Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux for New York Magazine
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Do you see that?” said Andrew Cuomo, who was making the rounds over brunch at Melba’s in Harlem one Sunday in March. Earlier that the morning, Cuomo had given a speech at Mount Neboh Baptist Church on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, just down the street from here, calling for the hiring of 5,000 more police officers and levying a blistering attack on the left flank of the Democratic Party—some members of which were running against him for mayor—for uttering what he called “the three dumbest public-policy words you can utter: ‘Cut the police.’”
The speech was well received, and the former governor gained an endorsement from the pastor, a longtime ally, and now here he was remarking on the inverted political landscape of the Democratic Party and trying to get in a couple of more shots at the antagonists to his left.
“This extremist left wing represents no one. Who does it represent? If you are in Manhattan, or Park Slope, and it’s ‘No police; police are bad.’ That was Bill de Blasio, and it’s very popular in Park Slope, yes, but who does that help?” Cuomo said. “Progressives were supposed to be about helping the poor, minorities, the disenfranchised. That’s why I wanted to do ‘more police’ in a Black church, because, by their own theory, progressives care about the poor and the downtrodden. No, they don’t. That’s not who your policies help. And meanwhile the city is going backwards and people are leaving.”
Cuomo hasn’t been much seen since he resigned his decadelong governorship three and a half years ago in the face of certain impeachment by the State Legislature, and here he reemerges among the post-church crowd like Lazarus. He stops for selfies. Tourists from California remember him from his COVID briefings. He goes into the kitchen to shake hands with the line cooks and busboys and to try out a little Spanish. Grandmothers pinch his cheek and kiss him, ask him if it’s true, if he is really back and running for mayor. He shakes hands with a dad who says he’s from Queens. “Oh, me too!” Cuomo says. “Hollis.”
No one asks him about the almost too long to list set of scandals that chased him from office and have hounded him ever since: the nursing-home deaths from COVID and their attendant cover-up, the book he wrote in the middle of the crisis that he used state employees to help work on, how his friends and family received COVID tests before anyone else in the state could, how a close aide went to federal prison for bribery, or even about the sexual-harassment scandal that ultimately led to his resignation.
“My case goes to nine women. I didn’t even know who they were,” Cuomo said after he finally sat down at a table in the middle of Melba’s dining room to discuss what forced him out of office. “I wasn’t even in a position to defend myself because they never said. I knew some of them, but ‘Was there ever a woman who on a rope line you put your arm around and took a picture? Did you ever kiss a woman on the cheek at a wedding reception?’ Literally like that. ‘Did you ever pat a woman on the waist?’” Cuomo said, putting on a face of someone bewildered by the nonsensical question he is being asked. “I mean, yeah. ‘Did you ever kiss a woman on the cheek? Did you ever say ciao bella?’ Yeah, I probably did. But there were no names.”
“You see all this behavior, for a 25-year-old or younger woman with different mores and sensitivities, it’s ‘Don’t touch me’ and ‘Ciao bella is offensive’ and ‘honey’ is offensive and ‘sweetheart’ is offensive, and that is a legitimate school of thought. I heard that intellectually, and I got it—but I just didn’t actually get it enough.”
In fact, a report by state attorney general Letitia James found that allegations of sexual harassment by 11 women (seven of whom were named) were credible, including from one who said that Cuomo put his hand on, tapped, and grabbed her buttock at an event and another who said Cuomo used to ask if she had ever cheated on her husband or if she could help him find a girlfriend and a third, a 25-year-old aide who said Cuomo used to ask her intimate questions about her sex life. Later, a report by the Justice Department upped the count to 13 women and found that Cuomo discriminated against women in his office and retaliated against those who spoke out against him.
