Breaking Down the NYC Mayor's Race

Both of them are members of a group called the New York Editorial Board , which is looking at the mayor's race and the dynamics within it . Welcome , we're glad you could be here , Joel . You want to kick us off ?

It's a ranked choice primary , so if the candidate you rank first doesn't win , your vote goes to who you rank second , third , fourth , fifth , and a lot of the Democrats are sort of clustered together .

There's an incredible Wizard of Oz shot at them , four of them linking arms when they were getting the Working Families Party endorsement the Working Families Party endorsement .

Right now , zoran Mamdani , who's the farthest to the left of the many , many other candidates , has sort of emerged from that group as the winning contender or alternative to Cuomo , and he's raised a lot of money , and in small dollars , but is way , way behind , and he's got less than two months to close that gap .

However , while the Democratic primary is often the only game in town , in this instance the incumbent mayor , eric Adams , announced at the very last minute he would not be running in the Democratic primary . Having said right up until then , why does the press put words in my mouth , of course I am . He's not the most reliable narrator , let's say so .

He will be on the ballot , certainly in November . Then , in the event that Cuomo does win the Democratic primary which is farther to the left , obviously , than the general election , though not as much necessarily as people think the Working Families Party may try to run its own candidate , perhaps Mamdani , perhaps city controller of Brad Lander .

If Mamdani wants to be the alternative to Cuomo , lander is still hoping to be the alternative to Mamdani , if there's some lid on the young socialist assembly members' support . There's a third centrist , this fellow Jim Walden .

There's Curtis Sliwa of Guardian Angels fame , if that's the word for it , as the Republican nominee , and so that could be , and that is not in November rank choice . Anything it's a winner . Take all . So if you have five candidates there , you only need so many votes to win . So all this is in some sense very exciting and interesting .

In other senses it seems a little haphazard and absurd . Basically , no one's talking very much about Trump cuts and the budget proposal he's just laid out . That would be devastating to New York . The mayor just passed his quote or introduced , excuse me , his best budget ever . That doesn't account for any of that .

The governor is about to has announced a deal in concept for a very weight state budget that increases spending . That doesn't account for any of that , even while acknowledging hey , we'll probably have to go back in the middle of the year and change this .

So , while people in the political class are very engaged and a lot is at stake , how competitive this is , how exciting it is to the broader city , frankly , I think , remains to be seen . Sorry , that was a long crisis , but there's a lot happening .

that we're in such an unprecedented time politically on a national level . What is it from a voter perspective that's going on ?

The COVID lockdowns coincided with major reforms to the criminal justice system that were enacted between 2017-2019 , but they didn't take effect fully until early 2020 .

So very hard to separate the anti-social impact of the lockdowns and kids being out of school for an hour and a half and all kinds of dislocations , people not being able to get their mental health care from the city government for a long time with the impact of the criminal justice reforms . Where does that leave us ?

Five years later , and after we already had a post-COVID mayoral election , felony crime is still roughly about 30% higher than it was in 2019 .

And , just consistently , we have greater disorder perpetrated by people who have had involvement in the criminal justice system before , either been arrested many , many times and or been through the city's mental health uh infrastructure I don't know if you want to call it a system .

For example , just this week , pregnant woman in chelsea , one of the city's wealthiest neighborhoods , bashed in the head with a metal pole by a stranger on the street during the day , stranger had been arrested eight times , including last year , for attacking another random woman in a sexual attack .

These things are much more common than they have been in most people's living memory , so that is still driving the electorate . That is why people picked Eric Adams four years ago . And people say how did we end up with Adams as the mayor ? People knew that he had flirted with corruption when he was a state senator .

He had many irregularities in his political past , as Harry talked about in the columns he wrote for the Daily News when Adams was first taking office , sort of warning us about the cronies he was surrounding himself with in city hall and in his own police department as he took the mayoralty .

Uh so people , why did people pick adams , even though they kind of knew this ? Because he was the only candidate in 2020 , 2021 , running on a law and order platform that we will make the city as safe as it was before COVID . He has consistently laid the blame at the feet of the state government for having changed these laws .

A new police commissioner constantly talking about how sane people are out on the streets to re-offend again and again . What does this have to do with this year's race ? People still want that at least . According to all of the polls that rank people's highest priorities , public safety and quality of life rank at the top all the time .

Cuomo is the one who is positioning himself to be a more competent version of Adams that I will be the law and order candidate , but I actually know how to do things . I did things as the governor for 11 years .

