Former New York Governor David Paterson is the latest New York Democrat to come out against his party’s nominee for New York City Mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Paterson addressed reporters at a press conference on Monday morning flanked by billionaire John Catsimatidis and prominent New York jurist Richard Weinberg, with all three calling for the broader field of hopefuls to unite around a single campaign for the general election in November to defeat Mamdani, and adding their voices to the chorus of invectives against him.
“This is not a job for young neophytes who do not have real life experience,” Weinberg said, addressing the gaggle first. “It is particularly not a job for somebody from a left-wing extremist ideology, who talks about socialism in our time, who talks about public housing as an absolute right where nobody could get an increase in their rents.”
Zohran Mamdani has campaigned on a rent freeze on rent-stabilized apartments, and while that policy has been greeted with a great deal of controversy in the press, it is far from unprecedented. New York City’s mayor holds a great deal of influence over the composition of the Rent Guidelines Board, which decides what level of increase to the rent is permitted for that category of dwelling. Mayor de Blasio used that power to stop increases on three separate occasions during his tenure, to much less consternation.
Paterson—now a VP with the Adelson-owned Las Vegas Sands Corp., a casino company—concurred with Weinberg’s assessment about the rent freeze, calling it “impossible,” and put his critique in starker terms when asked whether the party could learn anything from the Queens state assemblyman: “if he’s the cure to ail the party, then cyanide is a cure for a headache.” The former governor, who endorsed Cuomo in the primary, also repeated a controversial claim regarding the Democratic mayoral nominee that has been bouncing around mainstream circles for weeks, saying that Mamdani “supported the intifada,” referring to the both nonviolent and violent resistance of Palestinians against Israeli occupation. “If you read what the intifada really was, then you really have to really reconsider that candidacy.”
Mamdani has never expressed support for violence carried out by that movement, but rather, refused to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” out of hand, citing the word’s broad meaning as “rebellion” or “uprising,” which, he notes, has even been used by the Holocaust Museum in its Arabic translations about the Warsaw ghetto uprising. “As a Muslim man who grew up post-911, I’m all too familiar in the way in which Arabic words can be twisted can be distorted can be used to justify any kind of meaning,” Mamdani told podcast host Tim Miller in an interview. “And I think that’s where it leaves me with a sense that what we need to do is focus on keeping Jewish New Yorkers safe, and the question of permissibility of language is something that I haven’t ventured into.”
Billionaire John Catsimatidis, who appeared with the two veterans of New York politics, has been a vocal part of the mayoral race, telling the New York Post last year that he might throw his hat in the ring if incumbent Eric Adams had been ousted due to the federal corruption charges against him at the time. Since then, the owner of Gristedes and D’Agostino’s supermarkets has spoken numerous times about Mamdani’s proposal to start a chain of city-run grocery stores, first saying that he could contribute one of his own to the project, but more recently calling the project “oppressive” and “a blueprint for collapse” in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece. “Let’s go to September and make sure everybody knows who’s running, and everybody knows what the issues are,” Catsimatidis told reporters on Monday, later adding: “let common sense prevail.”
Catsimatidis has been a vocal supporter of President Trump, and the Republican candidate in the New York mayoral race, Curtis Sliwa, has a show on WABC, a radio station owned by the New York magnate. Asked why he is not calling for Sliwa to exit the race for the sake of rallying around another candidate, he answered “because I’m not going to do it. Full stop.”
Paterson, Weinberg, and Catsimatidis appeared short on proposals despite their calls for action against Mamdani. “This is today the beginning of a process, and it is publicizing our wish to find the right candidate for the city of New York starting in 2026, that’s what we’re actually doing,” Paterson said when asked for a specific plan. “We’ll have more later on.”
Unlike the Democratic primary, the general election is not ranked-choice, and the winner will only need a plurality of the vote (i.e. the most votes out of al the candidates, even if that’s not over 50%). Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo have both made public calls for the other to step aside in the race.
