What We Learned Interviewing the Democratic Candidates for Mayor

A transcript of The New York Editorial Board's debrief on our interviews with the Democratic candidates for Mayor.

Members of The New York Editorial Board met on the morning of June 16, 2025 and debriefed on what we learned from our interviews with eight of the nine leading Democratic candidates for Mayor.

Participating journalists: Nicole Gelinas, Josh Greenman, Christina Greer, Alyssa Katz, Ben Max, Akash Mehta, Myles Miller, Harry Siegel, Ben Smith, Liena Zagare. (Not present: Juan Manuel Benítez.)

Full Transcript

Ben Smith
It’s nice to see you all. Andrew Cuomo appears not to be joining us today. His aide, Melissa DeRosa, said to hold this time and then went dark after he canceled on us last [Friday]. I think we’ve been talking about his coming by the New York Editorial Board since at least early March. We’ve had every other candidate. Honestly, the thing that disappoints me most about this is that Andrew is the source of one of my favorite insights about journalism and city politics. He likes to talk about how when he was coming up, he and his father would talk about how important it was that there were great journalists on “the other side of the net.”

There was Jimmy Breslin and there was Pete Hamill and Jack Newfield and whenever Mario was proposing some policy or some idea, he would think about who’s on the other side of the net, and that would affect and shape the way that he ran the government, and how sad it is now for Andrew that he says that there’s nobody on the other side of the net. He doesn’t seem to be quite living up to that nostalgic vision here. Honestly, I don’t really understand what he’s doing. Maybe he thought he was running away with a front-runner race, but I’m curious if anybody here has a really clear interpretation of what he’s doing.

Alyssa Katz
Yes. It’s maybe pretty straightforward. I think he’s more comfortable talking off record to journalists and whispering in their ears than he is committing on record under tough questioning. We were here to ask the candidates tough questions and everyone else took them and he’s not.

Christina Greer
If I were him, I wouldn’t come here. There’s absolutely no way I would sit in a room with this table of journalists. We know that Andrew Cuomo, and I say this all the time, is on a less-is-more tour. The more he opens up his mouth, the more we see that he knows nothing about New York City or very little. I wouldn’t come and sit in front of the Bens, Harry, Josh, Alyssa, where he’s going to get rapid-fire questions about a lot of things that I’m sure — he has qualified people who have read the transcripts and know the types of questions that he’d be asked — he doesn’t come out as a win in this setting. To just ride name recognition, especially in particular communities, and say very little about policy and hope that you can just get to June 24th as quickly as possible, it’s interesting.

Josh Greenman
It was interesting though, he went to the New York Post Editorial Board at the very beginning of this race, and one might say it backfired. I think he was looking for a little bit of a truce there. He didn’t get it. They came out guns blazing. He has sat on the record for an interview with the Daily News Editorial Board. I think those are two known quantities to him, and we are not a known quantity. He worries about, not just what he can’t control but what he can’t anticipate. I think that’s what he worries about.

Christina Greer
But as mayor, you can’t anticipate most things. One thing that coming here would show is that he’s prepared or is willing to be prepared to be mayor of New York City.

Ben Smith
Anyone else want to extrapolate from his dodging us to what kind of mayor he’ll make?

Myles Miller
I’ll just give this anecdote. My mom is 65, lives in Parkchester. I don’t know if she could identify who AOC is and she called me from MS 127. She was in the voting booth, which I didn’t know. I said, “What are you doing? What are you thinking?” A Black woman of 65 who has been a Democrat her whole life, to not think about ranking Cuomo is a change. I think the reasoning for that is that sometimes name recognition isn’t always a positive.

For a person who has always voted with the Democratic Party, to see some of the negative ads and that kind of thing has actually had an effect. She also lived for the last 20 years in what’s now Little Yemen, which has become that pocket of AOC-and-Trump voters. That’s not to say that she would vote for Trump, but it is to say that there is a change. If you see folks who look a lot like Mamdani living in your neighborhood and interact with them in your bodegas or delis and in your supermarkets, it’s going to change the way you view who could lead your city. That’s my anecdotal evidence from – she also had to get a new ballot because she wanted to change her ideas.

Harry Siegel
Picking up on something Chrissy said. There’s a part of Cuomo that isn’t built for this. He got hit years ago running for reelection as governor about never, as best he could recall, having visited a mosque. Errol Louis asked him about that at the second [mayoral] debate. So this is a trap he’d already hit, and he was right back there. He still couldn’t recall the last time — he was going to have his staff check and get back after the debate. Then he said something like, “I’m a friend of all immigrants.” As if all the Muslims are immigrants or something. It was an unnecessary and weird and demeaning move. There was an earlier moment, at the very start of the debate, where he talked about “illegal immigrants,” and I have no strong feelings one way or the other about what the right term is there, but the Democratic Party’s reached a consensus. Brad Lander corrected him. Cuomo’s not a guy who likes to yield ground but he immediately stopped using the term.

The thing I wanted to ask him and this seems very relevant just because of timing here with early voting started. The numbers are way up particularly in Brooklyn — which is suggesting good things for Mamdani, but who knows, that was lots of mail-in voting last time and a ton of variables there but the votes are starting to get locked in. He told Dan Mannarino on PIX, and again, this is not a man who likes to give ground and he’s held his position about the nursing homes and COVID and his book deal this whole time and a big part of his closing pitch is “I saw us through COVID, you remember me.” But there’s this referral to the Trump Justice Department and Eric Adams is saying behind closed doors, “Hey, if it’s Cuomo, he’s got trouble coming this summer” from Washington. Adams, of course, like Cuomo, is very well defined and he’s thinking about a crowded, four- or five-way general where his floor is maybe 32%, and his ceiling is 37%. Maybe that’s enough with all these candidates there.

So Cuomo who’s denied that he’s ever read this nursing home report, and like everything with Andrew, it’s exhausting. He said nursing homes have to take people. Nursing homes took people. A bunch of people died in nursing homes. He never covered up the total number of deaths, but there are questions about whether he edited this report, because maybe he thought the first Trump Administration was out to get him. He’s consistently denied he ever saw the report. He swore in front of Congress and sworn testimony he had not. Now he says [on PIX], “I am sure, if I read the report, I made language changes.” I wanted to ask him about that and about what Eric Adams is communicating and hear his response. I’m pretty confident we won’t get an answer to that between now and the end of the primary.

Josh Greenman
Just a quick factual thing here. You said he swore he hadn’t read the report before Congress. I think what he swore is that he couldn’t remember.

Harry Siegel
Thank you, Josh. He couldn’t recall and now he says, “If I read the report, I’m sure that I made edits.”

Ben Max
First he said, “It turns out I saw it,” and that “I’m sure if I saw it, I made edits.” Again, that speaks to this idea of, when did you realize it turned out that you saw it? When the New York Times reported on it, and you’ve been asked about it enough times that you finally have to acknowledge it? I think what has been said so far speaks to two things. One, from my vantage point, there’s still a number of [Cuomo’s] major scandals that he still hasn’t sufficiently answered questions on. I don’t know that if we got him at this table, he would’ve given us much different answers.

