Title: City Politics: The Trump Factor; Bail Reform & Public Safety; Socialism

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Brian: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We begin today with our weekly Wednesday segment on the New York City mayoral race. Tomorrow, we'll do our new weekly Jersey Thursday segment on the New Jersey governor's race with Nancy Solomon, who's hosting Ask Governor Murphy here at seven o'clock tonight. For our Wednesday mayoral race conversation, WNYC and Gothamist political reporter, Elizabeth Kim, is our regular guest, as many of you know, sometimes with another journalist on board as well. Today is one of those days with Spectrum News NY1 political anchor and New York Magazine columnist, Errol Louis.

On Monday, Errol held a conversation with Zohran Mamdani about public safety at the Columbia University Journalism School. We'll play a couple of clips from that. Interesting for many reasons, including a New York Times/Siena College poll this week that asked who's the best candidate to deal with crime, and in first place was Zohran Mamdani. Surprised? We'll break it down. We'll also touch on the latest on President Trump's involvement in the race in conjunction with the Adams and Sliwa dropout narratives, which have not gone away, and more. Liz, happy Wednesday, and Errol, thanks for joining. Welcome back to WNYC.

Liz: Happy Wednesday, Brian.

Errol: Good morning. Great to be with you.

Brian: Errol, let's get right to the public safety forum with Mamdani at Columbia on Monday. Want to give our listeners some background. Why that? Why now? Why there?

Errol: There's a group that co-sponsored it, Vital City, that a lot of your listeners, I'm sure, are familiar with. They do a lot of really good, smart research on public safety in particular. The founder, Liz Glazer, has a long and distinguished career in law enforcement. They've put out countless calls to different candidates to come in and talk, and Mamdani was really the first to take them up on it. I think we're going to be doing one with Curtis Sliwa as well, but the invitations also went out to Mayor Adams and to former Governor Cuomo.

What we did was try and just wrestle it to the ground to take the whole bundle of issues, whether it's of policing, Rikers Island, general thoughts about crime and disorder, what the numbers mean, how you might change current policy. In this case, Zohran Mamdani has proposed a Department of Community Safety. We had plenty to talk about. It was a great format. There were mostly journalism students there, but there were others as well, and we just got to sit and talk for about an hour.

Brian: Before we play a clip, did you notice in the Times poll that not only does Mamdani hold a 22-point lead over Andrew Cuomo, it's also 15 points in a new PIX11 Emerson College poll. He leads by a lot in either measure. In the Times poll, they asked who's the best candidate to deal with crime, and Mamdani came out first with 30% saying he's the best. Cuomo was right there within the margin of error with 29%. Then 23% said Sliwa came out first, and only 15% said former police officer Eric Adams was the best candidate to deal with crime. Assuming the poll findings roughly represent reality, are you surprised by those results?

Errol: Not entirely. The overall theme that some of the candidates have just never really picked up on is that when voters think that there's something fundamentally wrong with the status quo, they're going to start looking for alternatives. Even if those alternatives seem outlandish or unproven or unusual, voters are going to gravitate to it. You have Zohran Mamdani proposing a new Department of Community Safety. Gee, what the heck is that?

I spent about an hour talking about it with him, but for voters, if you're offering something new as opposed to the status quo, they're just going to start looking elsewhere because I think the overall consensus is that we're not doing as good of a job as we should when it comes to all of these related questions of crime and disorder and public safety.

Brian: Though, Liz, history suggests that when New Yorkers are concerned about crime, they tend more to the right: electing Giuliani twice, Mayor Bloomberg three times in part on that, and then Adams in 2021. When we look at these polls, in particular the PIX11 poll, which asked the question this way, they did not find crime as a defining issue.

This year, 36% of the respondents listed the economy or housing affordability as their number one issue, followed by threats to democracy, cited as number two, the top issue by 25%, then crime, only 11%, called that their number one, and only 6% said immigration. Not good for Donald Trump playing a role in this race. If these two polls reflect reality at all, Liz, New York remains a liberal Democratic city. I wonder if you think it means the other candidates are campaigning on the wrong things, mostly fear of Mamdani, while affordability, Mamdani's buzzword, is what's on their minds.

Liz: Brian, you phrased this point before, which is, the increase in policing, the decline in crime generally since the pandemic, whether that has actually made that. Ironically, it has made that a non-issue, although it's not benefiting him. The other point I would make about crime is that I do wonder, and this is more with respect to public safety, actually, whether Mamdani was somehow able to weather that crisis, which was the Midtown shooting that killed four people and one of them being a police officer, because at the time, his opponents, namely Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams, really seized on his previous comments and criticism about the police being racist, his calls to defund the police.

