Andrew Cuomo didn’t call Zohran Mamdani to congratulate him Tuesday night, while Mamdani started his mayoral victory speech by slamming his vanquished opponent — two unusual moments that capped off a deeply bitter and at times personal feud between the two men that consumed the final stretch of the race for City Hall.
At a Wednesday morning press conference where he announced his transition team leadership, Mamdani told reporters he never heard from Cuomo after his win became official around 9:45 p.m. It’s standard for the losing candidate in a mayoral race to phone the winner to offer well wishes after the election has been called.
Asked if that rubbed him the wrong way, Mamdani said he’s not focusing on “the candidates of this past election,” but noted he did get a concession call from Curtis Sliwa, the Republican mayoral nominee who finished in third place.
“I spoke briefly with Curtis Sliwa, and then I headed to address the thousands of New Yorkers that were there waiting to hear of what this new era of government will look like,” Mamdani said, adding that “the first thing” he did after being elected mayor was to “drink some water.”
Asked why Cuomo didn’t give Mamdani the courtesy call, campaign spokesman Rich Azzopardi didn’t directly answer, but took a shot at what he saw as the mayor-elect’s overly aggressive comments about the ex-governor in his victory speech.
“I’ll let their respective speeches be the measuring stick for grace and leave it at that,” he said.
In his raucous victory speech to hundreds of supporters at Brooklyn Paramount, Mamdani opened his remarks by declaring he wished Cuomo “only the best in private life.”
“But let tonight be the final time I utter his name as we turn the page on the politics that abandon the many and answers only to the few,” he said to deafening cheers.
Later in the speech, Mamdani also cribbed a line from a quote attributed to Cuomo’s late father, Gov. Mario Cuomo, telling supporters: “A great New Yorker once said, ‘While you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose.’ If that must be true, let the prose we write still rhyme and let us build a shining city for all.”
In his concession speech in Midtown, Cuomo said he wanted to congratulate Mamdani, prompting his supporters to start booing.
“That is not right, and that is not us,” Cuomo told them, urging them to pipe down.
That marked a shift in tone from weeks of Cuomo and his allies taking aggressive and personal shots at Mamdani.
In an especially controversial moment, Cuomo appeared on right-wing radio host Sid Rosenberg’s show last month and did not object when Rosenberg said Mamdani, who’s set to become the city’s first Muslim mayor, would be “cheering” in the event of another 9/11 terror attack on New York City. Instead, Cuomo said, “That’s another problem.”
Pro-Cuomo super PACs also pumped millions of dollars into ads painting Mamdani as an extreme candidate with little experience who would plunge the city into chaos. Some echoed President Trump’s claim that Mamdani, a democratic socialist, is “a communist.”
“You have never had a job. You’ve never accomplished anything,” Cuomo told Mamdani on the stage of the second and final mayoral debate last month.
The vitriol flowed both ways. Mamdani, while promising to create a more affordable New York, routinely slammed Cuomo as a “puppet” of Trump and of the wealthy.
Mamdani, who has served as an Assembly member representing Queens since 2021, is set to be sworn in Jan. 1 as the youngest mayor in over a century.
