Andrew Cuomo Is Not Inevitable

The state of play

In two months, my new book, Glass Century, will be published. It is, according to Junot Díaz, “a marvelous paean to NYC and a spectacularly moving novel.” Please pre-order it now. I’ve gotten word it’s making the rounds on BookTube, where very nice things are being said about it already. If you want big books with ambition, you should buy Glass Century.

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I’ve been on Substack nearly a half decade. That fact seems fairly insane to me, and speaks to how much faster time seems to be galloping away in my thirties. I am not sure how 2015 became a full decade ago, but here we are. Allow me, for a moment, a trip down memory lane. Since this Substack has grown quite a bit, very few know what its purpose was when I launched almost five years ago. It was not called Political Currents. In fact, the project I had in mind was much less vague than that.

I called this newsletter The Cuomo Files.

It was a long time ago. I was thirty. I was trying to survive the pandemic, like all of you. New York was hit egregiously hard. In several months, tens of thousands of people died, and life as we knew it was upended horrifically. As terrible as 2020 could be, I personally found the next year worse: a lot of false promises of a finished pandemic, “real life” returning in fits and starts, and someone close to me getting vaccine injured. I felt lucky to have experienced my twenties before the pandemic and was suddenly uncertain if I’d ever be able to return, fully, to the existence I had known. We all carry scars from Covid.

But Cuomo. Andrew Cuomo, like Donald Trump and Eric Adams, has been in my life a very long time. Cuomo was first elected governor when I was in college at a state university on Long Island. When I took my first reporting job at a local newspaper in Queens, Cuomo was riding a wave of enormous popularity, having just forced the legalization of same-sex marriage through the state legislature. He was a kingly presence at press events and rallies; he seemed genuinely unassailable. Cuomo, in person, is imposing. He has a deep, rolling lilt and a barrel chest; he stands over six feet, and his hands might be the largest I’ve seen in person. When I covered him, his preferred mode of communication, other than the mid-sized indoor rally, was the “gaggle.” I hated, as a young reporter, the gaggles. Dozens of journalists would gather as a single, unwieldly horde around Cuomo at some event in Manhattan or Long Island and he’d decide, through the shouts, who was anointed for a question. He fed on this sort of chaos. Journalists were largely deferential to him because he projected power. He was seen the way he wanted to be seen. He wanted to exist in the tradition of Smith, Roosevelt, Rockefeller, and Moses. One got the sense he didn’t respect his father, Mario, all that much. Mario, the popular three-term governor, was a mostly ineffectual liberal—and not all that liberal, on the substance—and representative of potential unrealized. Andrew was going to command the state like his father never could.

There were great successes and plenty of failures in the years leading up to March 2020. The real triumph for Cuomo was the remodel of LaGuardia Airport, which is no longer an embarrassment. Moynihan Train Hall is very attractive, too. The Kosciuszko and Tappan Zee Bridges needed to be rebuilt and Cuomo did that. He can take credit for the Second Avenue Subway, though the three stops on the Q were far more expensive than they should have been. Against his will—initially, at least—Cuomo did authorize a much-needed minimum wage hike. I take a warmer view of the criminal justice reform legislation of 2019, which Cuomo did sign into law and now decries. Ditto congestion pricing, a successful program that Cuomo rubberstamped after Democrats in the legislature moved it to his desk. Anti-tenant for much of his tenure, Cuomo signed the legislation that ended the practice of deregulating rent-stabilized apartments.

Cuomo was also the governor who presided over the 2010s deterioration of the subway system and chased away the world-renowned transit expert who he had initially appointed to turn the system around. His administration was rife with corruption scandals; his closest aide was indicted and sent to prison before the Supreme Court, narrowing the definition of corruption, overturned the case. As governor, he fought, behind the scenes, to ensure the Republicans kept control of the State Senate so legislation he didn’t like could be bottled up indefinitely. He refused to comply with a lawsuit that was supposed to send more state funding to needy public schools. He cut funding, at various points, to the city’s public university system. In his first term, he warred incessantly with public sector unions. He needlessly tormented Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York City, and eight million people suffered for it.