I think on both COVID nursing homes and the book, and on the sexual harassment scandal, the answers are still insufficient. I wanted to ask him on sexual harassment, how he could square this idea that he championed changes to the state’s sexual harassment laws and spoke about it repeatedly in public, touted the accomplishment of changing what it means to commit sexual harassment or be the victim of sexual harassment in New York, then pleaded ignorance when he was accused of it, that he didn’t realize times had changed. To see if he had anything else to say about how he squared those things.

I think broadly about not coming to speak with us, there is a contradiction for Andrew Cuomo where he has a very powerful, tough guy persona, but is also extremely risk averse. This is a risk without a huge reward at the other end of the tunnel, if he comes and sits with us. If he goes to the New York Post or The Daily News, there’s some risk there, but maybe he gets an endorsement out of it. Even if we were endorsing, I don’t know that he would see that as a big enough payoff. The way he’s conducted this campaign, not even taking a few press questions after most press conferences, again, it just belies this idea of this big-time tough guy, manager, power player. He’s actually afraid a lot of risk and of questions.

Lastly, this idea of accountability that we saw at the second debate was interesting. We’ve seen him a few times in this campaign admit mistakes, which is very rare for him. Again, the decisions are probably political, but changing his tune on Tier 6 because he was thinking he might get the UFT endorsement; saying he regrets some of the COVID lockdowns when talking to Orthodox Jewish communities — it’s very interesting, when he will take some accountability or acknowledge some mistakes.

Nicole Gelinas
I would like to ask him, not so much on the past scandals, but how he squares how he has positioned himself in this race as a centrist and a tough-on-crime person. How he squares being a person who is not going to raise taxes with the move he made in his third term, where he was the person who waved into law the changes to the bail laws, the changes to discovery laws, the changes to juvenile justice laws. He raised income taxes on the wealthy, even though both the Trump and the Biden Administration were making us whole from our COVID losses. How does he square that move from being more progressive five years ago, going back to the middle, and what is the difference between his tax increase and what Mamdani wants to do? Is it just a matter of the degree of $9 billion versus less than $9 billion, or is it a difference in kind?

Christina Greer
I have a question: What were you doing in between the time that you resigned in disgrace and when you decided to run for mayor? I talk about this a lot with Michael Blake, but are you a politician or a public servant? Are you just waiting to be back in office or are you actually trying to work for the people that you say you want to represent? I’m curious as to what he can say he did to still justify his entree back into wanting to serve the citizens of New York City.

Ben Smith
I think we’ve given Cuomo 15 minutes here and then—

Akash Mehta
Can I jump in with one more thing? In all of our interviews, two of the themes that we’ve asked all the candidates about, one is their effectiveness as a manager. This is key to Cuomo’s pitch. I think we would all have a lot of tough questions about whether, in fact, he was a competent, efficient manager in the get-shit-done frame that he’s been using. As just one example, as Josh has pointed out, the stat he’s using on nursing homes death is just false because it comes from federal data that undercounts New York nursing home deaths.

Then, the other thing I’ve been really interested in is that we have a very age-diverse field of candidates. Ben Smith has been asking every candidate, are you a NIMBY or a YIMBY? There is an axis of politics that is not quite left-to-right in the traditional sense, but abundance-pilled or not and it’s really striking that Cuomo is the NIMBYest of any of the major candidates. For instance, Whitney Tilson said that sparking a boom in private sector investment in housing was his number one priority. I was interested to ask him, if that’s the priority, isn’t that a reason to rank Brad Lander who wants to build 500,000 homes or Zellnor Myrie, who’s pitched his whole campaign on building a million homes, over Cuomo whose housing plan says, “I want to protect low-rise neighborhoods.” Or even Zohran Mamdani, who wants to get rid of parking minimums and spur transit-oriented development and speaks wonkily about single-stair zoning reform.

Ben Smith
Any other Cuomo questions?

Liena Zagare
I’m curious about how moderate is he really? A lot of his positions have softened considerably between when he was, what Nicole was mentioning, his shift towards rather progressive and has he managed to shift back to moderate or not really? Taking, for example, the teacher evaluations where he insisted on data to begin with and now it’s very, We should be thoughtful about how we approach teachers and they work really hard to educate. But maybe it’s not that important to be incredibly accountable about the outcomes.

Josh Greenman
I think he’s running an old-style campaign. He’s gone out and he’s gotten the endorsements he thinks he needs to get by saying the things he thinks he needs to say. He believes that the people are ultimately going to see him as a person who’s going to do what’s necessary once he’s in and they’re not going to focus on the commitments that he’s made in the course of this campaign. He very well may be right about that.

Ben Max
The thing I think we would’ve asked him, and Nicole got at is, in that third term when you had a full Democratic legislature and progressives in the legislature really advancing a lot of stuff, they kind of just overpowered you. How would you deal with a pretty progressive City Council — some of the nitty gritty of coming in potentially as mayor and dealing with forces that are out of your control. Again, there’s ways mayors can institute some control over the City Council, of course, but those dynamics would be really interesting to discuss with him at this table and I think the type of stuff that we would love to ask him about.

Ben Smith
OK. Let’s give the rest of this breakfast to the candidates we did talk to. Listeners can hear the clanking. We should plug Lafayette, by the way. Great restaurant, great place for breakfast.

Harry Siegel
Just three three things we didn’t mention there. His “city in crisis” pitch and he shifted his crisis from crime to Trump very conveniently but he’s still the indispensable guy. Israel: He’s the guy who’s like, BDS is so bad that New York State needs to boycott the boycotters. It makes my head explode just thinking about that. And I don’t know why we could have asked this in a useful way because he can’t answer until after this primary, but the state of the Democratic Party, which pushed him out of office just four years ago, and in a great many ways he’s running against the herd and toward the center.

Christina Greer
Honestly, the $5 million influx from Bloomberg makes me reassess whom he would have in his administration as well. I think the days of calcified Democratic politicians being moderate or conservative, that’s shifting because they gonna have to slide, Eric Adams style, across the field because the tent is so massive and so polarized in a lot of ways. So they’re kind of cherry picking various issues, where they’re super progressive on one issue and maybe very conservative on in the middle on the third. And after there’s $5 million cash influx from Bloomberg, on the books, by the way, I’m also curious if that also shifts who he wants as his advisory team. And this endorsement from Ramos — we know during the campaign phase you make a lot of promises to a lot of people to help get you there. But once you’re at the table, you’ve built this coalition and how do you try to govern with the Ramoses of the world and the Bloomberg’s of the world as well?

Ben Smith
Yes. Last word on Andrew Cuomo.

