… and 4 more takeaways from the first major forum of the year, held last week at Brooklyn Law School.

By Jack Delaney | jdelaney@queensledger.com

It’s shaping up to be a crowded mayoral race, and a forum in Brooklyn on Thursday gave candidates an early opportunity to set themselves apart from the pack.

Recent polling suggests that if the election happened today, voters would choose someone who hasn’t even joined the race, at least not officially: former Governor Andrew Cuomo. Per Politico, the embattled Cuomo — a pugilistic figure who has faced both sexual harassment allegations and questions over his failure to divulge the true scope of nursing home deaths during the pandemic — is supposedly weighing a February launch date for his campaign, and has been building his team behind the scenes. 

A poll from last October had Cuomo beating current Mayor Eric Adams handily in a head-to-head contest, and the latest survey was no different. Thirty two percent of respondents cited Cuomo as their top choice, versus 10% for ex-Comptroller Scott Stringer, 8% for current Comptroller Brad Lander, 7% for state Senator Jessica Ramos, 6% for Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani — and only 6% for Adams. 

But campaign ads have yet to start running, and most voters aren’t focused on the race. Analysts caution that polling this far in advance of an election is often simply a test of name recognition, which is borne out by the fact that Cuomo and Adams also drew the highest negative ratings of the pool. And since neither attended the NYC Democratic Mayoral Candidate Forum, it offered five of the lesser-known candidates a prime time slot to throw shade at the absentees while raising their own profiles.

The event, hosted by Brooklyn Law School, included Ramos, Lander, and Mamdani, along with state Senator Zellnor Myrie and former Bronx Assemblymember Michael Blake. The group agreed on many policy questions: they would each uphold the original timeline for climate goals, stop Adams from shifting retirees to a Medicare Advantage plan, and build tens of thousands of new housing units. Yet in subtle ways, the forum also revealed fault lines that may prove influential once the campaign starts in earnest. Here are a few takeaways:

 

Takeaway 1: An Olive Branch to Trump

 

The elephant in the room was the president-elect — all five candidates ribbed Adams relentlessly for flying to Mar-a-Lago, but were also circumspect about the need to establish a working dialogue with a figure who has long been anathema to most Democrats.

For Ramos, the closure of five hospitals in Queens in recent years demonstrated that the healthcare system was in ‘dire straits,’ and would probably need resources from the new Trump administration. 

“I’m known for being a fighter. I’m very loud, and I like to take names, right? But we also have to maintain a very professional relationship and know how to pick our battles,” she conceded. “The reality of the matter is that we depend on the federal government for a lot of funding when it comes to our infrastructure, including our transportation.”

Be that as it may, Ramos did lay out a bright line on sexual and reproductive health. “If [President Trump] tries to attack those things,” she told the audience, “you better believe I’m gonna fight.”

The state senator’s comments track with a larger trend sweeping the nation: Democrats in nearly every state are cautiously scaling back their scorched-earth approach to Trump in the wake of his inauguration, instead emphasizing collaboration. In fact, Ramos’ statement was remarkably similar to that of Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, who said, “I won’t go looking for fights. I won’t back down from them, either.”

Myrie, Lander, and Blake expressed variations on this theme. But one notable counterpoint was Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, who initially broke ranks with his colleagues.

“We cannot allow ourselves to be held hostage by a federal administration,” he said. “We will have to find the funding within our city and our state, and I’m confident that we can as opposed to trying to curry favor [with Trump].”

Yet roughly ten minutes later, even Mamdani softened his opposition: “I would make it clear that New York values and laws are not up for negotiation. That doesn’t mean that I would reflexively say no to each and everything.”

 

Takeaway 2: Mamdani Means Business

 

Mamdani has been cast as the socialist candidate, the furthest left in a field with its fair share of progressives. Yet top members of the Democratic Socialist Party have criticized him for running as a ‘spoiler’ who might divert voters away from other leftists like Lander, Myrie, and Ramos, who are perceived as having broader appeal. These aren’t just murmurs of discontent, either: in October, Assemblymember Emily Gallagher said in a statement that Mamdani’s campaign was “unfair to [NYC-DSA’s] project as a whole and could be ruinous.”

At the forum, however, Mamdani made a point of stressing his caché with moderates, using very few buzzwords as he laid out a slate of policies that largely resembled those of his opponents. 

“Any candidate running for mayor,” he said in his opening remarks, “has to run with a platform that speaks to all 8.3 million people who call this city their home.”

Yet Mamdani did take a hard stance — aligning with NYC-DSA — on reforming the police department.

“I would treat the NYPD like every other city agency,” he said, explaining that he would place the department under civilian control, crack down on overtime, and reduce what he viewed as staffing bloat. “[It] does not need to have an 80-plus person communications department. I didn’t need to see a five minute video shot by drones of how the NYPD invaded Columbia University. We need one to two people to be able to share the basic facts.”

The bottom line is that Mamdani is hoping to be more than a spoiler, and his robust fundraising and social media presence may help. His campaign is almost neck-and-neck with Lander and Ramos in the polls, an early sign that other candidates may have to take his bid seriously as the race wears on. 

 

Takeaway 3: Rikers Isn’t Closing Anytime Soon

 

In November, a judge held the city in contempt for its handling of the Rikers Island jail complex, threatening to turn jurisdiction over to the federal government. New York is legally required to shutter the facility by 2027, but a plan to replace it with a distributed array of  borough-based jails has stalled. Just last week, the judge held a hearing on how a receivership might work, though the takeover is still up in the air.

So when moderators asked the candidates whether they would commit to closing Rikers on time, it was a question with newfound urgency. The response was the same across the board: yes, it would be shut down, but not by 2027 — and no one shared a specific plan for when and how they would accomplish a feat that has evaded city officials for over a decade.

“I would love to uphold the deadline,” said Ramos. “The truth is, I don’t know if I can, because nothing has been done by this current administration for the past three years.” 

The rest of the mayoral hopefuls were of similar minds. “We are facing some real administrative obstacles,” Myrie added, “and we have to be honest about that. But I’d be doing everything possible to get it closed on as close to that timeline as possible.”

 

Takeaway 4: Alliances Are On the Table

 

As is tradition, each candidate claimed to be uniquely qualified for the job. A former Obama staffer and small business owner, Blake said he alone had the local, state, and federal experience required to negotiate with Trump; Lander asserted that he was the only candidate in the race who was not taking contributions from real estate developers, and touted his track record of fighting corruption. Yet despite this jockeying, there was a consensus that infighting would have to be set aside if it detracted from the larger goal of defeating Adams and Cuomo. 

New York’s 2021 elections used a new system, ranked-choice voting, which was employed again for the second time in the 2024 cycle. The name says it all: instead of choosing one candidate, voters can rank up to five options. If a candidate takes more than half of first-choice votes, they win outright. If not, the voting continues through several rounds to decide a winner. The system was proposed as a solution to low turnout, but it also opens the door for candidates to benefit from higher rankings through alliances. 

Although no assurances were made — ”I am still willing to be swayed by my fellow colleagues,” said Ramos, “so I don’t have an exact order yet” — most of the candidates at the NYC Democratic Mayoral Candidate Forum seemed open to a concerted ballot strategy if it would topple the incumbents. 

”We have to get this right, because if Maya Wiley and Catherine Garcia had cross-ranked and cross-endorsed each other [in 2021], one of them would be mayor right now,” said Lander. “And our mayor would not be flying to Mar-a-Lago.”