Last summer, the New York Times, continuing a pivot towards a vision of itself as a national publication whose offices just happened to be in New York City, announced that its editorial board would stop making endorsements in municipal races. The announcement was greeted with dismay among many civic-minded New Yorkers, who saw the Times as abandoning a core responsibility in guiding and informing voters, ceding the field to the likes of the New York Post.
This year, as the current mayoral race heated up, the Times initially took a perplexing bank-shot approach to non-endosement, publishing the mayoral endorsements not of its own board, but of a confounding grab bag of New Yorkers that included a former editorial board member, a former state senator, a former Bloomberg deputy, and then… the guy who owns Warby Parker? Celebrity restauranteur Danny Meyer? The president of the Manhattan Institute? The Times Opinion editors then put this incongruous goulash of opinions in a blender and arrived at an aggregate non-endorsement endorsement of Brad Lander. Lander made sure to tout this homogenized-ghoulash-slurry endorsement on the debate stage and whenever else the opportunity presented itself, but everybody else in New York City probably rightly ignored it.
For one thing: who fucking cares what Warby Parker guy thinks? For another: Brad Lander, all available polling shows, is unlikely to win the Democratic mayoral primary. With early voting already well underway, the race appears to be between the two front-runners, disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo and State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani. One of these men is credibly accused of sexually harassing 13 women and covered up nursing home deaths brought about by his COVID policies, but the other one would like to tax the ultra-rich, a prospect evidently untenable to the New York Times, a paper owned by a family of centimillionaires.
So today the Times is back for another bite at the apple with an even dumber non-endorsement endorsement.
"Many longtime New Yorkers have worried that their city was heading back to the bad old days of the 1970s and '80s," the latest salvo from the editorial board begins, echoing the organizing theme of Cuomo's campaign. "Subway trips can have a chaotic or even menacing quality."
This vibes-based analysis is hard to falsify, being devoid of any empirical statement, but it's worth noting that—per the Times's own reporting—subway crime remains rare. Indeed, you are more likely to get in a traffic crash in the course of a two-mile drive than you are to be the victim of a violent crime on the subway.
"The quality of life has deteriorated over the past decade," the editorial board continues, neglecting to support this contention or even to specify by what metrics they are even defining the amorphous term. In any case, the board writes, there's an election on, and "New York needs a mayor who understands why the past decade has been disappointing."
What follows is a startlingly sweeping statement of values and dubious political history from the Old Grey Lady. In the last decade, the editorial board writes, "a certain version of progressive city management has failed." In the late Obama years, "some Democrats decided that he had been too cautious and adopted a bolder liberalism. At the municipal level, this liberalism was skeptical of, if not hostile to, law enforcement."
De Blasio was one of these who, the Times writes, "did not take disorder seriously enough."
Don't get the Times editorial board wrong, they beg, they're not calling for a "local version of the current Republican agenda, which slashes valuable government programs, opposes accountability for police departments and disdains some basic civil rights."
Rather, the board is looking for "a more effective and thoughtful liberal governance, in which City leaders use empirical evidence and effective management to achieve results." Who embodies this, in the Times editorial board's minds? Mike Bloomberg and Rahm Emanuel. (A more sincere and coherent editorial might wrestle with the contradictions of holding up Mike Bloomberg, who presided over the most sweeping regime of unconstitutional policing in recent New York history, or Emanuel, who helped cover up his police department's murder of a teenager, as people with reverence for basic civil rights or an interest in police accountability, but this is a different kind of document.)
"Many New Yorkers are understandably disappointed by the field" of candidates in the mayor's race, the editorial board continues, once again citing no evidence for the assertion. But in any case, they concede, the race is down to Cuomo and Mamdani. And that choice calls for a New York Times editorial board intervention.
"We do not believe that Mr. Mamdani deserves a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots," the board writes. "His experience is too thin, and his agenda reads like a turbocharged version of Mr. de Blasio's dismaying mayoralty."
The editorial runs three paragraphs knocking Mamdani because he favors rent freezes in rent-regulated housing, because he "minimizes the importance of policing," and because, "most worrisome, he shows little concern about the disorder of the past decade."
The critical analysis of Cuomo is somewhat more brief: "We have serious objections to his ethics and conduct," the board writes, "even if he would be better for New York's future than Mr. Mamdani."
Lest you mistake this for the Times calling for a plague on both leading candidates' houses, the board hammers home that it's not: It would be a mistake not to rank either candidate, the Times suggests. "The thing that matters most on a ballot will be the relative positions of those two candidates."
So there, in a profoundly mealy-mouthed, circuitous formulation, is the Times backing into its definitely-still-not-an-endorsement endorsement: It's down to Cuomo and Mamdani; you have to vote for one of them; you can't vote for Mamdani.
If a downside of taking this extremely winding, weasely approach to an endorsement is that the resulting document is largely unreadable, an upside is that, by never explicitly saying that the New York Times endorses Andrew Cuomo for mayor, it doesn't have to own the decision, to defend it. This strange letter can glide to its conclusion without ever explaining why, after publicly determining that Cuomo was not fit to be our governor, it is now asserting that he is fit to be our mayor. It does not explain what is more important to the editorial board than the 13 women who credibly accused Cuomo of sexually harassing them.
It does not reckon with the possibility that Cuomo may have had some part, as Governor, in shaping the aspects of New York City that the editorial board didn't like. It does not address the fact that the guy who they deem closest to their ideal of "liberal governance" spent much of his term as governor doing everything in his power to ensure that Republicans controlled the state legislature. It doesn't consider the implications of Cuomo's campaign being largely bankrolled by Trump-supporting billionaires.
An actual, persuasive endorsement of Andrew Cuomo would need to address all these things before coming to its conclusion. But this isn't a mayoral endorsement. The New York Times doesn't make mayoral endorsements. It's just telling you to vote for Andrew Cuomo.