Photo: Erica Lansner/Redux
With less than two weeks to go, it’s clear enough Andrew Cuomo remains the favorite to win the Democratic primary for mayor. What’s far less obvious is how large a lead Cuomo holds — and if he’ll actually coast to victory on June 24.
Divergent polls tell divergent stories. One affiliated with Team Cuomo shows the ex-governor beating Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialist state assemblyman, by 12 points in a ranked-choice voting simulation. Another poll, commissioned by Data for Progress on behalf of a Mamdani super-PAC, has Cuomo winning by just two points — within the poll’s margin of error. In 2021, the progressive Data for Progress was one of the most accurate pollsters, though any poll that’s not fully independent should be treated skeptically. The same holds for polls emanating from Cuomo’s orbit.
But the real story is a tightening race — and one, if it narrows even further, that all but erases the best-case scenario for Cuomo’s comeback. (Disclosure: In 2018, when I ran for office, Mamdani was my campaign manager.) If polling trends are to be believed — and the anecdotal evidence of Mamdani’s surge translates to enough raw votes — Cuomo is not going to demolish Mamdani and the rest of the Democrats. The days of the 25-point polling leads are gone. If, for example, Cuomo’s own polling is accurate, this will have meant a former governor who ruled New York State with an iron fist for nearly 11 years will have struggled to defeat a 33-year-old state lawmaker who only entered office four years ago. Cuomo, bloodied, will have done this with the assistance of a $10 million super-PAC that swamped the airwaves for months.
Mandate talk will be dead. For Mayor Cuomo, there might not even be much of a honeymoon.
Though it’s hard to remember now, Eric Adams enjoyed a genuine honeymoon and was briefly talked up as a national Democratic star. After winning the 2021 primary, he unironically called himself a face of the Democratic Party, and many national pundits swooned over a Black, pro-police moderate who seemed to point the way forward for a party backsliding with the working class. Adams squandered this goodwill with his corruption scandals and general incompetence, but he had a base to build from. A different politician, in his position, could have been very successful.
Cuomo may win by a wider margin than Adams, but his coalition already looks more wobbly. Whereas Adams, as a former police captain promising to combat rising crime, could find tangible grassroots support and a base of working-class voters thrilled to elect the city’s second Black mayor, Cuomo is hardly exciting anyone. He barely campaigns, doesn’t stage rallies, and ducks as many spontaneous interactions with the public as possible for someone running for the highest-profile local office in America. Cuomo’s support comes by default. It amounts to a blend of a diminishing number of voters fondly recalling COVID press conferences from a half-decade ago and many more who’d just rather not see a very young pro-Palestine socialist run their city.
If Cuomo isn’t exactly a paper tiger, he’s not made of much more than papier-mâché. Consider what his campaign would look like without a $10 million super-PAC bankrolled by the likes of Bill Ackman and Barry Diller. Or imagine, for a moment, if the professional-left organs like the Working Families Party were competent enough to raise a few million dollars to fund an independent expenditure against him. Now seed the field with tough, well-funded center-left candidates who could have taken the fight to him very directly. How would Cuomo have stood up against Kathryn Garcia, who came within 10,000 votes of winning four years ago and declined to run again? What about Letitia James, the popular attorney general who passed on a run to back, instead, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams? The New York Post tried to drag Jessica Tisch, the new police commissioner, into the primary, and the young billionaire probably would have broken Cuomo rather quickly. Tisch simply didn’t want to run.
This isn’t to downplay what Mamdani has done; there has never been another viable candidate for mayor like him in the history of New York City. A Muslim and avowed socialist is within striking distance of City Hall. In the younger neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens, Mamdani is going to obliterate the competition. He is energizing South Asian and Muslim voters. Win or lose, he’s a political star, and his coalition isn’t going anywhere. They’ll follow him, and they’ll keep reviling Cuomo. He’s positioned, at the very minimum, to lead the loyal opposition in New York for the next four years.
And that’s Cuomo’s problem. If he does become mayor, there will be at least two large and diametrically opposed cohorts who will be opposed to him: Republicans and progressive Democrats. Republicans polarized against Cuomo in the COVID era, and many of them are thirsty for the Trump Justice Department to indict him over allegedly lying to Congress over his pandemic response. Progressives, especially those under 50, are a growing bloc in New York and absolutely despise the law-and-order Israel hawk. There are enough moderate voters who will back Cuomo and probably keep his popularity from completely cratering. But absent two distinct periods — the passage of same-sex marriage in 2011 and the onset of COVID in 2020 — Cuomo was never especially well liked. His strength was dominating the machinery of Albany and running juggernaut reelection campaigns. He had more power than anyone else in New York, and he knew exactly how to wield it.
If he does trundle into City Hall, he’ll find himself quite constrained, at the mercy of a governor in Kathy Hochul who was once subordinate to him and a Democrat-run Legislature that, in essence, drove him from office four years ago, threatening to impeach him over the sexual-harassment allegations lodged against him. The City Council will be another problem for him: The body has a large progressive wing that will be happy to be the force behind veto overrides, in the very same manner it opposed Eric Adams. Cuomo will have the power elite on his side — the city’s real-estate titans and financiers — but that might not be enough to save him against the combined might of city and state lawmakers, as well as a governor who is, at best, wary of him. For now, Cuomo is dreaming of redemption, and he may have it on June 24. Life, if he does win, will only get harder after that.
