The Dictatorship
Andrew Cuomo is doubling down on a losing strategy against Zohran Mamdani
With less than a week to go in New York City’s mayoral race, Andrew Cuomo appeared on Fox News with host Maria Bartiromo to deliver his closing pitch to New Yorkers heading to the ballot box. And it was foreboding.
The former Democratic governor referred to the fact that his opponent Zohran Mamdani, who would be the first Muslim and South Asian mayor of the city, was born in Uganda. Cuomo said Mamdani — a state assemblyman whose family moved to the city when he was 7 — “doesn’t understand the New York culture, the New York values, what 9/11 meant.”
In his final moments on the show Wednesday, Cuomo concluded: “If Mamdani wins, the city will not survive that as we know it, and it will not recover for a long time.”
It was a stark warning emblematic of a campaign marked by fear and grievance, coming just days after Cuomo faced criticism for chuckling on a radio show when the host, Sid Rosenberg, made Islamophobic comments that Mamdani would cheer on a Sept. 11-style attack.
It’s the same approach that contributed to Cuomo’s surprise double-digit defeat by Mamdani in the Democratic primary in June, in what Cuomo’s backers had hoped would mark his triumphant return to politics.
And now, in the final days of a historic race, with turnout surging citywide and some polls tightening, Cuomo is continuing to count on fear to carry him over the finish line.
The race has become a battle over the identity and values of New York and the broader Democratic Party. And while Cuomo has successfully tapped into some voters’ anxieties and differences, many New Yorkers appear unwilling to follow him down a dark path.
Outside an early voting site at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, fear was equal parts motivator and repellent. Julie Kopel and Jeanne Peldman told BLN they took time away from their jobs to canvas for Cuomo. They said that, as Jewish New Yorkers, they’re concerned about Mamdani’s criticisms of Israel, including his belief that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.
“Andrew Cuomo is not the perfect candidate,” Kopel told BLN. “But this is one of those situations where you have to vote for the better candidate, and Mamdani would be absolutely horrible for our city.”
Mamdani has picked up endorsements from prominent Jewish politicians in New York, including U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler and city Comptroller Brad Lander. That hasn’t been enough to quell all the concerns that Cuomo and others have drummed up.
Mamdani, Peldman said, “hasn’t aligned with us, and it’s terrifying. I’m scared if he becomes mayor of the city.”
But Ben Wilson, a 26-year-old resident who described himself as Jewish but not religious, said he was drawn to Mamdani’s focus on making the city affordable for lower-income New Yorkers and did not buy claims that he is antisemitic.
Alyssa Cass, a Democratic strategist and partner with Slingshot Strategies, told BLN she doubted Cuomo’s negative messaging would change the fundamentals of the race.
“I am highly skeptical that [Mamdani] is somehow scarier after months of being mainstream and on the tip of everyone’s tongue,” she said.
Cass also pointed to high turnout in Brooklyn as good news for Mamdani, while noting that turnout on the Upper East and Upper West sides was more positive for Cuomo.
Two-time Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa is back on the ballot as well, mounting another long-shot bid to run the heavily Democratic city.
Beyond disparaging Mamdani, Cuomo’s scare tactics come off to some voters as an attempt to keep the conversation away from his resignation in 2021, after investigators commissioned by Attorney General Letitia James determined that the governor had sexually harassed 11 women, including several state employees. (Cuomo has denied the allegations.)
In fact, several Democratic women told BLN this week that their primary fears in this race were about Cuomo himself. Rebecca Perry, an Upper East Side mom of two, said Cuomo’s history of allegations of sexual harassment meant she had “zero interest in supporting him in any way, shape or form.”
Cuomo’s warnings about rampant crime under a Mamdani-led city seemed to resonate with some older voters, despite the fact that city data shows that major crimes are down and the New York Police Department recorded record-low transit crime numbers on the subway this fall.
At a polling location in West Harlem, Joann Goodson, a Black woman and lifelong New Yorker, said she had trouble believing Mamdani would be able to tackle the city’s affordability crisis as promised. She also described a fear of crime on the subway system as a reason to vote for an experienced politician like Cuomo. “I’ve got to keep my eyes open and make sure I’m looking around me all the time,” she said.
