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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now it's time for our usual Wednesday visit from our lead Eric Adams reporter, Elizabeth Kim, after what is usually the mayor's Tuesday weekly news conference, the only time all week he takes questions from reporters on topics that they choose. He held that news conference on Monday this week, but Liz is with us today. Besides news about the mayor and how he's running the city, there's also news which is probably a little more relevant right now about how the candidates running to unseat Adams in the Democratic primary are doing in fundraising, with new numbers out this week. We got the latest fundraising numbers from the candidates, painting a surprising picture of the race so far, at least what they call the money race, the money primary.

We have former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who raised a total of $1.5 million from 2,800 donors in the first few weeks of his campaign. Coming in second, we have Democratic Socialist Assembly member from Queens, Zohran Mamdani, who raked in $840,000 from 16,000 donors over the last two months, by far the most donors of any candidate, Zohran Mamdani. Adams himself reporting only a measly $36,000 in donations, 42 times less than Cuomo, if you want to do that math. But it's becoming increasingly likely, according to things that he's saying and these fundraising numbers, that he's not even running in the Democratic primary.

According to Brooklyn's Democratic Party chair, Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn-- who just broke with her and the Brooklyn Democrats' usual support of Adams or past support of Adams to endorse Cuomo. According to Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, the Democratic Party chair in Brooklyn, Adams is gearing up for an independent run for his seat in November. For more on this and what the mayor is actually doing in terms of policy, and even a new threat from Trump to withdraw federal funding from the MTA unless they do something different about subway safety, we welcome Liz Kim back to the show. Hi, Liz.

Elizabeth Kim: Hi, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Let's start with that one. What exactly is the Trump administration asking for in their request to see plans to improve safety? It seems to be half of what Adams and Governor Hochul talk about anyway. You know, deploying National Guard to the subways, all kinds of things. Why is this on the president's radar, and do we know specifically what he's demanding?

Elizabeth Kim: Yesterday, the US Transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, issued a letter to the MTA chair, Jano Lieber, and he demanded a list of actions and plans to reduce crime on its subway, on the subway system. What he's essentially asking for, and it's all listed out in this letter, is he wants data. He wants data on the rates of different crimes, like assaults, he wants data on fare evasion. He wants data even on subway surfing. You know, you look at a letter like this, and basically they're saying that if you don't comply, we will yank funding. But in the back of everybody's mind is also this congestion pricing plan, which the federal government is seeking to halt, and which is now in the courts because Kathy Hochul is trying to fight this. But other than that, it's hard to say.

It seems as if it's not going to be a difficult lift for the MTA to just hand over this data. This is data that the MTA and the NYPD track anyway, so I'm not really-- It's hard to understand. Is this some kind of performative measure where the federal government and Trump are saying to the MTA, "You have to get your act together. Crime is out of control in the subways, and I'm going to hold you accountable." I mean, that's certainly one way to read it. But like I said, this is data that the city is tracking already, and for the most part, things are moving in the right direction.

Brian Lehrer: Former governor, Andrew Cuomo, to this point, released his plan for improving subway safety. Here's a quick clip of him explaining why he feels this issue is important to New Yorkers. Cuomo, 22 seconds.

Andrew Cuomo: The city is in crisis. You feel it wherever you go. You don't have to read statistics, you don't have to read a report. You walk up and down the street, you go to the subway, you feel in your chest, your instincts, those New York instincts tell you we're in trouble.

Brian Lehrer: So he's running on that same, "I hear your fear," as frankly, Adams is running on, and as Adams ran on in 2021, and as Trump ran on last year. Does Cuomo have a plan for making the subway safer that's different from what Adams and Hochul have been doing?

Elizabeth Kim: Well, he did put out a plan this week. He put out a subway safety plan, and I thought this was interesting. Because unlike some of the other candidates who just put out this public safety plan, an umbrella plan addressing crime in New York City, Cuomo elected to put out a plan that was singularly addressed, focused on subway safety. In terms of what he's proposing, it's not too different really, from what the other candidates are proposing, or what the mayor is already doing with the help of the governor.

