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      Free buses, more housing, taxing the rich: how Zohran Mamdani has gone viral in the New York mayor’s race

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      Zohran Mamdani trailed Andrew Cuomo, the frontrunner to be the next New York City mayor, by 30 points just a few months ago.Now, just ahead of the Democratic primary on Tuesday, the 33-year-old democratic socialist has bridged the gap with Cuomo, a politician so of the establishment that a giant bridge north of New York literally bears his last name.The surge in support for Mamdani, an aspiring rapper turned state politician, with a penchant for turning out snappy social media videos and a track record of progressive, leftwing ideas, has shown his clear ability to win over young voters. It also didn’t hurt when he won the backing of the progressives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders this month.Mamdani’s rise has lent a new edge to an election that was in danger of becoming a procession for Cuomo, the former New York governor who resigned in disgrace in 2021 after being accused of sexual harassment.For a Democratic party struggling to stand up to Donald Trump and his “make America great again” acolytes, the closely watched election will offer an insight into what rank-and-file Democrats desire: a good old boy promising a steady hand on the tiller, or a fresh outsider who has energized parts of a weary New York electorate with plans to freeze rent and make buses free citywide.Mamdani’s rise has been boosted by a social media following that dwarfs his rivals’.He has almost a million followers across Instagram and TikTok, where he posts funny and self-aware videos selling himself to the public. The clips frequently show him walking through New York, or riding the subway, things that are unlikely to come naturally to the multimillionaire Cuomo.After supporters commented on Mamdani’s frequently exuberant hand gestures in the videos, he posted a clip where he promised to keep his hands in his pockets, removing them twice only to have them slapped down by a man on the street.“This election is in your hands,” a caption read on the video, in which Mamdani urged people to register to vote. The video was left to roll at the end as Mamdani laughed at the shtick.Born in Uganda to Indian parents, Mamdani moved to New York City when he was seven years old, and had a long-term interest in politics. Last week, a former classmate shared a video in which she recalled how Mamdani won a “mock presidential election” in 2004. A cricket and soccer player – “he usually played defense or defensive midfield, and would sprint down the field and score”, a former teammate told the Guardian – he was elected to represent an area of Queens in the state assembly in 2021.View image in fullscreenMamdani has bold ideas for what he would do as mayor. In a city with a longstanding affordable housing crisis, he wants to freeze rent increases for people in applicable buildings, and build 200,000 new units over the next 10 years. He says he would eliminate fares on city buses, something which would cost at least $630m but, according to Mamdani, would generate $1.5bn in economic benefits. (New York City has an annual budget of $115.1bn for 2026.) He says he can fund his proposals by increasing the corporate tax rate and bringing in a flat tax on people earning more than a million a year.But Mamdani’s limited political record, more than his proposals, has come under scrutiny as he has flown closer to the sun.There was more than a whiff of jealousy from Mamdani’s opponents during the Democratic debate on 4 June, with even his progressive rivals taking a shot. Jessica Ramos, a state senator – theoretically a more powerful position than Mamdani’s role as state representative – lamented that she had not run for mayor four years earlier, adding: “I thought I needed more experience, but turns out you just need to make good videos.”Ramos’s slight mirrored Cuomo’s persistent refrain that Mamdani lacks the experience to be mayor. As Mamdani has risen in the polls, Cuomo has stepped up the attacks on his rival, painting him as too radical and inexperienced to lead the city in a barrage of TV ads and mailed-out flyers. In one proposed mailer, a pro-Cuomo group appeared to have darkened the skin and beard of Mamdani, who would be New York’s first Muslim mayor, a move Mamdani criticized as “​​blatant Islamophobia”. A spokesperson for the group said the ad had been proposed by a vendor and upon review “it was immediately rejected for production and was subsequently corrected”.For his part, Mamdani has repeatedly sought to tie Cuomo to Trump, pointing out that many of his donors backed Trump in the presidential election.“Oligarchy is on the ballot. Andrew Cuomo is the candidate of a billionaire class that is suffocating our democracy and forcing the working class out of our city,” Mamdani’s campaign said in an email to supporters on Tuesday.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a more pointed critique of his opponent, Mamdani said on the debate stage: “I have never had to resign in disgrace. I have never cut Medicaid, I have never stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from the MTA, I have never hounded the 13 women who credibly accused me of sexual harassment, I have never sued for their gynecological records, and I have never done those things because I am not you, Mr Cuomo.”The New York Democratic primary will use ranked-choice voting, allowing voters to select multiple candidates, which Mamdani hopes could boost his chances. Last week, he announced he was “cross-endorsing” with Brad Lander, a fellow progressive who on Tuesday was arrested by Ice agents while visiting an immigration court.The winner of the primary is not guaranteed to become the 111th mayor of New York, but it is highly likely in a city where registered Democrats heavily outnumber Republicans. The incumbent, Eric Adams, who won the 2021 election as a Democrat but is running this year as an independent candidate, is deeply unpopular in the city. Last year, Adams was charged with taking bribes and accepting foreign campaign contributions. The charges were dropped in April after the Trump administration intervened.While popular with young people and the left of the party, Mamdani has lagged behind Cuomo among Black and Latino voters – though a recent poll showed Mamdani gaining support from both.The Cuomo campaign and its backers have also raised the issue of Mamdani’s criticism of Israel’s war on Gaza. He has said the country is committing genocide, a characterization that Cuomo, a fiercely pro-Israel Democrat who has courted the city’s large Jewish population, has sought to exploit. In a recent post on X, Cuomo all but accused Mamdani of fomenting antisemitism. Mamdani says he has built a coalition including Jewish New Yorkers, and would form a department to investigate hate crimes.In an election where Cuomo’s strategy has been to largely avoid the press and the public, the energy has been with Mamdani.A rally with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York congresswoman and a fellow democratic socialist, drew thousands of people to a music venue in Manhattan in mid-June, and Mamdani’s appearances at hip music venues across the city have drawn enthusiastic crowds.“For the longest time, mayoral candidates have been kind of the same type of guy. Either they’re like legacy New York politics people, or businessmen that kind of pivoted through,” said Tomas Carlson, a 23-year-old Mamdani supporter.“This is the first time in a while where I saw a candidate that had new ideas. And I think the Democratic party in general, we need a sort of fresh breath of air.” More