Another Black retiree, Vincent Fortune, said he didn’t like Mamdani’s past criticism of Democratic figures like Vice President Kamala Harris and was voting for Cuomo because “he was the less of all of the evil.”
It’s the older, more moderate Democrats that Basil Smikle, Columbia University professor, BLN political analyst and Democratic strategist, believes could help Cuomo. He called Cuomo’s campaign tactics racist and Islamophobic, but also cautioned that fear can be the strongest political motivator.
“In many instances, it even overshadows aspiration,” he told BLN. “I don’t think a lot of moderate to establishment Democrats and moderate Democrats loved [current Mayor] Eric Adams, but they saw him as a firewall against progressive politics. I don’t think that that’s changed with Andrew Cuomo. I think he tried to actually take the torch from Adams in that regard.”
Still other Harlem voters expressed excitement at the possibility of the first Muslim mayor — welcome representation for a neighborhood with a significant Black Muslim population. Boubakar Diallo, a Senegalese American, was so proud to vote for Mamdani he ran back inside the polling site when he realized he forgot his voting sticker.
Over the weekend, less than two weeks after Iran and the United States signed a memorandum of understanding to end hostilities, the countries exchanged multiple attacks. Iran fired at a ship crossing the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. shot at Iranian missile and drone sites, then both sides launched more strikes while claiming retaliation for the other violating the ceasefire. A meeting between the two countries was called offthough the White House now says there will be new meetings in Qatar.
This isn’t a return to full-scale war, but it isn’t peace either. It is a new phase in the conflict: the fight to control Hormuz. The United States already lost the fight Trump started; it failed to achieve his declared goal of the Iranian regime’s unconditional surrender, or, barring that, Tehran’s acceptance of stringent nuclear restrictions. Now the conflict is over whether Iran controls Hormuz and can charge fees, or if the U.S. can restore the pre-war status quo, with ships transiting freely.
The U.S.-accepted language doesn’t officially acknowledge Iranian control of Hormuz, but, if anything, it favors Tehran’s interpretation.
The two sides are making incompatible claims about the MOU’s contents. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that under the agreement, Iran has sole responsibility for the strait. Meanwhile, the Trump administration asserts that the U.S. will not allow Iran to “illegally control an international waterway.”
The MOU itself is ambiguous enough to allow for either interpretation. But that’s the problem: this core issue was never worked out. The MOU was essentially a negotiated agreement to negotiate an agreement, punting all major points of contention to future talks.
Article 5 of the MOU says “the traffic of commercial vessels will immediately start” and “Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage” but doesn’t say if those arrangements can include tolls. Beyond that, all the MOU does is require Iran to talk with Oman “to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz” while recognizing “the sovereign rights of coastal states.”
The U.S.-accepted language doesn’t officially acknowledge Iranian control of Hormuz, but, if anything, it favors Tehran’s interpretation. Professional diplomats would have demanded more specifics, including on the limits of coastal sovereignty over what has long been treated as an international waterway. But the U.S. negotiating team was led by an inexperienced vice president (JD Vance), the president’s son-in-law (Jared Kushner), and a real estate investor (Steve Witkoff). Perhaps they thought they could use the ambiguity to their advantage, or that any language was worth getting something they could call a deal. Whatever their logic, agreeing to this text set up the fight for Hormuz.
Iran is treating control of Hormuz as a spoil of a successful defensive war. After surviving the initial U.S.-Israeli assault and demonstrating that its military can block Hormuz despite U.S. efforts to prevent it, the Iranian government has consistently asserted that it will control the strait. Last month, Iran set up something called the Persian Gulf Strait Authority and told ships they’ll have to register and sign up for a mandatory insurance policy (which sounds like a euphemism for tolls).
Neither side looks interested in reigniting the high-intensity warfare that ended with a provisional ceasefire on April 8. But they’re still asserting incompatible claims over the strait.
Meanwhile, the United States is acting as if it’s still the predominant military force in the Persian Gulf, as if the war didn’t alter the regional power structure. Trump has been declaring Hormuz totally open and freeand lying that Iran agreed to it. Gulf Arab states are saying they won’t pay tolls. After the signing of the MOU, a stream of ships began exiting the Gulf via a route hugging Omanknown to be clear of Iranian mines. But the vessels are still within easy range for Iranian missiles and drones, as shown by the Iranian attack on a merchant vessel Thursday that kicked off the weekend’s exchanges of fire.