One distinctive feature of his plan is he wants to add transit police. He wants to add 1,500 transit police officers to get the city to 4,000. Now, what's different about that? Well, currently, the way that the mayor has surged police on the subways is he's in essence sort of borrowed police officers from other desks, other assignments, to basically go into the subway. I've talked to our police reporter about this, and he's told me that this is not really popular with a lot of police officers, and you can understand why. Maybe these were officers that were working on some kind of investigation, and all of a sudden they're being pulled into the subway system. Also, maybe you can argue it's not the best way to use police officers. That maybe if you develop a specialized force of officers that are dedicated and trained to handle crime on the subways, that perhaps that's a better idea.

I think that was probably the most distinctive facet of Cuomo's plan, because the others were to address fare evasion, that's been talked about a lot. And also addressing the homeless and mentally ill who are living in the subway system, which we know all the candidates, including the mayor, have addressed. Cuomo talks about it in much the same way as all the candidates do, is we need these kinds of "co-response teams" in which we are supplementing police officers with people who are clinicians, people who are trained to address and handle the mentally ill.

Brian Lehrer: I want the listeners to hear your question to Mayor Adams at the Monday news conference and his response on this topic. You asked the mayor about Cuomo's assertion that the city is in crisis. We're going to play your 45-second question to the mayor, then we're going to hear his answer.

Elizabeth Kim: I wanted you to talk about your opponent, Andrew Cuomo. He's repeatedly said the city is in crisis, and he said New Yorkers can feel it. At one point, he said you don't need to look at a report, you don't need to look at statistics. But the crime stats are showing, as you've repeatedly said, that most crime categories are showing that crime is falling. But at the same time, you yourself have talked about feelings versus facts. I'd be interested in asking you whether you feel feelings are more important than the statistics, or are they equally important? Do you regret maybe giving in so much to the way people feel versus what the numbers are showing?

Brian Lehrer: Another great question from Liz, and it turned out the mayor had a lot to say about this. His response runs almost two minutes.

Mayor Eric Adams: First, I don't know why you say I gave into the way they feel. Perception is reality to many people, and I think that's very important, that you never just dismiss how people are feeling. I think that's wrong to do. I used to have this uncle, I used to say-- he must have been eight feet tall. He would shake my hand, he'd squeeze it, and I would say, "Uncle Elliot, you're hurting my hand."

He'd say, "Boy, that doesn't hurt you."

I'm like, "How're you going to tell me what I'm feeling?"

And so I would never dismiss New Yorkers, but I can see why the former governor don't want to look at reports. Because you have to look at the reports of what he did when he was governor, to Tier 6, the laws he passed that made some of our streets unsafe, what was done around mental health. There's a whole lot of things that you can look at, and so it's best to say, "Don't even look at reports." No, I said look at reports, because reports-- You use your reports to write your stories, that tells us where we're moving forward, and so those numbers are significant of what we've done.

Over 20,000 illegal guns removed off our streets, almost 80,000 illegal vehicles moved off our streets, and so there's been some real success in what we've accomplished in this city. And what I tell the commissioner team all the time, we have to play a major role in making people feel safe as well, and it's interesting what does that. Like, just interacting with the public. They walk inside the subway station, "Hey, how are you, sir? How are you, ma'am? Is everything all right?" Making that announcement, "We have a police officer on board." We put a cop on every train during the overnight hours, and so there's some real successful things that we are doing and what we accomplish, and we're going to continue to do that.

Brian Lehrer: Liz, after your exchange with the mayor, what do you make of his response to your question? It's a bit confusing on its face, but in the same way as the conversation we and the whole city have been having for years now. He's saying, on the one hand, perception is reality, and you have to address how people feel. But on the other hand saying, "Look at the data, look at the reports. The subways are really pretty safe."

Elizabeth Kim: Right. I did think it was contradictory, but it is a difficult issue, I will say. You hear the mayor say, "Reports are important, the data is important, you write your stories off the data," and that's true. We are also writing stories off how New Yorkers feel, and I think this gap between how they feel and the data has been in some ways a little perplexing. I will point to two very interesting stories recently read. One was on Streetsblog, which reported that the number of disorderly conduct complaints on the subway has really surged. The other story was written by my colleague Charles Lane, which noted that there is a 10-year high in overall complaints that are fueled by crimes like shoplifting, drug sales, and harassment, even as crime drops in the major categories, so it's very interesting.

