POLITICS: NYC mayoral candidates see who can promise more than upstart socialist Mamdani — while Cuomo ducks and dodges debate attacks

Zohran Mamdani might or might not win the Dems’ mayoral primary, but the first debate showed he’s already won the argument.

The two-hour showdown turned into a bidding war to see who could promise to deliver more government giveaways than the 33-year-old Queens assemblyman.

It’s a lost cause when the trend setter is an admitted socialist who promises free everything, from food to rent to bus service.

Free except, of course, for the evil top 1 percent, who would be taxed to pay for it all. Unless they pack up and join the huge exodus of people who already have given up on New York ever fixing itself.

The debate showed how deeply the rot runs and why pessimism about the city’s future is the only sane response.

The sickening pandering to the left amounts to a race to the bottom, and re-affirmed for me why I don’t have a candidate yet.

I didn’t see anyone on that stage whom I can envision doing even an average job in City Hall, let alone turning around a declining city the way Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg did.

Mamdani is the flavor of the moment for many young voters, but his socialist ideas are dead-enders.

Is he really that ignorant about the history of the world and the countries that have gone full socialist?

Additionally, his refusal again to say Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state is disqualifying.

If it talks and walks like an antisemite, it’s an antisemite.

Mayor Adams, whom I supported four years ago, is such a wounded incumbent that he saw no path forward in his party, so he’s running as an independent.

Targeting Cuo

The other major theme of the evening was the gang-up on Andrew Cuomo. Polls have consistently shown him as the clear front-runner, with Mamdani running a solid second and most of the others stuck in single digits.

While I expected that Cuomo, the former governor who resigned in August of 2021 before he could be impeached and convicted over a slew of sexual harassment allegations, would be a target, I was surprised at how frequently even the also-rans found a way to attack him in their answers to most questions.

They clearly calculated that the only way to pull themselves up is to pull him down.

Even more surprising was that Cuomo often appeared unprepared for the onslaught. He hemmed and hawed, cleared his throat and seemed to be trying to run out the clock on the brief time moderators allotted for answers rather than give sharp, clear responses.

His hesitancy could be seen as playing it safe with his lead, but I believe it’s also possible his heart is really not in the race. His low-energy is a sharp contrast to his past habits, when he was the consummate pugnacious pol.

Now he seems to be running on auto pilot, as if he’d rather be in Albany or running for president. Or maybe just home watching TV.

One sign I see is that, after all this time, he still doesn’t have a clear, credible answer on the nursing home debacle he caused and can’t bring himself to acknowledge mistakes.

When the topic turned to reports of a federal probe of whether Cuomo lied to Congress about his role in a state report downplaying the number of deaths, Mamdani seized the opening to say bluntly: “Andrew Cuomo did lie to Congress.”

Comptroller Brad Lander seconded the point, saying Cuomo “lied to nursing home families to get a $5 million book deal.”

Cuomo denied the charges, but seemed to get lost in the weeds of his answer. The bottom line is that the exchanges showed that the topic remains a major weak spot for him, as it should be.

Similarly, his claim, which he has made in an ad, that New York “led during COVID” seems like a very dated pitch. While he did receive huge plaudits for his daily briefings during the pandemic, the events that followed and his forced resignation have overshadowed nearly everything that came before.

That he hasn’t used his time out of office to at least try to repair that damage and express remorse reveals a heartlessness unbecoming of someone who aims to lead America’s largest and most important city.

A dominant theme of the evening was how to handle the Trump administration, and the four moderators are to blame for making it a consistent, negative focus.

They made it their second round of rapid-fire questions and kept stirring the pot by essentially asking who had the toughest plan on how to resist.

They got what they asked for, and the answers grew increasingly bizarre. Scott Stringer, the former comptroller, claimed the president is “hell bent on destroying the social safety net,” while Michael Blake, a former state assemblyman who is black, tried to milk a racial angle.

Council Speaker Adrienne Adams declared she would stop Trump, saying “not in my New York.”

The competition to give the most radical answer grew so intense and bitter that some of the responses verged on the bizarre.

Two candidates actually suggested New York could withhold federal income taxes from the administration, with state Sen. Zellnor Myrie saying “that gives us the tax base so we can be independent of the White House.”

None dared to suggest cooperation. This is malpractice. The president can be a great help to his hometown, as he has shown with a plan for a new Penn Station.

Or, he can be a huge problem to a mayor and governor who think they can hoodwink him.

The mayoral candidates uniformly decided that they would show how tough they are by resisting him, which is a fool’s errand.

Unfortunately, it’s becoming typical of the Democratic Party nationally and in deep blue states. Harboring of criminal migrants and refusing to crack down on ­antisemitism are just two elements of what they call resistance to a president they don’t like.

The talk is so radical that it sometimes sounds like the beginnings of a secession movement.

They can’t be that stupid — can they?