Nicole Gelinas
It reminds me of the day after the prom when the teacher lectured us on how many students don’t show up on the day after the prom. We’re like, “We’re the ones who showed up.” [laughter] But yes in the centrist versus moderate versus conservative, it’s also a mirror of how much the race has changed since last December when we did our first interview. Where it was thought by some, at least by me, that the race would be won in the middle and it would be won mainly on crime. We saw that with the first couple of people that we interviewed, really broke in going to the middle on crime and people saying, We want to work with Trump constructively when we can and just how much events have changed — ironically because Adams has actually done a pretty good job on crime over the past few months — crime has receded a little bit as a crisis issue. And the events of the Trump Administration just overwhelming everything else. If we had someone like Brad Lander come in in June instead of either early this year or late last year, I can’t remember whether he was first or second, would he have also positioned himself differently in a later interview rather than focusing on going back to the middle, focusing back to—?

Ben Smith
The first thing that the first candidate we talked to, Brad Lander, said to us was, I just want to start by saying progressives made mistakes on law and order, and I’m moving to the center. Anyway, let’s move to the new candidates. I’d love to get to broad takeaways about the other candidates.

Josh Greenman
Lander, who was our first, was a very credible, very well prepared guy, as I think he’s come across this entire campaign. I think he’s had an interesting evolution in the course of the campaign because he started, as Nicole was saying, repositioning himself as a more pragmatic guy, as a more moderate guy, as filling the Kathryn Garcia role of sorts in this campaign, which nobody else is really filling. He’s had a very good week or two, in part because he got the choice of, you know, the first non-endorsement by The New York Times and now we’ve had two.

Yet, he then cross-endorsed Mamdani, Mamdani cross-endorsed him, and this is just my personal view, he loses a lot of the moderate brand that he worked quite hard to build by hugging Mamdani so close. It’s an interesting choice. That arc in his campaign saying, “I want to be not the pure progressive that I used to be, that I always came across as.” Now, towards the very end of this primary campaign he’s saying something different or at least appearing to say something different to a lot of voters.

Alyssa Katz
Josh, I have been thinking a lot about that cross-endorsement and what it means. I think it’s a couple of things. One is it’s a “we have to stop Cuomo at all costs” move. Number two, I think that Lander is — Yes, he may well lose some of the people who voted for Bloomberg and are looking for someone more centrist. But I think he’s both further legitimizing Mamdani, in a way he hadn’t been, Mamdani moves from being a more fringy candidate that way to somebody that the current city comptroller, who’s balanced the city’s books and so on and so forth, it really helps Mamdani and I think ultimately may help Lander as well. I don’t think it’s — I had the same reaction you did initially, of “why is he giving up that center?” But he really has nothing to lose at this point. If anyone in his range is going to win, it’s Mamdani and not him, and I think he knows that.

Back to the bigger questions about what we’ve learned about the candidates, I want to roll back to some basics here for anyone listening to this or reading it. We formed this project when The New York Times said it was not going to endorse candidates. I know I came into this very intentionally thinking, who is going to subject candidates to the kind of grilling that editorial boards do? Certainly The Daily News and The Post have done that. I think one practice that The Daily News actually initiated when I and Josh and Harry were on the editorial board was to publish those transcripts and really put the candidates out there fully. At least we did for the 2016 presidential race with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

I think we take for granted so much that yeah, candidates are out on the campaign trail. They’re doing all these forums. They’re out there every day. But really the kind of unique interrogation that we do as informed journalists who really know these issues, can follow up, can ask hard questions and have a substantial amount of time with each candidate and hitting their pain points as well as giving them the floor, I think is incredibly valuable. I’m so pleased about how that has worked out. As for the candidates, I think it was — I didn’t attend all of the meetings, so this is going to be a very partial view, and I’m not naming any specific candidates but I really do feel like we did exactly that kind of stress test where we pushed them and I think, Ben Smith here is especially adept at that, but many of us here too — to really rattle them a little bit outside their comfort zones and understand, ‘How does this candidate think? How do they make tough decisions’?

Christina Greer
Can I just say, the Brad-Mamdani cross-endorsement made sense to me, largely because Brad wants to be number two. Harry and I have talked about this a lot on FAQ [NYC]. I don’t think anyone’s going to get a first-choice win. It’s kind of like how many number twos can you accumulate? That to me was a smart choice to try and pick up a lot of that Mamdani momentum as him co-signing Brad as the second choice candidate. Lander, for me— I’m more interested not necessarily in crime, but in how a mayor will respond to Washington DC, Donald Trump, Immigration, ICE, really hard questions.

I thought Brad and Scott [Stringer] had really good comptroller answers, about money. About moving money around to protect the citizens of New York. Scott, to me, never felt like — he’s been in the race, but he’s wearing jeans and t-shirt. He’s like, Yes, I’m here. So of the two money guys, Brad, to me, made the most sense. I think for me the most memorable interview is Jim Walden because he’s the one, to your point, which made me really think about management style. He may be a fantastic lawyer, he may be well respected by his colleagues. But I was like, “There is absolutely no way in my estimation that someone with that type of temperament can and should lead the city of New York.”

Josh Greenman
And he’s not on the Democratic ballot, to be clear.

Ben Smith
It’s funny because he obviously had not been in the past asked a hard question. He felt a little uncomfortable being challenged, but he also did have a little speech at the end of his interview. A little, I’m mad as hell and won’t take it anymore. We’ve got to sweep this place clean. It felt like, “Oh, that’s interesting.” No one else is saying, this system is rotten and we got to get rid of it. Including Mamdani, actually, who’s been endorsed by DC-37. I actually thought that little moment of Walden, even though I agree with you, the whole interview is like, “he’s probably not professionally going to be successful in politics,” I thought that moment was really interesting.

Christina Greer
Interesting moment, but so much of being an executive is actually interacting with other people. It was a great speech, but I can’t imagine him working with women, people of color, young people. I was sitting here listening to him like—

Ben Smith
Me! Middle-aged white journalist.

Christina Greer
Yes. Know the room, dude.

Liena Zagare
I feel like both Scott Stringer and Brad Lander know the city best of all the people that we interviewed. To some extent, I wonder if they know the city too well — that they’re so deeply in the details, that they have a little bit of trouble zooming out and looking at how the people feel in this moment and connecting emotionally. That’s changed over the duration of the campaign, but that was my impression.

Josh Greenman
It’s true that one of the things that helps in a campaign is to have a clear message. To me, one of the struggles that, say, Adrienne Adams has, is it’s hard to decipher her message. She can say, I’ve done a lot of things, but there isn’t a kind of big frame. Mamdani has a big frame. Cuomo actually has a big frame, like it or not, which is that the city’s in crisis and it’s got to be rescued. The rest of them have got a collection of policies. This is not to demean them because it may actually add up to something better. But it is to say that it’s a bigger challenge to run for office when you have a collection of policies and not a big, bold message.

Ben Smith
With Mamdani, at the beginning. I think late January, early February. What did people make of him then? What do you feel like we learned about Mamdani?