The hitch in this is that Cuomo was the governor who signed into law , these reforms that made the criminal justice system more lenient be coming from the center , not from the left . But that's really not happening . And you know why ? Despite all of this , do we still have a risk of getting a left-wing mayor , mamdani ?

Because he's young , because he's optimistic , because he's fun and because people just are not tired of him . And so , despite everything that people want and they say they want , as we go into this backlash against trump , will people go in there and say you know what , I'm tired of cuomo , I'm tired of adams .

I don't care about this guy's ideology , I just want a new face in here . So that's why it's really , as harry said , it is up for grabs , despite what the polls consistently say about cuomo you know , I just , I just I think about .

Go ahead , Joel .

But I mean , you know , harry , can you explain a little bit about Mondani and what his appeal is ? And you know , because I always would think that he would be a traditionally he'd he'd be a fringe candidate and for our non-new york listeners , right , maybe just a little background . Yes , yeah , that would be helpful absolutely .

He was a young guy with a very limited record and a biography out of a biography rather out of a Tom Wolfe novel . You know he's the son of a named chair professor at Columbia , the extremely anti-colonialist , anti-israel named Herbert Lehman , professor of all things and a famous filmmaker . He's a young guy . He had a small rap career .

He grew up in part in Uganda . He's in his early 30s . He was elected to the assembly by winning a low turnout primary in probably the reddest district in the state that's , the lower of the two houses of New York's legislature and he's accomplished , frankly , very little since he's been there .

He was involved in a free bus pilot program with one bus line in each borough . That Mike Gennaris , the very powerful , like number two guy there , was the driving force behind it , though Mondani was really involved . He did a hunger strike on behalf of cab drivers who just were getting murdered by Uber and what had happened to their medallions and so on .

It's a longer story . That was the outside game . It was helpful , along with other mayoral candidates playing the inside

game and getting them something of a better deal . That's it . Those are this man's full accomplishments to date , along with putting out very appealing videos and running a very impressive campaign . The promises he's offering are unbelievably vast .

All the other candidates are talking about housing things you know , from like 200,000 units to a million in one case that involve what developers would be allowed to build and thus we would have in New York , mamdani's is . The city is going to build this and we're going to do it all with union labor too .

And this goes on and on Free buses citywide , which you know this pilot program proves which is always a big thing on the left that a small pilot you know . Hey , we can just scale this thing up effortlessly .

What's been missing from his appeal and I've written a bit about this and everyone else's because they're running for office is the sense that we're about to have much tougher decisions ahead considerably less federal money coming in and thus less money coming through the state .

It's been something of a bidding war , but all the other candidates thinking a little about rank choice and a little little about a general election and when Adams won in the last time around in 2021 , by the way , as Nicole was mentioning , you know in , safety was definitely the number one concern and the question now really is it safety or affordability ?

On some level , those are clearly the two big issues . He fundamentally won in the Democratic primary Among Democratic registered Democrats in New York who bothered showing up for a primary right . There was no question public safety was the issue that got him there this time around .

As I said , there could be both the primary and the general , but like Mamdani's appeal is like the John Lindsay line Shout out to the great . Passed on Jack Newfield . You know he's fresh and everyone else is tired . He's not triangulating his appeal . He is actually activating enthusiastic young people who think all these politics are stale .

These people are exhausting and do we want the present creepy mayor who surrounded himself with horrible cronies and like a series of neck and ass grabbers Excuse my language , but they are documented ? Cuomo would probably have a Drew Cuomo like , with some real accomplishments but an exhausting record to the Democratic Party basically exiled .

He says he was pushed out by them and , by the way , also has his own separate line . So if he loses the primary he can still run in the general as insurance and because in New York you can vote for candidates on multiple lines . Long story . But the short of this is there's a tremendous amount of uncertainty in our politics .

He has actually built enthusiasm and interest from people who haven't been participating . That's been his theory of the case .

I think there's a lot that's disqualifying about him , but I also have tremendous respect for what he's done in terms of engaging voters , interesting people who checked out or never been involved in our democracy in a way that nobody else in the race seems to be trying to be doing .

And while Cuomo is running a real Rose Garden campaign , that's all about getting sort of bosses together in a room , staged events , limited press and like what choice do you really have ? And for him , having Mamdani is the other part of that . What choice do you really have is wonderful .

