Andrew Cuomo campaigns for New York’s redemption – and his own

By Edward-Isaac Dovere, CNN

New York (CNN) — In New York, Andrew Cuomo’s comeback after resigning in disgrace could end up taking less than four years – with a scandal-plagued incumbent mayor, a disorganized left wing and a feeling that the city is on the brink paving the way.

It’s the latest saga in the long-running soap opera of New York politics. On the heels of a presidential resurgence from another brash guy from Queens and a Democratic Party with a loud socialist streak, Cuomo sees himself as the man for the moment as he campaigns to be the next mayor of New York City, even if that required moving into his daughter’s apartment to be eligible to run.

In public, Cuomo has kept mostly quiet, limiting himself mostly to surprise appearances where he stays a few minutes and disappears before he gets protested or takes any questions from reporters. In private, according to several who know him, he has been brooding about the investigation he is facing from President Donald Trump’s Justice Department, orchestrating efforts to undermine his opponents and stressing over what positions to adopt to be taken more seriously as a progressive himself.

He has been leaning on a sense of inevitability to press more potential supporters to get on board and leave others with the impression that he will remember those who don’t, delighting in opponents who, struggling for momentum, haven’t found an effective way to attack him.

With three weeks to go before the Democratic primary, Cuomo’s pitch has centered on how well he managed the state government – though not a single statewide official or previous city mayor whose terms overlapped with his would say they agreed with him when asked by CNN. He has not apologized or much addressed the series of sexual misconduct accusations that forced his resignation or the more than 12,000 deaths in nursing homes as he ran the state’s Covid-19 response – yet few voters are saying they care much, or even remember, according to focus groups conducted by opposition campaigns.

He never talks about redemption, though he has been chasing that since almost the moment he finished his resignation speech in August 2021.

“That’s clearly what it is, but he doesn’t talk about it that way,” said one prominent Democrat who’s spoken to Cuomo multiple times about the race but has heard no sense of reflection. “He talks about how the Democratic Party is so screwed up and it’s too far to the left, he talks about what a disaster [former Mayor Bill] de Blasio was, what a disaster [current Mayor Eric] Adams is.”

A limited campaign leaning into inevitability

For years, New York has been tilting toward being a homegrown Dubai: a status playground for the rich steadily pushing out enclaves where the struggling working class tries to scrap by, with Instagram spots for tourists in between. Unlicensed marijuana stores, a surge of migrants that has strained the city’s resources and a pervasive sense of rising crime (despite rates that are in reality dropping) have left many New Yorkers feeling the city is spinning out of control.

“We have known each other a long time and we have been through a lot together. We talk to each other, we’re straight with each other,” Cuomo said at his sole rally last week. “New York City is in trouble. You can feel it when you walk around the street. You feel it in the anxiety, in the frustration. You see it in the crime, you see it in the number of homeless mentally ill who are left on the streets. And you feel it in that New York City’s just getting more expensive, and it is unaffordable for working men and women.”

Rep. Greg Meeks, who also serves as the Democratic Party leader in Queens, said that not only does Cuomo seem like the only credible choice in this race, but he hopes his win reverberates among Democrats across the country in looking at what works with voters.

“I thought about where the city is, what the city needs, where we take the next step so that we continue to grow and produce jobs and housing and get things done – to me, there’s only one person that is running that has done those kinds of things,” Meeks said. “No one can deny that as governor he was able to get things done that were innovative and creative, and that’s what the city needs to continue to do now as we’re moving forward into a more technological and interdependent world. Then finally, someone who can truly stand up to Donald Trump too.”

Asked about the issues that forced Cuomo out as governor, Meeks argued, “He’s not like the president of the United States, who’s a convicted felon. He’s never been convicted of anything, and he has completely denied all of it.” Meeks added that his sense is of a man who is “contrite,” though Cuomo has spent far less time expressing any public contrition than he and aides have put into trying to undermine the investigations into him.

At the rally, Cuomo announced his support for a $20 minimum wage, boasting about how he had signed a $15 minimum wage as governor and leaving out that he had resisted the efforts to do that for years before backing it. The air conditioning couldn’t keep up with the room’s tightly packed clumps of members from a variety of unions in color-coded shirts, chanting their locals’ names and slogans.