Cuomo has spent his years out of office running these allegations down, even going so far as to sue one of the women who made them—at taxpayer’s expense and a cost of at least $18 million, according to one estimate—and maintains that much of the whole affair was concocted by James, whom Cuomo endorsed for the position and who, in a kind of gubernatorial attempted coup, ran for the job herself after he resigned. He points out that five district attorneys found that there wasn’t enough evidence of wrongdoing to bring charges. He blames the leftists in the State Legislature, who never liked him no matter how many left-wing priorities he passed—gay marriage, a $15 minimum wage, paid family leave, a fracking ban, free state-college tuition, legal marijuana, and stricter gun laws—and who were lying in wait to take him down. The allegations were just a pretext, in his view, especially at a moment when the progressive wing of the party had the upper hand in the Democratic coalition.
“That women’s issue was so electric that once somebody lights that fuse, you can’t stop it in that environment. Politicians were like dominoes—boop, boop, boop, boop,” he said, mimicking with his fingers the tumbling of the play tiles. In the end, everyone from Joe Biden—who, Cuomo was quick to point out, said he never read James’s report—to a legislator who was a personal (i.e., nonpolitical) friend told him there was no coming back. “So that’s how the system works. Do I think it was fair or accurate? No, and it’s been proven not fair or accurate. But I knew the political impact of it. I mean, I wasn’t kidding myself about that.”
The blast radius of the sexual-harassment scandal extended far beyond Andrew Cuomo. It eventually ensnared his brother, CNN host Chris Cuomo, and aides who were working at agencies across the government, and even people in the private sector who had lent Cuomo support. But for all the effort Cuomo has gone to (and continues to go to) to defend himself, the allegations are mostly a dead issue on the campaign trail. When Cuomo made his first press availability after announcing his run, no one from the city press corps even asked him about the sexual-harassment claims. His mayoral rivals have been slamming Cuomo for all sorts of transgressions but have mostly been laying off that angle as polls have shown that most voters don’t care.
And so, even though no one ever really thought that Andrew Cuomo would go away after stepping down, it can be a little hard to believe that he is here, running for mayor in a city he hasn’t lived in for decades and seemed to avoid when he was governor. Cuomo is facing a half-dozen serious contenders, most of whom have been running for many months in a still relatively new ranked-choice voting system. He is facing an antagonistic press corps that wants politicians it buried to stay dead and a city business and political Establishment exhausted by the seemingly nonstop battles royale of the Cuomo era and wary of a resurrected Cuomo out hunting for revenge.
Cuomo hasn’t run against a serious opponent in two decades, and the three months before the June 24 Democratic primary (which almost certainly will crown the next mayor) are bound to get ugly, with Cuomo’s opponents every day trying to make salient for voters Cuomo’s past behavior and the COVID dead that they say are his fault and, in the case of Mayor Adams, all but accusing Cuomo of racism for even entering the race against the city’s second Black mayor.
After finishing off his post-breakfast coffee and the sweet-potato pie with whipped cream, the former governor got up to go. As he does so, two older women, a mother and a daughter, sidle up to him for selfies. He obliges, posing in a three-sided hug, then turns back to the table he just left.
“I didn’t hug anybody, I didn’t kiss anybody, I didn’t touch anybody. It never happened,” Cuomo said with a wink. “I was harassed about 800 times, but that’s it.”
Cuomo told me that part of the process of his coming to grips with what had happened to him was reconnecting with his faith—reading the Bible, going to church, prayer. At one point, he said, he wrote down his sins on a piece of paper and tossed it into the waters off the Hamptons, where he was staying with his sister.
“I lived life. I spent time with my kids, I had my eyes opened to the part of life I was missing,” Cuomo said, his eyes reddening. He described a life in public service from the time his children were born, which meant that he missed the day-to-day moments of being together. “You know, they used to talk about ‘quality time.’ Like if you didn’t spend a lot of time with your kids it was fine so long as you had ‘quality time.’ And let me tell you, all of that was bullshit. You have to be there when they are down, when they are up, when they are moody. I did quality time, but it wasn’t a substitute.”
Realizing what he had missed with his children, now adults and scattered around the country, “was sad for me,” he said. “I’m not sure I always appreciated at the time the cost that I was paying for the life I had chosen. I just wasn’t there.”
