Hello everyone and welcome to the Focus Group podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of the

bulwark. And this week, we are taking you to the greatest city in the world to cover the

worst Democratic primary in the world.

I'm talking about the New York City mayoral primary,

which is quickly turning into a choice between Andrew Cuomo,

who in a sane world would be living in a cabin off the grid right now,

and Zoran Mamdani,

a socialist state assemblyman who is too much even for my colleague and card-carrying

pinko friend Jonathan Last. There are six other statistically significant candidates right now,

but ranked choice voting probably makes this a two-person race. We're going to talk about that

more later on. My guest today is Harry Siegel,

senior editor at The City, a non-profit New York City news outlet, columnist at New York Daily News,

and co-host of the weekly podcast, FAQNYC. Harry, thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me, sir. These are my favorite podcasts that

we do when I have somebody I don't know, because I do a lot of these with like my pals or people

in national or whatever, but when we have a local race and a person locally who's following

it super closely, who's going to teach us about all the dynamics that we need to understand, to understand this

horrible, horrible race.

So I'm going to start with this.

The New York Times editorial board ran an editorial this week that made clear they preferred

Andrew Cuomo to Zobron, Momdani, but wouldn't explicitly call for people to rank Cuomo on their ballots.

Now, you called this,

...