And Mamdani doesn't say defund the police , but like his public safety interests are very much around the idea that police have nothing to do with public safety , if you dig just a little , and I think that's very problematic . Last thing I'll say notably is there hasn't been all that much examination of his , as I said , very limited record .

It's really been a narrative driven race .

Uh , the post has taken a number of big swings and misses , uh , and when there was a piece that came a little closer , uh , that involved him being doing the soundtrack for a disney movie because his mom is there and and faking a South African accent in a South African interview in one clip and another boasting about how he'll sit .

He'll be whatever you want to hear and I'll be your mirror talking about a student election , but the sort of stuff that in a contest where the candidates were actually going at each other you'd be hearing all about this vanish without a trace .

Socialists , people on the left , never had to engage with it because they didn't even know what happened , and I think that speaks to some of the weird dynamics in New York City and the kingmaking within the Democratic Party that locks out a lot of the voters .

And people will have some of these concerns , probably starting with say let's go to , let's go to Nicole on this .

We are where we are because of 2008 and our bipartisan failure to deal with the real social eruptions that cause , on both the left and the right , that nobody liked these banks being bailed out , so they have been . They don't say anything controversial in public since 2008 . All they want to do is not have nobody pay attention to them .

So on something like , something like should the Roosevelt Hotel be housing 2,000 unvetted migrants , including young men and teenagers , who are constantly getting themselves into scrapes in Times Square in places that have had very low crime for the past few years ?

Now we sort of have underage people robbing and menacing people , and this is real , and if you say it's not real , that's how you get Trump . Was it a good idea to plunk thousands of migrants into the middle of a city that is still struggling to recover from these lockdowns and get people back to work ? A more courageous business community ?

You'd have these banks and these law firms , and you know saying this is not a good idea , and you never heard that

. You had these like these kind of mealy mouth . Oh , you know , we hope to help get the migrants jobs and so forth . I mean , they haven't taking a stand on anything and I think you see that mirrored in so many law firms just bowing down to Trump .

It's like , whatever your principles are , whether we agree with it or don't agree with it , it's just not clear that they have been able to articulate or stand behind any principles over the past 15 years . And that's even . We have a state budget that has a massive tax increase .

Kathy Hochul , when we're not officially in recession , tax revenues are still coming in . She has just increased a payroll tax on downstate businesses , literally a tax on jobs . She raised an extra billion and a half dollars or so for the MTA .

So to enact a massive tax on jobs and basically have nobody complain about this or even pay attention to it , it sort of shows you the strange vacuum of public attention and , in some cases , press attention to things that in another era would have gotten a lot more attention , and that feeds into the mayoral race .

I don't see a lot of people sitting around saying , boy , I wonder what the business community thinks of this . To the extent that people are anxious about jobs and anxious about taxes and costs , it's because they feel that in their own life .

You know , we just don't have a politically powerful business constituency like we used to have Now , on the other hand , businesses whose business model depends on corruption they are much more powerful than they used to be in the city .

No-bid contracts this is Adams loves to do these low-dollar , low dollar , no bid contracts , mostly with minority contractors , because and I only say that because this is a big part of his reelection you have all these ads all over the city .

Adams is good for the minority business community , so kind of small dollar , almost commodity contracts that are just given out by city hall , basically on a whim to spread , to spread the money around , basically , and create a small tech firms like really really , really small . Um , like they just they're doing this thing with panic buttons in bodegas .

Uh , you know , this is like a company that styles itself as a startup , and good for them . But the business model is you get the mayor to give a press conference highlighting your technology and that hopefully gets your business a little attention . I mean , that has kind of like bizarrely defined the adams administration it's very small ball .

You need a broader set of engagement and what it sounds like to me is A the leadership class , at least from a business , private sector perspective , is not engaged and most of the rest of the people are burned out with a series of unmet promises .

And the people who are to look at what Harry was saying , the people that seem to be engaged , are kind of the children's crusade , right , the next generation of young people that are coming up saying , hey , this is my city , so it's kind of a grassroots changeover .

You know a whole lot of that is actually extremely weird . Health care provision jobs and home health aides that are essentially like a series of frauds in which you know people can get paid to take care of family members and so on . That are making our job numbers not correspond how anyone actually feels about the economy .

And there's reduced confidence there with crime numbers , with the whole number of things . And there's reduced confidence there with crime numbers with the whole number of things .

