Newly announced mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo has faced a barrage of insults from his opponents attacking his record as governor since making his City Hall bid official this weekend.
“Somebody said the city’s in crisis? Who’s that guy?” Mayor Eric Adams said at the start of his weekly press briefing Monday, referencing Cuomo’s core message in a 17-minute campaign-launch video.
“Yes I do believe we need to be saved — from him,” Adams added, admitting he hadn’t watched the video where Cuomo, who’d already been atop every early poll, presented himself as the only person who could fix an out-of-control New York City.
Mayor Eric Adams holds his weekly City Hall press conference, March 3, 2025. Credit: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Offi
Comptroller Brad Lander held what he billed as an “emergency” press conference on Sunday to rip the former governor as unfit to run. “Andrew Cuomo is for himself and only himself, and is hoping New Yorkers will forget his disastrous record for our city of endless scandals, destroying the subway and cutting basic services,” he said.
Comptroller Brad Lander speaks at a City Hall rally to save shuttered early childhood education centers, Feb. 6, 2025. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
On Monday, he demanded Cuomo reimburse taxpayers for the $28 million taxpayers have spent defending him in his sexual harassment cases.
In a video posted Saturday, Scott Stringer compared Cuomo to Eliot Spitzer, the former New York governor who resigned in 2008 after the New York Times reported that he’d paid prostitutes for sex. When Spitzer tried to make a comeback by running for city comptroller in 2013, Stringer defeated him.
“You’ll forgive me if I’m not shaking in my boots when people say Andrew Cuomo’s the frontrunner to be mayor,” he said.
“Andrew hasn’t lived in NYC for nearly three decades,” State Sen. Jessica Ramos posted on X. “Shouldn’t he be running for office in Westchester, where he lived after resigning in disgrace?”
State Sen. Zellnor Myrie, from Brooklyn, launched a “Quiet Cuomo” website website calling him out for not going after President Donald Trump. And in a press release Monday, Queens Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani said that Cuomo’s 17-minute video “puts New Yorkers to sleep.” By contrast: Mamdani held a sold-out Oscars-themed fundraiser Sunday night.
“People are not willing to return to the chaos, corruption, and corporate greed that defined the Cuomo years,” he wrote.
The torrent of attacks suggests Cuomo is unlikely to win cross-endorsements from his fellow Democratic candidates. In a ranked choice voting system, such alliances occur, as when mayoral candidates Kathryn Garcia and Andrew Yang campaigned together in the closing days of the 2021 race. Garcia lost to Adams in the eighth round of vote tallying, falling short by just 7,153 ballots.
Rich Azzopardi, a spokesperson for the Cuomo campaign, said in a statement that “New Yorkers aren’t stupid — they know Governor Cuomo’s record of raising wages for millions, building landmark infrastructure projects like LaGuardia Airport, the 2nd Avenue Subway and Moynihan Train Hall, passing the strongest gun violence prevention and paid family leave programs in the nation and codifying Roe vs. Wade in state law years before the Supreme Court overturned it, and that he led the state and the nation through the dark days of COVID,” he said.
Cuomo resigned from his job as governor in August 2021, saying he didn’t want “distractions” to consume state government, following a report commissioned by state Attorney General Letitia James that found he had sexually harassed multiple women who’d worked for him. He has long denied the allegations.
He also faced accusations that he’d covered up the number of COVID-19 deaths involving nursing home residents, after ordering those facilities to take in people who had the virus. And the state’s highest court recently validated a state ethics board that determined he improperly used government staffers to help him write a pandemic response book, for which he received a more than $5 million advance.
Cuomo acknowledged in his campaign launch video that he “made mistakes, some painfully” and pledged he had learned from them.
He entered the mayor’s race atop nearly every recent mayoral poll by double-digit margins, although polling experts caution that early surveys should be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism.
He’s picked up endorsements, too, including from the Carpenters Union and District Council 9 Painters.
But he’s also faced opposition.
New Yorkers for Better Leadership is a political action campaign launched by Democrats to fight Cuomo’s run. The group held a conference call Saturday to lay out what they said is his stained record, and on Monday emailed “fact check” of his affordability plan.
And some labor organizations have promoted a plan for the ranked-choice primary: “Don’t Rank Eric or Andrew for Mayor,” or DREAM.
It encourages voters to not put either man anywhere on their ballot, even if that means ranking only three or four candidates and not using up all five slots.
“If you rank them second to last, he could get your vote,” the organization says. “If you rank them last, he could get your vote.”
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