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

[Quiet Em]

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.

https://newrepublic.com/article/197226/zohran-mamdani-wins-mayor-primary-mario-cuomo

I thought this was a pretty interesting opinion piece.