Lately, I’ve been following Andrew Cuomo on the campaign trail again. While one of his staffers, very recently, snarked at me for being on Zohran Mamdani’s payroll—I’m certainly not, and never will be—it reminded me not only of the prototypical posture of the Cuomo apparatchik, but also just how long I’ve covered this man. This Substack was launched, more than five years ago, as the Cuomo Files, as I sought to document the then-governor’s many failures over the course of the pandemic. It was a lonely road then, since Cuomo was a national hero. I found myself, for a period, shouting into the void. And then, slowly, the public discovered the truth, and I ended up publishing a book, in 2021, about Cuomo’s tenure as governor and his mismanagement of the pandemic. Since I once ran for office and Mamdani managed my campaign, I will inevitably be associated with him, but my “relationship” with Cuomo—I’ve never spoken with him beyond press conferences—far predates the rise of Mamdani, or even my awareness of the mayoral frontrunner. I began covering Cuomo, as a Queens Tribune reporter, in 2012, and covered his re-election campaign for the New York Observer in 2014. Cuomo has been a fixture of my entire life as a political writer.
The Cuomo I see on the campaign trail, the one who is behind in every poll and has a miniscule chance of victory on Tuesday, is both deeply familiar and entirely new. The familiarity lies in his condescension and general disdain for retail campaigning. Cuomo, as governor, rarely met voters on-on-one, and preferred these dreadnaught campaigns where he overwhelmed the opposition with tens of millions in TV and radio ads while appearing in public only for major rallies stocked with his labor union allies. There were few people, in Cuomo’s heyday, who organically arrived at his events. He was a master of choregraphed displays of might. He knew, as governor, how to subdue rivals and enemies, and he was the unquestioned ruler of New York for more than a decade.
Now he enters his latest, and likely final, phase: beleaguered underdog. One senses he still does not quite understand how he got here. Not long ago, Melissa DeRosa, who was once the second most powerful person in New York State under Cuomo and now serves as the unofficial boss of the Cuomo for mayor campaign, appeared at her alma mater, Cornell, to speak to students. At least one dared to ask DeRosa how she reconciled working for a man who was accused of sexual harassment and had to resign in disgrace. “God forbid anyone in your family is ever falsely accused, and then someone runs around and calls them ‘disgraced’ and asks you how you can stand by them,” DeRosa said to the student. “I hope you don’t have to deal with that moment.”
She added: “Watch yourself when you say things like that in public or if you want to be taken seriously.”
Watch yourself was notable. Cornell students took it as an implicit threat. Had Cuomo still been governor, there is little doubt DeRosa would have found a way to tweak the Cornell administration or outright punish them, even as a private university. Just about every prominent institution comes into contact with the New York State government, and Cuomo always understood the most effective ways to intimidate and inflict punishment.
But Cuomo is not governor. DeRosa is not the second most powerful person in New York. She is an aide to a flailing, desperate local campaign, one that has spent its final days indulging in Islamophobia and warning of New York’s utter destruction if Mamdani, as forecasted, becomes mayor. Cuomo does not know what else to do. Absent a compelling vision for the city he hopes to lead, he attacks and attacks and attacks.