Eduardo Munoz/Reuters

Think you know where the candidates for New York mayor are coming from? Think again. With less than 90 days to go before Election Day, the candidates are all migrating toward the political center, dropping old positions and adopting new ones, freely copying one another’s policies and style along the way.

Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, is downplaying and disavowing years-old social media posts about the NYPD, now claiming “I am not defunding the police; I am not running to defund the police” and describing himself as a “candidate who is not fixed in time, one that learns and one that leads, and part of that means admitting as I have grown.” Andrew Cuomo, whose unsuccessful Democratic primary campaign began with a clunky seven-minute video followed by months of conventional campaign ads, has begun borrowing from Mamdani’s playbook by shifting to snappy, short video clips with the aid of what the campaign calls “new people helping us with social media.”

Republican Curtis Sliwa, at 71 the oldest candidate in the race, told me his team is nearly all Gen-X and millennial staffers and that he’s targeting young voters who supported Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris for president and asking the leader of his party, President Donald Trump, to stay out of the race altogether. Mayor Eric Adams, after years of insisting that “Social media does not pick a candidate, people on Social Security pick a candidate,” has taken to releasing day-in-the-life videos showing him waking up, making a smoothie, and going to work as well as jokey videos on X that make fun of his political opponents, the press, and even himself.

The results of all this style and position switching are occasionally hilarious. “Cuomo’s efforts to parrot Mamdani—and the effort is evident, in every single video—have resulted in some of the most excruciating political content that I’ve ever seen,” writes Tyler Foggatt in The New Yorker. “He may say he’s in it to win it, but Cuomo radiates the sluggish reluctance of someone who has already lost—or at the very least can’t wait to get back to the comfort of his air-conditioned car,” Sam Adams writes on Slate.

Adams, the sitting mayor, created an instant internet classic with an unintentionally amusing video that invites viewers to “Come with me to get stuff done,” followed by scenes of the mayor boldly striding from one place to another but never actually getting anything done. Substantively, Adams has hammered at the twin themes of public safety and affordable housing, pointing to steep drops in violent crime and the creation of new subsidized apartments.

All this posturing and position shifting is a healthy exercise in democracy; candidates should be evolving during a campaign and fighting to attract support from the moderate middle, even at the risk of being branded wishy-washy or unprincipled. That is happening to Mamdani, who was slammed by my friends and former colleagues on the editorial board of the New York Daily News for changing his positions on law enforcement and on Israel, even as moves in the very directions the board has urged.

“Zohran Mamdani’s sudden 180-degree turn on defunding the police, from supporting the foolish concept to opposing it, coincides with his political necessity and rank opportunism as he tries to be elected mayor. At least the old anti-cop Mamdani was consistent, if wrong,” the board opined sourly. “We’re not buying it. Mamdani is trying to redefine himself to appeal to a wider audience in the general election and spinning it as if he all of a sudden learned something new from these conversations.” And while Mamdani has publicly discouraged use of the inflammatory phrase “Globalize the Intifada,” the News board again objects: “Now he’s someone who is trying to cover up his dangerous and unworkable views. With the old Mamdani you knew what you were getting. How many more conversions will Mamdani have over the next few months that will produce conversions of his stands?”

That’s way too harsh. It seems clear Mamdani is learning as he encounters voters on the campaign trail, as one would hope all candidates are doing in the home stretch of a tough race. Mamdani, like Cuomo, Adams, and Sliwa, has clearly realized he needs to change some positions in order to win and is willing to make compromises in order to govern a complicated city. What’s so bad about that? Brokering and managing compromise is the definition of what it means to be mayor of New York.

Cuomo, who acknowledges having lost the Democratic primary by failing to connect directly with voters (“I did not run a good campaign,” he told me), has been hitting the streets, holding regular press conferences and answering questions from reporters. He has also made a point of challenging Mamdani’s policies on housing, transportation, and food prices, offering what he calls better and more realistic ways of bringing down the cost of living. That’s commendable competition.

Ditto for the Republican, Sliwa, who is chasing after young voters struggling to make it economically. “No wonder why these millennials and Gen-Zers are so angry,” he says. “They have a right, because we sold them a dream, the American Dream: Get a good education, make $150,000 a year. And now they’re living in a dormitory and they’ve got nothing at the end of the month. The cost of living is skyrocketing. If I were their age, I’d be pissed off too. Zorhan, like Bernie Sanders, would be very attractive.” Sliwa, who got 28 percent of the vote four years ago, says he hopes to win by building a coalition of fed-up New Yorkers, including outer-borough conservatives and angry millennials.

I can’t quite imagine hipsters in Astoria and the Lower East Side ending up on the same page politically with Staten Island homeowners, but stranger things have happened. Voters should give all the candidates a new look as they try to shape a governing coalition out of the tribes of New York.

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