Zohran Mamdani, Brad Lander are cross-endorsing in race for New York City mayor

NEW YORK — After months of Andrew Cuomo topping the New York City mayor's race while the organized left scrambled, progressive candidates are finally using ranked-choice voting to fight back.
Whether there's enough time to capitalize on Cuomo's negatives remains to be seen — he continues to dominate most polls and is funded by a multimillion-dollar super PAC, with just 11 days until the Democratic primary.
Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander, the highest-ranking progressive candidates in the race, endorsed each other Friday, one day after the final Democratic primary debate during which both attacked Cuomo. The former governor saved most of his fire for Mamdani, who is nipping at his heels in the final stretch of the race.
In backing each other, the two candidates each urged his supporters to rank the other second as they seek every advantage before early voting begins Saturday.
And it comes as the Working Families Party encourages its other endorsed candidates to formally combine forces — something the campaigns have avoided until now.
'Today's cross-endorsement is probably the most impactful,' Ana María Archila, New York Working Families Party co-director, told POLITICO in an interview Friday.
She sidestepped criticism of two other party-backed candidates — state Sen. Zellnor Myrie and City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams — for not joining in the cross-endorsement.
'I know that Zellnor really cares about how to guide his voters. I know that the speaker really cares about how to guide her voters,' Archila said. 'It's really a candidate-to-candidate conversation, and because of that, it's very particular to the dynamics between the candidates.'
When asked about the possibility of a cross-endorsement, Adams told PIX11 News this week, 'I am still considering all of the options available.'
Cuomo, until recently appeared locked in a two-person race with Mamdani, a democratic socialist state lawmaker. But Lander, the city comptroller, had a good week with a strong debate performance.
An internal poll conducted by the Working Families Party showed a majority of respondents said an endorsement from their first-choice candidate would greatly impact who they rank second. The party endorsed a four-person slate in March, and placed Mamdani first, Adams second, Lander third and Myrie fourth two weeks ago.
The process of getting candidates to more formally support each other has been tortured ahead of the June 24 primary to unseat Mayor Eric Adams, who is forgoing the primary to run as an independent in November. Questions about strategizing more forcefully against Cuomo have frustrated contenders behind the scenes, though they've said publicly voters are just beginning to tune in.
Time is running out.
This primary is New York City's second citywide use of ranked-choice voting, which allows New Yorkers to rank up to five candidates in order of preference, rather than rely on a plurality vote in a crowded field. The contenders with the fewest votes are eliminated round by round, with their support redistributed until one of them surpasses the 50 percent threshold.
Until the Mamdani-Lander cross-endorsement, the most consistent guidance among non-Cuomo candidates and their surrogates had been for voters to fill their ballots with five candidates and exclude the former governor entirely.
In the 2021 mayoral primary, Andrew Yang and Kathryn Garcia formed a partnership to boost each other, though Eric Adams ultimately won. Yang's one-way support of the political neophyte was viewed as a last-minute boost to her surprisingly strong candidacy.
'Four years ago, we wound up with one of the worst mayors in our history, largely because the two top alternatives in the race did not come together and join forces to cross-endorse each other,' Lander said Friday in a statement, referring to Garcia and Maya Wiley, who placed second in the first round that year. 'We can't afford to make that mistake again.'
The city comptroller has been lagging Mamdani in the polls for much of the race, but he was the top overall pick for a New York Times panel of experts and he stepped up his game at Thursday's debate. Still, Mamdani has been the surging candidate throughout the cycle and he's ranked No. 1 by the Working Families Party as well as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
'As Brad and I exposed the ex-Governor's record of corruption and scandal on last night's debate stage, New Yorkers could see Cuomo for what he really is: a relic of the broken politics of the past,' Mamdani said in a statement. 'His campaign has always been a house of cards, and with Brad and I cross-endorsing on the eve of early voting, we will topple it together.'
The two are set to appear together Friday, as first reported by the Times.
'We have been encouraging this level of coalescence from the beginning,' Archila said. 'Honestly, it's been a year of showing candidates how other places that have ranked-choice voting organized, and how candidates themselves sort of deliver the final punch by doing precisely what Brad and Zohran have done today.'
Cuomo has campaigned as an experienced manager ready on Day 1, drawing a contrast with the 33-year-old Mamdani.
'No surprise here — the two have been attached at the hip for months, but it won't move the needle,' Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi said in a statement of Lander and Mamdani. 'The public is clamoring for leadership to take real action to make the city safer and more affordable and to protect New Yorkers from Trump.'
In a twist last Friday, long-shot left-leaning candidate state Sen. Jessica Ramos had endorsed Cuomo, though he made brutally clear he wasn't returning the favor. And at the Thursday debate, moderate candidate Whitney Tilson said he is ranking Cuomo second, though the governor didn't respond in kind.
Mamdani has tried publicly to nudge other candidates to cross-endorse.
'Don't just rank me — fill out the rest of your ballot. Here are three others you should rank,' he said in a video tutorial posted last week, pointing to graphics of Lander, Adams and Myrie. He delivered the guidance in Hindi and used glasses of mango lassi to demonstrate how votes are distributed in the city's ranked method.