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      Why establishment Democrats still can’t stomach progressive candidates like Zohran Mamdani | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Who’s afraid of Zohran Mamdani? The answer, it would seem, is the entire establishment. The 33-year-old democratic socialist and New York City mayoral candidate has surged in the polls in recent weeks, netting endorsements not just from progressive voices like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders but also his fellow candidates for the mayoralty, with Brad Lander and Michael Blake taking advantage of the ranked-choice voting system in the primary and cross-endorsing Mamdani’s campaign.With the primary just around the corner, polls have Mamdani closing the gap on Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor of New York. This has spooked the establishment, which is now doing everything it can to stop Mamdani’s rise.Take Michael Bloomberg, who endorsed Cuomo earlier this month and followed this up with a $5m donation to a pro-Cuomo Pac. The largesse appears motivated not by admiration for Cuomo – during his mayoralty, sources told the New York Times that Bloomberg saw Cuomo as “the epitome of the self-interested, horse-trading political culture he has long stood against” – but animosity towards Mamdani and his policies.Mamdani wants to increase taxes on residents earning more than $1m a year, increase corporate taxes and freeze rents: policies that aren’t exactly popular with the billionaire set.Bronx congressman Ritchie Torres (who was once progressive but moved steadily away from that and now receives fundraising assistance from far-right donors) is another establishment Democrat trying to prevent a Mamdani win at all costs. Torres, who makes his pro-Israel positions explicit, has criticized Mamdani for pro-Palestine comments. Torres has even said he won’t run for governor in 2026 if a socialist like Mamdani becomes the mayor because it will “revolutionize the political landscape”.The New York Times’ editorial board is also aghast at Mamdani’s sudden popularity. On Monday, it published a piece urging New Yorkers to completely leave the candidate off their ranked-choice ballot, arguing that the assemblyman is woefully underqualified for office and has a bunch of wacky progressive ideas that will never work including free buses and frozen rent. The Times, which announced almost a year ago that it will not make endorsements in local elections, did not officially endorse a candidate but it certainly didn’t tell people not to put Cuomo on the ballot. It seems being accused of sexually harassing multiple women and then going after those women in an aggressive and intrusive way (including demanding gynecological records) isn’t as disqualifying as progressive policies. And, of course, the sexual harassment is just one of many scandals that Cuomo has weathered, including allegations he covered up nursing home deaths during the pandemic.The Atlantic also came out with an anti-Mamdani piece, albeit one that was more subtle and which focused on the process rather than the personality. Staff writer Annie Lowrey argued that ranked-choice voting in a mayor primary, used by New York City since 2021, is not truly democratic: “Without ranked-choice voting, Cuomo would probably steamroll his competition. With ranked-choice voting, Mamdani could defeat him.” While there are problems with ranked choice (as there are with first-past-the-post systems), I think the bigger democratic threat might be a system in which a billionaire can swoop in with millions to prop up their preferred candidate at the last minute.All of this is anti-Mamdani mobilization is depressingly predictable: the Democratic establishment is allergic to fresh blood and new thinking. Shortly after Trump won the election last year, and the Democrats also lost the House and the Senate, Ocasio-Cortez launched a bid to become the lead Democrat on the House oversight committee, which is an important minority leadership position. Ocasio-Cortez has become a lot more establishment-friendly since getting into power in 2018 (New York Magazine even decreed in 2023 that she is just a “Regular Old Democrat Now”), but she’s still not centrist enough for the Democrats, it seems. Nancy Pelosi reportedly sabotaged the 35-year-old congresswoman’s ambitions and ensured that 74-year-old Gerry Connolly, who had esophagus cancer at the time, got the job instead. Connolly died age 75 earlier this year, becoming the sixth House Democrat to have died in office in 12 months.Then there’s the Democratic backlash to David Hogg, the young Parkland shooting survivor turned politico. The 25-year-old was briefly vice-chair of the Democratic national committee but stepped on powerful toes by criticizing the party for its “seniority politics”. Hogg, who has said that he’s worried about his generation losing faith in democracy, pitched competitive primaries which challenged Democratic incumbents who had become too complacent, injecting new blood into the party. This did not go down well and various members of the DNC had voted to hold new vice-chair elections that could have led to his ouster. Instead of waiting to be kicked out, Hogg recently said he would step away from the role.I am not a Mamdani evangelist, but while some of his ideas are a little pie in the sky, he’s authentic and ready to fight for normal people rather than corporate interests. Sure, he doesn’t have a lot of experience. But he has a huge amount of potential. He’s managed to get at least 26,000 New Yorkers to volunteer for him. And I don’t mean they’ve sent a couple of text messages: one week they knocked on almost 100,000 doors. Michael Spear, a professor of history and political science at a Brooklyn college, told Jacobin the degree to which Mamdani’s campaign has galvanized New York City voters is unprecedented: “I don’t think there is anything like it” in New York history.Nobody in the Democratic establishment is quite so delusional that they think the party is doing great. Everyone knows there is a need for change and yet they seem keen to sabotage anyone who might bring that change. Instead of rallying around fresh talent like Mamdani that can clearly mobilize young voters, the Democrats are mulling a $20m plan to try to manufacture a “Joe Rogan of the left” who can connect with young men, rather than support an authentic grassroots candidate who is already connecting with them.Will centrist interests prevail in New York? We won’t know until, at the very earliest, late on primary night, 24 June. Whatever happens, though, you can bet that Democrats will continue to do their very best to kneecap anyone who wants to drag them way from their obsession with doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. More

