The New York City mayoral contest is getting nasty.
Former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who remains the only credible challenger to the communist frontrunner Zohran Mamdani, endorsed the idea that his opponent would celebrate another 9/11.
“Can you imagine Mamdani in the seat?” Cuomo said during an appearance on a local radio show.
“Yeah, I could,” answered WABC radio host Sid Rosenberg. “He’d be cheering.”
“That’s another problem,” Cuomo replied.
Cuomo, talking to conservative radio host Sid Rosenberg this morning:
“God forbid, another 9/11—can you imagine Mamdani in the seat?” Cuomo asks.
“He’d be cheering,” Rosenberg says.
Cuomo paused and chuckled before saying: “That’s another problem.”
— Nick Garber (@nick_garber) October 23, 2025
Mamdani responded by accusing Cuomo of Islamophobia:
This is disgusting. This is Andrew Cuomo’s final moments in public life and he’s choosing to spend them making racist attacks on the person who would be the first Muslim to lead this city.
There are more than 1 million Muslims who live in New York City, and to have our faith be smeared and slandered by someone who at one point was considered a leader in the Democratic Party showcases the fact that bigotry and racism is not exclusively a Republican problem. It is also a problem within our own party.
It is time that we turned the page on Andrew Cuomo and on those that would tolerate this rhetoric from him.
>Cuomo has since tried to play down the comments, insisting they were a reference to Mamdani’s past interviews with the far-left streamer Hasan Piker.
“He was referring to Mamdani’s close friend Hasan Piker, who said ‘America deserved 9/11,’ a statement 9/11 families called on Zohran Mamdani to denounce but he refused for months,” Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi said in a statement.
“This is not new — the Governor held a press conference along with 9/11 families to denounce Mamdani’s association with and refusal to denounce Piker’s hateful comments.”
The two men went head-to-head the other night during an official debate, accompanied by long-shot Republican candidate Curtis Silwa.
In the audience tonight is Charlotte Bennett, one of the 13 women that Andrew Cuomo is credibly alleged to have sexually harassed while they worked in his government.
She can’t speak for herself because Cuomo’s lawyers have hounded her.
So I confronted him. pic.twitter.com/dtlLY2xVKi
— Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@ZohranKMamdani) October 23, 2025
According to the latest polling data from RealClearPolitics, Mamdani holds a commanding 17.4 percent lead over the disgraced former governor, making the chances of his political comeback seem less likely by the day.