He really weathered that moment. The person that was not criticizing him, which was notable, was the family of the slain police officer. We had that article in the New York Times this week, and I also reported on it, too, immediately in the wake of the funeral for that slain officer, was how that family actually embraced Mamdani. As you see in the Times reporting this week, they've continued to have a relationship with Mamdani. That story was about how he reached out to the rank and file. I do wonder whether the poll somehow reflects that, too, how he rose to the moment in that occasion. Did that sort of shape public perception on how he would lead the NYPD?

Brian: If people were paying attention around the funeral of the slain officer, maybe you're right. Here's a clip from Errol's public safety forum with Mamdani Monday night. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, by way of background, said this week that she thinks the 2019 bail reform law was the main cause of the spike in crime in 2020, not the pandemic. That law was passed before Mamdani was in the legislature. Also, the Raise the Age law to treat more teenage convicts as minors, not adults, which Commissioner Tisch says has resulted in more young shooting victims, but Mamdani addressed criminal justice reform like this.

Mamdani: This goes back to the earlier conversation around Raise the Age. The criminal legal reform package that was passed was prior to my time in Albany. Yet my understanding since getting to Albany has been that the intent of it was to also be accompanied by significant investment and education as to what this legislation was, because I can tell you that the way in which people have also understood these pieces of legislation has not always been tied to what the legislation itself actually does.

Part of that is a larger story around the void that Democrats often leave in the debate around any of these issues. We sometimes are almost embarrassed about our own ideals and our own convictions and our own legislation. I think that this is a real moment to make clear what those convictions are and explain why we actually have them.

Brian: Errol, want to give us some context for that clip and maybe some interpretation or analysis. It sounds like he's doubling down on supporting the bail reform laws.

Errol: That's exactly right. There's a question that's been going on for a number of years now, and the comment from the NYPD commissioner, I guess, kicks it back yet again, which is whether or not the rise in crime that happened all across the globe, but especially in the United States during the pandemic and as we came out of the worst part of it, whether it was due to the pandemic itself or whether it was due to the bail reform laws. There are a lot of people and a lot of leadership in law enforcement, in the NYPD in particular, that never wanted the reforms, that always predicted that they would lead to an increase in crime. Then when they saw the increase in crime, they say that's the reason.

As she said, it's her opinion. That word opinion is doing a lot of work there because you can't find any facts to support the idea that it was the pandemic, rather than the bail reforms and the Raise the Age and the discovery reforms that led to the increase in crime that happened in New York, as it did in every other jurisdiction, every other major city, all around the country, even places where there were no reforms. This is one of these things that gets put in front of voters.

I was a little surprised because Jessica Tisch, generally, has been kind of nonpartisan, kind of non-political, but what she said was really kind of a political article of faith that these laws, we believe, in her opinion, were responsible for a rise in crime. It wasn't a question-and-answer session, but the next question would be, "What makes you say that? Where's the evidence for that? What about cities where there was an increase in crime, where there were no reforms?" Are we talking about this like adults, or are we just putting out talking points and letting people pick and choose what they want to believe?

Brian: No bail reform going into the pandemic in so many other states that saw similar spikes in crime once the pandemic started. Here's a text from a listener, Liz, that says, "Eric Adams and Cuomo also called for police reform in 2020." I'll add to that that, of course, it was Cuomo, as governor, who signed the 2019 Bail Reform and the 2017 Raise the Age. I wonder if we're looking at Tisch as political in this respect, if the entire issue is neutralized, at least as it comes to Cuomo, because of his record.

Liz: I think that's an excellent point.

Brian: Liz, you go first, and then Errol.

Liz: No, I think that's an excellent point. You see that in the New York Post headlines on a regular basis, where they call it Cuomo's bail reform laws, and they're making him own it.

Brian: Errol?

Errol: Part of what is so distressing about the way it gets talked about with the commissioner's recent comment is that what they're really talking about when they say bail reform, what they're talking about is pretrial detention. What they're saying is that more people need to be locked up before their case has been adjudicated, before we know what evidence there is, before we know whether or not we arrested the right person. Let's just hold them at whatever cost it's going to cost to keep them in Rikers Island.