If ships can use this route without registering with the Iranian government, it will establish a corridor through Hormuz outside Iran’s control. That would effectively surrender Iran’s claims to sovereignty over the strait and erase most of Iran’s longer-term geopolitical and economic gains from the war, making this a put-up-or-shut-up moment for the Iranian regime and especially its Revolutionary Guard. That points towards further escalation.
Neither side looks interested in reigniting the high-intensity warfare that ended with a provisional ceasefire on April 8. But they’re still asserting incompatible claims over the strait, so there will likely be further military exchanges.
Maybe Iran re-establishes enough of a threat, including over the Oman corridor, that ships won’t risk transit. But that would undo the MOU, which in practical terms means economic benefits for Iran in exchange for allowing ships in and out of Hormuz. Iran is already enjoying the removal of the naval blockade the U.S. imposed in April and waivers for U.S. sanctions, thereby facilitating the sale of Iranian oil. They want other economic benefits the MOU promises, but they likely want the strategic and economic benefits of controlling Hormuz more.
And time is on Iran’s side. Disrupted shipping in the Gulf harms the global economy, and the bigger the economic damage, the more that the U.S. attacking Iran becomes a cautionary tale. For now, countries and companies are covering the oil shortfall by drawing down reserves, but reserves are running out.
Fear of a big energy market disruption, when daily oil demand increasingly exceeds available supply, was a main reason Trump surrendered to Iran in the first place. At the G7 summit on June 17, Trump said“We run out of reserves at about four weeks.” That would put the deadline in mid-July.
Maybe it’s more like August or September, but whatever the deadline, big economic problems will come if oil reserves run out and ships from the Gulf aren’t on the way bringing more. The markets did react positively when shipping began to pick up after the MOU, with oil futures dropping to around pre-war levels. But that won’t last if conditions stagnate or worsen.
Either way, Trump messed up this war so badly that the U.S. aim now is just to get back to something like the pre-war status quo. And at this point, even that looks unachievable.
Nicholas Grossman is a political science professor at the University of Illinois, editor of Arc Digital and the author of “Drones and Terrorism.”
The Supreme Court has handed President Donald Trump precious few losses over its last two terms. On Monday, though, five justices voted to block the Republican National Committee’s efforts to limit the window for counting absentee ballots in federal elections. It’s a commonsense decision, something that has been exceedingly rare on the court in recent years, that allows states to count ballots postmarked by Election Day but received afterward. But common sense hasn’t stopped Trump’s outlandish demands before, so it’s hard to see that changing now.
Trump has jumped on and off the vote-by-mail train over the years since his 2020 presidential election loss
Trump has jumped on and off the vote-by-mail train over the years since his 2020 presidential election loss, at times being okay with the method and at others calling it rampant with (nonexistent) fraud. He’s revived those complaints in the aftermath of California’s most recent elections earlier this month. The state has voted almost entirely by mail in recent years, with over 80% of ballots coming in via post.
The surge of ballots being processed at California post offices on Election Day means that it can take days, or weeks, for all of them to come in and be properly tallied. As a result, there can often be phantom results based on the tabulations of in-person ballots that are then quickly eaten away as more mail-in votes are counted. We saw as much during the 2020 presidential race — and despite warnings that this would be the case, the “red mirage” that eventually flipped into a Trump loss became a major rage point for Trump.
Pennsylvania Republicans attempted to challenge ballots that came in after Election Day in 2020, but a deadlocked Supreme Court ultimately allowed those votes to be counted. The Republican National Committee opted to try again in 2024, this time joining the Mississippi State GOP in challenging its state’s law providing a five-day grace period for ballots postmarked on Election Day to be considered valid. In doing so, the Republican plaintiffs claimed, Mississippi ignored federal laws that set Election Day as the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, not whenever the ballots were received.
Among the arguments in the RNC’s initial lawsuit also brought was that because more Democrats vote by mail than Republicans, it offers them an unfair advantage: “For example, according to the MIT Election Lab, 46% of Democratic voters in the 2022 General Election mailed in their ballots, compared to only 27% of Republicans… That means the late-arriving mail-in ballots that are counted for five additional days disproportionately break for Democrats.”
It’s a novel claim, especially when you consider it is primarily Trump’s fault that mail-in balloting is now considered a partisan issue.
