The Scene
New York City’s business community — stunned by the apparent primary victory of socialist Zohran Mamdani and fearing a leftward shift in America’s biggest city — appears to be abandoning its grudging support for former Governor Andrew Cuomo and organizing more desperately around Mayor Eric Adams in a last ditch effort to block Mamdani in November’s general election.
Some of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s biggest backers hinted in fluid, panicked conversations Wednesday that they’ll put their money behind Adams, who was elected in 2021 as a tough-but-fair ex-cop, and now, after a federal corruption indictment and the removal of his inner circle, is running on his policy successes and frankly fun personality.
Adams’ popularity stood at an all-time low of 20% in a poll last month. The business community was largely neutral on Adams, who they saw as a welcome if occasionally tiring return to moderation after the left-leaning, rich-baiting de Blasio era; they remain nostalgic for Mike Bloomberg’s three terms.
“There is going to be overwhelming support in the business community to rally around Adams,” said Richard Farley, a partner at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP who said he’s organizing a fundraiser for the mayor and has been speaking with some of Cuomo’s biggest donors. “This will be a street fight all the way to November.”
Adams’ path is “narrow,” acknowledged one adviser.
The business community is “struggling to understand the implications of Mamdani’s victory,” Kathy Wylde, CEO of Partnership for New York City, said in an interview. His focus on affordability tapped into “the financial insecurity young people feel and their anger that the established political class has done nothing to fix it. It’s not an endorsement of socialism but rather a rejection of the status quo, which threatens to bring on the kind of political instability that business hates.”
Asked about efforts to rally around Adams, a top political aide to Bloomberg responded with a shrug emoji.
Other executives mused about drafting a new candidate or rebranding one of this week’s also-rans who might look more attractive to centrists when stacked up against Mamdani — perhaps Whitney Tilson, the former money manager whose campaign got little traction but occasionally broke through with criticism of Mamdani, or Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who has repeatedly passed on more obvious opportunities to run.
Voters saw in Cuomo, the preferred candidate of business titans who bankrolled his campaign, an “uninspiring, bullying boomer Dad who couldn’t inspire people to leave a burning building and thought he could run an air campaign,” Farley said. “But they don’t want socialism, either.”
Bill Ackman, the new right’s Wall Street torchbearer, says he’s working on his own Plan B, with details to come.
In this article:
Liz’s view
Business leaders are less exercised about Mamdani’s proposed millionaire tax than you might expect — taxes are high in Westchester and Greenwich, too — but are deeply, intellectually offended by his plans to freeze rents, open city-run grocery stores, and otherwise have the government intervene in economic matters. “It’s officially hot commie summer,” hedge-fund manager Dan Loeb wrote on X.
And Wall Street’s Jewish community remains as exercised as ever by Mamdani’s support for Palestinian protests. What had been an intensely local campaign that was unusual by today’s political standards quickly became, well, globalized.
Ben’s view
Mamdani emerges from the Democratic primary far stronger than even his most ardent supporters had hoped, winning virtually all economic groups in the Democratic Party except the very poor and the very rich, both of whom supported Andrew Cuomo.
Adams, meanwhile, may be fatally unpopular, damaged by both public corruption charges, dropped by President Donald Trump in what many Democrats saw as deeper corruption; and by a perception that his hand is not firmly on the tiller. He is also shut out of the city’s generous public finance matching program for alleged past misdeeds.
But, as New York Magazine noted last year, the federal charges forced Adams to do his job. Crime is sharply down and his police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, is so successful that Mamdani’s progressive campaign comrade Brad Lander said he’d try to keep her. (Mamdani has been vaguer.) And Adams’ City of Yes housing plan is a significant move in the direction of a market-based solution to the core issue of the city’s affordability crisis.
Meanwhile the city’s Republican Party, a diminished institution whose line Mike Bloomberg rented, allowed the gadfly Curtis Sliwa to take its nomination unopposed.
In conversations Wednesday, Mamdani’s most experienced supporters were confident that the race is now his to lose; Adams’ inner circle acknowledges his path is narrow.
Notable
- Josh Greenman assesses Mamdani’s promises in Vital City and writes that he has “thimble of hope — and a barrel of concern.”
- “The same people dumping millions into last-minute attack ads should have been investing time and money to recruit, educate, and encourage young leaders,” New York Magazine wrote.