Cuomo took up running, lost 20 pounds, saw his siblings and their children in ways he hadn’t for years, and practiced a little law — “private clients, business clients, and people with private issues that they were trying to think through.” He also started his own consulting firm, making more than $500,000 in total according to recent Conflict of Interest Board filings. He invested in gold bars and in bitcoin, and was, he insists, at peace and not necessarily sure he would ever return to politics.
“Things happen, and you learn to live with it,” he said. “And a lot of bad things happen and a lot of good things happen, and if you believe in God, you know that men plan and God laughs, and you move on.”
Friends say Cuomo was truly shocked, and more than a little devastated, over how quickly his political career unraveled. He knew there was a rank of fractious leftists in Albany who wanted him gone but not that legislative allies would fold so quickly or that James would deliver such a devastating final report.
Photo: Andrew Kelly/Reuters
He had seen all of this unfold before, he said. Cuomo cited Al Franken, the Minnesota senator whose upward political trajectory changed in a moment after New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand said he needed to resign in the aftermath of allegations that he behaved inappropriately around women. In 2018, Cuomo had called on Eric Schneiderman, the New York attorney general accused by four women of intimate partner abuse, to resign (he was ultimately not charged).
“One of the things I had to give up was reliving the bad or any bitterness or any anger or any regret or anything,” he said. “It’s too negative. You can’t keep that negative in you and be productive and be healthy. I was angry for a period, and it affected everything I did. I couldn’t enjoy anything. You know this is the business. What I did to Eric Schneiderman, you could argue, or what happened to Schneiderman, or what happened to Franken. Things happen and things don’t happen, and you have to give that up.”
“I replayed the game,” he said. “You know, Monday morning, you wake up, you replay the game tape. I always felt good about what I got done, what I got accomplished. But was there a way to do it without pushing the legislature or the whole system, the bureaucracy, as hard? Probably. Could you get enough done if you didn’t push as hard? Probably not. But what’s the trade-off? I don’t know. I still think about it,” he said, trailing off.
And yet if you ask those who spoke with Cuomo what he was up to in his wilderness years, the answer they most often give is, “Scheming.” They describe a man who was never planning to walk away from politics.
Cuomo had considered running against Kathy Hochul almost as soon as he stepped down, but with investigations into his handling of COVID and the sexual-harassment allegations against him still swirling, it was deemed impossible. Instead, he started a podcast, As a Matter of Fact, and brought on guests like Anthony Scaramucci, Kellyanne Conway, and Larry Summers for conversations that often became a litany of complaints about the left or about Joe Biden, politicized prosecutors, and the ongoing migrant crisis. He blasted James and Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg for going after Donald Trump, saying they were politicizing the justice system. He struck up a friendship with Eric Adams, dining with the mayor at his favorite midtown haunts, excursions that were dutifully covered by the New York Post and that helped feed the speculation that the former governor must be up to something.
He joined the legal team that is supposed to defend Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu before the International Criminal Court (a move that was widely seen as yet another thumb in the eye of the DSA crowd in New York City), started a gun-control group called Gun Safe America and another group designed to combat antisemitism in America, an initiative he kicked off on the Fourth of July weekend at the Hampton Synagogue. “He spent a lot of time out here in the Hamptons,” said Rabbi Marc Schneier, who founded the synagogue and counts Cuomo as a personal friend. “You could tell he missed public life and was looking for a way to reenter the market, as it were. I think the phrase is ‘testing the waters,’ and why not? Americans love a comeback story, and Andrew Cuomo would be a great comeback story.”
Cuomo had been here, in the wilderness, before. Back in 2002, fresh off an eight-year stint at Housing and Urban Development under President Bill Clinton and living in Washington, D.C., Cuomo ran for governor. The party Establishment backed Carl McCall, the state comptroller, who, if he were able to defeat incumbent governor George Pataki, would become the first Black governor of New York. Almost certain to lose, Cuomo dropped out a week before the primary, claiming that he did it for the sake of party unity and not because he was about to get embarrassed. The city’s Black leadership was infuriated.