After a long, long struggle, and by long, I mean Robert F Kennedy, when he was our senator from New York in the 1960s, was fighting against this because there is an 8th Amendment or a prohibition against excessive bail that you don't just hold people because you feel like holding them or because it's your opinion that they might be dangerous. We don't do that in New York.

Brian: The debate now is over a dangerousness standard, part of the debate that a judge should have the discretion to follow when deciding if somebody accused should be locked up in the interim, right?

Errol: Yes, but that is no longer bail. Bail is specifically about, are you going to show up for your trial? If you're talking about, again, preventive punishment or pre-trial punishment or pre-trial detention.

Brian: Detention.

Errol: Yes, call it what it is.

Liz: Brian, what I would also add--

Brian: I'll just throw in, people forget that bail, why is it about money? It's so there's something on the line if they don't show up, that's to actually be tried. As you remind us, Errol, that's the point of bail, not dangerousness. The dangerousness debate is something else. Liz?

Liz: What I would also add is what is very frustrating to many criminal reform advocates about this conversation is that there is data that the NYPD could dissect and show whether there is cause and effect here, but they haven't done that analysis. That was something that came up. I saw a social media team, one of my sources, someone who's worked in the NYPD. There is this data out there. Why don't they just look at it and do a study on it? Advocates would suggest that the NYPD is deliberately not presenting the data, not presenting the evidence for this theory, because perhaps there is none.

Brian: Liz, here's another text from another listener. It says, "It's interesting that when Giuliani was mayor, he was always associated with the drop in crime, but as crime has come down now, Adams has not gotten the same credit." What do you think about that from either a crime stats or political analysis term? Certainly, he's, if these polls are any indication, not being given a lot of credit on crime.

Liz: That was the point I was making earlier, is we talked a lot about the increase in police presence, particularly on the subways, and how did that make New Yorkers and subway riders feel? People who called in, they were kind of divided. Some people said that it did make them feel safer because they were rattled by some of these, like shovings. We do know that there has been a rise in crime on the subways. Then other people said they didn't like it, and other people spoke out against the National Guard being on the subways.

Lo and behold, it's been a year later, and we're seeing these polls in which crime doesn't seem to be a motivating issue for voters, and I do wonder about that. The other thing that I think about too, and this was a question that Errol raised to Mamdani, is about involuntary commitment.

Brian: Oh, and we have that clip.

Liz: Yes. Maybe you should play it first.

Brian: Sure. Again, if you're just joining us, listeners, it's our Wednesday mayoral race segment with our Elizabeth Kim, and also joined today by NY1's and New York Magazine's Errol Louis, who, among other things, moderated a forum on public safety with Zohran Mamdani at the Columbia University Journalism School on Monday night. In this clip, Errol asks Mamdani about involuntary hospitalization to get people with apparent mental health problems that could be a threat to themselves or others off the streets.

Errol: Are you opposed to coercive medical treatment? This has reached the point where it's been talked about both as policy and as legislation, that in some of the encounters that we're discussing, involuntary commitment, treatment, or removal.

Mamdani: I'm skeptical about its efficacy, as I was saying with some of the research that I've read, but I do think it is a last resort. It is something that, if nothing else can work, then it's fair.

Brian: Errol, want to talk about that, and if it contrasts with the other candidates' positions?

Errol: Yes. It's a tricky kind of a question. Overall, the emphasis on it that has grabbed a lot of headlines, I think, is maybe a little misleading. The whole idea or the whole problem is that somebody is in crisis of one kind or another. The cops pick them up, or the MTA picks them up. They end up going cycling through a number of systems. They go to health and hospitals, they go to one of the public hospitals, they get stabilized, they get sent back out. Then they might interact with the shelter system, the Department of Homeless Services, but there's a good chance they're going to end up right back where they started, back on the streets, back on the subways.

The idea of involuntary commitment is relatively narrow of-- There's a small subset of the population I just described where it's because they're refusing treatment that they're in distress and that there's a clear path to taking care of it. The reality is, whether it's voluntary or involuntary, there aren't enough beds, there isn't enough permanent supportive housing. There's no clear protocol for which agency is going to take precedence and also track the person from place to place. Until you get into those really gritty problems, the involuntary commitment portion of it is actually not the most important part of it at all. I think that's what Mamdani was getting at.

Brian: Liz, I wonder if you're finding any resonance on the issue of public safety, one way or another, from the Trump takeover of the DC police and deployment of the National Guard there. The president is touting significantly lower crime stats since that all began about a month ago. I think the DC police and Mayor acknowledged that. Is that moving the needle, or could it in this election, or does it compete too much with the concerns about democracy, which seems to rank higher in the polls of New Yorkers?