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      New York mayoral candidate accuses Cuomo donors of altering photo in act of ‘blatant Islamophobia’

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      Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist state assemblyman waging a progressive bid to become mayor of New York City, has accused donors to the frontrunner Andrew Cuomo of “blatant Islamophobia” after a mailer from their Super Pac altered Mamdani’s image giving him a darker, bushier beard.Mamdani, 33, posted a closeup of his face as featured in the mailer from the Cuomo-backing group Fix the City alongside the original photograph from which it was drawn. In the transition, the image’s visual contrast appears to be manipulated, slightly lightening Mamdani’s skin but also giving him the appearance of a longer and significantly fuller beard.The mailer, first revealed by a reporter from the Forward, was aimed at Jewish voters. It accuses Mamdani, who is openly critical of Israel’s war in Gaza which he calls a genocide, of refusing to recognize Israel and supporting the boycott movement against the state.A spokesperson for Fix the City, Liz Benjamin, said that the mailer had not been released in the form that Mamdani found objectionable. “The mailer was proposed by a vendor; upon review it was immediately rejected for production and was subsequently corrected.”She added: “We are disturbed that this was posted online without our consent.”Mamdani, who would become the first Muslim mayor of New York should he prevail in the Democratic primary on 24 June and go on to win the general election in November, said the altered image amounted to “blatant Islamophobia”. He added a dig at Cuomo, referring to his big money donors who also back Donald Trump and the president’s Make America great again movement.The image, Mamdani said, was a demonstration of “the kind of racism that explains why Maga billionaires support [Cuomo’s] campaign”.Mamdani also cast the altered image as a sign that Cuomo and his donors were afraid of losing the mayoral race. Recent polls have suggested a tightening contest, with one recent internal poll, disputed by the Cuomo campaign, indicating that Mamdani was edging in front.The New York mayoral race is being followed very closely in political circles, partly because the city is the largest in the US and partly because the clash between Cuomo and Mamdani could be a referendum on the future of the Democratic party. Cuomo, 67, is a consummate machine politician who was elected as governor three times before resigning in 2021 following accusations of sexual harassment which he denies.He has been endorsed by Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of the city.Mamdani, by contrast, is a progressive state lawmaker from Queens who immigrated to the US from Uganda when he was seven. He was elected as a member of the New York state assembly four years ago.A self-identified democratic socialist, he was endorsed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the leading progressive member of Congress. He is running on a platform of making the city affordable to working New Yorkers, through a combination of rent freezes, free childcare and free and faster bus transport. More

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      Self-identifying ‘hot girls’ are mobilizing to elect a progressive as New York City mayor

