Business leaders gathered Tuesday at the Pool Room in the Seagram Building in Midtown Manhattan to meet with Governor Andrew Cuomo and strategize how to beat the Democratic nominee for mayor, Zohran Mamdani, in November’s election. 

New York’s wealthiest are panicking about the prospect of a 33-year-old Democratic Socialist mayor running New York City. After President Trump weighed in on the race last week, these leaders are ratcheting up their efforts.

“There’s a lot of donors that are showing up, and they’re all going to support him,” a real estate executive with knowledge of the meeting told The New York Sun about Mr. Cuomo. “You’re going to see a lot of movement in the next week.”

Mr. Mamdani holds a commanding 21-point lead in the New York City mayoral race, according to a New York Times/Siena poll released Tuesday. The poll suggests that Mr. Mamdani could win the general election in November with 46 percent of the vote to Mr. Cuomo’s 24 percent. The Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa, earns 15 percent of the vote, and Mayor Eric Adams comes in fourth with 9 percent.

Yet if the four-person field narrows to a head-to-head matchup between Messrs. Mamdani and Cuomo, the race is more competitive. Mr. Mamdani beats Mr. Cuomo by 48 percent to 44 percent. The poll’s margin of error is 3.6 percent. 

Mr. Mamdani trounced Mr. Cuomo in the June Democratic Party mayoral primary by 12 points. The shift by business leaders to supporting Mr. Cuomo comes after they spent the summer vacillating between supporting the former governor or the current mayor, Mr. Adams, who continues to be dogged by corruption allegations. 

In late August, a former aide to Mr. Adams handed a reporter a potato chip bag stuffed with cash in an apparent bribe, and a senior adviser, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, was indicted on state corruption charges. Mr. Adams’s poll numbers also continue to lag.

Billionaire hedge funder Bill Ackman backed Mr. Cuomo in the primary, then endorsed Mr. Adams, and then last week threw his support again behind the former governor. Mr. Trump also made it clear he wants a one-on-one race.

“I don’t like to see a communist become mayor, I’ll tell you that. And I don’t think you can win unless you have one-on-one,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “I would like to see two people drop out and have it be one-on-one.”

Trump administration officials reportedly offered Mr. Adams a job in the administration — a nomination to be ambassador to Saudi Arabia — in exchange for dropping out of the race. Business leaders are also reportedly offering Mr. Adams lucrative private sector positions in exchange for bowing out of the race. Mr. Adams insists he’s staying in.

“Andrew Cuomo is a snake and a liar,” Mr. Adams said at a press conference on Friday. “I’m the only one that can beat Mamdani.”

The Times poll, though, suggests Mr. Adams would lose to Mr. Mamdani in a head-to-head matchup by 19 points. The poll did not ask about a one-on-one race between Messrs. Sliwa and Mamdani. The founder of the Guardian Angels insists the only way he’s leaving the race is “in a coffin.”

“Why these polls don’t hypothetically put me against Zohran is troubling,” Mr. Sliwa told the Sun by text message. “The part of the poll that I can build on is what no other candidate has going for them in the polls. A majority of voters polled believe that I have good character and that I care about other people.”

The favorability issue is an Achilles’ heel for Mr. Cuomo, who resigned from the governorship in 2021 after 13 women accused him sexual harassment. He is also facing an investigation into whether he lied to Congress over his handling of Covid nursing home deaths. Only 39 percent of voters think he “has good character” and 59 percent view him unfavorably.

Despite increasing scrutiny of his platform and controversial past statements, Mr. Mamdani maintains high favorability numbers. Some 57 percent of voters say Mr. Mamdani has “good character” and “cares about people like me.”

The poll also finds that voters have more confidence in how Mr. Mamdani would handle top issues than any other candidate. Nearly 50 percent of voters surveyed say Mr. Mamdani would handle the affordability crisis the best. He also gets top marks for housing, taxes, and spending, his position on the Israel-Palestine issue, and even crime.

“The unfavorable ratings for both Cuomo and Adams are higher than for Mamdani, so it means neither one of them could beat him until Mamdani’s negatives are higher,” Mr. Trump’s pollster and adviser, John McLaughlin, told the Sun last week.

So far the attacks on Mr. Mamdani don’t seem to be making a dent, according to the poll. New Yorkers also like many of Mr. Mamdani’s far-left proposals, even though 65 percent don’t believe he’ll achieve them all if elected mayor. 

Nearly 70 percent of voters surveyed say they support freezing rents on stabilized apartments. Fifty-six percent favor free buses. And 71 percent favor increasing taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers.

Mr. Mamdani is attempting to moderate his messaging as he heads into the general election. While he once supported “defund the police” and said in the primary that he opposed hiring more police officers, he told Marcia Kramer this week that he will take an “outcome oriented approach” to crime, even if that means hiring more cops. The Times poll finds 66 percent of New Yorkers favor hiring 5,000 additional NYPD officers.