So I can't speak to California , but in New York some of the business community is hostage because Eric Adams , the sitting mayor , who they have to do business with , who's running for reelection in an extremely long shot way but is unbalancing things , makes it hard for them to push elsewhere With the unions .

One big one , dc 37 , just endorsed Adrian Adams , the city council speaker , who had a bid that was briefly exciting to the political class and has largely failed to launch , and this was sort of her last chance to claim momentum and reintroduce herself in the race , but it was more of a symbolic thing because they don't actually have the door knocking , get out

the vote organizational capacity they used to , and then Cuomo smartly waited until like the day after that to announce that 1199 , whose president was just voted out and who insisted but not even four years ago right that he resign as governor in Doris Cuomo and the one thing sort of canceled out the other .

The teachers union , uft , here is having a forum and like trying to have leverage . They've been very unsuccessful in recent cycles . Part of what is helping Mamdani rise again with real citizen organizing and enthusiasm for all .

My dubiousness is that the Democratic Party and its extensions don't have the juice they did to to competently administer or run things , to influence how people think or vote , and there's just an increasingly large and obvious space . I don't think it's so large that Mamdani breaks through .

By the way , I don't think there's a ceiling , but I think there's an awful lot of normies who are like Cuomo . That guy was okay during COVID and he wasn't Trump and he's a tough guy and he built things . And if many of those people rank him . All this becomes academic .

Very likely he gets the Democratic nomination and is then in a very strong position to run in a general , and he is close enough , on crime and disorder , to where the popular center is , which is way far from a lot of these candidates ,

even as they're trying to like sort of tiptoe toward it that he's going to be hard to beat Curtis Sliwa , who's the Republican , the guardian angel guy . He was the Republican in 2021 . You know , eric Adams laughed at him and crushed him .

There's a number of reasons for that , but if , for all the conversation about this , for all the ways in which the center has collapsed since 2002 , in my view , and then 2008 progressively , I still think that Cuomo is like the normal guy and , by the way , he's older and diminished and you can see it , uh , when you're around him in ways that are striking have

not been widely observed to this point well , that's an interesting .

But the risk for him is that he does . He eventually gets on stage of a campaign finance board sponsored televised debate that actually does get some public attention . You know they'll run it right before the baseball game or whatever , and people will use clips from the debate for campaign ads . The clips will be on the news .

So even if you're not paying a lot of attention , this will be your introduction to the race . And if he hasn't been on the stage and bantering with these people and being challenged , he might look very rusty and he might not respond well to an attack or challenge or he might just seem out of it .

Who knows , maybe that won't happen , but there is a risk that he's going to get up there and look like Biden and people are going to say wait a minute . I've been told for six months this is the next mayor and he can't even deal with five people on the state . So I mean , if I were advising him I'd say go out and do some of these forms .

I mean just just it's just like writing . You get rusty if you are not doing it , and he hasn't been publicly challenged like this in , you know , six years and more actually .

Yeah , I think that's a good way of putting it the older voters as well as perhaps I mean this is a generalization , but maybe some younger voters who are Orthodox Jews , uh , orthodox jews or asian american and thus have been more fearful of being the victims of hate crimes in the past few years .

This is more of your public safety voters and your younger transplants to the city that have a sort of weird idealism . It's like a privileged idealism like whoa why shouldn't I be able to afford a two-bedroom apartment ? And it's not even affordability . It's more like a strange entitlement mentality that those are the Mamdani people Like .

If we get rid of this conspiracy of homeowners , we can afford the housing that we we desire . So it's very superficial , but I think that's a good way of putting the split .

Is it going to be there are more people , more younger people or more older people , and so which of those two arguments are going to end up showing up at the polls ?

So there was a Queens district attorney race a couple of years ago where this real lefty , tiffany Caban , who's very much sort of against the carceral state and all that it represents and actually put out a flyer with Zora and Mamdani a few years ago being like if you see a crime , here's what you should do , and it was .

It was I don't want to sound cute , but it was much closer to give a hug and it's like don't call the police . That's how people get hurt , like what . She came super duper close after a recount to winning that race . That wasn't all that much covered . A little like AOC was probably . Ah , there's some natural ceiling there .

There are a lot of shifts going on and I think there's real enthusiasm with younger people who are really upset by Israel's war in Gaza and , like a lot of them and Mamdani , well before October 7th , was talking about a genocide state I think he's got like an ideological and deeply addled view of this .

