Andrew Cuomo and Jessica Ramos at the Puerto Rican Day Parade on Sunday.
Photo: Andrea Renault/STAR MAX/AP Photos
“Corrupt egomaniac.” “Creep.” Fake New Yorker. “Remorseless bully.” Jessica Ramos hasn’t exactly been kind to her mayoral opponent Andrew Cuomo in recent months. So it was a shock to New York’s political class, and even caught some of her top advisers off guard, when she announced Friday she was endorsing him for mayor.
But for people who know Ramos well, it was a told-ya-so moment. “It sucks because, honestly, it’s like, to support Andrew Cuomo is like selling your soul to the devil,” says Alessandra Biaggi, Ramos’s former colleague in the State Legislature, former ally in taking down Cuomo’s machine in the Senate, and former roommate in Albany — before, she says, their friendship blew up over a misunderstanding involving a wedding invitation. “I wasn’t surprised.” Other progressive ex-allies were scathing, such as Yuh-Line Niou, a former lawmaker who shared that Albany apartment and that anti-Cuomo agenda, too. Julia Salazar, a state senator who represents Ridgewood, took to X to highlight the “integrity” of another candidate who’d rejected the Cuomo campaign’s entreaties. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez piped in with a simple “lol. lmao.”
If there’s one kind of politician Ramos loathes more than the centrist former governor, it’s the fellow progressives who, in her mind, preen for attention and toss out pie-in-the-sky plans while she’s left to do the unglamorous-but-crucial work of governing. So on Friday, Ramos made a move to screw over such lefties. She teamed up with the enemy of her enemies.
Ocasio-Cortez was the object of that ire for years, and lately Ramos began to feel similarly about Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialists of America candidate who leveraged social-media prowess and star power to emerge as the leading contender to Cuomo in the June 24 primary. You didn’t need to be a particularly sharp observer of last Wednesday’s debate to notice Ramos taking not-so-subtle digs at an unnamed opponent for being a lightweight. Making tensions worse was the talk in Queens about the DSA running a primary challenge to Ramos next year, part of frosty competition between the union and leftist wings of New York’s Democratic coalition.
Ramos had been in talks with various people in Cuomo’s orbit for weeks, according to a source familiar with the matter. She decided to endorse him after the debate, that source adds, after watching Cuomo bat away two hours’ worth of attacks with relative ease. Still, Ramos couldn’t resist taking a shot herself at Cuomo afterward, telling Politico she wished that voters cared more “about women getting harassed. We talk about it all the time, but I’m not running about Andrew Cuomo’s record.” The following morning, Ocasio-Cortez released her slate of five endorsements for the ranked-choice primary and left off Ramos entirely. A second source familiar with the matter says that only reinforced her decision. “When the ballot came out, she wasn’t even fifth, she was like, ‘Fuck. You.’”
So on Friday she hugged Cuomo awkwardly at a rally at the carpenters’ union headquarters. “Donald Trump isn’t just a national threat, he’s targeting New York,” she said. “We’re not going to beat that with hashtags or headline stunts.” (Ramos and Cuomo’s campaign both declined to comment.)
Ramos, who has trailed in polling since entering the race, has known for a while that she wasn’t going to be the city’s next mayor. In mid-April, she texted Lindsey Boylan, a former aide to Cuomo and the first woman of 13 to eventually accuse him of sexual harassment: “I don’t see how Cuomo doesn’t win the primary at this point frankly,” Ramos wrote. Many of her allies in the labor movement, her traditional base, endorsed Cuomo instead. (“I used to work for 32BJ,” texted Ramos, referring to the local affiliate of the Service Employees International Union, “and they didn’t even give me a screening.”) The left-of-center Working Families Party was reluctant to add her to its slate of five candidates, leading to a bizarre moment later in which she turned a campaign video in support of Newark mayor Ras Baraka, who had been arrested outside an ICE detention facility, into a series of gripes about the party. But Ramos told Boylan she’d tough it out. “I stay in to take Latino and some others from Cuomo,” Ramos texted. “I really wish progressives understood people of color.”
Boylan was working with several candidates to try to keep Cuomo out of City Hall and Ramos would seem like a natural ally; in her political career, she had shown a particular sensitivity toward victims of sexual assault and harassment. She called on Cuomo to resign in March 2021 after so many women came forward (he denies their allegations). She was a co-sponsor with Biaggi of 2022’s Adult Survivors Act, which lifted the statute of limitations to sue alleged perpetrators of sexual assault. When she first got to Albany, she and Salazar pushed to legalize sex work after the “dehumanizing and humiliating” way police officers on Roosevelt Avenue treated her and her friends when the cops suspected them of being prostitutes.
“I am so over politicians building their credibility cynically on the backs of women who have had the courage to go through the shit that I have gone through,” Boylan tells me. A major New York Times story on Boylan and her fellow Cuomo accusers was largely crowded out of the political conversation by Ramos’s endorsement. For her part, Ramos hasn’t taken down her social-media posts accusing Cuomo of being a predator and told the Times she has no plans to do so. “Today is not about forgiveness or about forgetting anything,” she said.
At her best, Ramos can be dogged and empathic, bringing in billions in COVID relief for undocumented workers, and willing to take a stand that the rest of the political class might view as slightly crazy, such as opposing a mega-casino project in her district. But few local officials — maybe with the exception of Cuomo — are as open about letting their personal beefs drive their decision-making, or as willing to alienate friends. Last year, I spent hours with Ramos as she waged a quixotic campaign to keep Mets owner Steve Cohen from getting an opportunity to build that casino. As the child of undocumented immigrants and a divorced mom to two young boys, Ramos was genuinely passionate in her concerns that the project would leech money from the area’s working-class families. Her opposition was also driven, in part, by how much people on the other side had pissed her off. Ramos felt Cohen’s team was waging a popularity contest with her in her own backyard.
More than a few close observers drew a parallel between Ramos’s anti-casino effort and her U-turn last week, even though the former was a campaign against a billionaire’s power and the other is to join a campaign backed by billionaires. Both efforts went against the apparent political logic. Both left Ramos in a lonely position.
Ramos’s anti-casino effort failed because of Cohen’s intense lobbying efforts — and because her Senate colleagues were willing to make a virtually unprecedented end-run around her to give a key approval on the project. That’s how isolated Ramos found herself in the Senate. One Democratic lawmaker told me they’re unwilling to have sensitive conversations around her for fear she’ll leak them. “I can’t imagine another scenario or any other colleague in which the chamber would have big-footed that colleague,” that lawmaker says. “But we were willing to do it because it was Jessica Ramos.”
Ramos was still holding fundraisers over the weekend, in part because her cash-strapped campaign is in a dispute with a contractor over $250,000 in questionable bills. Observers wondered whether Cuomo’s camp had promised to help make the quarter-million-dollar charge go away, or get her a job in City Hall, or protect her against an almost-certain primary challenge from the left.
Two sources familiar with the matter said the specific horse trade didn’t matter much. According to these sources, Ramos agrees — this is a deal with the devil. It’s also a chance for Ramos to get on the same side as her union allies, realign with her not-exactly-DSA base, and a chance to take the air out of a couple of shiny balloons. “She’s not stupid,” one of the sources says of the alliance with Cuomo. “She knows: ‘Better than even-money chance he stabs me in the back and does not give me what I’m asking for.’ But still worth it. Still worth it to put a stick in Zohran and AOC’s eye.’”
