Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images
Andrew Cuomo, as a mayoral candidate in the general election, was always inevitable. What’s been shocking, in light of the Democratic primary last month, is the circumstances under which Cuomo has decided to forge on.
He is not the Democratic nominee. He is an independent. And unlike even the optimistic forecasts for Zohran Mamdani’s victory last month, Cuomo is not campaigning in the wake of any razor-thin margin or ranked-choice-vote calculus that pushed him into a close second. He really came nowhere close to winning.
There is something wholly pathetic about this second Cuomo effort. It truly has no raison d’être beyond Cuomo’s swollen and deeply damaged ego. Eric Adams, at least, is the sitting mayor even though he’s wildly unpopular. Adams skipped the primary altogether, so he doesn’t carry the stigma of having been rejected by the Democratic electorate — even though, had he run, he would have been. And Adams is starting to round up some serious cash: $1.5 million over the past month, surpassing even Mamdani. Business elites seem to prefer Adams over Cuomo these days.
The most generous case for Cuomo’s general-election odds is that Mamdani, a proud democratic socialist who is just 33 years old, will prove alienating to wider swaths of the electorate. The Black voters who backed Cuomo in the primary could stay loyal. Orthodox Jews, certainly, will not support Mamdani, and some could remain with Cuomo despite Adams, a proud Israel supporter who did not clash with religious Jewish communities during the pandemic, perhaps being the more attractive option for them. Moderates who sat out the primary could flood the polls for Cuomo in November. Republicans who view Curtis Sliwa as too clownish might be in play, too. (Disclosure: When I ran for office in 2018, Mamdani was my campaign manager.)
Still, it’s difficult to see what Cuomo’s path to victory will be. The anti-Mamdani vote will be cut up among him, Adams, and Jim Walden, a little-known attorney also running as an independent. Walden has proposed a poll in the fall to determine who is most viable and asking the other candidates dropping out if they don’t finish first as the anti-Mamdani choice. Cuomo likes this idea because he’s polling ahead of Adams and Walden. Even if Walden abides by this — he is polling distantly behind the mayor and former governor — Adams surely won’t, and Cuomo will be left thrashing about.
Not that it truly matters. Mamdani, who won the highest turnout Democratic mayoral primary in New York since 1989, will have a much stronger hand to play in the general election. Major labor unions that reflexively backed Cuomo in the primary, like 1199 SEIU, 32BJ SEIU, and the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, are now in Mamdani’s corner, and the city teachers’ union, after remaining neutral, is fully behind the young socialist. More and more politicians once skeptical of Mamdani, like Jerry Nadler and Adriano Espaillat, are now onboard.
This doesn’t mean Mamdani is a lock to win. He’s got to campaign strenuously in the general election. In the weeks after the primary, he has prioritized meeting with politicians, labor bosses, and wary business titans over street campaigning, and eventually he’ll have to shift back toward an active and public campaign schedule. There’s time for that, though, and New Yorkers are more tuned out of politics in the summer months.
Cuomo’s challenge is that his campaign argument is unchanged; there’s no evidence he’s going to recalibrate how he talks to voters or attempt, in some way, to inspire them. His vision of the city is strikingly dark — crime is spiraling out of control, no one can ride the subway, the socialists are going to torch all of it — and largely out of step with how voters perceive their own reality. They want a mayor who is proud to be here, who has lived in the five boroughs and relishes street life. Ed Koch grasped this as did even Michael Bloomberg, who didn’t regularly demean the city he sought to govern. Cuomo has not lived in New York City for most of his adult life. In the primary, he hardly campaigned at all. He’s promised now, in the interviews he’s granted, to be more aggressive on the trail.
What does that really mean for a disgraced former governor so averse to traditional retail campaigning? Is he going to start to have conversations with ordinary people? Stand outside a subway station for an hour, passing out leaflets? Is he going to trundle up to Inwood or out to Kew Gardens to speak at a forum in front of 50 random locals? It’s difficult to fathom this kind of Cuomo emerging, though anything, in our unpredictable age, is possible.
It’s important, too, to remember what would be happening if the roles were reversed. Had Mamdani lost to Cuomo by 12 points, the entire Democratic Establishment, from Chuck Schumer and Kathy Hochul on down, would have automatically backed Cuomo and blasted apart the socialist assemblyman for attempting a third-party bid. He’d be called a spoiler, a sore loser, and a dangerous radical bent on the destruction of the Democratic Party. Instead, with Mamdani as the nominee, they’ve stayed on the sidelines and seem to be waiting to see if anyone gains momentum.
That’s Cuomo’s ultimate hope: Polls show him surging, endorsers flake away from Mamdani, and New Yorkers decide they want to hand the ex-governor his political redemption. If they don’t, Cuomo’s political career is over for good, and all he will be remembered for is resigning after being accused of sexual harassment. That’s his greatest fear.
