New Yorkers will find out the identity of their next mayor on Tuesday, in a race that will decide who will run, and defend, the US's largest city at a time when Donald Trump has threatened to send military troops there. Against that backdrop, New York has seen a mayoral election that has pitted two very different Democrats against one another.
Independent mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo received sharp criticism after his campaign inadvertently launched an AI-generated Criminals for Zohran Mamdani ad on social media during Wednesday night's mayoral debate, which was labeled as racist and Islamophobic. The two-minute ad, aired around 20 minutes after the start of the Oct. 22 debate, was quickly deleted by the Cuomo campaign but drew widespread condemnation from social media users and has been reshared countless times.