But let's say that it's a sincere , sincerely held view that many people who are either ideological or not and are just watching , you know , like footage in an increasingly connected world of atrocities and suffering and that sort of thing which is real , are sort of activated on these terms and don't feel seen or heard . You have up against that .

You have 1.1 million Jews here and the left loves introducing their Jews and centering them and being like this is the real Jewish community . I'm not saying those people are not Jews or anything like that .

I think that stuff's appalling and I think Cuomo , for instance , has flirted with it in really disgusting ways , but those are a distinct minority of these 1.1 million Jews . This is like bigger than Tel Aviv or Jerusalem . It's the biggest Jewish voting population in the world and I think that there is some ceiling there or some limits there .

But if a lot of new young people turn out , this could the primary in particular could be a very different and surprising result .

Nicole's absolutely right that Cuomo is rusty and you're going to have seven candidates , each one with eight to one matching or many of them Sorry , it's not everyone's qualified with like eight to one matching funds , running TV ads about what a goon this guy is , and there's a lot of stuff he's done that makes that feel real .

And then on a stage with him where they get , you know , collectively , like seven minutes of speaking time for every minute he gets , and he's not that well , he's used to being in Albany , it's insulated .

You sort of control the setting and the thing he's used to dominating phone conversations and off the record ones with reporters , including people like us , right , and suddenly he's not going to be monologuing . This has to be good enough .

There's a decent chance it will be , but it's a risky bet and if that doesn't happen , or even if it does in this primary , like this general , could be extremely weird and it just points to how broken down our democracy is . Well , we're talking about the national democracy and defending it .

I think there's real things happening there , but we may have just a sort of arbitrary and accidental result because of the weird and stupid systems we have , where 27% of like a not overwhelmingly impressive general election turnout or whatever , ends up deciding who's running the city for the next four or probably eight years .

And maybe it's a socialist , maybe it's a corrupt centrist , maybe it's Curtis Sliwa , who's wildly unqualified , had many marriages and a bizarre personal life that also involves Queens and the district attorney . I won't even get into that . Like it's all .

All things are very weird and we had a COVID election like this where where Andrew Yang you know , ridiculous , basically totally unqualified , never bothered , voting in New York , didn't know a damn thing , but that's serious People advising him .

It means we whistled past the graveyard in 2008 and covid and all that the idea we can just endlessly do so I don't think it's sunk in for new yorkers how high the are

, how serious this are , like the level of vetting that's necessary , and pretty soon the ship's going to have sailed .

It only works in a low stakes race where no one is paying attention and people don't mind standing sending a message because they know their congressperson doesn't really do anything where the mayor is actually supposed to do something . But how he could pull this off this time is again low turnout .

Everything Harry was saying really organizes people to vote , which is easier when you have early voting , when you have mail-in voting . So it's not like you know , if you've been smoking a bong all day on Election Day and you forget to vote , like you can still vote for that 10 days before and even over a longer time period .

I I like people who have , you know , set ideas , but he kind of ran for mayor as a platform to showcase these ideas that had nothing to do in new york city , like a universal basic income and different way of funding national campaigns . And mamdani is very different in that he does know what a lot of voters are thinking about and worried about .

I mean , you go to cuny and you talk about free buses and people say , yeah , I think free buses are a great idea , like it's a really simple and obvious thing . I think he connects better than yang did in a more AOC-ish way .

Sorry , nicole , I just wanted to say that , as we're recording this and sorry to be peeking at other screen windows , the Daily News is reporting that AOC is beginning pressure from the left to weigh in now , when the maximum impact moment is , and she obviously doesn't want to go with a loser , which is what happened sort of desperately in 2021 , for complicated

reasons we don't need to get into . But she's just met the news is reporting with Mondani and Brad Lander she has a long and pretty close relationship with , but right now this is his last chance not to be the also ran or the bridesmaid in this contest in the left , to at least be the competitor to Cuomo , and so I think she may be coming in soon .

And you know , I'm sure , from Maldoni's perspective , where his whole thing has been this hustle to be like look momentum , excitement and media presence , I can convert those into real things and position a lot of his appeals look what a good race I'm running . If I can do that , I can do it . And the guy is all around the city .

He's taking the trains , he's talking to people , he's engaged in small d democratic ways , he's reading all of our stuff , he's showing up in hostile outlets and meeting with the post editorial board and like pissed off cops with the podcast , uh , in the new york editorial board and like coming off like I'm not stupid , I have some idea what I'm saying .

