NYC mayor election Tuesday pits rookie Mamdani vs experienced Cuomo

How bad could it be?

How bad could it get?

The answers are “very” and “much worse than now, which isn’t great to begin with.”

The question, of course, is whether New York City will actually elect Zohran Mamdani mayor next Tuesday. The electorate is certainly awake. More than 160,000 people voted last weekend, with a large turnout in early voting.

New polls reveal Mamdani has lead over rivals weeks after election day

Four years ago, a total of 1,149,172 people voted, with Mayor Eric Adams accounting for two-thirds of those votes. Curtis Sliwa, then, as now, the GOP mayoral candidate, raised 312,385. It seems unlikely that Sliwa will reach that goal again, because serious Republicans will at least hold their noses and vote for former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and not because they like him. This is not the case. But because they are afraid of Zohran Mamdani.

Many, if not the majority, of Cuomo’s voters will join him for the most practical of reasons: 300,000 people work for New York City and Comrade Mamdani will have no idea how to run a city of that size. It’s hard to believe he has the management skills to run a string of bodegas, let alone the entirety of New York.

Let that number sink in: 300,000. This is an organization as large and as multifaceted as any complex operation on the planet. New York City is involved in virtually everything from policing to schools to subways – from the hospitals that welcome babies into the world to the cemeteries where they will one day be laid to rest. This is an extremely complex set of tasks every day, just to keep the subways running. Imagine New York with a series of power outages, like the ones California experienced in 2000-2001 and again in 2020. Do you think Mamdani is prepared to deal with a medium-sized crisis?

The average New York state legislator has a staff of, wait for it, 10 people. Mamdani has six years of experience managing 10 people. Can you imagine any company in the world taking the head of a small, even obscure, local media outlet and placing him in the office of a large national corporation? Of course not. Yet New York City dances on the edge of this abyss.

So, does the rise of early voting represent the reality of a wake-up call and citizen backlash? Whatever your ideology, no one wants to experience a governance disaster. This is what a vote for Mamdani is: a vote for chaos.

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While you may not like Andrew Cuomo, he knows how to staff a massive organization — nearly 150,000 people are New York state employees — and how to recruit good people most of the time. In fact, doing the job of mayor of New York is very difficult. In my lifetime, only Rudy Guiliani and Michael Bloomberg succeeded, although Ed Koch was entertaining because he failed to transform the city into a thriving, vibrant place that was the envy of the world.

New York City is no place for a rookie mayor. Pray that an influx of usually indifferent voters will show up by Tuesday, that they will vote for Cuomo and resist the temptation to throw away their vote for Curtis Sliwa. The stakes are simply too high.

Hugh Hewitt is the host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” airing weekday mornings from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. ET on the Salem Radio Network and simulcast on the Salem News Channel. Hugh Wakes America up on over 400 affiliates across the country and on every streaming platform where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel News Roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6 p.m. ET. A native of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a professor of law at the Fowler School of Law at Chapman University since 1996, where he teaches constitutional law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American newspaper, authored a dozen books, and moderated about twenty Republican candidate debates, most recently the Republican presidential debate in November 2023 in Miami and four Republican presidential debates during the 2015-2016 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests, from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump during his 40 years in broadcasting, and this column provides insight into the lead story that will drive his radio and television show today.

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