Why The Center-Right Failed to Gain Traction

Many center-right commentators argue that the 2025 New York City Democratic primary candidates have failed to confront the city’s core challenges: excessive spending, high taxes, and heavy regulation. They contend that residents receive inadequate services in return and that the city, rather than fostering economic competitiveness, relies on its fading prestige to retain affluent residents and major firms in finance and professional services. This view has more influence online and on podcasts than among the electorate. Investor and philanthropist Whitney Tilson, who has made many of these arguments, is polling at 1 percent in the primary.

The center-right’s failure to gain traction can be explained, in part, by the coalitions behind the two leading candidates. Former New York governor Andrew Cuomo has assembled a base made up of groups largely content with the status quo and looking to him to preserve it. His principal challenger, Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, draws support from those dissatisfied with the current system—but who see the solution as more public spending and higher taxes.

A recent analysis by local political commentator Michael Lange demonstrates how this situation materialized. Lange divides New York City’s State Assembly districts into seven categories, ranking them from most favorable to Mamdani to most favorable to Cuomo.

Cuomo’s geographic base, according to Lange, lies in 25 districts he labels “Cuomoland”—a broad arc stretching across most of Staten Island, southern Brooklyn, eastern Queens, and the East and parts of the West Bronx. It also includes a wealthy district on the Upper East Side.

“While vast in geography,” Lange writes, “the core of Cuomo’s support comes from the Black electorate in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.” The former governor also performs strongly in white-majority homeowner areas.

Lange labels Cuomo’s next-strongest group of nine Assembly districts “Keep It Close,” imagining them through the lens of Mamdani’s campaign. These include low-density neighborhoods adjacent to Cuomoland, along with middle-class apartment enclaves like Forest Hills in Queens and Riverdale in the Bronx.

Cuomoland’s population is substantially dependent on civil-service and unionized private-sector jobs, which offer a path to the middle class for many less-privileged segments of the population. The former governor didn’t get the endorsement of District Council 37, the city’s largest public-sector union—it went to City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams—but he is very much interested in its members’ votes. This is why he has promised, for example, to undo the “Tier 6” public pension reforms he helped implement as governor.

These districts are largely anti-development. Many of their representatives voted against a modified version of Mayor Eric Adams’s proposed “City of Yes for Housing Opportunity” zoning amendment in December 2024. As freelance journalist Benjamin Schneider observes, this helps explain Cuomo’s pledge to preserve low-density neighborhoods, as well as his close ties to major developers and the construction trades, whose principal development interests are in high-density areas far from Cuomo’s base.

Cuomo’s geographic base stands in sharp contrast to Mamdani’s. Lange identifies seven strongly pro-Mamdani Assembly districts along the East River waterfront in Brooklyn and Queens as the “Commie Corridor.” However anachronistic the label, these districts lean heavily to the left. Observers of city land-use policy will note that many of the most significant post-2000 rezonings—particularly for housing construction—have occurred in this corridor.

Nearly as strong for Mamdani are four Assembly districts Lange labels “No Kings & No Cuomo.” These include Downtown and Brownstone Brooklyn, Greenwich Village, and Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Of the four, only Downtown Brooklyn is a high-growth area, having been rezoned in 2003.

Mamdani’s geographic base is largely composed of young, well-educated professionals who pay market—or near-market—rents in unregulated or upper-tier regulated housing. They are also less likely to work in civil service or other unionized jobs.

In other words, this population is the inverse of Cuomo’s base. They are far less likely to benefit from existing government patronage, yet still face high rents, high taxes, the elevated cost of city living, and the burden of student debt.

That makes Mamdani’s pitch for new public spending and new services attractive to them. As Mara Gay of the New York Times, from a perspective sympathetic to Mamdani, writes, “Mr. Mamdani’s surging campaign is a sign that a sizable part of the Democratic base may have had enough with politicians like Mr. Cuomo. They are fed up with high rents and stagnant wages, leaders who won’t break up with corporate interests, who run for office past their prime and who haven’t shown enough fight against Mr. Trump.”

From a housing perspective, Mamdani’s base presents opportunities for constructive change. The assemblyman could build on Mayor Adams’s progress with the “City of Yes” initiative to push for more ambitious zoning reforms in Cuomoland and other NIMBY-dominated areas where he currently draws little support.

However, Mamdani’s avowed socialism and pro-union stance make him unlikely to challenge the privileges of entrenched big-government interests. That poses obstacles both to creating fiscal space for new spending and to building the political will for meaningful deregulation.

In New York City, center-right reform tends to follow crisis, not precede it. Michael Bloomberg’s rezoning agenda emerged from post-9/11 uncertainty. Cuomo advanced pension reform in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Eric Adams, with Speaker Adrienne Adams, enacted the “City of Yes” after a sharp drop in rental vacancy rates triggered by the 2019 rent regulation law.

As mayor, Cuomo or Mamdani might find himself forced to pursue reforms that his coalition would reject in calmer times. But for those hoping for a center-right renewal, the likeliest scenario over the next four years is a mix of shortsighted policies and the continued slow decline of a once-great city.

Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images