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      “Hot girls” may not be a pollster-approved voting bloc in the way that young men or the college-educated are, but since the 2020 election the demographic has held a particular status – at least for the very online.It started in 2020, when the model Emily Ratajkowski officially endorsed Bernie Sanders’s pre-pandemic presidential campaign. Inspired by Ratajkowski, self-professed hot girls piled on their endorsements, posting selfies with the hashtag #HotGirlsForBernie. Some saw it as a way to counter the persistent “Bernie bro” narrative, a rebuke of the idea that Sanders’s fandom consisted solely of obnoxious, socialist-in-name-only men who lived their lives on Twitter.Five years later, “Hot Girls for Bernie” is a relic, one of the last gasps of hope young progressives felt before the reality of Trump 2.0 took hold. Nevertheless the phrase has returned, this time in support of Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old democratic socialist and state assemblyman from Queens who is running for New York City mayor. This week, a social media account called “Hot Girls 4 Zohran” dropped on X and Instagram to give away free Mamdani swag.View image in fullscreenThough the account is unaffiliated with the Mamdani’s official campaign (and Mamdani’s representative declined to comment), it speaks to the grassroots enthusiasm fueling the millennial’s run for office.Mamdani does not have the widespread name recognition of contenders such as the current mayor, Eric Adams, who is running as an independent after a series of scandals, or Andrew Cuomo, who resigned as governor of New York in 2021 after facing multiple sexual harassment accusations, which he denied. But Mamdani’s campaign has tapped a hyper-progressive wellspring by putting forth policies that sound ripe for a Fox News scare segment. They include increasing the city’s minimum wage from $16.50 to $30, opening city-owned grocery stores, and making childcare and bus fares free.Mamdani, a failed rapper and son of the indie filmmaker Mira Nair, is most at home on social media, especially TikTok. He exudes a kind of nerdy-cool vibe, which has earned him a GQ profile and a spread in Interview Magazine, where he fielded questions from New York luminaries such as Chloë Sevigny, Cynthia Nixon, Eileen Myles and Julio Torres. Last month, more than 18,000 citywide donors helped his campaign secure $8m, hitting the fundraising limit set by the city.Hot Girls 4 Zohran is run by two friends, Cait, 24, and Kaif, 28, who live in Brooklyn and did not want their last names published due to privacy concerns. Cait, who is very active on X, says she has been harassed by users who don’t agree with her political opinions. But she’s fine with her face being out there – she posed for the account next to a box of Hot Girls 4 Zohran T-shirts.Cait and Kaif say they are supporting Mamdani because he wants to make the city more affordable for the working class and courts individual donors over the super-rich. “We’re both fairly skeptical of institutional politicians, especially given the last election,” said Cait, who works in marketing. “We really just want to get his name out there.”And hot girls help. Not in an ogling way, but as a tongue-in-cheek way for voters to self-identify and convince others to do so too. “It’s empowering for women, and it brings us together,” Cait said. “There’s an intersectionality to it.” Kaif says that they use the “girl” descriptor liberally – it’s more of a mindset than a gender classification. “So many men have also reached out to us asking for T-shirts,” he said.Cait was in high school when Hot Girls for Bernie went viral. “I was still pretty young, but I noticed it even back then,” she said.She has Danaka Katovich to thank for the inspiration. In 2020, after seeing playful memes about Ratajkowski’s support for Sanders, the then student at DePaul University in Chicago made a group chat for “hot girl” Bernie supporters. Katovich told Vox that 50 friends joined the group, which dropped a social media campaign featuring equally sexy and silly selfies.“I’m surprised people are still doing this,” said Katovich, who is now 25 and working for a feminist non-profit aimed at ending US warfare and imperialism. “Back then, journalists asked me: ‘What does Hot Girls for Bernie mean to you?’ I was 20 – it didn’t mean anything to me, since it started as a joke.”Katovich remembers people criticizing the “hot girls” label for being glib or exclusionary, but she insists it was inclusive. “Anyone could post a picture, non-binary people were included,” she said. “Sure, there were some dudes who would comment on a picture and say, ‘You’re actually more of a seven,’ but at the time, it didn’t feel like anyone who mattered really cared what you looked like at all.”View image in fullscreenKari Winter, a professor in the global gender and sexuality studies department at the University at Buffalo, agreed that “hot girls” can mean whatever posters want. “Although I personally would not use the term ‘hot’ or ‘girl’ as a trend, I like the way young women, LGBT, non-binary and disabled people use it to claim their own multi-faceted existence in the world,” she said. “It reminds me of a time when a lot of us had bumper stickers and T-shirts that said, ‘This is what a feminist looks like,’ and the point was to be inclusive, because feminists look like everything and anything.”A recent AARP New York and Siena College poll shows that Cuomo holds a strong lead of 34% in the Democratic primary pack, thanks to older voters. Mamdani follows at 16%, and 20% of Democratic voters say they are undecided among the nine total candidates. The June primary is ranked-choice voting, a confusing system that has New Yorkers listing candidates in order of preference. The winner will probably face off against Adams and a Republican in November.Despite Cuomo’s early lead, Winter says that Mamdani’s intense focus on courting working-class voters can serve as a lesson to Democrats. “Democrats need to understand that the way to energize people is not to keep trying to play to some mythical middle, but to galvanize people who are so sick of corruption and the pandering to wealth,” she said. “The only way forward is to galvanize people who care about common people and the common good.”View image in fullscreenThe Democratic national convention might not recognize a hot girl delegation, but Bernie evangelists say the movement wasn’t all frivolous. Hadiya Afzal, a former DePaul University student who was active in the Sanders group chat, says that many of her friends went on to work in progressive politics and still dedicate much of their time to the causes they care about.“I think that’s what folks should take away from this kind of campaign: at the end of the day, it’s about the policies,” Afzal said. “There would have been no Hot Girls for Bernie without an actual policy platform. That’s the backbone of what made it meaningful.”Over at Hot Girls 4 Zohran, Cait and Kaif want people do more with the T-shirts than pose in them for social media. “If you wear the shirt out and about, then it spreads the word, and we really want to mobilize voters of all ages,” Kaif said. Ultimately, he and Cait hope the moniker will aid the candidate in his goal of building “the single largest volunteer operation” of any New York mayoral race ever. With a force of 10,000 door knockers, Mamdani is well on his way.One of those volunteers is Joshua Leirer, a 37-year-old who lives in Ridgewood, Queens. When Leirer canvassed in one of Brooklyn’s parks in March, there were so many volunteers that they had to spread into the “outskirts”. And, crucially, “the volunteers are hot.”“The people I talked to were really cool and friendly,” Leirer said. “A lot of glasses, a lot of beanies. I would call it a Brooklyn hot.” More

