Cuomo Earned This
An erstwhile juggernaut slouches toward defeat
I was very excited to see Vox write about my new novel, Glass Century, likening it to the works of Jonathan Franzen, and give a very nice shoutout to The Metropolitan Review, the literary magazine I co-founded and lead. I encourage you to read the Vox piece and, if you haven’t already, to buy Glass Century. The Wall Street Journal declared that “the amplitude of Glass Century is also its greatest strength. The people it depicts are as textured and as durable as their city.” If you agree, rate it on Goodreads.
You wouldn’t know it unless you truly cared, but Andrew Cuomo is campaigning again. He has a public calendar that is slightly more robust than the nigh empty one he kept in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor. He’s visited several neighborhoods and public housing developments, advising reporters ahead of time of his whereabouts. He’s given a few interviews and held press conferences to announce new policing and housing affordability plans. He’s tweeting up a storm. He’s talking a little politics with Donald Trump.
And he has a new campaign logo. Like the old one, it looks like it was designed by a somnolent middle schooler who was tinkering around with Canva for, at most, a half hour.
These will be, barring some great unforeseen circumstance, Cuomo’s final months on any campaign trail. Polymarket gives him about an 8 percent chance of winning in the general election, and it’s difficult to see this number moving much higher. Zohran Mamdani, his great nemesis, has won the Democratic nomination, and he now competes with a stronger hand than he ever had before June. The major labor union that backed Cuomo are lining up behind Mamdani. If several leading Democrats, including Senator Chuck Schumer and Gov. Kathy Hochul, have refused to endorse the socialist, none are rushing to Cuomo. And this is why the Democratic establishment’s unwillingness to boost Mamdani doesn’t matter all that much. Neutrality is damaging for Cuomo because it means no one is lifting a finger for him. He lost to Mamdani by a significant margin despite a super PAC spending nearly $30 million on his behalf and organized labor begging their membership to show up for him.
He’s now a significant underdog, and he doesn’t have any real concept of how to pivot, rebrand, or reset the race in such a way that he’ll benefit. He is on track to lose again, and lose badly. It’s a fate he wholly earned. Defeat looms, in part, because he’s entirely unwilling to do what’s needed to make himself a real threat to Mamdani.
He’s not a street fighter. He doesn’t know how to become one. If he did, the general election might look very different.