Zohran Mamdani Reminds Me of Someone. His Name Was Mario Cuomo.

Which candidate, running as an
underdog in New York’s Democratic primary election, said the following?

“Once the middle class goes over
to the right with the rich, they bludgeon the poor. The whole society suffers
because of the social disorientation that produces crime, deterioration,
everything evil. You cannot live with a large part of this state or nation
deprived. It can’t be done. You can’t build a wall between you and them and say
maybe they’ll go away.… You can’t leave it to the rich to do the right thing,
any more than we could leave it to the business people to provide safe quarters
for the garment workers a hundred years ago. That’s why people burned to death
in factories.… You need unions the same way you need policemen. You
need laws that say to the rich, you’re gonna have to share some of your wealth—that’s why we have the income tax.”

You might well assume that those
are Zohran Mamdani’s words. But they were spoken to me by Mario Cuomo, the
father of Andrew Cuomo, in April 1982, during his underdog gubernatorial campaign
against Ed Koch, which I was profiling
for The Village Voice. 

Koch had defeated Cuomo five years
earlier in New York City’s mayoral election, partly by pitching the death
penalty, which Cuomo bravely resisted. And now Cuomo was polling seven points
behind Koch statewide. Yet, somewhat like the underdog Mamdani in 2025, Mario
Cuomo was drawing positive attention in 1982 by campaigning with tremendous
energy, charm, and eloquence. To the surprise of the Democratic Party
establishment of that time, Democratic primary voters in 1982 spurned the
overdog Koch for the underdog Cuomo, somewhat as primary voters now have
spurned the overdog Andrew Cuomo for the underdog Mamdani. The similarities,
and the ironies, are instructive.

Like Zohran in 2025, Mario in 1982
did champion economic justice and ethno-racial inclusion. Like Zohran, Mario,
too, was a son of immigrants in Queens, and he’d become a strong advocate for
justice and comity across ethno-racial lines on behalf of a broader civic
vision. Like Zohran, Mario was subjected to rumors that he harbored antisemitic
views, even though, as I noted in the Voice profile, there wasn’t a
shred of evidence to suggest them. Like Mamdani, who already holds public
office as a member of the New York State Assembly, Mario Cuomo was lieutenant
governor under Governor Hugh Carey, although that office was so purely
ceremonial that at one point, Carey told a reporter that he wasn’t sure where
his lieutenant governor was or what he was doing. (Small wonder that The
Voice later archived my 1982 profile, the first really in-depth piece on
Cuomo, under the headline, “The article that made Mario Cuomo governor – No
Kidding!”) In June 1982, when Cuomo was still trailing Koch, the headline had
been, “Cuomo: Too True to be Good?”