Andrew Cuomo’s Long Goodbye

Andrew Cuomo likes to make a big deal about the age and inexperience of the likely next mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, but the former governor himself got an early start in politics. Cuomo was nineteen when he helped manage his father’s doomed mayoral campaign against Ed Koch, in 1977. He was not yet forty when Bill Clinton named him the Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, in 1997. When Cuomo was elected governor, in 2010, all of this early experience helped him consolidate his power and rule New York, for eleven years, as one of the most consequential governors in state history. By the time he resigned, in 2021, amid credible and documented accusations of sexual harassment and abuse of power, he had been inflicting his forceful, recalcitrant politicking upon New York for nearly half a century.

In his run for mayor this year, Cuomo’s line has been that Mamdani, a thirty-four-year-old socialist who is running fourteen points ahead of him, “hasn’t accomplished anything.” “He’s never had a real job,” Cuomo shouted repeatedly on Wednesday night, at the final mayoral debate. During his six months of campaigning, Cuomo has tried to hold himself forward as an exemplar of battle-tested leadership. In truth, he has looked fed up and exhausted, the deepening lines on his face tensing with old resentments and bad impulses. He garbles Mamdani’s name in debates and interviews. He is dismissive and evasive when asked about the women who accused him of harassment. He has resorted to increasingly baroque lines of attack against his opponent. “Why won’t you say B.D.S. against Uganda?” Cuomo barked at Mamdani at one particularly incoherent moment on Wednesday.

Despite Cuomo seemingly having every kind of advantage—name recognition, Democratic Party support, the backing of many of the city’s most influential and wealthy residents—Mamdani trounced him in the June primary. That night, Cuomo called Mamdani early to concede, and Mamdani has said that the disgraced and beaten old pol was nothing but courteous. Since then, however, Cuomo has mounted a scorched-earth Independent campaign for the general, which has appeared mostly designed to damage Mamdani’s new public prominence. At one point during the most recent debate, Cuomo said that he believed Mamdani was trying to “stoke the flames of hatred against Jewish people”—a smear that is about as vile as anything that Donald Trump has said about an opponent.

Mamdani believes that Israel is an apartheid state, that the war in Gaza is a genocide, and that the American government has been complicit in the Israeli government’s violations of international laws. These are views that he hasn’t departed from in the course of his campaign, and which Cuomo assumed would tank his standing with Jewish New Yorkers. Yet Cuomo’s overt pandering to the city’s conservative and alarmed Jewish residents hasn’t worked as designed—Mamdani did fine among Jewish voters in the primary, and one poll this summer showed him winning by seventeen points among Jews in the general, with more than sixty-per-cent support among Jews under forty-four years old. His campaign was built, in part, on alliances between Jewish and Muslim progressives. Plus, for a supposed antisemite, his primary campaign was staffed by a nontrivial number of nice Jewish boys.

Despite all the insults, Cuomo’s general-election strategy has been, in some ways, an acknowledgment that Mamdani has figured something out. Since June, Cuomo has retooled his pitch to voters, emphasizing affordability; simulating relatability in short-form social-media videos; and making overtures to the city’s burgeoning Hindu communities—all tactics cribbed from Mamdani’s primary run, during which he courted Muslim and South Asian voters in the city as no mayoral candidate had before. Cuomo has even softened the emphasis on Israel, and acknowledged that there are “two sides” to the issue. “I didn’t see the anti-Israel anger,” he said candidly last week, during an appearance on “Morning Joe.” “I didn’t see how that was going to motivate people in a mayor’s race.” In his attempts to compete with Mamdani, Cuomo has also proposed a series of shoot-from-the-hip policy changes that are as untested and disruptive as anything the socialist has proposed, including an idea to introduce means testing to the city’s rent-stabilized housing units. His candidacy has helped obscure, rather than bring forward, real questions about whether Mamdani can govern the city.