We're less than three weeks from Primary Day—and nothing happened during Wednesday's televised debate between the Democratic mayoral candidates that is likely to dramatically change the state of the race.
Over two hours, the nine candidates onstage tried out various attacks on frontrunner Andrew Cuomo, while Cuomo himself mostly stuck to the script (something something "experience" something something "stand up to Trump") and focused his ire on Zohran Mamdani ("Mr. Trump would go through Mr. Mamdani like a hot knife through butter") and Brad Lander, the two candidates who are polling closest to him. While portions of the debate were lively, no one had enough time to really lay out their vision for the mayoralty; 30 seconds is not enough to both introduce yourself to voters AND answer the question that was posed. Frequently, the debate went off the rails (nine politicians onstage—what did you think was going to happen?!) and the moderators, who were from NBC 4 New York, Politico, and Telemundo 47, struggled to rein the shouting suits back in.
Enter former State Assemblymember Michael Blake, who was happy to create some of the chaos by gleefully jumping into the role of Cuomo spoiler.