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      Mamdani Wins Backing of Major Health Care Union That Had Endorsed Cuomo

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      Local 1199, which represents 200,000 health care workers in New York City, rescinded its support of Andrew Cuomo and is now endorsing Zohran Mamdani for mayor.Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, the upstart democratic socialist who convincingly won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City, was endorsed on Friday by the city’s powerful health care union, Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union.Since his win last month, Mr. Mamdani has quickly coalesced much of the city’s organized labor behind him, receiving endorsements from unions representing millions of teachers, hotel workers and nurses, among other professions.Many of these unions, including Local 1199, had endorsed former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who is now running in the general election as a third-party candidate.The health care union’s initial support of Mr. Cuomo was seen as a sign of the longtime alliance between the former governor and the union’s former leader, George Gresham. The two had a tight relationship going back to Mr. Cuomo’s time in office, when he influenced state policies to aide Mr. Gresham and his members.But with Mr. Gresham voted out of office this spring, the union’s executive board voted on Friday to endorse Mr. Mamdani, with the union’s recently elected president, Yvonne Armstrong, lauding Mr. Mamdani’s “plan to ensure frontline caregivers can continue working and living in our city.”“Working people across New York City are uniting to defend our neighborhoods and our city from unprecedented attacks from extremist politicians and their billionaire donors who are taking away health care, ripping families apart and endangering our democracy,” Ms. Armstrong added in a statement.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      13 Law Enforcement Unions Endorse Eric Adams in N.Y.C. Mayor’s Race

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      Mr. Adams, who was elected on a law-and-order campaign message, is seeking to portray Zohran Mamdani, this year’s Democratic nominee, as weak on crime.Four years ago, Eric Adams used a law-and-order campaign message to help propel himself into City Hall. On Thursday, many of those responsible for law and order in New York City came together to try to keep him there.Thirteen law enforcement unions endorsed Mayor Adams’s third-party bid for re-election, filling the steps of City Hall in a show of support. The participants were not in uniform, but held aloft signs displaying the seals or badges of their unions. Others waved American flags. One person held a handwritten sign: “Make Adams Great Again.”The show of support helped mask some of the turbulence surrounding Mr. Adams’s leadership of the Police Department.He cycled through three police commissioners before Jessica Tisch’s appointment in November, the first mayor to have that many in a single term since the 1930s. On Wednesday, one of those former commissioners filed a lawsuit accusing Mr. Adams and top police officials of running the Police Department like a criminal enterprise.The mayor, however, has tried to focus attention on the city’s receding crime numbers as a rallying point to bolster his bid for a second term, and as an argument against the candidacy of Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee and a democratic socialist. Mr. Adams argued that Mr. Mamdani’s progressive policies will hurt businesses and make the city less safe.Mr. Mamdani, for example, supports a plan to reduce the number of people held in the Rikers Island jail complex and replace it with borough-based jails. He also in 2020 questioned whether the city should use police officers to respond to domestic violence calls.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Faith Leaders Can Now Endorse. Will That Swing the NYC Mayor’s Race?

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      The I.R.S. has cleared faith leaders to endorse political candidates to their congregations. New York clergy are wrestling with the choice to use their newfound influence.Four days after his remarkable showing in New York’s Democratic mayoral primary, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani appeared at the Harlem headquarters of a group headed by the Rev. Al Sharpton. He acknowledged the leaders and biblical scriptures that fueled his campaign.“Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning,” Mr. Mamdani said, a reference to Psalm 30:5, a scripture that is especially popular in Black churches. “And it has been night for far too long in this city.”Mr. Mamdani did not come to the gathering on June 28, for the National Action Network, explicitly seeking an endorsement from the faith leaders in the crowd. But under a new rule change from the I.R.S., he and his opponents in the mayoral race may be able to secure one without tax repercussions.Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee seeking to become the first Muslim mayor of New York City, regularly campaigned at mosques.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesThe I.R.S. said in a court filing last week that houses of worship could endorse political candidates to their congregations without losing their tax-exempt status. The move was initially seen as the agency’s formal termination of a longstanding but spottily enforced rule against campaigning from the pulpit.But in New York, the ruling could also open up a new front in the city’s heated mayoral race, offering candidates the chance to formally consolidate support from not only faith leaders but their congregations.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      N.Y.C. Panel Withdraws Proposal to Switch to Open Primaries

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      The panel, created by Mayor Eric Adams, said it would introduce other ballot initiatives, but not a proposal that would allow all voters to participate in primaries regardless of party.The primary elections that New York City uses to pick its mayors will remain unchanged, after a special panel that had been formulating a switch to an open primary system said on Wednesday that it would not put the proposal on the ballot this fall.Under the proposal, all registered voters, regardless of their party affiliation, could participate in primary elections. The 13-member panel, called a Charter Revision Commission, said it had decided not to put the proposal before voters because there was no consensus among civic leaders as to what the new primary model should look like.Richard R. Buery Jr., the chairman of the commission, which was created by Mayor Eric Adams, said in a statement that he was “personally disappointed” in the decision and hoped the issue might be revisited in the future.“I hope civic leaders will build on the progress that we have made this year, develop greater consensus and advance a proposal to voters prior to the next citywide election,” Mr. Buery said.In a 135-page report released earlier this month, which outlined the open-primary plan and other proposals, the commission acknowledged that some members of the panel felt that this year was not the right time to introduce such a major change.One reason to delay a move to an open primary system, the report said, was that New York had only recently enacted a big change to its elections — ranked-choice voting — that some voters still struggled to understand.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Adams Eclipses Mamdani in Recent Fund-Raising, as Cuomo Lags Behind

