The NY Times Isn’t Endorsing Cuomo—They’re Just Telling You to Vote for Him

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.