Liz: I think the latter is true. We talked about what would happen to the race if President Trump were to decide to send in the National Guard into New York City. Does it benefit anyone? Who does it hurt the most? I'm very unclear on that. I think all of the candidates are unified in that they do not want to see that happen. Cuomo has used the specter of that to argue that he would be the better mayor to handle such an incursion, but I don't know. I think New Yorkers are more or less unified that they see that exactly as an issue around democracy and not really helping public safety in any way. We've just discussed, Brian, that that issue has not become the front and center issue of the mayoral campaign. It's been affordability.

Brian: Listeners, we've been reading some of the texts that have been coming in. Others of you who want to chime in with a comment or a question on the phones or our text message thread, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text. Errol, any other thoughts on the role Trump is playing in voters minds in this race? I'm going to play a Mamdani clip here in a second, but we had the tape of Cuomo a few weeks ago telling supporters at a Hamptons fundraiser that Trump would get Adams to drop out and Trump would convince New York City Republicans that they'd be wasting their vote on Sliwa, so they should vote for Cuomo. Here's something Mamdani said about that last week.

Mamdani: Let's cut out the middleman. Why should I debate Donald Trump's puppet when I could debate Donald Trump himself? If Donald Trump is serious about this, he should come to New York City. We can have as many debates as he want about why he is cutting SNAP benefits for hungry New Yorkers just to fund tax cuts for his billionaire donors.

Brian: It's a funny line. Cut out the middleman. I'll debate Trump directly. Obviously, trying to associate Cuomo and Adams with Trump as much as possible. What do you make of Trump's role overall with all of these things and how they are affecting the race, if at all?

Errol: Electorally, Donald Trump is poison to any candidate, whether they're a Democrat, an Independent, or a Republican. He is not liked in New York City. In fact, if you look at the cross-tabs on today's Emerson College poll, he is very, very, very unpopular here. To the extent that people see any candidate as doing his bidding or having some kind of an understanding with him, whether it's Eric Adams around his legal troubles or Andrew Cuomo, just based on the statements that Cuomo himself has made, the response is instant and the response is negative.

Even Curtis Sliwa has said he doesn't expect and doesn't particularly want an endorsement from Donald Trump in this race, the Republican nominee. Everybody's trying to get what they want out of Donald Trump, but also not have it necessarily be all that public. We know, for example, because some of the mayor's people have confirmed it, that the mayor's representatives have indeed been talking to representatives of the White House and the administration to try and form a possible exit strategy for Eric Adams, either after January 1st or possibly even sooner, but he doesn't want to acknowledge that publicly because, politically, that's just very, very harmful.

Brian: We'll continue in a minute with Errol Louis from NY1 and New York Magazine, our Liz Kim, and you. Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

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Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue our weekly Wednesday mayoral race conversations today with, as usual, our WNYC and Gothamist political reporter, Elizabeth Kim. Also today with Errol Louis, political anchor on Spectrum News NY1 and New York Magazine columnist and host of the podcast You Decide with Errol Louis from Spectrum, and you, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Before we leave crime and public safety and go to other issues, Errol, a few people are texting takes like this, "Crime was not high due to the pandemic. There was no crime during the first three months of the pandemic. Crime rose following the George Floyd protests." What do you say to that?

Errol: I've seen some data about those first three months, and that, really, from, I guess, a social science standpoint, that's a very interesting moment. You can draw some conclusions because there was a brief window, again, it was only about-- I thought it was about six months, but three to six months, where the reforms had taken effect, but the pandemic had not hit. That's where you could maybe start to try and probe it and see if there was some effect that could be traced back to the laws themselves. That's an interesting question. I don't know what the answer to that is, but very few people have ever wanted to talk about that.

Here's another number, though. Felony assaults have increased. Right now, they're up by 44% since 2019. Is that the laws, or is that something else? I just assume that a dislocation that caused similar problems throughout all of the United States and indeed the whole world, meaning an increase in crime and social disorder, which has a cause, the pandemic sort of makes sense. If you want to tie it back to and say, "It wouldn't have been quite as bad if it weren't for these laws," okay, we can talk about it.