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Chicago Tribune

31 minutes ago

• Chicago Tribune

Appeals court lets President Donald Trump keep control of National Guard troops deployed to Los Angeles

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Politico

44 minutes ago

• Politico

Who Pritzker could pick for his No. 2

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Politico

an hour ago

• Politico

How the Israel-Iran conflict could hit the economy

Presented by As the U.S. weighs intervention in Israel's conflict with Iran, Wall Street has been skittish, eyeing the potential fallout for oil prices and inflation. To get a better sense of what's driving the oil market and what economic risks might lie ahead, MM caught up with Rory Johnston, an oil market analyst at research service Commodity Context who's been following all of this closely. A takeaway from that conversation: The price jump has been notably large for a market that has become desensitized to political risks after safely weathering multiple shocks over the last few years, including Covid and the Russia-Ukraine war. Now, 'even a numb cynical oil market sees Israel bombing Tehran and says, 'OK, maybe worry a bit here,'' he said. Conflict with Iran is the 'No. 1 risk scenario that people talk about, and now we're living in it,' he added. A worst-case scenario would be if Tehran is driven to close off the Strait of Hormuz, a channel through which about a fifth of the world's oil passes. Experts including Johnston say it's unlikely Iran would do that unless pushed to the brink — such a move would run the risk of hurting its own economic lifeline, as well as antagonizing its neighbors in the region — but the shockwaves would be significant. For now, what struck your host is that this conflict is helping prop up prices at a time when they'd really started to drop, and that could help boost U.S. oil production, which had previously been forecast to contract in 2026. But the exact trajectory of all this is highly unclear. 'This is usually the lead-up to summer driving season, so gasoline prices were set to rise anyway,' POLITICO's resident oil market expert Ben Lefebvre told MM. 'Because of the current Middle East situation, they'll rise further than they might have when oil was still around $60 a barrel. But when compared to what U.S. drivers experienced even last year, it won't be too far off recent norms … if there is such a thing as 'recent norms.'' 'The interesting thing is whether this spurs U.S. oil companies to drill more,' he added. 'They might just see this as a temporary boost and not something they want to get too far ahead of.' Rewind to before the current Israel-Iran conflict escalated. OPEC, the cartel of major oil-exporting countries, had been holding back production but then ramped up output earlier this year. That move was taken, in part, to get ahead of the effects of President Donald Trump's tariffs, which had raised fears that demand for oil would crater amid a global slowdown. That was leading to forecasts of oversupply later this year, Johnston said, reducing incentives for oil companies to produce. Now, Israel's attacks on Iran have likely led to fear-buying, as well as speculative trading, that has pushed up prices as much as 15 percent. Fighting so far has spared infrastructure that would significantly crimp the outflow of crude. 'While theoretically on its face, nothing that's happened so far has changed anything physical about supply and demand, part of the way … price formation has occurred is you have physical participants — a refinery, whatever — that's all of a sudden worried they're not going to be able to get cargos next month or the month after,' Johnston said. For prices to stay high or go higher, there likely would have to be some actual damage to key oil infrastructure, he said. But in the meantime, the scope for economic disruption is still significant. The largest price increases have been for diesel, a key input for shipping and therefore a potential risk to inflation in many sectors. 'It might not seem as harsh at the pump, but your shipping and your route delivery is going to feel the pinch of diesel far more,' Johnston said. More broadly, John Fagan, co-founder of Markets Policy Partners and the former markets head at the Treasury Department, said this oil price shock feeds the narrative that the U.S. is going to have slower growth and higher prices: stagflation. 