The next year, his marriage to Kerry Kennedy, a union of two of the most famous families in Democratic Party politics, blew up in spectacular fashion amid allegations that she was having an affair with a polo-playing restaurateur. A report in this magazine portrayed Cuomo as almost clinically depressed, wandering around his empty Westchester mansion (the mansion was described as her idea; Cuomo had wanted to live in the city) at a loss at what to do next.
What he did next was scheme, putting together a master class in how an out-of-work politician returns to power. He threw himself into the cause of reforming New York’s harsh Rockefeller-era drug laws, teaming up with the likes of Russell Simmons and Sean Combs to host a rally and concert outdoors in Manhattan; it was an issue of paramount importance to the Black political leaders Cuomo had irritated with his gubernatorial campaign. He met with labor leaders and bigwig Democratic donors, boxing out his closest competition to run for state attorney general. Once elected AG, Cuomo almost immediately set his sights on the job he had run for five years before, teaming up with Republicans to investigate Governor Eliot Spitzer, sinking Spizer’s popularity before he ultimately resigned in a prostitution scandal.
Spitzer’s lieutenant governor, David Paterson, took over in a similar wave of good feeling that quickly crashed as stories of dysfunction in the governor’s office—in political circles, it was always believed that Cuomo was behind many of them, though Cuomo denies it to this day—led him to decide to not seek reelection.
This time around, Cuomo’s comeback has taken a lot less work. Neither the anti-gun effort or the antisemitism campaign amounted to much, and the case against Netanyahu has gone nowhere. The podcast never caught on.
In the end, all he had to do was lie low and take occasional meetings with political power players to keep his name out there—and watch while a mayoral administration collapsed into chaos.
To be a New York political reporter during these past two years has been to be tipped off every few months by someone who claims to be very much in the know about how Andrew Cuomo is about to announce he is running for mayor, or has already hired a campaign manager, or isn’t running but is instead running for governor. He was going to announce over the holidays, then in early February, then late February, or maybe it was just a week before the April 3 filing deadline. He was pushing Eric Adams out of the race except when he was working to keep Adams in the race to deflect some of the media scrutiny.
Such is the mystique of Cuomo as a political operator that after four of Adams’s top deputies resigned suddenly in the wake of the mayor’s acquiescence to Trump, a rumor went around city political circles that somehow Cuomo was behind it, a contention his aides said was ridiculous. One labor operative told me that he had been paranoid for weeks that anytime someone called him to talk about the mayor’s race, the person, no matter how close an ally, was secretly working for Cuomo and back-channeling the conversation back to him.
The rumors were crazy but also evidence of the shadow Cuomo has cast on the political conversation in New York over the past two decades. Cuomo was regularly meeting with labor and business leaders, eating breakfast as often as three times a week at the Regency, still the city’s premier place to see and be seen. Those who met with him say that some of Cuomo’s old feral instincts seemed a bit softer, as if the guy who, as one former aide put it to me, “woke up every morning wondering how he could get revenge on someone who he thought had fucked him over” had mellowed now that he was no longer consumed with smiting his enemies.
“He just seemed like a really different person than the one I had always heard about,” said Andrew Yang, the 2021 mayoral candidate who dined with Cuomo at the Regency earlier this year. “Just on a human level, he sounded like he had been on a journey and that he had learned from it.”
He asked Yang about his ideas for the city, and Yang talked to him about the need for more police and for more specialized high schools. “He expressed that the city’s future really hangs in the balance right now, that we could end up in the soup if we aren’t careful,” Yang said.
Cuomo wouldn’t publicly admit his interest in the race, but privately, as 2024 wore on, Cuomo was increasingly telling business, labor, and religious leaders that he was running, that the city was in the grip of politicians who weren’t just too spineless to stand up to the far left but who were incompetent to boot. He told them that if he entered, he was almost certain to win, with the unspoken warning that they would be wise to not support his opponents. A team of close advisors, including consultants Charlie King and Bill Murrow, along with his former chief aide, Melissa DeRosa, built a turnkey campaign operation on his behalf. Hoping to avoid a perception that Cuomo was running against the political Establishment, she set about lining up endorsements from fellow politicians, many of whom had previously called Cuomo unfit for office, and reigniting Cuomo’s old network of staff and allies for another battle.