I think there's also a question of, is there in fact just a lag in how New Yorkers feel? For example, assaults surged in 2023. They are now, in fact, starting to decline, but perhaps it takes a while for people's feelings to sort of catch up to the data. But I continually put this question to the mayor because I think that from the very beginning of his mayoralty, he put feelings at the forefront. I do wonder that if by doing that, he's made it very difficult for himself to lean on the data to present this message that crime is going down and things are moving in the right direction. Because now you have his opponent saying, well, New Yorkers don't feel that way. You have the former governor talking about New Yorkers and their instincts about crime.

Brian Lehrer: Right. And the data does show, and we've talked about this before, that even as overall crime is down, random crimes-- that some of the assaults went up statistically last year. Random crimes are up, and there's nothing that's going to make people feel more shaky and insecure when they're riding the subway or anywhere else where they think they might be vulnerable to a random assault than the randomness and a spike in randomness.

Elizabeth Kim: That's right. There've been undoubtedly some very shocking high-profile crimes, especially in the subway. The other point that policy experts point out is the visibility of homelessness, is that something that is sort of making New Yorkers who ride the subways feel anxious?

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, you can weigh in or ask Liz a question if you want for the next few minutes, but we're going to move now from what the mayor was saying in particular to some of these other developments in the Democratic mayoral primary. I mentioned in the intro, Brooklyn's Democratic Party chair, Assembly Member Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, did not endorse Eric Adams for reelection. She has, and the Brooklyn Party has endorsed him in the past. She seems to think he's running as an independent instead. Liz, is there evidence of that?

Elizabeth Kim: Well, the mayor was asked multiple times about whether he would consider running as an independent on Monday. And that was based on a New York Post story that said that this was something that the mayor was considering, and it was attributed to an unnamed source. The mayor didn't rule it out, which left a lot of people in political circles wondering if this was in fact something he would do. Then, lo and behold, one of his closest-- I guess you could call her a former ally, Assembly Member Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn goes on New York 1, and she says that this is an idea that the mayor is considering, and she's basing it on conversations that she's had with the mayor himself.

Brian Lehrer: Now, Cuomo's fundraising haul, $1.5 million in the few weeks he's been in the race. Impressive, from about 2,800 donors. But this is newsworthy, a surprise second place in dollars goes to Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani, raised about $840,000. But look at the number of donors, 16,000 donors over the last three months, far and away the number one in terms of number of people donating to his campaign. Here's a clip of Mamdani from an event held, I guess, by Cuomo's former rival Cynthia Nixon, the actor who also primaried him from the left in 2018 when Cuomo was running for re-election as governor, you'll remember. Here's Mamdani speaking at a recent fundraiser in Nixon's New York City home.

Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani: For too long, it's felt as if Democrats are simply waiting to surrender until the midterms. We have to remember that the power of Donald Trump and the power of this rising right wing movement is not simply that which it holds technically, but the narrative power, the stories they tell of who they're fighting for, and those are stories of we must contest each and every day. I pledge to you that together we can not only contest them, but we can win them.

Brian Lehrer: And one more clip. He got attention recently as well for this particular clip that's racking up millions of views online. He showed up to border czar Tom Homan's appearance in Albany shortly after the detention of Columbia University former student activist Mahmoud Khalil last week.

Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani: How many more New Yorkers? How many more New Yorkers will you detain? How many more New Yorkers without talking? Do you believe in the First Amendment? Do you believe in the First Amendment, Tom Homan?

Brian Lehrer: Do you believe in the First Amendment, Tom Homan? For listeners who haven't been following the race or don't know of Mamdani yet, would it be accurate to characterize him as perhaps the most left of the progressive challengers to Adams and Cuomo?

Elizabeth Kim: Yes, that's fair. He is a Democratic socialist, and he does have the most left-leaning ideas, and he got them out early. You know, free buses, freeze the rent, he has an idea for city-owned grocery stores. These are a lot of big-government ideas, and it's totally fair to consider him the most left-leaning. And it's interesting, because he is also perhaps the candidate on the left that is really having a breakout moment now, both in fundraising, but also just, I think, in social media. And we could talk about whether or not-- how important that will be, but certainly, like in the clip that you played where he was yelling at Tom Homan, last I saw, that got over 3 million views. That video went viral.