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      Andrew Cuomo enters race for New York mayor as frontrunner – but trailing baggage

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      Abraham Rios, a 76-year-old army veteran and retiree, regularly meets friends at a coffee shop around the corner from his home in Brooklyn, and that is about all he does, he says.The Puerto Rico native who served in the Vietnam war is satisfied with the money he gets from social security and enjoys life, but he would like to see more police in his Clinton Hill neighborhood, where he has lived since 1964.Rios thinks Andrew Cuomo, who on 1 March entered the New York City mayoral race in an attempt to resurrect a seemingly dead political career, can make that happen.“He is a very good leader,” Rios said of Cuomo, who resigned as New York governor in 2021 after facing sexual harassment allegations, which he denied. “He made his mistakes, like all of us have,” but “the governor built bridges. He helped the poor. He helped everybody.”Cuomo’s long history in New York politics and name recognition has helped him storm to a lead in a candidate field featuring an incumbent – Eric Adams – whom many see as corrupt, and a large number of lesser-known candidates who are struggling to get much traction.The scandal that brought Cuomo down and his controversial handling of the Covid-19 pandemic probably won’t have a significant impact on his chances of winning, New York political analysts say, but some voters don’t like what they viewed as his heavy-handed approach as governor and don’t think he is progressive enough.“The judging of the mayor is going to be determined not on incidents in their past but who we feel has got the best chance of leading the city when things that are not predictable happen,” like the pandemic and the September 11 terrorist attacks, said Mitchell Moss, New York University professor of urban policy and planning. “He is the only candidate” with experience “at the federal level, the state level and who understands how to make the tough decisions”.The Democratic mayoral primary, which will probably determine who wins the general election in the blue city, is scheduled for 24 June. The city will again use a ranked-choice system in which voters pick their preferred candidates from one to five, though they do not need to select more than one. If someone captures more than half the votes, they win; if not, the candidate with the fewest first-round votes is eliminated, and their supporters’ votes go to their second choice. That process continues until one candidate has a majority of the votes.Cuomo, who for months was rumored to be considering running, had a wide lead in February polls, with about a third of voters in two surveys saying he was their favorite candidate among nine Democrats, while the runner-up in each only received 10%.Other candidates include Adams, who faced a federal indictment until the US justice department dropped the charges against him, it appears, in exchange for his help implementing Donald Trump’s immigration policy; the current and former city comptrollers, Brad Lander and Scott Stringer; the New York state assembly member Zohran Mamdani; and the state senator Jessica Ramos, among others.In announcing his candidacy, Cuomo said the city was in crisis.“You feel it when you walk down the street and try not to make eye contact with a mentally ill homeless person or when the anxiety rises up in your chest as you’re walking down into the subway,” Cuomo said in a video. “These conditions exist not as an act of God, but rather as an act of our political leaders, or, more precisely, the lack of intelligent action by many of our political leaders.”View image in fullscreenAs governor, Cuomo allegedly bullied those who disagreed with him. While that made it hard for him to find allies when he faced calls to resign, it also contributed to the perception that he is a strong leader, said Doug Muzzio, a retired political science professor who worked at Baruch College.Meanwhile, “the incumbent is seen to be a weak person who is in the pocket of a president who the voters despise”, Muzzio said.Cuomo can also point to his infrastructure accomplishments, Moss said, which include rebuilding a bridge that connects Brooklyn and Queens, an overhaul of La Guardia airport and construction of the Moynihan Train Hall.Kim Grover, a graphic designer who lives in the East Village, said she was concerned about the allegations that Cuomo sexually harassed 11 women and that his administration underreported how many people died in nursing homes during the pandemic.Still, Grover thinks Cuomo stood up to Trump during the pandemic – and in doing so, to many, became a hero. She now worries about maintaining New Yorkers’ civil rights and sanctuary city policy, which keeps local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration officers, something Trump and Republicans have attacked.“In terms of his excellent delivery and communication skills, my first thought would be that [Cuomo] would be a good person to stand his ground against President Trump,” said Grover, 67, who has not decided whom she will support.Gabe Russell, a petitioner for a Democrat in the comptroller race – whom he declined to name – did not like Cuomo even before the Covid and sexual harassment scandals, and Cuomo is not on his list of five candidates. His top two choices are Mamdani and Lander.Cuomo “was very cozy with the real estate lobby … and that is always a bad sign”, said Russell, 33, who wants the government to use mathematics to prevent gerrymandering. “New York is one of the bluest states. We should have been doing far more lefty stuff than we ever do.”Russell also thinks Cuomo could lose support, citing the 2021 mayoral election, when Andrew Yang was the frontrunner and then fell to fourth place.Elena Siyanko, a longtime leader of arts organizations who moved to New York in 1996, said the city was once a “generative place in terms of culture, where artists could afford to live” but had become a place “for hi-tech and financial services”.An East Village resident, Siyanko blames Cuomo for the safety issues he now decries because of how he cut funding for social services. For example, to address a budget shortfall, he discontinued $65m in annual payments for a rental assistance program, while also refusing to raise taxes on the state’s wealthiest residents.“He is in this neoliberal camp of removing any safety net and economic support from public life,” said Siyanko, 53, who immigrated from Kyiv, Ukraine, and is undecided in the mayoral race. “We just need to try to get to a corruption-free candidate in this chapter of our life in New York City.” More