Here, again, I think it's important to remind people that the bail reform laws were not about crime prevention. The bail reform laws were about bringing New York in line with the US Constitution in the 8th Amendment, which says excessive bail shall not be required. If you want to change that, if you want to ignore that, if you want to do the pre-trial detention, you should just come out and say so. I think we're always, I guess, trying to blame an increase in crime on our favorite cause, and I think there's some of that going on here.

Brian: Liz, another striking finding from the Times poll, and this hasn't gotten a lot of publicity that I've heard elsewhere, but it's in the Times article about their poll, Times/Siena poll, and we've speculated about this on this show after the primary. Here's an actual poll finding. Mamdani's positions on the Middle East seem to be working for him. Reading from the Times article on their poll, it says, "By a large margin, likely voters also said Mr. Mamdani was the candidate who had best addressed the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. 43% favored his position, compared with 16% for Mr. Cuomo."

It says, "Mr. Mamdani has been among the most outspoken proponents of Palestinian rights and a longtime critic of Israel, describing its war efforts in Gaza as genocide. Mr. Cuomo is a staunch ally of Israel and has volunteered to defend its leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, from war crimes accusations." Liz, being a critic of Israel in the context of New York City today and the context of events since October 7th, 2023, has apparently flipped from a liability to an asset in political terms. Does it look like that to you?

Liz: Right. You can make the argument that Mamdani has been ahead on this issue, in maybe being in line with broad public opinion about Israel's war in Gaza, and that he has been ahead of his fellow Democrats on it, because already now we've seen as the war is becoming more and more unpopular, we're seeing Democrats who were very staunchly pro-Israel. I'm thinking about someone like Congressman Ritchie Torres, also kind of moderate, his opinions on the war as well. Other Democrats are falling in line.

Brian: Errol, anything on that?

Errol: Across the board, with a lot of Mamdani's positions and appeal, people should maybe try and separate how they feel about it from what the polling information is telling us. Some of this stuff is very popular. Free buses happens to be popular. The idea of, I don't know, these five demonstration government-owned grocery stores appears to be popular. The idea of affordability as opposed to public safety is the leading issue that seems to have been proved out in the way the primary numbers came in.

One big mistake that I think Cuomo and Adams and Sliwa might be making is by trying to make the race about Mamdani and what he's promising to do, because when you poll it and when you give people a chance to talk about it, a lot of it turns out to be pretty popular.

Brian: Yet Cuomo is continuing on that same tack or that same track. Let's talk a little bit about the Adams and maybe Sliwa dropout drama continuing to unfold in that context. The idea, of course, is to consolidate the non-Mamdani vote behind Cuomo on the theory that enough New Yorkers find Mamdani scary or at least oppose his policies. Here's Cuomo on CNBC yesterday arguing that the consolidation will happen even if no one drops out.

Cuomo: We'll see what happens with Eric Adams. In reality, for voters, there are going to be two viable candidates who can win. It's going to be me and Mamdani. You could not have a more stark choice because Mamdani is a socialist. I am a Democrat. We haven't even gotten to the discussion of what a socialist really means in New York. He is a radical socialist, anti-business, anti-public safety, et cetera. That is not what New York City is all about. This is a business capital.

Brian: The attack is on socialism, but a few things. The PIX11 poll with Emerson College found, get this, 66% of respondents said they favor Mamdani's proposal for a 2-point tax increase on people with incomes over $1 million, 66%. Only 18% opposed it. I want to replay something surprising. Errol, you'll tell me if it's surprising to you that Curtis Sliwa said, when he was here during a campaign interview a few weeks ago.

Curtis Sliwa: I listened to Mamdani say that we should have free bus fare, and everyone else gets bent out of shape. Oh, that's socialism, and I say, look, we had socialists in New York City, in our City Council, congressmen from East Harlem who represented people there for many years. We've had communists elected before. Nothing to be frightened of. The State of Israel, Ben-Gurion, it's a socialist country. Rabin was socialist. Stop the labels and stop the nonsense.

Brian: Errol, what do you make of Sliwa positioning himself that way-

Errol: I think he is absolutely right.

Brian: -especially if he wants to be the alternative to Zohran Mamdani?

Errol: It's interesting. The last time I spoke with him, he actually said that he was specifically hiring Gen Z and Gen X staffers for his campaign and that he was specifically going to make a run at some of the younger voters, in particular, who were attracted to Zohran Mamdani. He, I think, has a sense of where the electoral winds are blowing and just figured he would try and position himself.