John Costa, the international president of the Amalgamated Transit Union, led a round of cheers as he talked about Cuomo helping improve both safety and service on the subways.

Asked afterward to explain why he was backing Cuomo, Costa told CNN, “I’ve watched him, I watched his family, his father. I thought he was a great governor. I think he’s learned a lot from his father and I thought he was great as a governor. You know, and then things happened and he had to step down for whatever reasons. Now he’s back. I think he’ll be a great mayor.”

Cuomo’s upward spiral of inevitability – from those either wanting to be with the guy who wins or worried he’ll be vindictive against those who weren’t with him when he does – also pulled in less enthusiastic union members, like one who asked not to give his name when asked why he was there.

“I came because we have dues we have to pay: if we don’t come, we get docked $500,” he said. “I got no choice.” A representative of that union clarified that the policy was not specific to appearing at the Cuomo event, but at political events in general and was an encouragement, not a requirement.

Over several weeks, a Cuomo aide offered several different rationales to CNN for why he would not be available for an interview. The candidate has participated in only a handful of interviews since entering the race in March, leaving reporters after the union rally shouting questions at him through the closed window of his Dodge Charger as an aide tried to usher them out of the way while warning they were in danger of being run over. Cuomo smiled but did not engage, then made a right turn on a red light as he pulled away. (A Cuomo spokesperson told CNN the former governor “pulled into the intersection while it was green but there was someone in the crosswalk so he let that person go.”)

One event he won’t be able to outrun is Wednesday’s city-mandated primary debate and Cuomo is holed up in prep – his aides worried that in his first competitive debate in 20 years, the risk for a bad moment is high.

A frazzled, fractured opposition

Cuomo’s dominance to date might not have been possible if all the candidates and other city power players who agree that they don’t want him as the next mayor could agree what to do to stop him. Instead, they have often added fuel to his argument that the left wing of the party is too much of a mess to run one of the largest and most complex municipal governments in the world.

Cuomo isn’t the only critic. Queens and Bronx Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive icon, has been chiding them for failing to mount an organized strategy against him, according to multiple people familiar with the conversations. What she’s been getting back is a lot of frustration, and a bunch of complaints that actually she doesn’t get how politics works.

For all the anti-Cuomo memes and custom t-shirts they’ve inspired, talks between campaigns about coordinating spending on ads or other tactics broke down without getting anywhere.

Aides to several top New York political leaders have been fuming privately that others think it was up to them to stop Cuomo, and most – including Gov. Kathy Hochul, Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, and Brooklyn-based House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries – have all said that they will stay neutral. No candidate was willing to risk a kamikaze mission of going hard negative on Cuomo at the likely expense of becoming too toxic to win. Jumaane Williams, the anti-Cuomo public advocate (effectively, the city council president) popular among many Black voters in the city, last Tuesday held an event in front of City Hall to announce he was jointly endorsing two candidates – city council speaker Adrienne Adams and comptroller Brad Lander. Then on Wednesday, Williams put out a video with another candidate, Zohran Mamdani, endorsing him.

Leaders of the Working Families Party, for years a definitive force in galvanizing city politics with deep animosity for Cuomo personally – on top of policy and political disagreements that go back over a decade – have shocked allies by how flat-footed they’ve been in response to his candidacy. And though on Friday the group announced a recommended ranking order for several of the candidates, with Mamdani endorsed for first, slides obtained by CNN of the polling presentation officials made to candidates show that they acknowledged their endorsement would make little difference for who gets ranked first.

With ranked choice voting, “progressives are really trying to figure out what strategies work best in that environment in a way that moderates or the right really haven’t had to wrestle with because there’s one of them, where there’s a slate of progressive candidates,” said Tiffany Cabán, a city councilwoman from Queens proudly risen out of the Democratic Socialists of America, in an interview on the steps of City Hall last week.