Ben Max
The thing that stuck out to me about Mamdani, that speaks to the theme of these breakfasts and this race, is he had a lot of energy, a lot of earnestness, a lot of key planks to what he was running on and really tapping into how people feel — Liena, as you were just getting at. But to me it was incredibly apparent, during and after that breakfast, how little he’s done. The fact that almost every answer came back to his campaign to get a free bus pilot as his one major accomplishment.

He can point to a couple other things where he contributed, as he has throughout the campaign, on taxi medallion owner relief and things like that. But it’s just very evidently true that he hasn’t been around a long time and hasn’t done a lot and that came across to me over and over again in that discussion — even as he was talking repeatedly about how, I really want to answer this question. He was very earnest and he wanted to explain to us his plans and how he’s thought all this through, but in a sense it was performative. It’s only an academic exercise for the most part for him at this moment.

Alyssa Katz
The only thing I would add to that is that all of what Ben Max just said is true. Yet he did survive our interrogation pretty unscathed. It’s really a testament to his incredible communication and political skills that he was able, despite those exact deficits that you’re talking about, be pretty convincing. He sat at this table and laid out what he sought to do very clearly. It’s really no different than anything he’s done since. We were talking a little bit about how candidates might have spoken here or approached the issues here in December and January versus now. I think he was absolutely consistent. That’s a testament to his remarkable approach.

Nicole Gelinas
Yes, he was consistent. He stuck to his three big picture items, his free buses, his free childcare for everybody, six weeks and older, which is a big difference between what Lander and Stringer are offering, which is a more incremental expansion of pre-K, and Myrie offering after-school. He wants to raise taxes on the wealthy and on businesses, not as the unfortunate byproduct to fund his programs, but that is actually an important discrete part of his platform. He wants to raise taxes for the sake of raising taxes. That this is part of his signaling, that this is a feature not a bug. De Blasio wanted half a billion dollar tax increase. This is de Blasio times almost 20.

Akash Mehta
More recently, when he’s been asked “what have you done?”, he says, what I have done is brought more popular energy — I don’t know if these are his exact words — brought more popular energy into local New York politics than any politician in recent memory and built the largest volunteer operation in New York history. And, honestly, I’m sort of torn on this. The first thing he said to us, when we asked him, what does the mayor do? He said, Fundamentally the core work of being a mayor is being a messenger and a liaison. And Josh asked: You didn’t mention being a manager.

I’m a little torn on this. Most of my questions were about management of agencies. But looking back at the interviews, I’m wondering, was I really interviewing these candidates for the job of first deputy mayor? His response to this, and I think some other candidates gave us this response too, was that ultimately a big part of their job is to hire talented technocrats for those managerial positions. A lot of what the mayor does is go to Albany and campaign for their priorities or go to the public and campaign for their priorities. Maybe this is a question for some of the veterans around the table: What is the balance of a mayor’s real responsibilities between the communications side, the political mobilization side, and managing the giant bureaucracy?

Josh Greenman
I think a lot of it is management, honestly. I think it depends on the person in the job. But if you saw Giuliani or Bloomberg or de Blasio for that matter, run meetings, you really got to run meetings and decide when you’re zeroing in on particulars and when you’re backing off and letting the—

Myles Miller
De Blasio never backed off. He never backed off. As a former de Blasio adjacent person, because he was a staffer, he was always—

Ben Smith
You worked for him.

Myles Miller
Yes. I worked at the Fire Department. He was always zeroing in on everything to the point where you never sat at the table so that you never got his ire. Sorry to interrupt, but very involved. Too involved.

Harry Siegel
Speaking of Mamdani and de Blasio, what Akash was bringing up, when I sat down with Mamdani two weeks ago to talk with him about all of the enthusiasm he’s generated, which has now replaced buses — a bus pilot program, one in each borough for a year free — as his signature proof of concept: Look what a great campaign I’m running. Look at all the enthusiasm I’ve generated. I take that very seriously when you see people signing up for politics who haven’t been there and volunteering, and doing shifts, and knocking on doors, in some ways replacing what the Democratic machine used to do — doing politics. There’s something very serious about that.

He actually said, Look, my model here wasn’t to have been leading everyone except Cuomo in the polls for three months. My model here was Bill de Blasio. A little of this was in my column and it was all on the record but I had to squeeze in other things. My model was Bill de Blasio and holding onto resources. He also generated tons of fundraising enthusiasm here and had all those matching funds to the point where he is raising for other candidates, Adrienne Adams, Justin Brannan, and so on. Then at the very end, right when people are focusing to have the clearest message, which he’s been very consistent about, as Alyssa was bringing up, and break through late.

To some extent, it seemed talking with him and his comms guy, that the extent to which that this broke through and defined the race, with some help by the way, for both Cuomo and maybe [Eric] Adams. Cuomo very much wanted this to be, It’s me or the socialist. And he may come to regret that. But I thought that it was really interesting that he has exceeded in some ways his theory of the case. Last thing here is, at the debate, he said I’m going to appoint the really good people. AOC brought that up, he’s going to need to, when she endorsed him. He said, “the best and the brightest”. Which I know is just a turn of phrase, but it made my jaw drop. “The best and the brightest” is the shorthand for the educated WASPs who fucked up the entire Vietnam War and kept giving us further in with statistics proving that this was all going wonderfully. It did pop in my head, “You might want to find a different—”

Josh Greenman
Harry, Gen Z probably doesn’t see or care about that, but that’s a good one, yes.

Ben Smith
I just want to get to — We had particularly three people who I suspect will be, even if they do not win this race, we probably haven’t heard the last of them. To me that would be Myrie, Ramos and Tilson. All obviously ambitious people who want to be involved in New York for years to come.

Myles Miller
In what ways do you think we’ll continue to see Ramos?

Ben Smith
I don’t know.

Josh Greenman
Maybe as a staffer if Cuomo’s mayor. One thing about all of them is, being mayor, to be a very good mayor, you got to both be good at being on stage and behind a podium and be good in a room. I thought Ramos, for instance, was very good in a room. She’s very good in a room. Myrie, a little bit less so. This is just— I’m talking like this is a stage review, this is not, would they make good mayors?

Ben Smith
They were both new to this kind of situation basically.

Josh Greenman
Yes. Ramos came off to me as very human, very real, very honest, very direct. Myrie came off as earnest and caring a lot about the details of the job. Maybe a little bit smaller to me personally than the job. Those two.

Christina Greer
I’ll say this for those three and this was— I had this quote for the Times, whatever that melee was, and they didn’t use it, about Whitney Tilson. But for me, Whitney Tilson is ripped straight from the headlines of rich white man who wakes up one day, runs for politics, runs for office, and is like, I care about education and crime.

Ben Smith
That’s a grand tradition.

Christina Greer
A grand tradition! And it is so frustrating for me. I don’t think he knows much about New York City beyond his bubble. I’m very concerned that his bestie’s Bill Ackman, I asked him about that on FAQ. I do judge people on the company they keep. If that’s your best friend, and he’s a nonstarter for me on a whole host of levels and I do get frustrated by these kinds of billionaires who wake up and are like, I’m so concerned about charter schools and colored children being educated. I’m like, “Wait, where, how, why?” I don’t think we’ve seen the last of that, and that to me is frustrating.