While the deeply conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals saw merit to the GOP’s arguments, Justice Amy Coney Barrett did not. She authored the majority opinion overturning the 5th Circuit’s decision, finding along with four of her fellow justices that federal law as written doesn’t override states’ constitutional role in running elections. Not content to break out the Webster’s dictionary definition of “election” — “[t]he act of choosing a person to fill an office,” for the record — Barrett hammered home that just because everyone voted in person at one point in U.S. history does not magically make federal law say that all votes must be received and counted before Election Day ends.
Barrett’s decision not only should have been a foregone conclusion, but it should also silence any future challenges to states’ ability to set a grace period for ballots received after Election Day. And yet we know that’s not the case with Trump, who has already used it to push for the SAVE America Acta bill that would make it harder for many Americans to register to vote and cast their ballots. As the president put it on social mediahe believes that there should be “NO MAIL-IN BALLOTS (EXCEPT FOR ILLNESS, DISABILITY, MILITARY DEPLOYMENT, OR TRAVEL!)”
It’s ironic, though, that the court’s decision did in its own way prove why the SAVE America Act is required for Trump to get his way on mail-in voting.
It’s ironic, though, that the court’s decision did in its own way prove why the SAVE America Act is required for Trump to get his way on mail-in voting. The president signed an executive order in March attempting to place new restrictions on absentee voting unilaterally, once again attempting to snipe authority over elections from the states. If implemented, the Postal Service would be required to develop a rule allowing it to check absentee ballots against a “state citizenship list” and discard any that it found lacking. A federal judge has already blocked that orderagreeing with plaintiffs that “the Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling helped reaffirm that states still possess the full ability to determine their electoral processes so long as they fit within federal law. It would require an act of Congress to change what those laws say, no matter how much Trump may wish otherwise — and he does clearly wish otherwise. But while his proposed USPS workaround is still a concern, the idea that he possesses a power over elections beyond what has been afforded to him by Congress seems unlikely to go over well with these justices.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House.
The Dictatorship
Supreme Court to rule on birthright citizenship, campaign finance and transgender athletes
The Supreme Court on Tuesday is set to hand down its final opinions in cases argued this term, with three big matters left: birthright citizenship, campaign finance and bans on transgender athletes.
Announcements in the trio of closely watched issues will cap a high court term that has already featured several significant rulings on tariffs, voting rights, immigrationand more.
The Republican-appointed court majority, which includes three justices appointed by Trump, has broadly empowered the president in his second term in office but hasn’t always sided with him. Monday’s 5-4 ruling on mail-in ballotsauthored by Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett, was one of the latest examples.
The president himself has said he expects the birthright citizenship case to join his short list of big losses, but as always, we won’t know the answer until the opinion comes. Here’s a recap of the cases in which we expect rulings when the justices take the bench Tuesday morning in Washington, D.C.
Birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara
When Trump returned to the White House last year, he signed an executive orderthat purports to end automatic citizenship for babies born in this country. The order hasn’t taken effect because it’s “blatantly unconstitutional,” as one of the several judges who ruled against Trump in the lower courts observed.
Now, the Supreme Court must decide whether to maintain the status quo or to green-light one of the president’s most lawless moves yet.
Campaign finance in NRSC v. FEC
The court is considering whether to loosen campaign finance restrictions further, in a GOP challengeto limits on political parties’ coordination with candidates on campaign spending. The case was brought by Vice President JD Vancewhen he was a Senate candidate, along with national senatorial and congressional committees of the Republican Party and former Ohio GOP Rep. Steve Chabot.
Their appeal questions the precedent that upheld those limits in 2001by a 5-4 vote. They calledit a “5-4 aberration” that was “plainly wrong the day it was decided.” The only justice still on the court from that 2001 case is Clarence Thomaswho dissented at the time. The current majority is more aligned with his view.
Transgender athletes in West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox
The court is also set to rule on whether states can ban transgender women and girls from competing in women’s and girls’ sports. There are two separate cases, regarding bans in Idaho and West Virginia, respectively. The court seemed likelyto rule against the athletes on the issue that affects similar laws in more than half the states in the country.
Last term, the majority upheld a ban on gender-affirming care for minors in the Skrmetti case. Earlier this term, the majority sided with California parentswho were against school policies to prevent outing transgender students.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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