Now, the polls are suggesting that that's not quite working out as he had hoped, at least not yet, but there's definitely something to that, and he's exactly right. I'd even go a little further. We've already had a DSA, a Democratic socialist mayor. His name is David Dinkins. He was a member of the DSA. We've had a Democratic socialist Manhattan borough president, Ruth Messinger, who was the Democratic nominee for mayor in 1997.

Brian: She lost to Giuliani by about 1,000 points, but still.

Errol: Nevertheless. The point is, what's mainstream and what's unthinkable? We should all maybe rearrange our thinking about this. Since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got elected, there's something like 250 democratic socialists holding office around the country. In some cities, they're not quite a plurality, but they are a meaningful segment of the city council in places like San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, I think, and a couple of other cities. The world is changing.

Brian: Liz, one more issue: education. We'll do a whole separate on this in our 30 Issues in 30 Days election series starting in a few weeks. You reported on charter school advocates trying to ramp up visibility against Mamdani. What are you seeing there?

Liz: This looks like a potential revival of the charter wars in New York City, which we really haven't seen really heat up since de Blasio's first and maybe part of his second term. These are two charter schools who are rallying to expand. They are rallying to expand in classrooms in New York City to get more space, to get more funding. What they see in this moment, it was very similar to what they saw in 2013, when Bill de Blasio was the Democratic mayoral nominee which is Zohran Mamdani, who is now the Democratic mayoral nominee, is not a fan of charters.

He is opposed to raising the cap on charters, which is something that is actually decided in Albany. The mayor does not have control over it, but he can take a position, and he, like de Blasio, is opposed to that. He also has said that he wants more oversight of charters. It's very interesting. They have come out and they decided to be proactive on this issue. They are planning a rally next Wednesday. It's going to be a march across the Brooklyn Bridge. Again, very reminiscent of 2013, because this is exactly what they did in 2013. They're sending a message. They're sending a message to Zohran Mamdani, much like they did with Bill de Blasio.

What I should also say is what these charter school wars have often been is a proxy war, a proxy war between business interests who are free market evangelists versus progressives who are pro-union and very pro-traditional public school. We see the same people who are pouring money who are backing charter schools, these hedge funders who are also anti-Mamdani people who are pouring money into anti-Mamdani PACs like Fix the City. There's something else going on here, and that's something that Mamdani has recognized, and he's not backing down.

I asked his campaign about this upcoming rally, and he just said it. He said charter schools siphon resources away from public schools. This is going to be a very interesting issue, I think, in part because education has not been front and center of this mayoral race. How do we start talking about this? This march, very much like the one in 2013, you can expect it to have a lot of families who are Black and brown, who live in lower-income communities that have underperforming traditional public schools, who have made the decision and the commitment to go to charter schools because they feel like they're a better choice for their families.

How does that land with Mamdani? The optics of that, I think, make him vulnerable, and it could put him a little bit on the defensive to answer. These are sort of the demands, the long-standing demands of a lot of lower-income families in the city, which is we want better performing schools in our district. How are you, as mayor, going to provide that for us, especially if you're not going to expand charters and you're going to do more oversight of them, et cetera?

Brian: With our Elizabeth Kim and NY1 Errol Louis. Dominic in the Bronx, you're on WNYC. Hello, Dominic.

Dominic: Hi. I guess I'm a little late to the table. I missed the other. I wanted to just point out that I think Cuomo-- I want to say this as respectfully as possible. He's a moron. Mamdani is not a radical socialist. If he were a radical socialist, it would be a very different ballgame. He's a Delano Roosevelt kind of Democrat. He's like a Bernie Sanders kind. I think it's just very interesting because I think the fear that the elites have of Mandani is that he's got so much support from the proletariat, and it's a direct threat.

I teach for CUNY. The whole charter school thing is exactly that. It's a way of taking money from the working class and the poor and giving it yet again to the hedge fund managers, the people who make profits. When they talk about better performing schools, they're talking about based on these standardized exams and how the students do. They don't talk about education. That's my five cents. Thank you for taking my call. Love you guys.

Brian: Dominic, thank you for making it. Of course, as Liz's article on the charter school advocates points out, you talk about the billionaires, former mayor Michael Bloomberg and hedge fund billionaire Daniel Loeb were among the prominent charter supporters who donated to Cuomo's primary campaign. On the other hand, Errol, when the caller frames it in terms of Mamdani being for the proletariat and the billionaire or hedge fund class trying to stop him in these polls, Mamdani's strongest support, from what I read, continues to be more among educated and affluent voters as he runs on being a champion of the working class. You're seeing that?

