Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has a “more than 50% chance” of winning the city’s November mayoral race in a head–to-head race with front-runner Zohran Mamdani, American hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman said on Sunday.
The prominent New York investor made the remarks in Israel following a lecture he gave at the University of Haifa, where he and his wife Neri are being awarded an honorary doctorate.
He predicted that New York Mayor Eric Adams, who is running fourth in a four-way race for City Hall according to the polls, will pull out of the race in the coming week, while the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa, is likely to follow him out.
The latest polls give Cuomo a theoretical path to victory, but only in a two-way race against Mamdani.
The Democratic nominee for Mayor of New York City, who has refused to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” has repeatedly pledged that, if elected, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be arrested if he enters the city.
“He’s never run anything,” Ackman said of Mamdani when the question of the New York race came up after the investor spoke out against the ills of socialism. “He was a rapper, but not a successful one,” noting the Assemblyman benefited from a weak field of candidates and being a good speaker.
Ackman, 59, one of the most prominent and influential figures in the U.S. capital market, has been a staunch and vocal supporter of the Jewish state in the nearly two-year-old war against Hamas in Gaza. He has also been a leading voice against the antisemitism on U.S. college campuses, including his alma mater, Harvard.
U.S. President Donald Trump had said on Friday that it appeared Mamdani was headed to victory.
“I call him my little communist, he’s my little communist mayor, you look at the other candidates, maybe one-on-one somebody could beat him, and I’m not looking at the polls too carefully, but it would look like he’s going to win. And that’s a rebellion,” Trump said on Fox and Friends.
