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Primary Day is now four weeks away, and a recent Marist poll shows that former Governor Andrew Cuomo and State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani still running in the top two slots on the Democratic side of the ledger. The gap between the two may have shrunk a bit; however, minority support is overwhelmingly on the former Governor’s side by a margin of 50% to 8%. Does limited minority support spell the demise of Mamdani’s bid to run the Big Apple? Joe Borelli is the managing director of Chartwell Securities and the former minority leader of the New York City Council. He appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program with his take on the poll and says that minority voters will make their impact known in the race that counts in November.
“If you think about who Zohran Mamdani’s base vote is,” Borelli told host Larry Mendte, “it’s white people in Park Slope and Williamsburg and Greenwich Village, and places like that. That’s who fundamentally drives the radical left. It’s not people of color, whether they’re black, brown or anything. It is people who are white liberals- we all know the type. Thirty years ago, we might have called them yuppies, then we might have called them hipsters. Now we just call them terrible, and those are the people that just make up the base of the far left, and unfortunately, they turn out.”
Minority support, Borelli feels, will ultimately be split between a Democratic Cuomo and an independent Eric Adams in the general election in November- which is where the door might open just enough for the likely Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa. “That does really give Curtis Sliwa an opportunity- and he can’t run the same campaign that he ran in 2021. He has to run a very different campaign… but going to 38% this year could potentially win the mayoralty.”
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