The one concerted effort to stop Cuomo came from Letitia James, who was urged into first running for state attorney general by Cuomo in 2018, and then led the investigations into the nursing home deaths and sexual misconduct allegations. After deciding not to run against Cuomo herself to focus on leading lawsuits against the incoming Trump administration, James joined with state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins in trying to recruit candidates, sources familiar with the efforts told CNN. Multiple prominent women in New York got calls, including Adams, the city council speaker, who is of no relation to the mayor. All turned them down.

But when a combination of events, including the mayor’s top aides resigning in protest in February over how the Trump Justice Department pulled back on the charges he was facing, Adams changed her mind and made a late entrance into race. She has struggled to raise money or gain any public traction, and while James has stuck by her, Stewart-Cousins hasn’t said anything publicly about the race. An aide to Stewart-Cousins did not respond to a request for comment.

“The mayoral race has not gotten a lot of traction,” James told CNN in an interview. “We’ve not broken through all of the executive orders, the tariffs, the chaos, the confusion, and other corruption. So it’s difficult in this climate, this 24-hour media circus.”

Both as a former Cuomo colleague and a lifelong Brooklyn resident, James says she knows the clock is ticking.

“Individuals have to think about what’s in the best interest of the city, as opposed to what is in their best interest,” James said. “And I don’t know whether or not there are a sufficient number of individuals who can set aside their ego at this point.”

The Cuomo foil who wants to make Cuomo a foil

From even before he officially launched his campaign, Cuomo was talking privately about Mamdani as the foil he wanted: a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America who has a record big on marching with causes but light on substantive results, who could embody the caricature of a far-too-left turn in the Democratic Party talking about equity and inclusion while New Yorkers were scared to get on the subway.

The 33-year-old assemblyman has become identified enough with the new young left that Ella Emhoff, the stepdaughter of Kamala Harris, endorsed him. But his views are so controversial that the former vice president has had to privately clarify that this does not signal her support, a source told CNN.

But Mamdani attributes his rise at least in part to Cuomo. “He’s the perfect foil for this campaign because he represents the failed leadership that we’ve seen not just in City Hall from Eric Adams, but also from Cuomo himself in the governor’s mansion in Albany,” Mamdani told CNN, standing in front of a Brooklyn brownstone where a fundraiser had been shifted to a no-donation meet-and-greet because he already raised the maximum allowed under the city’s system.

And at least, Mamdani charged, he would not be compromised by the donors Trump shares with the Cuomo-aligned super PAC that is preparing to come down hard on him in the final weeks of the primary.

But as Cuomo has centered much of his campaign on denouncing antisemitism and talking up support of Israel – major issues in a city with such a large Jewish population – he has found an easy target in the Israel divestment-supporting Mamdani, both among Jewish voters and among those who see the far-left’s identification with the anti-Israel cause as endemic to what is driving mainstream Democrats away.

In the interview, Mamdani blamed Cuomo’s attacks, which include demanding his opponents condemn the DSA for calling the alleged shooter in the killing of two Israeli Embassy employees in Washington a “political prisoner,” as part of the former governor’s “long track record of weaponizing very real concerns for his personal and political benefit.”

When asked to clarify his own position on Israel, a Mamdani aide tried to stop the interview.

Pressed multiple times to clarify if he believes Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, Mamdani instead repeated a line he’s been using that “Israel has a right to exist as a state with equal rights.”

A race that will run to November

Candidates in New York can run on the ballot lines of multiple parties, even those they make up. Should he lose the Democratic primary on June 24, Cuomo will still be the nominee of the Fight and Deliver Party. If Cuomo wins, Mamdani – or whoever comes in second – is expected to be the nominee of the Working Families Party. After declining to run again in the Democratic primary, Adams, the incumbent mayor, is planning to run in the fall as the Safe Streets, Affordable City nominee, people familiar with his plans told CNN. Curtis Sliwa, who has made a personality and career of being a lifelong gadfly, is making a repeat run as the Republican candidate.

That means the next mayor of New York could win without a clear majority of the vote – in a race with multiple candidates facing significant question marks about their candidacies and in what has the possibility of being the first competitive citywide general election in more than two decades, when ranked choice voting will not be a factor in determining the outcome.

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