Jessica Ramos: I’m not sure what her future looks like, just because so many people are so angred by that endorsement and women do get penalized in different ways than men. She sat in this very seat that I’m sitting in. One of the first things she said was that she was a survivor and Cuomo and his sexual misconduct were so abhorrent and he can’t be a leader, can’t be anywhere near leading. And then to have that 180, I think a lot of people, not just survivors but people who care about progressive politics, are looking at her as someone who can’t be trusted. And I think women do get penalized more. .

As far as Myrie, I thought that he would have a very different campaign. I think Mamdani sucked out a lot of the wind out of his sails. Even though Mamdani is younger, Myrie feels younger than Mamdani. On stage, he didn’t have the presence. A lot of folks just felt like he was, kind of too small for the job. I don’t think that we’ve seen the last of him yet. I would sound like America’s Next Top Model but this clearly wasn’t his moment and so I’m curious to see what he runs for that makes it his moment.

Alyssa Katz
I do think that Ramos’s future was a little bit presaged by certain things she was talking about with us here at this table. One of them was about how there are a lot of Ramos-Trump voters. She has a history here, she’s the chair of the labor committee in the state senate and has a history with union work. Remember, Cuomo has gotten a lot of the major trade union endorsements. He held his announcement at the Carpenters Union. I haven’t talked with her about this in detail or investigated it, but I do sense that she really is determined to keep the Democrats relevant to a union movement that has been really flocking to MAGA. I really do see a future with her, for her in that lane.

Ben Smith
You really heard from her, maybe more than the others, this very intense connection to the people she represents.

Alyssa Katz
Yes, definitely.

Christina Greer
Is that appointed politics or elected politics? I could see her having a role, let’s just say, in liaison politics, but I don’t know how many people who are voters look at her the same way.

Alyssa Katz
Maybe not electoral politics, but in union politics — in some other way she will. This is not the last.

Josh Greenman
I think people have much shorter memories. I think that if Cuomo becomes mayor and if she has a role in the administration and if he’s a two-term mayor who’s seen as a successful mayor, all that goes away.

Nicole Gelinas
A survivor also means she survived politically and just like Cuomo, she survives maybe by being flexible, very flexible, and ends up in a Cuomo City Hall. I think the issue of housing shows how subtly different these candidates are and how that matters. For example, Myrie, his plan to build or preserve a million units of housing in 10 years, 700,000 of those would be new housing. Massively ambitious. I think he both wanted headlines out of that, which he didn’t really get, but also shows a little bit that he’s naive. You do what you can do, and it’s probably not a million units of housing in 10 years.

Whereas Lander and Stringer, their housing plans showed a real practicality that they have actually succeeded in getting rezonings done and getting community boards to support major new house building projects. Of course, Brad Lander brought up the Gowanus Canal rezoning, which he got the community board, or he helped get the community board to support. Stringer talked about compromises where people don’t want upzoning on the middle of the block, then they have to do upzoning on the avenue. It shows that they’ve really done this work and they know you don’t just throw out a big headline, big figure, out there and get praise for being a YIMBY.

You actually show that you have done what you can actually do on the ground politically in New York City. Then you had Tilson who specifically brought up on his own the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and said, Shadows don’t bother me. We have a housing crisis. That’s not the way to go. You get YIMBY points for that, but it actually does matter whether you have a green space and whether there are shadows covering that green space in a neighborhood that is already quite dense. To go out of your way to antagonize people who are part of your voting base, who you need, shows the big picture. We need more housing. Great. The smaller political picture also matters a lot and he missed that whole part.

Ben Smith
Yes, I think if I could just jump in on the YIMBY thing. I feel like I learned that YIMBY points don’t lead to votes. Zellnor ran this very— He’d obviously been reading a lot of social media and read Ezra Klein’s book or maybe it wasn’t even out yet. He, honestly, had I think was probably the only one- You say it’s pie in the sky, but he had a visionary, large scale, We’re going to build huge neighborhoods, we’re going to build for probably, what, a million and a half new people in the city. It seemed like, a little to my surprise, there wasn’t really an electoral appetite, like, Wow, yes, let’s do something huge. No one has promised that.

Ben Max
I also just don’t know that he sold it that well. I mean, the candidate, the vision, the campaign, where does that all — How do you get to that right mix of things? I think he had issues on the candidate side, even though he is very impressive and does have, I think, a bright future and has actually a very strong, or accomplished, legislative record — people can obviously disagree with how strong it is, but in contrast to Mamdani, Myrie also, there was a little bit of this with him as is the case with several candidates, which is they were eyeing this run as, I’m going to be the alternative to Eric Adams in the Democratic primary. Then the whole thing totally changed. That’s not obviously the theme of our breakfasts with them. I think that’s hanging over this race. It was a lot of people going, What if I can get into this primary and be seen as the alternative to Eric Adams? Then that shifted. But back to Ramos for one second: It also became clear, I think in her campaign and a little bit in breakfast with us that she also had a lot of antipathy for Mamdani.

Ben Smith
For the left.

Ben Max
Yes, for the left — the socialists. Her decision was ultimately seemingly in part due to the labor discussion we already had, but also this idea that she, like many voters, like Michael Bloomberg, like others, started to see this race as a choice between Cuomo and Mamdani. I don’t know if that’s the correct analysis, that’s some of that too. Which also gets at one theme of this campaign and these breakfasts too, which is this idea of substance versus vibes. Even Cuomo is running a lot on vibes — some on its substance on his record, but a lot on this vibe of “city in crisis.”

Ben Smith
Since we were really engaging on substance, who do people think was the readiest? The most—?

Myles Miller
Lander? He was out of the gate with us and it was on point. I think that the most interesting thing he said, and not because I worked there and not because I worked for him, was that he valued a lot of the people that Mike Bloomberg had in his administration. Then it would be some of the people he’d look to in his administration. That was something you would not have heard from a prior Brad Lander. He’s moved so much to the middle, that is the stuff that he’s saying. It was very interesting.

Akash Mehta
To be fair, Mamdani said the same thing about—

Nicole Gelinas
Janette Sadik-Khan. He said he hoped that she would call him after he mentioned her here, which indicated how he wasn’t being taken seriously by the establishment at the time.

Harry Siegel
I don’t remember if we asked, if Ben Smith asked Mamdani the NIMBY-YIMBY question. We got through a lot of candidates, but just real quick, before we get past that. Ben, I wanted to just ask you. Mamdani was just on Pod Save America. He got asked specifically about abundance and he gave a very word salad-y answer not disavowing it. Abundance is really interesting in bringing that focus around housing particularly and just the whole thing of thinking of single stairwell versus dual stairwell.

