Just two days before early voting starts in the New York City mayoral race, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo seemed to agree with a radio host who suggested that Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani would be “cheering” if a terrorist attack occurred.
“That job is a scary job. You wake up as mayor, you wake up as governor, any morning there’s a prison uprising, there was just a mass shooting, there’s Legionnaires’ disease, there’s gonna be a fiscal collapse, Wall Street’s moving to doubt. Any given morning there’s a crisis,” Cuomo said on Sid Rosenberg’s “Sid & Friends In The Morning.” “And people’s lives are at stake—God forbid another 9/11, can you imagine Mamdani in the seat?”
Rosenberg replied, “I could. He’d be cheering.”
“That’s another problem,” Cuomo said. “But can you imagine that? If Mamdani was in the seat on 9/11, what would have happened in this city?”
Mamdani called Cuomo’s remarks “disgusting” when asked about the interview on PIX11 News that same day.
“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,” Mamdani said.
“Frankly it’s not about me,” he continued. “It’s about the fact that 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 and it is time that we turn the page on Andrew Cuomo, and those that would tolerate this kind of rhetoric from him as well.”
Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for Cuomo’s campaign, said in a statement to TIME that the former governor 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.”
Piker, a popular streamer, later acknowledged that his remarks about 9/11 were inappropriate. His name was not mentioned during Cuomo’s conversation with Rosenberg. In the first mayoral debate last week, Mamdani called Piker’s comments on 9/11 “objectionable and reprehensible.”
Mamdani’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The mayoral race has drawn national attention in recent months. In a stunning political upset, Mamdani defeated Cuomo in the Democratic primary this summer. Cuomo later launched an independent campaign, but faces an uphill battle against Mamdani, who holds a double-digit lead in the latest polls. Current Mayor Eric Adams ended his re-election bid last month, leaving just Mamdani, Cuomo, and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa in the race.
Adams told the New York Times on Thursday that he plans to endorse Cuomo, a little over a month after he called the former governor a “snake and a liar.” It’s not yet clear what impact Adams’ endorsement will have on the mayoral race.
