4.5 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 23 June 2025
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
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Journalist & author of CUOMO: Return of the Dark Prince Ross Barkan returns to Bad Faith to discuss with Brie his tight coverage of the New York City mayoral race. Barkan worked closely with socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani back when Zohran managed Ross' 2017 State Senate campaign, and he can offer unique insight into how Mamdani has managed to surge to the top of the polls against corrupt, billionaire-backed sex pest and former governor Andrew Cuomo. Also discussed: what it means to run a good campaign, what we might expect to see on election day, and what the left can learn from Zohran no matter the outcome.
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0:00.0 | Cuomo's campaign is a disaster. It's an awful campaign. It is probably the worst front-running campaign I've ever seen. |
0:06.5 | It makes like Hillary 2016 and Kamala 24 look like hyper-competent, honestly. It's almost a joke. |
0:14.7 | It's messed up campaign finance or paperwork. It has really ugly signage. It doesn't like do anything. Cuomo |
0:22.9 | barely himself, barely campaigns. I mean, this whole campaign has really been about the Super PAC, |
0:28.3 | which is decently run. It also has unlimited amounts of money. And Cuomo beat Cuomo. He can say, |
0:34.9 | I've been governor of the state. I will fix the city. That coming off of |
0:39.4 | Eric Adams is a compelling argument for the average voter who doesn't pay that much attention. |
0:45.1 | But this Cuomo campaign itself, it's deeply unimpressive. His governor campaigns were better |
0:50.1 | than this one. This is, I give it a D minus F if I give Zoron's campaign an A and pure, just |
0:56.7 | from a technical perspective. Well, is there a weird sort of inverse? I mean, Zoran's campaign, |
1:03.3 | as you noted, has been so clear and consistent on messaging. Everyone knows it's about the free buses. |
1:10.0 | Everybody knows about the |
1:11.3 | city run grocery stores. On the other hand, Cuomo doesn't seem to have an affirmative message, |
1:16.7 | but was there an opportunity or is there an opportunity to sort of narrow down the criticisms |
1:21.4 | of Cuomo as well? It does sort of feel like outside of this really great moment that Zeran had |
1:27.4 | at the debate where he kind |
1:28.6 | did this rundown laundry list of I'm not you. I'm not the one who has sexual allegations. I'm not |
1:34.6 | the evil of this guy gets lost in the volume. You know, is there an argument that you got to pick |
1:41.1 | one? You got to pick one or two things that Cuomo has done and really |
1:45.2 | push them on the public because it does feel like a lot of the stuff got memory hold. And in fact, |
1:50.2 | you're getting people who condemned Cuomo for one of, or all of his scandals, who condemned him |
1:57.6 | and the call from his step down over the sexual assault, sexual harassment stuff, |
... |
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