Ben Smith
He also told the Times that his biggest change of position had been that he’d come to believe in the private market for housing.

Harry Siegel
Which is interesting because his proposal is to have the government build housing, which is, it’s a smaller number, but it’s vastly in some sense is more ambitious than all the other candidates including Myrie’s million units. They’re just talking about creating the conditions for private developers to build.

Josh Greenman
If he can get the $70 billion from the state that the state’s probably not going to give him in borrowing authority.

Harry Siegel
He says, this is what he is running on. He said, I’m going to do all this and my campaign — very de Blasio again — is proof I can, and I’ll go to Albany with the mandate and they’ll give me this. I’m very skeptical. His promises are 20 times, POLITICO calculated, what pre-K costs. De Blasio of course did not get the tax increase. He didn’t get the money. It’s a very interesting pivot for the socialist in the race, to be leaning into the abundance argument.

Ben Smith
Abundance, it doesn’t get you votes, but it’s a way to signal toward the center in a way.

Akash Mehta
Yes, he wants to do both. He wants to do both the upzoning that spurs private investment and public building. I do think it’s striking that Myrie, I can’t remember how many of the 15 votes in the New York Times panel of 15, but I think the majority of them went to Myrie on the issue of housing. This is clearly an emerging consensus, not among voters, but among the elite opinion makers that, again, Cuomo is the biggest dissenter from.

The million units — is it naive? Politically, yes. There’s no way that the mayor of New York is going to do what, for instance, Hochul could not and get the housing compact through the state legislature and preempt local exclusionary zoning or get over the outer boroughs who all voted against City of Yes. As a policy matter, I don’t think it’s naive. My understanding is that his plan to build or preserve a million units really does add up to a million units. I’m very interested to see whether that elite consensus continues in future rounds and becomes a litmus test that candidates need to pass if they want to get, for instance, the New York Times endorsement.

Ben Max
In Cuomo’s defense, just quickly — I agree he’s saying his housing platform, after City of Yes has passed: No, we’re not going to touch low density neighborhoods further for now, but he is talking about building 500,000 units of housing. I don’t know if his plan will work. Cuomo’s got this very interesting tension where he’s close to both real estate and labor, which we saw when he was governor, and how that can be very challenging in your policy-making on things like tax breaks for development. He’s even talking about [housing supply] in a significant way.

Nicole Gelinas
Even Myrie, when we got him down to details of housing. He started to sound more like Lander and Stringer. For example, when we asked him about the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, only because we had already talked about it with Tilson, Myrie said, I am happy with the compromise plan that came out. He didn’t use that moment to say, Oh, we lost out on hundreds of affordable units because some rich people care about shadows on their fancy plants. He also said the same thing about Arrow Linen. He said he was happy with the way the compromise plan came out. So he’s been through this enough on the ground, even without a direct role in it as a state official to know you do these things through compromises. I think the million units is kind of like Vision Zero. It’s a big goal. It doesn’t really matter, practically speaking, if you don’t get to a million units. You’re just telling people, Hey, I want to build a lot of housing, and if you fall short, even significantly short, he would have at least got things going in the right direction. In terms of who’s the best manager. I think both Lander and Stringer. The city could well survive a Lander or Stringer mayoralty. Those were the two that had—

Ben Smith
That sounds like a New York Times endorsement

[laughter]

Nicole Gelinas
—the grasp of how you actually run the city on a day-to-day basis.

Ben Max
We’re seeing, I think, in this race, a big difference again, on the substance versus vibes, experience and trying to run on experience. Adrienne Adams is largely trying to run on, I’m in City Hall. I’ve been doing the work. Just shift me over to the other side of City Hall. I don’t think her campaign has been quite about enough more than that — somebody mentioned that earlier.

Ben Smith
We actually haven’t really talked about her. We talked to her the other day. What did people make of that conversation?

Josh Greenman
I didn’t know what it added up to. Maybe you can call this the shallowness of the media, wanting to put someone in a box. But voters want to be able to put someone in the box a little bit, understand where they’re on the spectrum. We have all these heuristics for understanding candidates, and she resists all of that. She’ll say what she’s done, but she has a hard time, I think, saying, This is who I am and this is what I stand for as a candidate.

Ben Max
Legislative leaders — that’s a big problem. They’re running the body and trying to find compromise on a whole lot of things and unless they are super ambitious, which she wasn’t coming into the role because she wasn’t planning to run for mayor, might not necessarily have a big agenda. Her number one issue has been housing and she’s got accomplishments on that she talked with us about.

Myles Miller
That’s true. I think my takeaway is one that I saw Eric Phillips share yesterday, which is that she continues to have to be pushed. I don’t think that I took away from our interview that she frankly, really wants to do the job. I don’t know that she frankly wanted to be council speaker, but that’s not to say that when she has these positions, she does a bad job at them. It’s just that for this job, for the job of mayor, you really have to want it and want to do it 100 percent. And you just never get that sense. Now, there’s the interesting narrative that Hochul looking at her for lieutenant governor. That’s interesting. Maybe it gets her name recognition up, but I don’t know if anybody took away from the interview that she really wanted to be mayor beyond being pushed by Tish James.

Ben Smith
The other person, we mentioned Whitney Tilson a couple of times, but I feel like he’s attempting to occupy a lane. Did anybody find anything else interesting about him?

Nicole Gelinas
I think it shows what a fiscal bubble the world is in that pretty much no candidates really talked about fiscal issues. Brad Lander had a couple marginal ideas about how to save money, which I guess he should get credit for that because nobody else did. I think Tilson deserves a good mark for being the only person who has aggressively said, No, we can’t raise taxes right now. We are already at the top of the heap when it comes to marginal tax rates. He’s the only person who tried to bring that up.

I think the campaign points to the fact that Bloomberg was Bloomberg because he had so much money.I think even Tilson would say, Bloomberg makes Tilson look poor. But also because [Bloomberg] was well briefed from the start. He had this team of people who really understood the city, who explained the city to him, and Tilson did not have that. You could tell he does not understand how the city works and maybe you don’t want the city to work that way, but that is how it worked. Bloomberg actually succeeded because he didn’t try to come in here like DOGE and rip the city apart. He worked within the city’s system, for better or for worse.

Harry Siegel
Just one other thing about Tilson. He pretty explicitly said to us, which has now become obvious that first off, he was in this race because of Israel and protesting, policing stuff. Secondly, that he was an insurance policy in the event that the voters rejected Cuomo because of his litany of issues, which also go with his litany of accomplishments and having been around for so long, and having done a lot. That hasn’t happened, which is interesting to see. Like a prelude to the general [election] with a different electorate where Jim Walden has different ideas and priors, but is going to be occupying a somewhat simpler mode with more of a mad-as-hell thing. He just put out his nuclear bomb for [City Hall] ethics proposal that did not draw a ton of attention. The race is going to refocus and it’s going to be: corrupt Eric Adams exhausting and very touchy Andrew Cuomo and an absurd young man Zohran Mamdani, and a complete clown — and He’s smart, so he has no excuse because he does know better — Curtis Sliwa and then this other guy, and one of them has to win. It won’t be ranked-choice anymore. It’s just the most votes wins, which again, is Adams talking about his theory of the case, which I don’t think will pan out.