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      Trump administration briefing: pro-Ukraine rallies across US as Trump officials fume at Zelenskyy

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      The disastrous meeting between US president Donald Trump and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House on Friday has catalysed a series of pro-Ukraine protests across the US.Protesters took to the streets in New York, Los Angeles and Boston, with hundreds gathering to express support for Ukraine and Zelenskyy.Hundreds of protesters also gathered in Waitsfield, Vermont, on Saturday to oppose vice-president JD Vance’s visit to the state for a ski trip with his family.The demonstration had been planned earlier in the week by the Mad River Valley chapter of Indivisible, a grassroots group, but additional protesters said they were motivated to join after watching Vance and Trump’s combative Oval Office meeting.Pro-Ukraine rallies in multiple US cities after chaotic White House meetingVideos posted on social networks showed hundreds of demonstrators gathered in New York’s Times Square, many carrying the blue-and-yellow flag of Ukraine on their backs. In Los Angeles county, a pro-Ukraine crowd rallied in front of a SpaceX’s facility, and protesters in Boston held an “emergency rally” for “fair peace” for Ukraine at Boston Common.Read the full storyTrump officials fume at Zelenskyy for disregarding advice before meetingInside the Trump White House, officials blamed Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, for the meltdown in the Oval Office on Friday, and expressed frustration that he pushed for security guarantees even though the US had made clear they wanted to negotiate that later, according to people familiar with the matter.Read the full storyFiring of watchdog agency chief illegal and would give ‘license to bully officials’, court rulesA US judge on Saturday declared Trump’s firing of the head of a federal watchdog agency illegal in an early test of the scope of presidential power likely to be decided at the US supreme court.Read the full storyKennedy Jr backtracks and says US measles outbreak is now a ‘top priority’Two days after initially downplaying the outbreak as “not unusual”, the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, on Friday said he recognized the serious impact of the ongoing measles epidemic in Texas – in which a child died recently – and that the government was providing resources, including protective vaccines.Read the full storyAndrew Cuomo announces run for mayor of New York CityFormer New York state governor Andrew Cuomo announced on Saturday he would run for New York City mayor, an attempt to come back from a sexual harassment scandal that forced him to resign more than three years earlier.Read the full storyEmail shows Musk ally is moving to close office behind free tax-filing program at IRSAn Elon Musk ally installed in the US government said in a late-night email going into Saturday that the office behind a popular free online tax-filing option would be shuttered – and its employees would be let go.Read the full storyMedicaid recipients fear ‘buzzsaw cuts’ for Trump’s agendaRepublicans are considering a rollback of the federal social safety net, particularly Medicaid, which has nearly 80 million enrollees in all 50 states. The budget plan proposes an $880bn reduction in funding for the insurance over the next decade, an amount experts warn would hollow out the program.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Civil rights attorneys sued the Trump administration on Saturday to prevent it from transferring 10 undocumented immigrants detained in the US to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

      A FedEx cargo airplane caught on fire after striking a bird shortly after the plane’s departure from Newark, New Jersey, on Saturday morning, according to officials.

      A decision by regulators to extend the life of two of the oldest reactors in the US decades beyond their original permits has elevated the risk of a nuclear disaster in heavily populated south Florida, environmental groups are warning.