Carl McCall had lunch with Cuomo and agreed to endorse even before Cuomo announced he was running, taking some of the heat out of the charge that Cuomo was again elbowing aside a Black political leader. Ritchie Torres, an ambitious congressman from the Bronx who had been making noises about running for governor, did the same. The Staten Island Democratic Party endorsed him. In late February, two weeks before Cuomo was set to announce, Frank Carone, a Brooklyn lawyer and political power broker who has been Adams’s chief political patron, told Politico New York Playbook that while of course he was still supporting the mayor, he had also been in touch with DeRosa and the rest of Cuomo’s team, for whom he has “great respect.” Five days later, Adams abruptly canceled an appearance at a candidate forum that was supposed to mark his unofficial entry into the race, citing “the advice of counsel.” Associates of the former governor even tried to come to some accord with Tish James. One elected official showed up unexpectedly at her house, but James rebuffed their entreaties. (The Cuomo team denies this ever happened.)
When Cuomo finally entered the race after weeks of speculation, he didn’t do so with the kind of inspiring, shareable social-media video that most campaigns aim for; instead, he announced with a direct-to-camera, 17-minute address that didn’t so much inspire hope or love for the city as fear. New York, as Cuomo described it, was on the brink.
“You feel it when you walk down the street and try not to make eye contact with a mentally ill homeless person or when the anxiety rises up in your chest as you’re walking down into the subway. You see it in the empty storefronts, the graffiti, the grime, the migrant influx, the random violence,” he said, his eyes darting across the teleprompter above the lens. “The city just feels threatening, out of control, and in crisis. These conditions exist not as an act of God but rather as an act of our political leaders — or more precisely — the lack of intelligent action by many of our political leaders.”
The video was Cuomo’s idea, and he knew that almost no actual voters would sit through it. Rather, it was for the press and the political professionals the Cuomo campaign expects will spread its core message: that this is a “break glass in case of emergency” moment and Andrew Cuomo is the voters’ hammer. Let the rest of the field go for social-media virality; this was going to be a campaign built on old-school brute-force logic.
The next day, Cuomo announced his run in person at the carpenters-union hall on the West Side of Manhattan. The hall was packed with supporters, including, according to a report in Politico, union members who were bussed in without being told they were attending a Cuomo campaign rally. Signature gatherers with clipboards fanned out among the crowd to get Cuomo on the ballot. His three daughters spoke on his behalf and attested to his character, as did a multidenominational array of religious leaders.
The same day Cuomo announced, his opponents countered. Brad Lander held “an emergency press conference” calling Cuomo unfit to be mayor. Scott Stringer released a web ad reminding voters how he had defeated Eliot Spitzer when that former governor tried to make a comeback attempt and run for a city office. Zellnor Myrie slammed him for cutting funds for critical city services as governor.
Cuomo didn’t respond to the attacks and scarcely engaged with the media. After his announcement, he ducked behind a blue curtain while his staff and security kept the reporters away.
Friends say that when he was out of office, Cuomo could sound like a retired football coach watching his old team play, yelling at the television, but that his outrage was mostly directed at the governor, not the mayor. Eric Adams was, after all, a moderate like him, someone who seemed to hate the DSA-inflected left and its enablers in the elite media as much as he did and, perhaps most important, governed every day as if his administration were a rebuke of Bill de Blasio. Cuomo even warned Adams against going out on the town so much, telling him that it read to voters much like de Blasio’s late-morning gym habit: a sign that you weren’t much interested in them.