Of the candidates, he certainly had the strongest criticism of the government's arrest of Khalil, and you see in that moment where he-- You can speculate, maybe it was a little bit performative, but it certainly got people's attention as a candidate and how he would stand up to the Trump administration, which is also echoed in that other clip at that fundraising event that Cynthia Nixon put up on her Instagram. These are both examples of how he would respond to Trump. That has become a very important part of this race, and a lot of the candidates are being asked this question.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and it goes to our previous segment. I mean, that's how a lot of people who are Democrats would have wanted Chuck Schumer to respond to Trump, rather than saying, "Well, we don't have the leverage to shut down the government and get them to reopen it on our terms. So it would be worse for the country because Trump and Musk could do more damage," in the measured way that he said it. Whether or not that would actually be a more successful strategy in the long term is, of course, what we were discussing in the last segment. And you know what Eric Adams said in 2021 when he was running, and there were other candidates to the left of him who were really popping on social media. He said, "Elections aren't decided by people on social media. They're decided by people on Social Security," and that turned out to be the case.

Elizabeth Kim: That's right. And I would point out a very important caveat of the 2021 race is-- remember Dianne Morales? She was the most left-leaning candidate in that race, and at a certain point, she did kind of seem like a breakout star. She did have a lot of young energy behind her, but her campaign ultimately did fizzle out.

Brian Lehrer: I guess as a matter of political analysis, voters who maybe are to the left of either Cuomo or Adams have to ask themselves, what about the scenario where Mamdani is the Democratic nominee, Curtis Sliwa presumably is the Republican nominee to the right of everybody, but Eric Adams is running as an independent? Is Adams going to serve as a spoiler? Is Adams going to attract a lot of moderate Democrats? And there might be a lot of moderate Democrats as compared to, say, if somebody not as far left as Zohran Mamdani was the Democratic nominee.

I mean, it's a multi-layered strategic kind of electability voting strategy which might not even be right. The Democrats have put up a lot of moderate candidates who have lost, and the argument is, maybe Bernie Sanders or somebody like Bernie Sanders would have been more effective in the race, but we don't really know. But we may be heading toward that scenario as a calculus for some Democrats to have to decide on for themselves in this primary, right?

Elizabeth Kim: That's right, and I think that for the mayor, that is his dream scenario, because he has done a lot to turn the left into this boogeyman. You often see him using, not Mamdani as a foil, but he uses Brad Lander as this progressive foil. So I think for him to have that play out is exactly a reason why he would consider running as an independent.

Brian Lehrer: A couple of people want to weigh in on the crime question and the perception of crime question. One listener writes in a text, "It's pretty simple, what people are feeling is disorder. While serious crime is down, street homelessness, public drug use, and public psychosis remains high, especially in the subway." I think Virginia in the Bronx is going to say something similar. Virginia, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

[silence]

Brian Lehrer: Virginia, are you there?

Virginia: Yes. Every time this [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: Hi, we got you.

Virginia: Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Virginia: Hello?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, we have you.

Virginia: Oh, okay. Yes. Every time this conversation comes up, it's really disturbing because, again, it's being centered around perception versus fact. Any data scientist, and in fact, somebody you had on the show said that it matters what you're looking at and what's left out. I mean, even in Liz's question, even though the premise of the question is that the categories-- that even though it's gone down in these categories. Well, the categories are everything. This time, at least in the mention in the conversation, you had-- and I'm sorry, I've forgotten what they were called-- but those other two surveys that talked about the disorder that is surging, those are the things that keep us feeling unsafe and like this city is out of control. [unintelligible 00:24:16] but the fact that in all [unintelligible 00:24:19] there's no such thing as a one-way street anymore because of all the bikes and mopeds and everything going everywhere--

Brian Lehrer: Right. So, again, that perception of disorder and the politics that that might lead to. Virginia, thank you very much. Last thing, on this eye-popping number of Mamdani donors, how significant historically is the number of donors compared to the total amount of money fundraised?

Elizabeth Kim: Well, I don't know historically like what is the largest number of donors and how that plays into the race and who the ultimate victor is. But certainly, when it comes to getting matching funds, the city has this very generous program that is taxpayer-funded, and it's an 8:1 match on contributions of $250. But you have to get 1,000 donors, and you have to get to $250,000, so this is important, because what that program is valuing is this idea that you're getting grassroots support, small money donors. And I would say that is indicative of how strong or compelling that message is across a larger swath of New Yorkers.

Brian Lehrer: Elizabeth Kim, City Hall reporter. Hear her on WNYC, read her on Gothamist. Hear her back here with me almost certainly next Wednesday around the same time. Liz, thanks a lot.

Elizabeth Kim: Thanks, Brian.

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