I could defend elegantly my positions in a two minute setting . I think that's ridiculously insufficient for the job because you're not running to be chief performer but like he's clearing those bars pretty easily and cuomo , like the whole bar is going to be these debates and a handful of ads and like sort of reputational snuff .

It's a very weird dynamic that's going to clarify very shortly and and mondani is hoping aoc could be what helps get some over the top and just into a face-to-face . Where he's close enough he can close the rest of that gap .

Because we've seen , we've read a lot of stuff , some of which you guys have produced that kind of throws your hands in the air and says you know , we're looking at large cities and blue states as not really being governable and what's your feeling about ?

You know all those people who might have voted for Giuliani who are now either dead or living in Florida , all the middle class ? or indicted , or the middle class people who get married and for a while , and then the people work for the government .

So is the basis for improving the city , the electoral basis , the social basis , is it eroding to a level which make it very difficult ?

In a ton of ways , andrew Cuomo is running on a city in crisis campaign and crisis campaign it's like a troubled city in real and worrisome ways that are not just psychology , as you know .

The incumbent mayor naturally wants to claim , but it would take some real will and it would take some real pressure on the Democratic Party blob to get there , and maybe that's Cuomo who has his own hostility to it . Maybe it's a socialist like Maldoni who isn't really part

of it and is just using its primary process in effect . But , joel , if we could have six-story housing everywhere , that would be awesome Statewide . Kathy Ockel just had and failed to pass like a plan for accessory dwelling units . There's some basic and simple solutions to the place .

The pressure we're under is a sort of crazed and vindictive not always wrong , not always stupid national government that wants to exacerbate every ungovernability problem and then say you see how these people are , while cutting off funds and resources while letting his wonderful taste in enemies this president , like a venal political class , make bad decisions that exacerbate

its own problems and then insist that the thing we need is a stronger hand and like the right father figure which is also what Cuomo is running as , as a Democrat , to get us there . But I think in an honest sense , new York is not at a moment of profound crisis .

There are serious obstacles ahead and like dangerous cyclical trends and you and I have talked about a bunch of them and the forces that are spreading people out from cities . The crime rate , which is real . The problems with those statistics , so that the disorder , I think , is worse than those numbers show . The affordability issues .

The economic ones the Google doesn't play the role which basically owns Chelsea now , like a previous business community did .

But for all that , if people show up and vote , if people take these elections seriously and there's some indicators they will and if people are serious about withstanding the pressures that are coming from Washington , deciding what's really important to maintain and preserve and this isn't just lip service and governing efficiently and well to make that happen , thinking

about waste , fraud and abuse and those sorts of things , what are we actually getting something from our money from . I think the city is plenty governable . I'm even mildly optimistic for its future . But we'll see .

You know people who often run their own small business . You know , maybe , a small retail business or services business , restaurant . They are bogged down in regulations that they see as in many cases pointless , and they own their home so they're worried about public safety and disorder .

And their kids are in the public school so they want some kind of standards to be upheld in the public schools , which are actually not so bad . But things like the exam schools .

You know , getting into these exam schools , like getting into Harvard , a big subsector of the Asian American community really wants to keep those exam schools because this is their kids' path to Harvard . So those are kind of today's Giuliani-era voters .

And one element of inconsistency that throws yet another element of unpredictability into this is maybe it's just me and I'm behind everyone else , but this is the first few months that I felt like there's a real shift in the city where people feel good , that the city does feel finally recovered from COVID . People are back in Manhattan .

They keep saying tourists aren't coming because they're boycotting America , but I run into European tourists everywhere . You can barely walk on sidewalks . Even the Chinese tourists are back and it's like you know . People are out at clubs , they're out doing things , they're having fun .

Even the subways because of congestion , pricing , subways are much more crowded than they were a year ago and subway crime is down . I mean , there's just no room to stab someone on the subway right now . It's just it feels different just over the past few months . So you have this weird environment where Adams could sweep in and say you know what ?

Things are not so bad , just stick with me . And that is also a . There is a compelling case for that . I mean , he's finally got a competent police commissioner who is having significant results , and so do people just wake up from not paying attention to this election and say I'm overwhelmed by Trump , I'm overwhelmed by a million things .

The city is not massively worse than it was four years ago . So let's just stick with this guy and you know we'll leave the decision for another four years .