      Singer Angie Stone, known for her hit Wish I Didn’t Miss You, has died in a car crash at the age of 63. More

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      Andrew Cuomo announces run for mayor of New York City

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      Former New York state governor Andrew Cuomo on Saturday announced a run for mayor of New York City, an attempt to come back from a sexual harassment scandal that forced him to resign more than three years earlier.Cuomo, 77, served as governor from 2011 to 2021, guiding the state through the worst, deadliest months of the Covid-19 crisis. But he was forced to resign in August of his final year as governor when an investigation commissioned by the New York attorney general, Letitia James, found he had sexually harassed at least 11 women during his time in office.The former governor, a Democrat, is aiming to unseat incumbent the New York City mayor, Eric Adams, who has been grappling with criminal corruption charges that the US justice department is seeking to have lifted – pending a judicial sign-off – at the behest of Donald Trump’s second presidential administration.In a campaign video announcing his mayoral candidacy, Cuomo verbally painted the so-called Big Apple as a city in crisis.“The first to solving a problem is having the strength, having the courage, to recognize it, and we know that today our New York City is in trouble,” he said, pointing to empty stores fronts, graffiti, grime, an influx of migrants that has taxed municipal infrastructure, and violent crime in some instances carried out by people who are mentally ill and lack access to treatment.“The city just feels threatening, out of control,” Cuomo said in his more than 17-minute announcement video. “These conditions exist not as an act of God, but rather as an act of our political leaders, or more precisely the lack of intelligent action by our political leaders.”The city faces a ranked-choice Democratic primary in April now dominated by two political figures with tarnished reputations, both betting that voters will overlook claims against them as politically motivated – or, in Cuomo’s case, that sexual harassment allegations which he vigorously denied have lost their power to derail political careers several years since the dawn of the #MeToo era.“How can you have a report that says 11 cases [of sexual harassment], and then it goes through law enforcement and they find no cases?” Cuomo said at a South Bronx church in March 2022, calling the report “a fraud”.A former staffer, Charlotte Bennett, later dropped her sexual harassment lawsuit against Cuomo, shortly before she was set to give her deposition in the case.A former Cuomo top aide who claims Cuomo made unwanted sexual advances towards her in 2000 told the New York Post that “women’s rights” will suffer if he is elected NYC’s next mayor.“Women haven’t done enough to toughen laws to protect women from such immoral, unethical and what should be illegal behavior by men in positions of power, such as Cuomo,” Karen Hinton said Saturday, adding that the mayoral election “should be an opportunity … to give women a strong, powerful voice” in city government that it “won’t get it if Adams or Cuomo is elected”.In his statement, Cuomo briefly addressed the end of his governorship, which included claims that he had allowed Covid-19 to fatally tear through state nursing homes and then attempted to cover it up.“Did I always do everything right in my years of government service? Of course not,” he said. “Would I do some things differently knowing what I know now? Certainly. Did I make mistakes? Some painfully. Definitely. And I believe I learned from them and that I am a better person for. And I hope to show you that every day.”He added: “I will fight Washington and Albany to make sure we get our fair share of funding, and to protect the rights and values that New Yorkers hold dear: that we believe that any discrimination by race, color or creed is anti-American.”Adams, a Democratic star when elected in 2021, has seen his support dwindle amid a swirl of scandals that ensnared some of his closest confidantes.Four deputy mayors recently resigned after it was claimed that the justice department’s request to drop its criminal indictment against Adams amounted to a “quid pro quo” with the Trump administration leaning on the mayor to help with federal deportation efforts.In a crowded field of mayoral candidates, Cuomo benefits from high name recognition, with 32% of those polled picking him as their favorite candidate. Other candidates – including former city comptroller Scott Stringer, incumbent city comptroller Brad Lander, state senator Jessica Ramos and Adams – are at 10% or less.There’s a dynastic component to Cuomo’s entry into the race. His father, Mario Cuomo, also served as New York governor, but he failed to win a bid for New York City mayor in 1977.Since stepping down as governor, the younger Cuomo has maintained his public profile, visiting Black churches and Jewish community groups. Both are constituencies where Adams and Cuomo are bound to seek key voter support.“Leading in practically every public poll so far, even before announcing his candidacy, Cuomo appears poised to prove that he has managed to overcome scandals that may have felled other politicians after his yearslong dedication to staying in politics and a series of legal victories that he has framed as vindication,” the journal City and State recently opined. More

