Inadvertently

Oppo Research - or lack thereof - in the NYC Mayoral Race

With about a week to go before Election Day, some very detailed oppo research showed up in an Andrew Cuomo ad about the leading candidate for mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani.

Within five minutes, the Cuomo campaign took down the ad.

“The video was a draft proposal that was neither finished nor approved, did not go through the normal legal process, and was inadvertently posted by a junior staffer,” said Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi.

To the extent anyone noticed the ad, critics found the AI images clunky and the overall presentation to be offensive and insensitive. Former NYC mayor Bill de Blasio called it “disqualifying.”

The ad, however, was chock-full of opposition research on Mamdani, including press reports about the Democratic Socialists for America platform. But the glimpses were fleeting, overpowered by the AI-generated characters.

(There was another, more detailed, oppo dump in the mayoral race last week, but the target wasn’t Mamdani. Former mayoral candidate Jim Walden posted oppo research on the Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa. Some of the posts were viewed about a thousand times, which is to say the oppo made zero impression on New York City voters.)

Mark Halperin said efforts to use oppo research against Mamdani have “failed miserably” to arrest his momentum.

WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan speculated the Cuomo campaign simply didn’t do its homework. “If they had killer oppo,” she wrote in late June, “they might have used it before [Mamdani] won the primary.”

To paraphrase former U.S. Senator Howard Baker, what did Cuomo know about Mamdani, and when did he know it?

We may find out more after the votes are counted and campaign insiders begin pointing fingers.

With any luck, the “junior staffer” will fill in the gaps.