Errol: Yes, absolutely. In fact, the phrase, I learned this from a real estate guy, a big part of the Mamdani base, or what some real estate brokers call HENRYs, highly educated, not rich yet. These are people like Mamdani himself, who described himself in an interview with me as having felt like, in his 30s, he was just kind of stalled out. His career wasn't going where he wanted it to, that the cost of living was just too high. There were no clear pathways into the successful life that he wanted to have and that he felt, on some level, had been promised to him by New York.

What his campaign is really based on is the fact that there are a lot of people who feel that way, that they're paying 50 plus percent of their income for rent, that the pandemic has set some things back as far as their ability to be mentored and to have the kind of relationships and maybe, either in the arts or in the corporate world, that they were hoping that was going to lead them to a different place. There's a lot that's wrong here, that it's just too expensive. I think there's definitely something to it.

I wouldn't use the word proletariat, but I do get the feeling that much of-- When we see the elites that are very upset about the rise of Mamdani, I think they're probably not so much upset with him because he personally is just a very likable guy. He's easy enough to talk to, but it's the people that are behind him, it is this class.

I always think of them as the Occupy generation who have seen one social failure after another, from the mortgage crisis to the wars in Iraq to the failures on the affordability front to the rise of Donald Trump. They're just not thrilled about the status quo and what the future holds, and they're looking for alternatives. If I were a happy member or leader of the status quo, I'd be a little concerned because these young people are going to be the voting majority in short order.

Brian: There's a generation, as you say, that didn't live through the Cold War, let's say, and doesn't have the same toxic association with the word socialist that older people might because it meant a certain thing at that time. It may mean something very different in the context of the United States today. I guess Mamdani is still having to prove to some voters that he doesn't go as far as some of the things that he said.

You know, Errol, that there's this clip of him circulating, speaking to a Young Socialist of America conference in 2021, where he came out for the idea of government seizing the means of production or somehow seizing the means of production. It was in the context of a much more multi-issue answer, and it's not something he's ever emphasized or run on, but that clip is out there for anybody who wants to hear it and think, "How radical is this guy that he's not telling us," right?

Errol: I've been saying to many of the socialists for a while now, I keep asking them, "Where's the socialism?" Five government-owned grocery stores is not the same as saying we're going to start 500 food cooperatives, which would start to feel like something else. He's not talking about worker-owned businesses. They're not talking about, I don't know, a government buyout of Con Edison. It's just not there. Even if that was your agenda, I don't know if City Hall would be the right place to try and launch that revolution.

I won't begrudge anybody the right to be afraid of the word socialism, but it's very much as you say, Brian. One thing that comes from having lived through the Cold War is you know the real thing when you see it. I look at this and I'm thinking, "Eh." When you see Hugo Chávez on televisions, he did expropriations live. He was the president of Venezuela, and he would on television say, "Mr. Mayor, seize this house," and they would just take somebody's house right there live [crosstalk].

Brian: That, of course, is post-Cold War. Things like that under Maduro in Venezuela now might still be going on, or in Cuba still, but that's--

Errol: That's serious stuff. That's serious stuff. That's not like, oh, I'm not going to open any more charter schools. You know what I mean? [chuckles]

Liz: Brian and Errol, I'd like to ask you both whether you think that how does Mamdani's identity as a South Asian Muslim color this conversation of, is he this radical socialist? Because I've often wondered about that. The Islamophobia is very blatant and out there. All you need to do is just go on social media and you see it. It's alive and thriving, and it's coming from all corners of politics, especially from the MAGA sphere. When I think about someone like Chuck Schumer, who endorsed India Walton, she was a Democratic socialist.

Brian: Running for mayor of Buffalo.

Liz: Buffalo.

Brian: She won the Democratic primary in that case.

Liz: It wasn't a big deal. People were like, "Oh, yes." He backed her.

Brian: Yes, he backed her. That's true. She was the more mainstream-

Liz: Correct.

Brian: -Democrat who then ran as an independent after losing the primary. Sound familiar?

Errol: He won on a write-in ballot. That was extraordinary what they did to her.

Liz: I can't help but wonder, with Mamdani, the way we talk about Mamdani in Democratic political circles is he's too extreme, he's too radical. The top Democrats are kind of keeping him at arm's length cuz they're worried. How much of his identity as a Muslim, as a South-- He would be the first South Asian mayor if elected. How does that play into the fear-mongering?

