Powerful Democrats continued to circle around Zohran Mamdani this week, hesitating to endorse his campaign for New York mayor as Andrew Cuomo officially launched his mulligan bid as an independent.
Mamdani traveled to DC on Wednesday for meetings with Democrats, though not with House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer — both New York City voters. “I have a sit-down conversation, and then I take it from there,” Jeffries told reporters on Thursday, explaining that he would talk with Mamdani in the city on Friday.
Bernie Sanders, who endorsed Mamdani toward the end of the June primary, urged him to be more insistent in getting Democrats to endorse their nominee. According to CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere, Sanders also advised Mamdani to clean up his position on the term “globalize the intifada,” which he did not condemn in a pre-primary interview.
Mamdani had begun to do so, telling a closed-door meeting of business leaders that he discouraged use of that term. Cuomo’s relaunched campaign was less focused on it, this week, than on interviews recovered by conservative X channels from early in Mamdani’s career, where he mused about whether prisons were still necessary and about seizing the means of production.