Trump front-and-center as nation’s biggest city holds primary election for mayor

He’s not on the ballot, but President Donald Trump is front-and-center in the city where he was born and made his fame, as heavily blue New York City holds its Democratic Party primary for mayor.

And in the nation’s most populous city, where Democrats for generations have dominated the political landscape, Trump has been the boogeyman on the mayoral campaign trail.

“LA’s in chaos. Imagine it’s Times Square. Trump’s coming for New York. Who do you think can stop him?” said the narrator in an ad earlier this month by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.

“Trump’s at the city gates,” the narrator in Cuomo’s ad warned. “We need someone experienced to slam them shut.”

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Cuomo was spotlighting the recent protests in Los Angeles, sparked by immigration raids carried out by ICE at the Trump administration’s direction, to raise warnings about Trump and showcase his own experience.

The former three-term governor of New York, who resigned from office in 2021 amid multiple scandals and is now working to pull off a political comeback, was arguing that the president had “declared war” on the Big Apple and other cities across the country and suggested Trump may eventually send troops into New York City.

Cuomo, who said recently that, as mayor, he’d mount a national campaign to try and thwart Trump’s agenda, vows to protect New York City from what he suggests is a possible future federal crackdown against immigration protests.

And on the eve of the primary, Cuomo told a large crowd of supporters at a union hall that Democrats need to “stand strong, stand united, stand tall” against Trump. 

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It’s not just Cuomo.

Most of the other candidates in the 11-candidate Democratic mayoral field have also taken aim at Trump and showcased the steps they’d take to push back against the president. And Trump was a top topic at the final primary debate earlier this month.

And that was before Trump further dominated headlines this past weekend by launching military strikes against Iran.

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While national and at times even international events and figures often impact the campaign trail in New York City, Marist University Institute for Public Opinion director Lee M. Miringoff noted that “the fact that Trump is so front-and-center is so unusual.”

Cuomo’s commercial, part of what his campaign said was major ad buy, came as progressive Zohran Mamdani was surging in the latest public opinion polls, closing the gap with the more moderate former governor.

Mamdani, a 33-year-old state assembly member from Queens, is a democratic socialist originally from Uganda. His primary bid was boosted earlier this month after he landed an endorsement from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive rock star and New York City’s most prominent leader on the left, and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the progressive champion and two-time Democratic presidential nominee runner-up.

With multiple candidates on the left running in the primary, the endorsements by Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders aimed to consolidate the support of progressive voters behind Mamdani.

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The 67-year-old Cuomo, for weeks, has been questioning Mamdani’s experience leading New York City.

Cuomo’s campaign has criticized Mamdani as a “dangerously inexperienced legislator” while touting that the former governor “managed a state and managed crises, from COVID to Trump.”

Mamdani is also spotlighting the president, as he aims to tie Cuomo to Trump by pointing out that many of the former governor’s donors had backed Trump in last year’s presidential election.

“Oligarchy is on the ballot. Andrew Cuomo is the candidate of a billionaire class that is suffocating our democracy and forcing the working class out of our city,” Mamdani’s campaign argued in an email to supporters.

Trump and his administration were also in the New York City mayoral campaign spotlight last week when New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who is in a distant third place in the most recent polls, was arrested in Manhattan by Department of Homeland Security agents.

Lander was detained for allegedly assaulting a federal officer as he tried to escort a defendant out of an immigration court.

Temperatures are forecast to reach 100 degrees in New York on Tuesday as the city holds its primary. The dangerously high temperatures may keep some older voters from heading to the polls. Because of that possibility, the heatwave could affect turnout in a race that may come down to Cuomo’s union support and campaign structure versus Mandani’s volunteer forces.

New York City election officials said that more than 384,000 Democrats cast ballots in early voting, which ended on Sunday.

The election is being conducted using a ranked-choice voting system in which voters rank candidates by preference on their ballots. If no candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes, the lowest vote-getter is dropped, with that candidate’s votes reallocated to voters’ next-highest choices. The process is repeated until one candidate cracks 50%. Mamdani is hoping that the ranked-choice process boosts his chances against Cuomo.

New York City’s primary comes as the Democratic Party works to escape from the political wilderness, following last year’s elections, when the party lost control of the White House, the Senate majority and failed to win back control of the House from the GOP.

And it comes as the party works to resist Trump’s sweeping and controversial second-term agenda.

Miringoff said the results of the primary will be seen as a barometer of which way the Democratic Party is headed, towards the center if Cuomo wins and towards the left if Mamdani is victorious.

“Because it’s New York and it’s a very blue city and everything that happens is magnified, I think we’re going to be hearing a lot about the future of the Democratic Party and which way it should define itself, going towards the midterms,” Miringoff said.

The center-left Democrat-aligned group the Third Way said in a memo they were “deeply alarmed” over the prospect of a Mamdani victory.

“A Mamdani win for such a high-profile office would be a devastating blow in the fight to defeat Trumpism,” the group argued.

The winner of the Democratic Party primary is traditionally seen as the overwhelming frontrunner in the November general election in the Democrat-dominated city.

However, this year, the general election campaign may be a bit more unpredictable.

Incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, a moderate Democrat elected in 2021, is running for re-election as an independent. Adams earlier this year dropped his Democratic primary bid as his approval ratings sank to historic lows.

Adams’ poll numbers were sinking even before he was indicted last year on five counts, which accused the mayor of bribery and fraud as part of an alleged “long-running” scheme to personally profit from contacts with foreign officials.

The mayor made repeated overtures to President Donald Trump, and the Justice Department earlier this year dismissed the corruption charges, so Adams could seemingly work with the Trump administration on its illegal immigration crackdown.