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Disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo has made it clear he is going all-out in an effort to be elected mayor of New York City. His name appears at or near the top of many polls, but his campaign financing mechanism failed to attract matching dollars recently from the city’s campaign finance board. Nevertheless, Cuomo is plowing ahead, as he recently announced he intends to run as an independent, as well as a Democrat, regardless of the whether he wins or loses the Democratic primary next month. Hank Sheinkopf is a long-time Democratic political consultant; he appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to handicap Cuomo’s strategy.
Sheinkopf told host Larry Mendte that the two-party strategy is Cuomo’s surest way of hedging his bet: “Getting an independent line is a way of hedging against people who don’t want to vote for him as a Democrat, should he win that primary of June 24th. And then we talk about the fall now, he’s going to have Curtis Sliwa on the Republican line, Eric Adams running on two lines, I think. Brad Lander won’t be there, likely, but [Zohran] Mamdani will be. So, it’s a way for him to find a place for people who don’t like Republicans or Democrats, or who don’t like Democrats, certainly, would feel comfortable voting for him.”
At the end of the day, though, Sheinkopf says the race probably all comes down to money, and Mamdani’s war chest, Sheinkopf believes, should capture our attention: “Money is going to be the defining argument. Zohran Mamdani will have whatever he needs to; it’ll come in from all over the country from sources we haven’t thought about… This is a real campaign to take over a real city and to turn it into what the left and the extreme left believe that city ought to be.”
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