race where there’s one candidate and it’s a weak candidate? Is it a race where someone emerges that we haven’t heard about yet, and is actually a strong candidate? I think Cuomo will make his calculation based on what the numbers say and what his gut tells him to do politically.”

Josh and Mike also evaluate whether some of the potential mayoral candidates not mentioned in their story – including Scott Stringer and Ruben Díaz Jr. – would challenge de Blasio, and why the mayor’s polling numbers continue to flag, even as crime in New York City remains at record lows.

You can listen to the podcast here. To download, review and subscribe to this episode of The Slant Podcast on iTunes or stream the episode via Stitcher.