Andrew Cuomo's Leaky Juggernaut

A heavy favorite enters the home stretch

Launch day for Glass Century is nearly upon us. Two critics recently published generous reads of the novel, which Junot Diaz has called “spectacularly moving.” The critic Udith Dematagoda declared that “its appearance should be of critical interest, at the very least for the fact that there are millenial writers capable enough of writing plausible and compelling social novels that give account of the familial, social and ideological forces that have shaped their generation.” And Adam Pearson wrote that “the beauty of Glass Century lies less in its individual scenes than the panoramic effect of its whole … Millennial authors fearing for their relevancy might take note.” Please preorder it now! The novel is available in all formats—print, audio, and e-book.

I’ll be at the Hudson Valley Ideas Festival this Saturday to discuss Glass Century. And on May 6, I’ll have my launch party at P&T Knitwear in Manhattan. Unlike most bookstores, they will be selling beer and wine, so you really want to get there. Tickets are going very fast—we’re nearing the RSVP ceiling—so I suggest securing your ticket and getting inside. I’ll see you soon.

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Andrew Cuomo has not run a good campaign for mayor of New York City. You might think, as someone who wrote a very critical book—soon to be reissued—about the ex-governor, this would not surprise me, but it does. Even though I wrote about the challenges Cuomo might face entering a mayoral campaign, I believed he would, at the very minimum, meet the standards of his three statewide bids for governor. Cuomo never enjoyed retail politics, but those campaigns were always serious, professionalized operations. They had nice signs and literature, smart people working for them, and rarely made mistakes. If Cuomo was never all that talkative with the press, he didn’t completely hide from them when campaign time rolled around. After a rally, he might linger, reporters huddling around to pepper him with questions.

In the June 24th primary, Cuomo remains the overwhelming favorite. Most polls show him at around 40 percent, and if he finishes with that number on the night of the election, he will win easily. His top rival is now Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist assemblyman. Mamdani is running an incredibly strong campaign, but there will undoubtedly be voters who shy away from him because he is a fierce critic of Israel. This race, for him, is now winnable—though I’m a friend of his, I would not have necessarily proclaimed that in October—if it’s still tough. For Cuomo to be stopped, at the minimum, other candidates need to perform better. That means Scott Stringer, Brad Lander, and Adrienne Adams. Adams, of no relation to the formerly indicted mayor, might have the highest ceiling. We’ll see how far she can climb.

But Cuomo. If, indeed, he triumphs in June, he will have run perhaps the worst front-running campaign I’ve ever seen. A paperwork error has already denied him, at least temporarily, public matching funds. His staff used AI to write bizarre portions of a housing platform. His campaign signage looks like it was designed by a middle schooler who wasn’t trying very hard. He spends most of his days hiding from the public, rarely appearing at mayoral forums and almost never talking to reporters. It is less a rose garden campaign and more of a long stay in a bunker.

None of it means, of course, Cuomo won’t win. The chaos of the Eric Adams years has meant his decade at the helm of the state is appealing to many voters. Memories might be short when it comes to the Covid scandals and the sexual harassment allegations that drove him from office. His tough-on-crime message might resonate, as well as his ability to tout tangible accomplishments like the overhaul of LaGuardia Airport. Cuomo’s record is checkered, but he has plenty of successes to highlight. As of now, he appears poised to recreate the Adams coalition—working-class Black and Latino voters, along with Orthodox Jews—and perhaps bolster it with some more liberal whites. He’s the favorite for a reason. It helps that the hobbled Adams is no longer competing in the Democratic primary, electing instead to run as an independent in the general election.

We’re entering crunch time. May will be the last full month of the primary, and New Yorkers will start to pay real attention to the race. Until now, it’s been background noise. TV ads are hitting the airwaves. Remarkably, Mamdani, thanks to receiving the maximum public funds available for the primary, has more cash in the bank than anyone, including Cuomo. Cuomo has a super PAC bolstering him, which makes the paperwork error less fatal. Both Mamdani’s campaign and Cuomo’s super PAC are on television already. Lander, Stringer, Zellnor Myrie, and Adrienne Adams should, at some point, join them. I don’t know if this is a true two-horse race yet—my sense is Adrienne Adams, with the endorsements of Attorney General Letitia James and the public sector union DC37 (along with the potential backing of the New York Times), might start to rise—or if Cuomo can be stopped.

What I do know is that Cuomo’s negatives can rise if his rivals spend aggressively enough against him and somehow break through with the broader electorate. Candidates who haven’t moved in the polls in several months will have decisions to make: focus on ads introducing themselves to the public or hammer Cuomo exclusively. One wild card is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who will probably split the difference among Lander, Mamdani, and Adrienne Adams and announce some sort of endorsement slate, since the primary is ranked-choice, allowing voters to choose up to five candidates. (If AOC ranks them, that will be interesting. Mamdani is a natural political choice but she’s close to Lander.) Ocasio-Cortez can’t necessarily pick a winner, but she can drive her base to a chosen candidate and decide, if she cares enough, to raise an enormous sum to oppose Cuomo. She could help the Working Families Party, increasingly feeble, fund a TV ad campaign to knock Cuomo down. So far, Cuomo has been able to duck the public and maintain his standing in the polls. If the ad campaigns against him are successful and other candidates start to break through, he will be forced to engage with the city he hopes to lead. That would be a good thing. He owes it to everyone, including the New Yorkers he failed as governor.