At Cuomo watch party, worries over Mamdani's victory
Minutes after the AP called the New York City mayor’s race for Zohran Mamdani, Skylar Ribotsky, 22, a recent Binghamton University graduate, said, “The idea of a Mayor Mamdani is very scary to a lot of people in this room.”
She said she spent the day canvassing for Andrew Cuomo on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “I don’t want to be delusional,” she said. “I hoped real New Yorkers would come out and say this guy’s policies or his vision for the world goes against everything we believe in.”
But that had been a hard case to make, she said. “Support for him in my age group — I can’t escape it, it’s everywhere.”
She said she was troubled, as a Jewish woman, by Mamdani’s “inability to genuinely understand or take ownership” of political rhetoric like the phrase “Globalize the intifada” that she said caused lasting harm to Jews, including Jewish New Yorkers, the largest population of Jews outside Israel.
She described Mamdani as glib — a highly effective communicator but no architect of policy. Mamdani’s free bus platform, for instance, “sounds great, but doesn’t work,” she said.
“Somebody has to pay for this, and who?”
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Nicholas Spangler is a general assignment reporter and has worked at Newsday since 2010.
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