'Demand is not collapsing, and oil prices are not unbelievably high, so you don't have that pop and drop kind of dynamic' when prices rise above where the market can support, he said. 'And if the dollar can't rally, that's supportive of [higher] oil prices.' HAPPY FRIDAY — Hope many of you got to have a restful day off yesterday. Send thoughts about the economic outlook to vguida@ and as always, send MM tips and pitches to Sam Sutton, who is back next week: ssutton@ Driving the day Deputy Treasury Secretary Michael Faulkender speaks at the Council on Foreign Relations at 12:30 p.m. Debt warnings fall on deaf ears — Republicans are largely ignoring a host of reports warning that their bill would worsen the nation's fiscal trajectory in a serious way, our Ben Guggenheim reports. The Congressional Budget Office estimates Tuesday led to an unusual finding. Usually tax cuts tend to cost less under so-called dynamic scores that include economic effects. Not so here: The $2.8 trillion figure released Tuesday outstripped the CBO's prior $2.4 trillion estimate that did not include economic analysis — mostly because the bill would increase interest rates. But the GOP is relying instead on estimates from the White House that Kyle Pomerleau of the American Enterprise Institute called 'outrageous' and 'way higher than everyone else's.' Your MM host chatted last week with Joe Lavorgna, who joined the Treasury Department this month as a counselor to Secretary Scott Bessent, and he had thoughts on CBO's projection that the economy would grow at an average rate of 1.8 percent over the next 10 years. 'Once the One Big Beautiful Bill passes, it's going to lock in the gains that we saw in the first Trump administration, when we were growing at nearly 3 percent,' he told your MM host. 'Then, you could make a case because of AI,' productivity growth will be much higher. 'The trailing 10-year growth rate of GDP is 2.5 percent. Why aren't we using that? .. 1.8 is unbelievably pathetically slow.' On the pods: Hear from CBO Director Phillip Swagel himself on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Sober news on entitlements — The longterm financial health of Social Security and Medicare worsened last year, our Michael Stratford reports. 'Annual reports released by the Treasury Department on Monday show that Social Security's reserve funds, if combined, would run out of money to fully pay beneficiaries in 2034 — a year sooner than projected last year,' Stratford writes. 'And the trust fund that pays Medicare's hospital bills would be depleted in 2033 — three years earlier than expected.' Trump calls for 'clean' Senate crypto bill to pass — Late Wednesday, Trump called on House Republicans to move 'LIGHTNING FAST' to send Senate-passed stablecoin legislation to his desk, dialing up pressure on GOP lawmakers in the lower chamber to adopt the measure without any changes, our Jasper Goodman reports. The Economy ICYMI: Fed holds rates steady — Federal Reserve officials announced Wednesday that they will hold interest rates steady, ignoring repeated calls from President Donald Trump to dramatically lower borrowing costs. In fact, projections from the central bank's policymakers suggest they're less confident they will be able to significantly decrease rates than they were in March. Vibe check: Here was Trump's response on Truth Social Thursday morning: ''Too Late' Jerome Powell is costing our Country Hundreds of Billions of Dollars. He is truly one of the dumbest, and most destructive, people in Government, and the Fed Board is complicit. Europe has had 10 cuts, we have had none. We should be 2.5 Points lower, and save $BILLIONS on all of Biden's Short Term Debt. We have LOW inflation! TOO LATE's an American Disgrace!' Jobs report Carolyn Davis is now director of comms at Better Markets. She previously was director of external comms at Leadership for Educational Equity. Mike Spratt has joined the ICI as an associate general counsel. He previously was assistant director in the Division of Investment Management Disclosure Review office at the SEC. He also served as counsel to former SEC Commissioners Kara Stein and Elisse Walter.