Politics
Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City, appeared with Sen. Elizabeth Warren to highlight his plan for free universal child care.
By Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Benjamin Oreskes, New York Times Service
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NEW YORK — If left-leaning voters in New York City needed further spiritual encouragement to support Zohran Mamdani’s bid to become mayor, they got that and more Monday from Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.
Warren was in full-scale attack mode on Mamdani’s behalf. In an opinion piece published Monday in Rolling Stone, she wrote that two of his opponents, Mayor Eric Adams and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, were “deeply flawed candidates”; she later defended Mamdani’s calls to raise taxes during a combative interview on CNBC.
“Oh dear, are you worried that billionaires are going to go hungry?” she said.
And then she joined him on the campaign trail to highlight his proposal to enact free universal child care, an issue that Warren had made a central part of her 2020 presidential campaign. They argued together that families desperately need relief from the high costs of child care.
Warren said that Mamdani had the right affordability message for Democrats nationally.
“New York City is the place to start the conversation for Democrats on how affordability is the central issue — the central reason to be a Democrat — and delivering on it in meaningful, tangible ways that will touch working families,” she said.
Then she laced into Cuomo, accusing him of being beholden to wealthy donors and slow to understand everyday New Yorkers’ worries about the cost of living.
“Andrew Cuomo is spending his campaign evidently out just grabbing up as much money as he can from millionaires and billionaires who are unhappy” about Mamdani’s candidacy, she said, adding that Mamdani “didn’t start by bending a knee to the billionaires to say, ‘What would make your life better?’”
Mamdani, a state Assembly member from Queens who won the Democratic primary in June, has proposed free universal child care for every child in New York City ages 6 weeks to 5 years. His campaign said the plan could cost more than $5 billion per year, paid for by raising taxes on corporations and wealthy residents — a proposal that would need approval from state leaders in Albany.
Mamdani acknowledged Monday that achieving that goal would be difficult, but called it necessary to help families struggling to pay the average yearly child care cost of more than $25,000. He has said that the city would open child care centers and would subsidize rent for existing centers and the cost of home providers. The city already provides free preschool for children who are 3 and 4 years old.
Warren, who endorsed Mamdani after his primary win, joins other progressive leaders, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, in actively campaigning for him. Other prominent Democrats in New York have not yet backed him, including Gov. Kathy Hochul and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader.
Cuomo, who is running as an independent after losing the primary, held his own news conference Monday to reiterate his calls for more police officers after a mass shooting in midtown Manhattan last week. He announced a $250 million plan that aims to attract and retain 5,000 new officers over five years.
Cuomo said that Warren’s comments were “political rhetoric,” suggesting that his record as governor, including raising the minimum wage, showed how he prioritized working-class voters.
“I want to make things more affordable,” he said.
Cuomo used a PowerPoint presentation to make his case for hiring more officers, quoting former Mayor David N. Dinkins and former President Barack Obama as he explained how the money would mainly go toward $15,000 bonuses for newly hired officers. They would receive $5,000 after graduation from the academy and another $10,000 after a year of service. Mamdani has said that the Police Department should stay at its current size.
Cuomo also used the event to reveal a new campaign logo, which features the words “to build a new NYC” beneath his name. But he centered his message on many of the same policy prescriptions and attacks on Mamdani that he shared during the primary campaign.
That included emphasizing Mamdani’s past criticism of the police and his support for the “defund the police” movement in 2020. Although Mamdani no longer supports the idea, Cuomo was skeptical, paraphrasing author Maya Angelou, who said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
Cuomo also pledged to add 400 new officers to the Police Department’s Strategic Response Group. The unit, which was key in responding to last week’s shooting, has drawn criticism, including from Mamdani.
“I don’t think the assemblyman understands public safety at all,” Cuomo said.
Adams echoed Cuomo’s criticism of Mamdani. “We just have a philosophical difference in the principles of public safety,” the mayor said Monday, “and there’s a reason crime is down and jobs are up, and idealism collides with realism when you are saving the lives of people.”
Cuomo said he would roll out a more detailed affordability agenda in the coming weeks that would focus in part on expanded access to child care. He has not called for universal child care, though he has said he would expand universal prekindergarten for 3-year-olds and “increase child care options.”
Adams, who is also running as an independent, has called for “universal child care for low-income families” and recently announced a $10 million pilot program that will start in January for children 2 and younger. Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate, also has an affordability plan, though it does not address child care costs directly.
Cuomo, Adams and Sliwa all trail Mamdani in the polls and are each vying to emerge as the candidate best positioned to take him on, in part by trying to win the support of the city’s business leaders and more moderate voters.
Universal child care was one of four key policy proposals Mamdani presented during the primary campaign, along with making buses free, freezing rents on rent-stabilized apartments and creating city-owned grocery stores.
On Monday, Mamdani heard from families about the high costs of child care at an event at the offices of District Council 37, a prominent union that represents city workers and that endorsed him. Parents talked about quitting their jobs to care for children, enlisting grandparents to help and how child care can cost as much as rent.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