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      Mayor Eric Adams reported raising $1.5 million over the last month, but his inability to qualify for matching funds may hamper his re-election bid.When Eric Adams appeared at a campaign fund-raiser in Florida earlier this month with people who are aligned with a Young Republicans group and President Trump, the event seemed incongruous for a sitting Democratic mayor of New York City.But this is no ordinary mayor’s race.As Mr. Adams makes a long-shot re-election bid as an independent candidate in November, he has begun to expand his fund-raising network to try to compete with the Democratic nominee, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani.The latest fund-raising period in the race suggests that the mayor still holds sway with some donors — even if they are outside the typical New York donor world.Of the $1.5 million that Mr. Adams raised during the most recent filing period, from June 10 to July 11, nearly half came from outside New York City. Eight donations arrived from Florida on the day of the fund-raiser, totaling $2,325.Mr. Mamdani also posted a strong fund-raising haul during that period. He raised $852,000, including $256,000 that is eligible for public matching funds, effectively boosting his total to $1.1 million, according to his campaign. And in a sign of his growing national stature, roughly 45 percent of his contributions came from outside New York State. He now has just over $2.6 million on hand.Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, in contrast, raised just $64,000 during the recent fund-raising period, in part because he was not actively fund-raising while he mulled whether to continue his campaign as an independent in November. He has almost $1.2 million on hand, and, after releasing a video on Monday confirming his intention to run, is expected to now start focusing on raising money.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mamdani, Be a Convener, Not a Commentator

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      Dear New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani:I have been watching you tortuously try to explain to pro-Israel New Yorkers that your readiness to defend the phrase “globalize the intifada” was not antisemitic or meant to favor the elimination of the Jewish state.You have said that it’s not a phrase you use but have not condemned its use by others, insisting that it means different things to different people. Going even further on Tuesday, in a meeting with New York business leaders, you reportedly said you would “discourage” use of the phrase.It seems to me that you have gotten yourself tied up in knots on this issue, pulled between your supporters and your critics. May I offer two pieces of advice that have guided me over four decades of navigating this conflict:First, if you are discussing a mantra — like “globalize the intifada” — that takes 15 minutes to explain why it doesn’t mean what it obviously means, I’d suggest that you distance yourself further from that mantra.May I offer an alternative? “Two states for two people.” It works really well with drums — “Two states, for two people.”While that solution may be a long shot, it has the virtue of being the only viable, just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — one that many Americans still support, and one, if this Gaza war ever ends, I believe many Israelis and Palestinians and Arabs and Muslims and Jews in New York City will as well. There is no other viable alternative. There is no one-state solution; there is no three-state solution. The only alternative to “two states for two people” is, in my opinion, no states for two people — just a grinding forever war between two people living intertwined with each other.Second, the world does not need the mayor of New York City to be another commentator on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The world is awash with commentators on this issue. We don’t need any more. We need leaders ready to be conveners of those looking for the only just solution.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Your Questions About the New York City Mayor’s Race

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      Readers wanted to know more about Zohran Mamdani, how he won the Democratic primary (and how Andrew Cuomo lost), and what it all means. We have answers.Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll answer some reader questions about Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani and the New York City mayor’s race. We’ll also explain why the subway floods so often during rainstorms.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesAssemblyman Zohran Mamdani stunned New York City, the country and many in his own party when he defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary last month.As voters and political observers digest the primary results and look toward the general election, questions have also arisen: about the candidates, how journalists are covering the race and what it all means. We asked readers for their questions, and more than 100 poured in from all over the world. Our reporters and editors have answered 21 so far, a few of which are below. Read the full article here.We’ll keep at it until the November election, sharing selections in this newsletter. Submit your questions here.How does Mamdani’s race and subsequent win reflect the overall picture of politics — especially the identity of the Democratic Party — going into November and beyond?— Samantha Kaplan, Annapolis, Md.Age distribution of voters in New York City mayoral electionsIncludes 2025 mail ballots processed through the morning of June 26

      Sources: New York City Board of Elections; L2By Alex LemonidesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mamdani Says He Will ‘Discourage’ the Term ‘Globalize the Intifada’

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      Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee in the race for mayor of New York City, moved to distance himself from comments that sparked outrage during the primary.Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, told an influential group of business leaders on Tuesday that he would not use the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which has been seen as a call to violence against Jews, and would “discourage” others from doing so, according to three people familiar with his comments.The phrase has been a rallying cry among opponents of the war in Gaza, and Mr. Mamdani, an ardent critic of Israel’s military operations, had refused to condemn its use during the Democratic primary race that he won in June.His comments came in a closed-door meeting with roughly 150 business executives at the offices of Tishman Speyer in Rockefeller Center. It was hosted by the Partnership for New York City, a consortium of members representing banks, law firms and corporations.Mr. Mamdani told the group that while many people used the term to express solidarity with Palestinians, some New Yorkers viewed it as a reference to violence against Israel, according to one of the people who were familiar with his comments.Just two weeks ago, shortly after his primary victory, Mr. Mamdani said in an interview on “Meet the Press” that the term was “not language that I use” but that “I don’t believe that the role of the mayor is to police speech.”Mr. Mamdani’s shifting language comes as his campaign moves from his stunning victory in the June primary to the general election in November, when he faces a fractured field of competitors including Mayor Eric Adams and former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who are running as independents, and the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More