As Cuomo knows better than anyone, the city is a function of the state. New York City is reliant on Albany not just for its funding but for many of the rules and laws that it implements to govern itself. This stark reality is why, even as Cuomo inched closer to a mayoral run, many political analysts thought he was in fact gunning to get his old job as governor back. Would a Mayor Cuomo really want to go hat-in-hand to the State Legislature that nearly impeached him and ask for more funding or for local control of city schools? But a potential governor’s race was almost two years away, Adams was starting to flounder, and so in late 2023 Cuomo took an apartment on East 54th St.
In his campaign launch, it could sound sometimes as if Cuomo still thought he was running for governor, especially when he talked about the infrastructure projects that he built as governor, including the Mario Cuomo Bridge, which connects suburban Westchester County to even more suburban Rockland County. Cuomo’s political image was always as someone who understood the suburbs around New York City, especially its more middle-class towns, where he capped property taxes and spent his time off fishing or working on cars. In his first term especially, Cuomo rarely held public events in New York City, according to aides, out of fear of being upstaged by then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg. These days, he gets around town in his own car, a Dodge Charger.
“A big risk for Andrew Cuomo is that he runs a campaign like he is trying to win over swing voters in the Rochester suburbs and not Democratic-primary voters in New York City,” said one Democratic pollster. “Suburban voters want to hear you talk about all the problems the city is for the state, but city voters, to state the obvious, live here, and so they don’t really believe all the doom and gloom about the place. They see New York’s problems, but they want to know your plan to immediately fix them. He is pitching a different audience now.”
Even before Cuomo got into the race, a pair of dark-money groups, funded by business and labor leaders who feared a campaign of retribution, formed in order to drive up his negatives. One, New Yorkers for Better Government, ran digital ads that compared Cuomo with disgraced pols like Spitzer, Anthony Weiner, and George Santos and accused him of covering up COVID-19 nursing-home deaths. Its efforts are echoed by another group called the Nursing Home Justice League, which is supported by a number of leading local Republicans and Democrats and has built a memorial wall in Brooklyn to, as the group puts it, “honor the nursing home victims of Governor Cuomo’s failed leadership during the pandemic crisis.” (Cuomo has always insisted that he complied with federal guidelines.) Meanwhile, the Working Families Party, which Cuomo went to war with during his term as governor, and a coalition of labor groups have been developing a strategy to get all of the non-Cuomo, non-Adams candidates to work together.
Unexpectedly, he also has to contend with the New York Post, a newspaper that in the past has been willing to throw its weight behind favored candidates. As the moderate in the race, Cuomo should be the paper’s favorite, but the early coverage has been brutal, including a welcome-to-the-race editorial on the day Cuomo announced titled, “Behold! Biggest Liar in New York Wants to Be Mayor.”
His half-dozen or so progressive opponents, who had mostly been muddling through a somnolent mayoral campaign, appear energized at the emergence of a Cuomo candidacy. Lander held a press conference nearly every day after Cuomo first announced, blaming the former governor for many of the ills that now befall the city: “At a time when we all want to turn the page on endless chaos, Andrew Cuomo’s scandals, corruption, and disregard for our city except for when it serves his personal ambitions, are literally the last thing New Yorkers want to replace Eric Adams.” Stringer led reporters on a tour of “Andrew Cuomo’s Manhattan,” which included stops on Billionaires’ Row to call out Cuomo’s failures to boost the city’s affordable-housing stock. DSA-aligned assemblyman Zohran Mamdani compared him to Trump, and said that Cuomo “shares the president’s love for billionaires, corruption, and harassing women.” Myrie, a state senator from Central Brooklyn, has been hitting Black churches, warning at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network that Cuomo isn’t one of them. “We have had so-called leaders who sat in the governor’s mansion, sat in our pews on Sunday, and cut our schools on Monday, and now they are using us to rehabilitate their image,” he said at one in early March.