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      in US Politics

      How a faded New York hotel became a lethal political battleground

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      Manhattan’s Roosevelt hotel, with its faded Renaissance revival facade, last week became the focal point of a fast-moving political battle enveloping New York City’s mayor, the state governor and the department of justice in the service of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda.Trump’s new head of homeland security, Kristi Noem, claims the formerly luxurious 1,025-room hotel, now a shelter for mostly Central and South American immigrants, is a “base of operations” for Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan prison gang.Noem’s head of immigration enforcement, Tom Homan, wants Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents to be able to enter the hotel, but New York’s sanctuary city laws prevent New York police from cooperating.The Trump administration, under Elon Musk’s cost-cutting Doge team, claimed that $80m had recently been transferred to New York to house migrants, including in the Roosevelt, and clawed it back.The Roosevelt is a grimy backdrop to an extraordinary battle that has pitted the city’s Democrat mayor, Eric Adams, seeking re-election this year, against Governor Kathy Hochul, and has had career federal prosecutors, Democrat and Republican, at each other’s­ throats over claims of bias and corruption.Late Friday, the justice department moved to dismiss corruption charges against Mayor Adams, the latest move in a legal saga that led over two days to the resignation of seven career prosecutors and left a justice department in chaos.View image in fullscreenDuring his campaign Trump vowed to “save” New York, claiming that businesses were fleeing hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who were sucking up public resources. Last year, the city estimated that the migration crisis has cost New York $5bn in two years, and costs are expected to double in 2025.Last week, the justice department in Washington sent a proposal to New York’s southern district to shelve an indictment against Adams on corruption charges of accepting illegal campaign donations in exchange for political favours, arguing that it would interfere with his ability to help the administration tackle illegal immigration.Democrats claimed the move amounted to using the law to influence an elected politician. It was characterised by one of Adams’ prosecutors as a “dismissal-with-leverage” proposal, a corrupt exchange for allowing federal agents to deport tens of thousands of migrants in the city against sanctuary city laws.Danielle Sassoon, acting US attorney in New York, said she could not “agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations”, and resigned. Emil Bove, acting deputy US attorney general, accepted her resignation, alleging that she was “incapable of fairly and impartially” reviewing the case.Hochul said she was considering removing Adams as mayor over the alleged deal and claims Trump’s department of justice “is already showing they’re corrupt”. Homan called Hochul an “embarrassment” who “needs to be removed”. Progressive Bronx Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said: “This corruption poses a real threat to the people of the city.”View image in fullscreenThe escalating drama kicked off last month when Damian Williams, the former Democrat prosecutor who brought corruption charges against Adams, wrote that New York was “being led with a broken ethical compass” – seemingly a reference to Adams.That was a red flag to the incoming administration, whose chief executive is still smarting over a state conviction on a scheme to obscure hush-money payments to a porn actor and an $83m civil judgment for defaming writer E Jean Carroll and has seemingly found an ally in the Democrat mayor.“We are living in an era where political favoritism overrides the legal process in pursuit of political gains. This marks a dangerous new phase where selective law enforcement, applied at whim, is a weapon,” said Mike Quinn, a lawyer involved in the drive to hold Sackler family members accountable for the opioid crisis.Adams, like Trump, claims the criminal actions brought against him are politically motivated. The two are growing closer, with Adams visiting Trump at his Florida estate.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe impact on Adam’s re-election prospects are hard to read. A recent poll ahead of the Democrat primary in April had the mayor in third or fourth place, behind Trump’s arch enemy Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor who resigned in 2021 amid a sexual harassment scandal. Cuomo has not yet officially declared. In the running also is Zohran Mamdani, a progressive Democrat, who has vowed to lower the cost of living for working-class New Yorkers.A poll last month found that 73% of likely primary voters held an “unfavorable” view of Adams, with fears about subway crime, highlighted in December when a homeless woman was fatally set on fire in a subway car, among the factors behind their dissatisfaction.“New Yorkers have the idea that the mayor turns on the lights in the morning and turns them off at night,” says Democrat consultant Hank Sheinkopf. “They instil in him tremendous values and powers. When he fails to meet them on either side of the aisle, people lose their minds, and that’s what’s happening in New York right now.”But Adams has scored some wins, including reducing a post-Covid rat infestation by introducing plastic rubbish bins. “Everybody wants the city to function, and if it doesn’t function it doesn’t really matter what your ideological bent is,” says Sheinkopf. “It’s about how the garbage gets picked up, how you don’t feel threatened by homeless people and how your life functions.”But the left also dislikes Adams as a matter of reflex. “It’s a natural response, because anything Trump touches is right by definition,” Sheinkopf points out.If Adams loses the Democrat nomination, he could run as a Republican, much as three-term mayor Mike Bloomberg did in 2002. New York has only had four Republican mayors in a century, each one elected after a crisis.The crisis this time, says Sheinkopf, “is that New York is out of control. Corruption, crime and the sense that things have broken down.” But he doubts Adams is the one to fix it. “He created it, so it’s a hard sell”.One scenario, hinted at by City Hall insiders, is that under a deal to drop the Adams corruption charges, the mayor could then switch party in a bid to stop Trump’s arch enemy, Cuomo.Trump and Cuomo have fought bitterly over the years, including in 2019, when Trump called his brother Chris, a former CNN host, Fredo after the hapless brother in The Godfather. “If I wasn’t governor of New York, I would have decked him. Period,” Cuomo said. More