In 2020, he repeatedly downplayed the threat of Covid and blocked de Blasio from implementing a lockdown order. Then, several days later, he did it on his own, seemingly so he could take sole credit. Hospitals were overloaded because he had, in past years, shut facilities that could have handled the influx of patients. At the same time, he authorized a policy of sending hospitalized Covid patients back to the nursing homes they had recently come from, even though temporary overflow centers still had excess capacity. As Covid ravaged the nursing homes, Cuomo effectively told his Health commissioner, Dr. Howard Zucker, to count the deaths in such a way so the death toll in the homes was largely hidden. At the same time, as these people got sick and died, he accepted more than $5 million to write a memoir on 2020. A year later, he resigned, forced from office for an entirely unrelated reason: sexual harassment allegations lodged against him. By then, I had published a book about Cuomo, accounting for much of this.

Now Cuomo is back, running for mayor of New York. On Sunday, I covered his launch at a carpenters’ union hall in Manhattan. It was vintage Cuomo, thundering from the stage as union men cheered him on, and he was in his element, decrying the progressive left and promising to restore the city’s pre-pandemic quality of life. He is fighting a two-front war against the left-of-center Democrats in the primary and Adams, the beleaguered, Trump-aligned mayor mired in corruption scandals. Adam is likely to lose and Cuomo, as of now, is the obvious frontrunner. He is hoping to recreate Adams’ winning 2021 coalition—outer borough Blacks and Latinos, Orthodox Jews, and other white moderates—and secure his comeback, holding less power than he did before but far more than a disgraced private citizen. The city is a creature of the state, as Cuomo knows well, but he can torture Kathy Hochul and the state legislature plenty from City Hall. And he’ll control America’s largest police force and education department.

To win, Cuomo must stay ahead from now until the end of June. This will be harder than it looks. The top Democrats running against him, including Brad Lander, the city comptroller, have made attacking Cuomo their lone focus. If the electorate has moved on from #meToo, there are the Covid scandals, which can be fodder for devastating television ads. Can the Working Families Party, increasingly irrelevant within the five boroughs, rise to the occasion and slay their old nemesis? If the WFP can raise north of $1 million for anti-Cuomo spending and dispatch a few smart operatives to craft ads, they will have made a tremendous difference in this primary. Another question: will the New York Post remain committed to its anti-Cuomo stance? The influential right-wing tabloid has savaged Cuomo thus far and tried to urge Jessica Tisch, the police commissioner, into the race. But if Lander or Zohran Mamdani, the DSA candidate, start to surge, it’s not hard to imagine the Post deciding that the left is a worthier target than Cuomo. If I were Lander, I would try to do whatever I could to ensure the Post does not make the last month of the primary miserable for me.

Past mayoral frontrunners, like Christine Quinn and Andrew Yang, have faltered. Cuomo could easily prove more durable than either of them. He’s got a political base already and there could be room to expand. If organized labor consolidates around him and endorsements from sitting politicians start to roll in, his campaign will acquire lasting momentum. But here’s one tough reality for Cuomo: he has never, ever been in a race like this one. Cuomo gubernatorial campaigns were like dreadnoughts cutting through the sea. Cuomo always had, by far, the most money and rarely had to engage in any kind of retail campaigning. Not since his 2006 race for attorney general has he been in any kind of Democratic primary where there was parity between himself and his rivals. Zephyr Teachout and Cynthia Nixon were outspent by tens of millions of dollars in statewide campaigns that came down to little else beyond television and radio ads. As governor, Cuomo was able to meet the media on his own terms—occasional one-on-one interviews, heavily-managed press conferences, and rallies that left no time for difficult questions. Unlike the mayor of New York, he could disappear for many days at a time, with the Albany and New York press corps left to wonder where he might be. He was the imperial governor. To win, he must behave differently. And he cannot approximate Kamala Harris, ducking the media altogether. If he does—or if he crumbles under the scrutiny—his political career will be over for good.