The newspapers don’t want New Yorkers to put Zohran Mamdani on their ballots

The New York Times editorial board couldn’t keep quiet after all.

On Monday morning – nearly a year after announcing it would no longer endorse in municipal elections – the 16-member editorial board released a piece advising New Yorkers to not vote for Zohran Mamdani for mayor. And acknowledging that the Democratic primary seems to have narrowed to a two-man contest between the young Assembly member and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the board reluctantly favored the latter.

“We do not believe that Mr. Mamdani deserves a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots. His experience is too thin, and his agenda reads like a turbocharged version of (Bill) de Blasio’s dismaying mayoralty,” one section of the piece reads. “As for (Andrew) Cuomo, we have serious objections to his ethics and conduct, even if he would be better for New York’s future than Mr. Mamdani.”

The Times editorial board isn’t the only one to take such a stance in recent days. On Saturday, the New York Post’s editorial board published a piece titled “Keep menace Zohran Mamdani completely off your NYC ballot in the Democratic mayoral primary.” Both papers have a track record of influencing local elections with their endorsements – the Post was a pivotal backer of Mayor Eric Adams in 2021 and the Times gave second-place finisher Kathryn Garcia a major boost with their endorsement. 

But the two print titans followed some smaller papers: Last week, the editorial board of the Queens Chronicle released a piece simply titled “Vote anyone but Mamdani.” Last month, amNewYork published an editorial that called Mamdani “unfit to lead” the city, but they did not actually endorse another candidate. Both the Chronicle and amNewYork accused him of either antisemitism or not standing with Jewish New Yorkers because of his criticism of Israel. 

"These are the opinions of only about a dozen New Yorkers,” Mamdani said of the Times’ editorial board’s criticism on Monday. “A democracy will be decided by close to a million New Yorkers.” Asked about the other editorial boards’ pieces, Mamdani’s campaign spokesperson reaffirmed Mamdani’s statement on Monday, saying that the editorial boards still amount to the opinions of only a couple dozen New Yorkers. 

With just a week left until Election Day, the race is increasingly a contest between Cuomo and Mamdani according to most recent polls. Cuomo is focusing his efforts on casting Mamdani as inexperienced and idealistic. In addition to his campaign and a super PAC supporting his bid spreading that message, Cuomo is also more frequently talking directly to journalists to get his case across after avoiding press questions for much of the campaign. Asked about the Times’ editorial board’s piece on Monday, Cuomo said he hadn’t read it but that it had been described to him. “To the extent that they said they didn’t think Mr. Mamdani was suited to be mayor, I agree with that,” Cuomo said. Asked about the aspects of the piece that criticize his own record and his resignation in disgrace, Cuomo gave the paper of record less credence. “The Times hasn’t endorsed me in most of my races, and I’ve won.”

Remember the NYT opinion panel? Some of them are quite pissed.

The editorial board’s piece comes less than a week after the Times’ opinion section released a comprehensive project involving a panel of 15 thought leaders across politics, law and business who’d been recruited to weigh in on the mayoral race. Asked to assess the field of Democratic candidates, seven of the panelists selected City Comptroller Brad Lander as the best overall choice, two selected Mamdani, another two selected Cuomo, and another two picked former hedge-fund executive Whitney Tilson. One person picked City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams. While the project was largely kept under wraps from the public prior to its release, many believed it was intended to fill the gap in wake of the Times editorial board doing away with its highly coveted endorsement last summer. 

Under the impression that they’d be the only people weighing in on the mayoral race, several of the panelists convened by the Times for the project said they felt blindsided by the editorial board’s piece. While none of the people interviewed by City & State selected Mamdani for who they felt would make the best mayor, they pointed out that they have longstanding relationships with many of the candidates – something that factored into their calculus on whether or not to participate. Several people asked to participate in the project ultimately declined because they were concerned about being publicly critical of Cuomo, according to a piece from Kathleen Kingsbury, head of the opinion section. They also said they wished the editorial piece had better factored in their perspectives – most specifically, the strong opposition many of the panelists had expressed toward the former governor. While the piece expressed objections to the sexual harassment allegations that led to Cuomo’s resignation, describing his treatment of women as part of “a larger pattern of bullying, self-serving behavior,” it didn’t cite other controversial aspects of his record like nursing home deaths and taking money from the MTA. 

“People in politics in Albany and in New York City are vindictive and it’s just really disappointing that we stuck our necks out for the benefit of our city to only have that experience undermined frankly by people that don’t actually work as closely with these elected officials as we do,” said Jared Trujillo, a professor at the CUNY School of Law. 

Pointing to the Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin’s opposition to 25-year-old David Hogg that led him to leave his vice-chair position in the organization and the party’s failure to hold a Democratic primary last year, Democratic strategist and government veteran Amit Singh Bagga described the editorial board’s piece as representative of what’s happening in the Democratic Party at large. 

“It’s clear that we in The Establishment and our organs will cling, however suicidally, to a version of power we’ve already lost rather than contend with new blood and new ideas - the show people are actually buying tickets for,” he said. “As we eat each other for lunch, the right is feasting on all of us for dinner.”

Frederick A. Davie, Union Theological Seminary senior executive vice president, said he wasn’t exactly upset, but he was confused to see the editorial board’s piece in light of all the work the panel had put into the project. “It’s pretty clear that there is a kind of desire on the part of some powers that be and it sounds like the majority of the Times editorial board not to have Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City,” he said. “It would not be illogical for anybody to conclude that this might be kind of a backdoor endorsement of Andrew Cuomo as well, which I find interesting.”  

Howard Wolfson, a deputy mayor under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and another member of the Times’ original panel, didn’t have the same complaint, however. “I’m glad they did it,” Wolfson wrote in a text. “I appreciated the ways in which they took the panel’s views into perspective.”

The piece quickly drew a flurry of frustration online in wake of its release. Without a full-throated endorsement, several mayoral candidates cherry-picked and shared complimentary quotes from the piece, with Lander sending a press release quoting a line that suggested he was “at the top of the ballot” for progressive voters, and Tilson sending a press release that said the editorial board “essentially endorsed” him – though they didn’t.

In a text sent to voters, the pro-Cuomo independent expenditure committee Fix the City wrote: “See the breaking news from the New York Times? They said Zohran Mamdani's agenda is ‘uniquely unsuited to the city's challenges.’ Give it a read.”