With early voting having begun in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, the race looks to be between Andrew Cuomo, the freshly de-disgraced former governor, and Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist state assemblyman who is running to dispense expensive new entitlements.

But it didn’t have to be that way.

As part of a journalist collective called the New York Editorial Board, I met with every major candidate over the past six months, except Mr. Cuomo, who declined to join us. The candidates who are struggling to capture the attention that Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Mamdani have gotten all expressed thoughtful ideas about the possibilities and limits of city government. (You can read the transcripts of the interviews here.)

So it’s a shame that the two candidates who could have given Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Mamdani more of a challenge — Comptroller Brad Lander and his predecessor Scott Stringer — put themselves in a no man’s land by turning left during Bill de Blasio’s mayoralty and the “defund the police” movement and then following voters’ shift to the middle when crime rose. When Mr. Lander and Mr. Stringer undercut their credibility on a vital issue to voters, their other smart proposals, which I get into below, got lost in the campaign.

And as has proved true in other municipal elections over the past few years, public safety remains a dominant issue for voters, along with affordability. Though homicides have fallen to pre-2020 record lows, felonies remain 31.2 percent above 2019’s level. Voters remain nearly as concerned about safety as they were in 2021, when they overlooked warning signs about ethics and management to elect Eric Adams, a former police captain who ran on restoring order, as mayor. (The still-disgraced Mr. Adams has skipped the primary to run as an independent in the general election.)

These days no candidate talks about “defund the police.”

That makes the moves by Mr. Lander and Mr. Stringer from the left to the center on policing seem even more clumsy.