With the sexual-harassment scandal not moving voters away from Cuomo —
“everyone already knows about it, and absolutely nobody cares,” said one operative from a rival campaign — his competitors have focused their efforts on trying to blame his actions as governor for a lot of what voters say are their current dissatisfactions with New York City. That has meant pinning the mental-health crisis on his decision to reduce psychiatric hospital beds and the poor state of the subways on his decision to raid the coffers of the MTA. Similarly, they point out how he failed to meaningfully address the city’s spiraling housing crisis and suggest that his reforms on bail and discovery have led to a spike in crime.
Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux for New York Magazine
The anti-Cuomo candidates are also consolidating into something of a team, coordinating their strategies in the hopes that there is a progressive, anti-Cuomo majority in the city’s Democratic-primary electorate. The idea is that together, they can maneuver the relatively new ranked-choice-voting system to their benefit. Their staffs are all on a text chain and in regular contact. Lis Smith, a top Democratic operative who once worked for Cuomo but publicly broke with him last year, has been offering advice unofficially to friends working for Cuomo’s rivals.
The anti-Cuomo candidates, a group that now includes Adrienne Adams, the City Council Speaker and a relative moderate who was a late entrant into the race, have mostly refrained from attacking one another. And if they do, progressive leaders have been quick to remind them to knock it off. “We are not going to have a fight between the four or five candidates that are vying for the left,” said Antonio Reynoso, the left-leaning Brooklyn borough president. “We are going to be working together. I get calls from candidates running for mayor every week, and I am brutally honest with them,” he added. “If there is a candidate that starts bashing another candidate, I am going to give them a phone call and tell them that their individual goals are not more important than the greater good here and we are not going to allow you to hurt the movement.”
But operatives for the progressive candidates admit that they are stuck in something of a prisoner’s dilemma: They all think they can win, if only voters will give them a shot, and so want their opponents, who they believe definitely can’t win, to sacrifice themselves and spend all their energy attacking Cuomo. But of course, if everyone thinks they should be the next mayor, and someone else should be the designated attack dog, the strategy falls apart.
Cuomo has been consistently polling in the 30s or 40s, and before he entered the race, the question his rivals were facing is whether that is the ceiling of his support or the floor. Cuomo is, after all, a candidate with close to 100 percent name identification. “He is not going to become better known in the course of this campaign,” said another rival operative. “And he is not going to be better liked either.”
One pollster pointed to surveys that showed Cuomo’s retrospective job approval (i.e., how well you think he did as governor) is somewhere in the high 60s. But ask voters about his personal favorability rating, and it drops to the 50s. Ask voters if they could see themselves voting for him, and the number drops to the 40s. And ask if they will rank him first on their ballots in the city’s ranked-choice-voting system, and the number drops to the 30s—proof, they said, that his current strength is a mirage.
Other recent polling shows that this theory might not be right. A trio of late March polls put Cuomo at around 40 percent, suggesting that since entering the race, Cuomo has, if anything, increased his lead — that he was, in fact, becoming if not better known, at least better liked. One survey showed Cuomo leading among nearly all demographics, including with over half of women. The poll also found — matching the conviction of some in the Cuomo camp — that backers of Eric Adams and Adrienne Adams might ultimately give their support to Cuomo, potentially giving him a route to clear 50 percent and victory in the primary.
The poll also showed Cuomo’s nearest competitor to be Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old assemblyman from Queens. The Cuomo campaign can scarcely believe their good fortune — as much as Cuomo likes to deride his opponents as far-left members of the Democratic Socialists of America, Mamdani, whose viral online videos have turned him into a phenom in the early part of the campaign, actually is a member of the group. It is the belief among several of Cuomo’s advisers that Mamdani can’t possibly break 50 percent but that he could win over the left and deprive oxygen and attention from Cuomo’s other competitors, creating a dynamic much like Cuomo faced when he ran statewide against Zephyr Teachout and Cynthia Nixon, both candidates beloved by the progressive left but with little traction beyond it. The Cuomo camp has been privately in conversations with donors and potential supporters, warning them of the possibility that Mamdani could win and that the city is on the brink of electing an avowed “defund the police”–style socialist unless Cuomo puts a stop to it.
