New York —

Zohran Mamdani was pushed to provide specifics about his plans if he’s elected mayor of New York City in the campaign’s first fall debate, hammered by his two older rivals who painted him as unprepared and accused him of selling the city’s residents a fantasy.

Much of the two hours on stage centered on Mamdani, the 33-year-old democratic socialist and clear front-runner in the polls. But there were so many back-and-forths that Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, started an answer just 15 minutes into the event by saying: “First of all, there’s high levels of testosterone in this room.”

Mamdani didn’t answer exactly how he would afford his signature policies of freezing increases on rent-controlled apartments and making buses free, or how to square past comments on the police that he says don’t represent his current views. And he notably declined to back the reelection bid of New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, one of the few major Democrats in the state to endorse him.

Andrew Cuomo, running as an independent after losing to Mamdani in the Democratic primary, said Mamdani’s “whole plan is based on a myth” of believing that Albany would pass new taxes to enable his plans. Sliwa called his ideas “fantasies.” But Cuomo had his own struggles to explain what new ideas he would bring to City Hall or the questions about sexual harassment and his handling of Covid-19 in nursing homes that followed him when he resigned as governor.

“What I don’t have in experience, I make up for in integrity,” Mamdani told Cuomo early on.