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?”