To Cuomo aides, who derisively refer to his opponents as “the assistant managers,” none of the attacks on the former governor are working. To those who say he is not a real New Yorker, “just listen to him talk,” said one aide. The notion that Cuomo is somehow weak on crime will be ludicrous to voters, and as much as his opponents want to criticize his record, he is also the only one with the experience running an entity as large and as complicated as New York City, the argument goes.
Cuomo’s rivals’ current strategy is to get him out of his cocoon, to bait him into actually campaigning in unscripted settings, hoping he makes a gaffe. But Cuomo has been disciplined in sticking to a front-runner’s strategy, appearing with local leaders who have endorsed him—many of whom Cuomo donated to out of his sizable state campaign war chest over the past couple of years—at diners and senior centers. He rarely alerts the press to his public schedule, and when he does, he does not often take questions from the media, whom he believes have it in for him. Cuomo is almost certain to max out in fundraising as part of the city’s campaign-finance system and is also the only candidate with a multimillion-dollar super-PAC boosting his chances, one that has already raised more than $2 million from donors like Stephen Ross, the billionaire real-estate developer.
It is a campaign built on a belief that politics hasn’t changed as much as some pundits might think. “The backbone of this campaign is labor, the backbone of this campaign is the Black and brown and white ethnic working class in the outer-boroughs,” said DeRosa. “It’s going to be diners and senior centers and churches, and it is a belief that Twitter is not real life and that is going to go over the top of the press.”
What Cuomo has not done much of on the campaign trail is attack Donald Trump, something his opponents have done relentlessly and also wondered aloud why Cuomo is not, positing publicly that Cuomo is trying to avoid prosecution from the Trump Justice Department or that he and Trump have a secret alliance.
Privately, in making his case to elected officials, Cuomo has been talking up the threat that Trump signifies for the functioning of the city and has been telling members of the city’s congressional delegation especially that he is best suited to be the strong hand against an increasingly vengeful federal government; Cuomo aides say that continually going after Trump publicly on the campaign trail would risk his getting lumped in with the rest of the mayoral field. Plus even before Cuomo announced, there were rumors among New York politicos that the mayoralty was little more than a stepping-stone for a presidential run. Not talking at all about Trump, or any national issues, was a way to tamp some of that down.
Cuomo’s is not a campaign that aims to inspire or become a cause. Mayoral campaigns, or any campaign for that matter, tend to succeed when they are built around big ideas and tangible improvement. Think of de Blasio, who ran on the theme of “The Tale of Two Cities” and pushed for universal prekindergarten to address those inequalities. It was true for Mike Bloomberg too, who pledged to utilize technocratic expertise to help the city recover from 9/11, and even for Eric Adams, who relied on his biography as a working-class former cop from the outer-boroughs to bring attention to crime and small businesses.
Then there is the wild card of this being — allegedly — a different Cuomo, one matured and made more human by the battles that led to his resignation. A guy who has discovered a new peace and equanimity and not the person who wakes up every morning thinking about revenge. How that guy runs a government is really anyone’s guess.
Toward the end of our interview, Cuomo began recounting all the things that had seemingly gone wrong in the state since he left office—the botched marijuana rollout, a legislature that won’t confirm a governor’s chief-judge pick, a lack of major infrastructure accomplishments. “But the situation here in the city is much more dire,” he said. “Like, if I wanted to get back to office, the question will be, ‘Why don’t you run for governor?’ That is not why I got here. I didn’t have a desire to get back into office. I felt that I was needed here, that I have the experience to actually really help.”
He got up to leave, heading toward his Dodge Charger, out into the city he hopes to lead. Cuomo’s strength among the voters belies how much of the political class, from across the ideological spectrum, wanted to see him gone. Few of course were willing to say that publicly, fearful of a governor with a famous taste for vengeance.
But this is, he promises, a new Andrew Cuomo, one who is not just scarred by a precipitous fall from grace but aware of how one needs friends in politics.
“You know this dynamic,” he said. “You know what I do.”