Josh Greenman
Just to bring this back to Mamdani for a second, who I think is really the story of this campaign. One interesting thing about him is though he was so completely and consistently on message with us and in general, throughout this campaign. I think re, Whitney Tilson, there’s also a flicker of a guy who’s learning and a guy who’s listening.

Ben Smith
Is this Tilson or Zohran?

Josh Greenman
No, Zohran. His youth is also a guy who can see evolving in front of you and there’s something attractive about that. To realize that, Oh yes, I’m going to read that book that you just mentioned to me and maybe it’ll actually change the way I see things. Even though he comes off as this very rigid guy who’s got his three things and keeps saying his three things. There is an openness that I think is part of what draws people. Maybe it’s a small part to him.

Harry Siegel
It’s a performance of openness. It’s an important performance, but he has been so clear on his priors and his messaging and the things he’s talking down now about how he would handle the police, where he simply doesn’t answer direct questions but gives beautifully elaborate, thoughtful answers that suggest things. Like, would your NYPD arrest people who block ICE vans? Here’s 200 words that are thoughtful and interesting and show someone who’s listening and responsive but don’t answer the question. He’s been very clear that the BDS movement, well before October 7th, is what led him into politics. While he does show openness, he reads everything, his answers are thoughtful and engaged. He’s been really locked in on what his fundamental principles are. Some of these involve international politics and such, but a lot of them are, Government can do more. There’s a lot more to take from the rich. They’re not all going to leave. Let’s go and do it. That may or may not pan out, but I don’t think there’s been any movement on how he’s presenting it.

Christina Greer
I don’t know what’s in the water in East Africa, but he is Obama-esque. This is 2007 all over again, right. There are a few things about Mamdani, and the aw shucks’ and I am learning. Let’s be clear. His father is a Columbia chaired professor of politics. He understands politics, he understands domestic politics, he understands international politics. He’s also been at tables, from a very young age, with people who were discussing and debating politics, domestically and internationally, in a multicultural, multi-ethnic dimension. This kind of, I’m just an immigrant from Uganda. That may be the tagline — My mom’s from Kansas, my dad’s from Kenya — that’s a cute tagline, but he’s swift. Similar to Obama, zero record. Let’s be honest, and let’s be clear, as Obama likes to say. When Obama comes in, he’s a U.S. senator for 20 minutes before he runs for the presidency. You can understand why the Democratic establishment, Hillary Clinton-istas of the world were like, What is happening? This man has zero record. How is he emerging? I think a lot of the Democratic establishment in New York is looking at Zohran Mamdani like, this man has passed, I don’t know how many bills he’s passed in Albany, but let’s be clear.

Ben Smith
I believe Andrew Cuomo said three.

Christina Greer
Yes. I think, though, that he’s tapped into something. You know how I feel about the DSA, but he has tapped into something. Same way Obama tapped into something where it’s inspiring people to actually see themselves in politics.

Ben Smith
To continue the Obama analogy, Obama managed to really get the passionate support of the left through a cultural signaling without ever really delivering—

Christina Greer
Do you know what I call it? I call it the Zora Neale Hurston form of politics. If you read Zora Neale Hurston, she says, at the beginning of every novel, I’m going to tell you a secret. I’m going to take you on this journey and like we’re going to end up together after I tell you this thing. You finish her book and you realize she’s told you nothing. She hasn’t told you anything and Obama’s books are the same way. Dreams of My Father, you learn nothing really about anything. I think Zohran does a really great job of talking to you and making you feel a part of the collective, but at the end of our journey together, I don’t know if I’ve actually learned what the thing is that you said I was going to learn.

Nicole Gelinas
Yes. I think there is a pernicious ingeniousness to the free buses where you start off in January thinking, This is absurd. It costs $800 million a year. Nobody’s even asking for a free bus. This is not how to fix transit, but it turns the critics around where if you are complaining about a free bus by June, you almost sound unhinged. It’s gotten so into people’s minds to such an extent that how can you complain about a free bus? Who could object to a free bus?

Christina Greer
We got expensive ferries, that no one asked for.

Nicole Gelinas
Yes. It’s a very simple top-line point, but I just want to say, both of you brought up politics. In the general election, I have a question — Losing the Democratic primary: it doesn’t hurt Mamdani that much because he was seen as the underdog, that carries through to the general election, but that just is devastating to Cuomo because he’s won, he has defined Democratic primaries for 15 years. Is that right or is that wrong?

Ben Max
He’s supposed to win.

Ben Smith
I suppose people hate the Democratic Party. Everyone hates the Democratic Party. Democrats hate the Democratic Party. I think he will say, “I didn’t leave the party, these lunatics left me.” I think the party is so unpopular that I actually, politically, that’s probably where people—

Liena Zagare
I think Mamdani captured the big ideas lane and deprived anybody who had good ideas that are implementable of all oxygen. He made that ideological, to the point where, again, there was no lane and if you had good ideas you were, by definition, on the far left. At the same time, I feel like Cuomo, running in that moderate lane, made it almost cynically transactional. If you are more of a moderate, then thus by definition you are super transactional and unable to come up with some kind of compromise. When you look through that lens, I think in terms of who can actually manage the city and run a good government that can make the compromises between the left and the right, and has some track record, again, you go back to Brad Lander.

Christina Greer
That was my estimation for the New York Times thing.

Ben Max
I was actually about to go back there because to return to how this group started and how this conversation started: Brad Lander, like he did running for citywide office in ‘21, if you read his interview with us, he’s running as someone who would be a candidate of the New York Times editorial board, which helped him win citywide in ‘21 but was bowing out this race. He was to be a candidate, as he was in ‘21 citywide, of the New York Times editorial board and AOC. Even with an eye, again, on the Kathryn Garcia voters much more than the Maya Wiley voters because he thought the Maya Wiley voters would probably come along with him and then there came Zohran Mamdani to just take that lane.

To Liena’s point, in his conversation with us, and I think throughout the campaign, Lander has been about 50 ideas and not about three ideas. He’s got three at the top, and talked with us about those, but not as clearly defined as could be. That was the difference I think, for the candidates that came in and talked with us, is that definition of who are you and what are you running on? It wasn’t always clear or consistent when people came to this table why they wanted to be mayor and what they would do for the city.

Ben Smith
Harry, and then let’s move to the comptroller and public advocate benefits because if people need to slip out, they can.

Josh Greenman
Isn’t that going to be a bonus episode, the comptroller, public advocate?

Ben Smith
Should we very quickly do comptroller? OK. Very quickly, Harry.