Errol: It's huge, Elizabeth. If you think about it, he is the living, actual, factual embodiment of everything the birthers falsely said about Barack Obama. He actually was born in Africa. He actually is Muslim, and he actually is a socialist. For the MAGA crowd in particular, that's just irresistible, and they just go to town. Here in New York, hopefully, we'll be a little bit more tolerant and rational and recognize that he represents some really important demographic shifts here. In particular, the fact that there are-- I think the estimate was 760,000 Muslims in New York. That wasn't true even 25 years ago. The politics follows the demographic change. That's been true in New York for 400 years.

To me, it's nothing to get overly excited about because change always happens. If you look back and see how they treated the first waves of Irish voters who started claiming a lot of offices in the 19th century, it was pretty vicious, it was pretty ugly. In the end, it was completely unavailing. We make Americans here, we make New Yorkers here. Sometimes they have a different language, sometimes they have a different religion than the people who were there before, but in the end, I don't know if-- We'll see how it works out. I guess I'd say more seriously, too, and it's a little troubling. When you see the candidates, I don't know if you've noticed this, Elizabeth, but once he became the nominee, Zohran Mamdani got a police detail.

Liz: Yes.

Errol: There were big details and there were small details, and they do it according to how much they're needed, what kind of threat they might perceive out there. He has a pretty big detail, and that suggests to me that there's something that we should be concerned about as far as how people are reacting to who he is and what they think he might represent.

Liz: After winning the primary, he cannot move around the city and campaign the same way he did when he was this relatively unknown 33-year-old assemblyman from Queens. He has gained a level of celebrity and notoriety that is-- I wonder how he handles it, especially if he is elected. He has a huge detail, and he's gotten a lot of death threats according to his campaign, and this was something that they worried about even before he won the primary. He has had to campaign in a different way now.

Brian: One more call. Marcus in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Marcus.

Marcus: Thanks so much. I'm not calling in on behalf of any candidate, but I think we're really paying the price for the fact that we don't have ranked choice voting in general elections. It's too late for this year, but 2029, we could have another commission that would give us a chance to approve that. If we had ranked choice voting, we wouldn't have this musical chairs of who should drop out and whatnot. I think all voters would be empowered. If you're a Sliwa voter, you could vote for Curtis first, and you could presumably not rank Mamdani.

Lastly, we're likely to have the winner have less than 50% of the vote and going to be perceived as a winner who's not really acceptable to most New Yorkers. You recall, lastly, Mamdani, he only had 45% or less than 45% of the first-place votes in the primary, and it only was after the ranked choice voting that he was elevated to 56%. I think we really need to think about what would be different if we had ranked-choice voting this year.

Brian: Marcus, thank you. Here's Eric Adams the other day reflecting on the results of that ranked-choice voting primary.

Eric Adams: There was a one-on-one race primary. He beat them by 12%. Are we going to do this all over again? We bought into that the last time, we bought into him being 36 points on the poll, we bought into the day before the election that he was up by 10 points. We bought into all this before. As I move around the city and visit senior centers, shake hands, walking streets, where is he? We have seen this before. Campaigning is not walking the streets of the Hamptons, it is walking the streets of Harlem.

Brian: Mayor Adams on Channel 2. Errol, last thought. As the caller points out, we don't have ranked choice voting, and Mamdani, at least in this poll, which is more like a round one, if there was ranked choice voting, doesn't clear 50%. How about that hypothetical?

Errol: I see that as an argument for the old system that we probably never should have thrown out, but maybe a runoff would be in order. I say that in part, Brian, and you appreciate this, that when there's more than, say, three candidates and there's a lot of issues floating around, it really can be helpful to have a runoff. Everybody take 10 days, let's catch our breath, let's have one more debate.

Let's really try and winnow down and dig in on a lot of the issues and then have another vote. I think that is probably the right way to do it, but we've got the system that we've got. I would say that this system is fair enough that whoever does win, even if it is with a plurality, will be able to claim that they have a mandate to do what they're promising in the campaign.

Brian: Errol Louis hosts Inside City Hall weeknights at 7:00 on Spectrum News NY1. He also hosts the You Decide podcast, and he's a New York Magazine columnist. Our Elizabeth Kim will continue to join us every Wednesday until the election. She, of course, reports for WNYC and our local news website Gothamist. Thank you both.

Liz: Thanks, Brian.

Errol: Thanks, Brian.

Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We'll talk to New York City's rat czar right after this.

 

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