Viral Exchange from Second NYC Mayor Debate Proves Why Mamdani, Cuomo Should Never Run Anything, Ever

If you didn’t watch the final New York City mayoral debate, congratulations: Go on and mark yourself safe from having wasted 90 minutes of your time with a grandma-killer and a commie talking over each other.

I’m a political junkie and write about this stuff, so I didn’t have that luxury. However, I can sum it up two ways. First, it’s dispiriting seeing three people on stage and knowing that the one guy making sense — activist, perennial candidate, and conservative gadfly Curtis Sliwa — had zero chance of winning.

Second, in a matter of a little over two minutes worth of exchanges, both Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo proved why they should never have a chance to run anything, ever, and one will almost certainly be in charge of the nation’s largest city.

Cuomo, to be fair, came out a bit more punchy than he did during the first debate — saying several times, as CNN noted, that “the city has been getting screwed by the state, and that has to change.”

This led to Mamdani blaming Cuomo for not building housing in New York City while he was governor, something the assemblyman has run on as a way to bring real estate prices down.

The only problem is … that’s not really Albany’s job.

“I understand my friend doesn’t really understand government,” Cuomo said. “The governor doesn’t build housing in New York City.”

“Not if it’s you!” Mamdani retorted.

“No, legally, there are jurisdictions,” Cuomo said, to laughter. “The governor doesn’t pick up trash; he doesn’t run the fire department. That’s what the mayor does. The mayor builds housing.”

Then, as Cuomo noted, Mamdani has never “accomplished anything.”

“I did things; you have never had a job,” Cuomo said. “There’s no reason to believe you have any merit or qualification for 8.5 million lives. You don’t know how to run a government.

“You don’t know how to handle an emergency, and you’ve literally never proposed a bill on anything that you’re not talking about in your campaign,” he continued. “You had the worst attendance record in the Assembly, and you gave yourselves the highest raise in the United States of America. You went from $110,000 to $140,000, and then you never showed up for work, and you missed 80 percent of the votes. Shame on you!”

This drew applause, and a bit of blood:

Andrew Cuomo is crushing Zohran Mamdani at the Mayoral debate tonight pic.twitter.com/59R6DCtflj

— The Uri (@uricohenisrael) October 23, 2025

However, Mamdani had time to respond. While part of it wasn’t substantive — “Always a pleasure to hear Andrew Cuomo create his own facts,” Mamdani said through that fixed perma-semi-smile he’s rode throughout these contests — part of it was.

“We just had a former governor say in his own words that the city has been getting screwed by the state,” Mamdani said.

“Who was leading the state? It was you!” he said, pointing to Cuomo. “You were leading the state for 10 years, screwing the city!”

Mic Drop………
Cuomo said NYC was getting screwed by the State.
Mamdani: Who was state? You were state as Governorpic.twitter.com/64cXSZWUTr

— Dr Ahmad Rehan Khan (@AhmadRehanKhan) October 23, 2025

So, who’s in the right here? Answer, sadly: Yes, either way.

Mamdani has run a campaign on exploiting all the feels, as the millennial audience might say. (Or “joy and vibes,” if you’re a former Kamala Harris staffer.) But most of the proposals that he’s running on — eliminating bus fares, raising taxes on the “ultra-wealthy,” that sort of stuff — that’s in Albany’s hands. And he can want to build more housing, but clearly Gov. Kathy Hochul isn’t going to dump the kind of money that he wants into the project.

In the meantime, he has an undistinguished record in the state Assembly. His capacity in any sort of executive-style job — like mayor, governor, or even borough president or city council member — is a big fat zero. He doesn’t seem to know what the job entails, just that he can get it done. In no other field of endeavor but electoral politics would we accept this kind of tyro as an ideal candidate for the mayor of the nation’s largest city.

But then there’s his only legit competition, Andrew Cuomo. Sure, Cuomo was punchier this time around and seemed more focused on what being mayor entails than rebuilding his political brand — which is what hurt him the first few times — but he openly said that “the city has been getting screwed by the state” and that he’d change that. Except: He was leading the state from 2011 until 2021.

Are we to believe that everything really began going south for New York City the moment he left the governor’s mansion? No, of course not — it’s just something that Andrew Cuomo said. Just like his COVID-19 nursing home death numbers or the denial of every sexual misconduct allegation against him, they’re the words of a very desperate, very cornered Cuomo. He’s a man who knows how to govern but does it poorly, trying to make up ground on a man who has no idea how to govern but thinks he can give every man, woman, and child in Gotham a free pony if he just taxes Park Ave. residents 300 percent of their income, which he can totally get through — and they’ll like it, by the way.

Sadly, these are New York City’s two options. I wish it weren’t so, but the polling averages don’t lie: Sliwa has been a distant third in the RealClearPolitics aggregate, and he’s more than 13 points behind Cuomo as of Thursday morning, who’s more than 17 points behind Mamdani. Unless he has a way to find a way to find a cool 30 percent jump in support between now and the first Tuesday in November, it’ll be one of these two charlatans — who should never run anything, ever, not even a deli. In just two minutes and one exchange, they managed to prove that amply.

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