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After weeks of guarantees that he wasn’t going anywhere, Eric Adams finally caved to the pressure and suspended his bid for a second term as New York’s mayor. That has the political pundits wondering if one of the remaining candidates can now gain momentum and make a move on front runner Zohran Mamdani. There are five weeks left until Election Day, however, and many of the doomsayers who don’t want to see Mamdani in City Hall are quick to point out that there may not be enough time left to mount a comeback. Joe Borelli is a former minority leader of the New York City Council; he appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to reassess the field now that Adams has bowed out.
Borelli told host Larry Mendte that he feels some of the voters who passed Cuomo over earlier might change their minds in the time between now and Election Day: “I think you are going to see Andrew Cuomo get some momentum. This announcement by Eric Adams isn’t coming in a vacuum. So I‘m assuming there will be groups, there will be people, there will be market makers, elected officials, who will now suddenly either come out and endorse Andrew Cuomo, or they might even recycle some endorsements- you know, people who endorsed him for the primary that have been kind of quiet recently- they might do another round of endorsements for hm. He’s going to need to and he’s going to try to take back some of the momentum by Mamdani.”
Borelli was also realistic in describing the chances that Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, currently mired in a distant third place, can gain any traction from Adams’ departure: “I don’t see a scenario where Curtis ekes ahead of Cuomo. That could happen; it’s possible to happen. There’s a lot of negatives about Andrew Cuomo out there, so in theory it is possible. The pressure to get out of the race almost becomes the story in and of itself... That’s the story of the Sliwa campaign right now, and he’s got to break that cycle.”
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