The Friday before Primary Day, top officials at the super PAC boosting Andrew Cuomo were guardedly optimistic about his chances – despite some troubling signs in the early voting tallies.
Addressing donors in a virtual meeting, Fix the City Chair Steve Cohen cited major newspaper editorials that argued Zohran Mamdani wasn’t fit for the mayoralty, according to two people who attended but requested anonymity because the virtual meeting was private.
John Cordo, a lobbyist whose clients include 1199 SEIU, answered a query about get-out-the-vote work by describing the efforts planned by the many unions who had endorsed the former governor, the people said. Then pollster Mark Penn, whose early clients included former Mayor Ed Koch, previewed a poll showing Cuomo still held a double-digit lead.
Even amid the sunny presentation, some of the donors exchanged worried texts, attendees told Gothamist. Where was the concrete plan to turn out voters for Cuomo? And Penn’s subdued tone belied the message of reassurance he was supposedly delivering.
“If the job was to get people fired up, it got people worried,” one of the donors said.
A week later, the political scion who was once talked up as a presidential candidate is back in the electoral wilderness. Cuomo conceded the Democratic primary to Mamdani on Tuesday. The former governor decided Friday to keep his name on the general election ballot as the candidate of the “Fight and Deliver” party, a campaign official said.
Whether or not he continues to actively campaign through November remains an open question. But the 40-minute Fix the City confab showcased many of the shortcomings of Cuomo’s comeback bid for mayor, which was designed to resurrect his career after he resigned from office in 2021.
With early polls showing a comfortable lead, the former governor skipped many candidate forums and tightly managed his public appearances, often ignoring questions from the press. He relied on old hands, some of whom don’t live in the five boroughs. The campaign banked on support from institutions – particularly labor unions – that it hoped would translate into necessary votes.
It was a strategy built on a sense of inevitability. Cuomo has near-universal name recognition from his 15 years as a statewide elected official. He started working in New York politics five decades ago as an aide to his father Mario Cuomo’s unsuccessful bids for mayor and eventual election as governor.
Tuesday’s result showed he hadn’t kept pace with the times.
“This is a huge generational shift in the Democratic Party,” said J.C. Polanco, a professor at the University of Mount Saint Vincent. “Cuomo campaigned as if it was 1999 and that was not going to fly.”
Click here to read my whole post-mortem of the effort at Gothamist.
Other outlets did similar stories, including this one from Nick Reisman and Sally Goldenberg that said Cuomo “ran like an aging rocker on a final tour playing his greatest hits.”
“All of us have a blind spot,” former Gov. David A. Paterson, who endorsed Cuomo, told The New York Times. “His blind spot is that he doesn’t really connect particularly well with, just, people.”
Howard Glaser, a former part of Cuomo’s inner circle, had this poetic and searing appraisal in the final days of the primary. He called Cuomo’s effort “A grim and joyless campaign, as befits a battle for a prize never wanted, one long viewed with disdain and contempt as a trifle that only lesser men would debase themselves to seek….”
Cuomo’s spokespeople said they were proud of the campaign they ran and said they met all their metrics. Mamdani just expanded the electorate in a way they couldn’t anticipate.
“My campaign team did a tremendous job at many things and I was proud to have the support of the majority of the Democratic elected officials and labor unions,” Cuomo said in a statement to CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere. “To the extent there were strategic errors, the buck stops with me. There’s no question a fall campaign would need to be a different effort informed by the lessons of this one.”
We don’t yet know whether that fall campaign will materialize. Cuomo kept his options open by staying on the line, and I suspect we’ll see in the next few weeks if things if it gels into a real effort. The defection of unions like the Hotel Trades Council and SEIU 32BJ to Mamadani is a blow. We’ll also see if some of the deep-pocketed people concerned about Mamdani put their money behind Eric Adams. He’s already making that play, as the New York Times reported.
As for the larger stakes, there were so many tactical missteps in the primary campaign that I think it’s hard to read the results here as some bigger statement about the never-ending struggle between centrist and progressive Democrats. I thought Tim Lim, a Democratic strategist and fundraiser, put it well.
“For moderates and wealthy Democratic donors, the reaction is, this is horrible and it’s going to ruin us. For center-left Democrats who don’t necessarily support Mamdani’s policies, the reaction is, this is a rejection of the Democratic establishment and Mamdani ran a great campaign against a sex offender,” Lim told Politico. “And for progressives, they believe this is what happens when you listen to voters.”
I do think the race represented a clear mobilization of the youngs. As a Millennial who is just now watching more people in my generation assert themselves in politics, I think we bring a strong feeling of rage against the machine. The Wall Street Journal tapped into that when it interviewed college-educated voters who are struggling to make their way in New York City but find the financial model makes it simply impossible.
“Money is always on our mind,” 36-year-old William Albuquerque, a Brooklyn resident who canvassed for Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, told the WSJ. “Rent is such a huge part of our cost every month, it’s impossible not to think about it.”
My fellow Millennial Alex Burns melded the results with other recent primaries and put it this way:
Democratic voters are voraciously hungry for freshness and change. The Democrats thriving this year — not just Zohran Mamdani on the left, but also two centrist gubernatorial candidates, Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey — project vitality and vigor that was absent from Cuomo’s hey-it’s-me-again campaign. All these candidates are relatively young, relatively new to politics and were relatively unknown until recently beyond their home districts.
Both Sherrill and Spanberger first sought (and won) office in 2018 as part of a wave of Democrats who ran in response to Donald Trump’s 2016 election. Another member of that class is Antonio Delgado, who is now running against Gov. Kathy Hochul.
She’s about a year younger than Cuomo. Delgado has endorsed Mamdani.
THE QUESTION: Mario Cuomo ran in the general election contest in 1977 after losing the Democratic primary to Ed Koch. On what line to Mario run? (Andrew is Mario’s kid.)
Know the answer? Drop me a line at jimmy.vielkind@gmail.com. Or just write with thoughts, feedback or to say hi.
THE LAST ANSWER: Only one of you was brave enough to write with predictions about the primary, and they were all wrong!