Harry Siegel
Closer question for this group, maybe we can sweep in comptrollers in the course of this: Justin Brannan cursed a lot and did not offer specifics, and I think he’d be more entertaining to cover. He may have lost my vote. That may be the one vote that shifted for me in the course of [these]. I just wanted to ask this group: We’ve just had three consecutive elections where the Democratic primary was the whole thing. The last one was ranked-choice, and it went OK. We didn’t end up with one of those complicated circumstances but came close, where if the third-place candidate [Garcia] hadn’t passed the second [Wiley], they would’ve won, which could happen in ranked-choice. I’m just curious how you all think how important the Democratic primary is and how representative it is of the will of the party or the city at this point? It feels to me like the map and the territory are in wider and wider divergence.

Josh Greenman
I think nobody knows, and if Cuomo is the victor in the primary, he has run a campaign that’s very similar to Eric Adams’s mayoralty. With the exception of the corruption. He has his own corruption issues, but he has not distinguished himself very well from Adams other than saying, I can do it. I’m going to do it well.

Harry Siegel
Actually, it’s the way he’s running stuff.

Josh Greenman
Right.

Ben Smith
Just to get back to the interviews and the transcripts. Did people feel they learned things from [Mark] Levine and from Brannan? I did. I, for one, liked the cursing.

Myles Miller
Yes. I feel like I know Justin very well and it feels like it was a different Justin in the room than the Justin that we know privately or have seen, it was very muted, just very different Justin. To me, I think Levine came across strong. I thought it was interesting to hear from both their financial bonafides. Even if Justin Brannan’s was as an intern on Wall Street, didn’t say as an intern, did say as a young person.

Ben Smith
I liked that he didn’t pretend.

Myles Miller
Right, which is a good thing.

Ben Smith
I would say I thought both comptroller candidates were among the best prepared people to talk to.

Myles Miller
Yes.

Ben Smith
I was impressed with both of them. Also, I thought they both showed like flickers of awareness that New York City is not identical with New York City government and had some level of interest in the private sector and business and the things government affects, which a lot of people we talked to really just solely focused on managing agencies.

Myles Miller
They both struck the right tone, I think, which is nice to hear.

Ben Smith
I missed Jenifer Rajkumar, but our brief encounter with Jumaane Williams, and Jenifer Rajkumar, anything jump out at people?

Harry Siegel
Rajkumar is if you just know her as the person who’s showing up next to Adams, which is honestly the extent of my understanding of her, it was interesting and more compelling to be in a room with her and get some sense. It certainly didn’t make me want to vote for the person who’s partnered up with Adams, wanted to run for different things and ran into this late. It’s plainly just an ambition play. I wasn’t there for Jumaane. Comptroller and public advocate, in different ways, are really hard offices to run for. Like the public advocate is a pathetic pity prize to Andy Stein, who didn’t even end up winning it, a ridiculous office—

Ben Smith
He did wind up running Democrats for Trump, so there’s that—

Harry Siegel
Comptroller: no one cares about what the office actually does, so you have to run on different things. They’re frustrating ones to get a handle on but it’s always good to put people through these paces.

Ben Max
I was struck with both — with Rajkumar and with both comptroller candidates, about people that are supposed to be in these positions of a lot of accountability and at least Brannan and Rajkumar, running for their positions on being tough and tough talking, but then they didn’t really want to be that tough talking about anything or anyone. That’s something I give Jumaane Williams credit for all along. He actually says stuff and he says what he thinks and tries to hold people accountable when he thinks they’re not doing the right thing. Mark Levine isn’t quite talking as tough and his campaign, also, just seems to be running a bit of a go along-get along campaign. Which, again, everybody’s running their campaign to try to win and do what they think they need to win. Fascinating for Levine to sit here and even say he wasn’t going to criticize Brannan or any of his competition when obviously his campaign is very assertively digging up dirt on Brannan and pitching it, and that’s fine. At least come to the table and be aggressive and be assertive and say some stuff.

Myles Miller
I did try for both of them: Come on, trash talk, let’s hear it.

Christina Greer
I wasn’t here for the comptrollers and so that’s that. I think spending so much time with Scott and Brad let me think about comptrollers in a different way. As far as Jumaane coming in, my biggest takeaway was he’s been at the job, he’s been a fighter for New York for a very long time.And I really think that Michael Blake would be a really great public advocate. I think that him sitting in this seat, actually, and how he sees himself as an opposition to certain power structures, to me it’s a shame that he’s actually — that this is the race that I think, in this moment, makes the most sense for him.

Josh Greenman
Ironic, because isn’t that the one job he hasn’t run for?

Ben Max
Yes, he did. In the special.

Christina Greer
He did.

Josh Greenman
Oh, he already ran for it?

Christina Greer
Yes, before.

Josh Greenman
So he’s run for everything.

Ben Smith
I would say I did appreciate from Jumaane that he was so late that he was authentically mortified about it and apologetic in a way that, I don’t know, I’ve definitely got politicians who don’t have that mode of just Ugh, I screwed up.

Akash Mehta
He’s had practice being apologetic for that.

Myles Miller
I also think Jumaane is very authentic. Of all the people we covered, the most authentic one.

Ben Max
He’ll engage in the discussion in-depth on police reform — signaling on it, the specifics of it, policing and police accountability, all of it, and will really try to get into the heart of it.

Ben Smith
He thought about contradictions in, you want more housing, but you go to these community meetings and you ask people if they want housing next to them. I thought that was an interesting rep.

Akash Mehta
You get the sense that most of these people blow in the wind when it comes to crime and safety. Like even Whitney Tilson told us that he was campaigning for bail reform. Jumaane Williams — I didn’t go back and check, but he said, I never said defund the police. I was against that slogan from the beginning. You do get the sense of consistency there.

Christina Greer
Before I leave, I just want to say that this has been fantastic. I really think in the past I’ve been a part of the Amsterdam News endorsement board and for various reasons didn’t happen which I think is a real disservice to New York City, because having these very same candidates in a hot seat, in a room of majority Black people asking similar but not always the same questions and how people answer them in Harlem, in front of majority Black audiences, has yielded very different answers at certain points in time. I think we have so many forums, I get it, but it is helpful to have ethnic media have these similar roundtables because there’s a lack of consistency for some candidates that I think voters should see.

Ben Smith
Oh, that’s interesting.

Nicole Gelinas
I think it’s been very helpful, hopefully not just to us, but to the voting public as well. But one thing about the comptroller and the public advocate races is I wonder what the end game is, because this whole process shows how hard it is to move up through New York City government. What is Scott Stringer’s reward for being comptroller? Nothing, nobody remembers. And Brad Lander too. I think they’ve both been pretty solid comptrollers, but there doesn’t seem to be a path upward right now. The path seems to be, swoop in from outside and/or swoop in from state government.

Ben Smith
Thank you guys so much. This was a really fascinating experience for us. If anybody is still listening at this point, we will be back next season — the general — with some more interviews. Honestly, if you have thoughts on what we should do going forward, please respond to the Substack, send us an email or DM us on Twitter with your ideas. So thank you.