NEW YORK – Eric Adams’s embattled mayorship is providing former Gov. Andrew Cuomo an opening to revive his own political career as he fights to supplant Adams as the centrist in New York City’s mayoral race.
Adams, a law-and-order Democrat elected mayor in 2021, has drawn a crowded primary field as his reelection campaign sputters under a cloud of scandal. His approval rating had already sunk to record lows for a sitting mayor as he grappled with sexual misconduct allegations and a migrant crisis.
But Adams faced an exodus of staff and calls for his resignation last month over an alleged quid pro quo to get the Justice Department to drop federal corruption charges against him. Adams has denied all wrongdoing and refuses to step down.
Cuomo found himself under the weight of similar scrutiny when he resigned from the governor’s mansion in 2021. Nearly a dozen women came forward to accuse him of harassment or unwanted sexual attention, while his handling of the pandemic — once a bright spot of his governorship — morphed into allegations that he intentionally understated the number of nursing home deaths.
Cuomo, who denies the accusations, has spent years attempting to rehabilitate his legacy, suing the state for records in the sexual misconduct investigation that led to his ouster. In December, he filed a defamation lawsuit against one of his accusers.
But Adam’s own fall from grace has given Cuomo, 67, a chance to rewrite the final chapters of his career outside of the courts. Since launching his campaign in March, Cuomo has taken a commanding lead in the polls and siphoned some of Adams’s old political coalition.
The mayor has so far mounted an almost nonexistent campaign, hiring a bare-bones staff and raising a meager $36,000 in the most recent fundraising period. But he maintains he will run for reelection, fueling speculation in recent days that he may skirt the June 24 Democratic primary to compete in November as an independent.
Cuomo cements front-runner status
Cuomo has quickly played catch-up since entering the mayoral race two weeks ago. He raised $1.5 million in his first public filing, with another $1.5 million reported by a super PAC supporting his candidacy.
The support includes a swathe of donors in real estate and finance who backed Adams four years ago, while Cuomo secured the endorsement of Rodneyse Bichotte-Hermelyn, the head of the Brooklyn Democratic Party, last week. The endorsement represented a major loss for Adams, a Brooklyn native, on his home turf.
The institutional support suggests a segment of New York’s political class sees Cuomo, a pragmatic Democrat who won three terms as New York governor, as a safe bet at the outset of the race. He has attracted a third of the vote in repeated polls, three times more than Adams, his nearest opponent.
But Cuomo does not have an easy path to victory in June. He is running against a who’s-who of New York City power players with large war chests and endorsements of their own.
That field includes the city’s current and former comptroller, its sitting council president, and several state legislators. Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist candidate in the race, has shown particular fundraising strength as he captures a sizable share of the youth vote in polling.
On June 24, each of those candidates will compete under a relatively new system of ranked-choice voting that rewards politicians with broader appeal. Ranking as voters’ second choice can be just as important as their first on subsequent rounds of balloting.
On the Republican side, radio personality Curtis Sliwa is mounting another run for mayor after a 40-point loss to Adams in 2021.
Cuomo haunted by past scandal
While Cuomo has denied that his mayoral bid is about resuscitating a political career that ended under threat of impeachment from the New York state Assembly, he has systematically attempted to reclaim his reputation in the three years since he resigned from office.
He’s accused Attorney General Letitia James of running a politically motivated investigation into the allegations of sexual harassment while blaming “malpractice” by the federal government for New York’s early response to the pandemic.
To this day, Cuomo is fighting an ethics investigation in court into whether he inappropriately used state resources to write a memoir on his COVID leadership.
Ironically, Cuomo will be forced to relive those very accusations as he mounts a comeback run for office. Already, left-leaning groups have begun to air ads mentioning the tax dollars spent on Cuomo’s legal fees, while candidates have called him a “corrupt chaos agent” akin to Adams.
In a statement, Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi claimed the Trump administration “corruptly chose to go after New York for purely political reasons” in investigating the nursing home deaths.
He further accused his opponents of “seeking notoriety or a craven political advantage” with the sexual misconduct allegations.
Polarizing reputation
Cuomo made an oblique reference to the unnamed mistakes he made as governor in launching his campaign on March 1.
“Did I make mistakes, some painfully?” he asked in an announcement video. “Definitely, and I believe I learned from them and that I am a better person for it, and I hope to show that every day.”
But the thrust of Cuomo’s election pitch centers on his reputation as a hard-nosed yet effective leader who steered New York away from political dysfunction. Cuomo brought major infrastructure investments to the state in his 11 years as governor and prided himself on good financial stewardship.
“Our city is in crisis — a crisis of affordability, of quality of life and of leadership, and in this race, Governor Cuomo, and Governor Cuomo alone, is the only proven, tested leader to tackle these issues head on and who voters know can get the job done,” said Azzopardi.
Cuomo’s reputation has polarized New York residents for years, with some seeing a brash political operator willing to bully his way through Albany. But it’s also the basis for his enduring appeal.
Henry, a 20-year-old who lives in Brooklyn, told the Washington Examiner he was considering voting for Cuomo despite the controversy and his own misgivings over nursing home deaths.
“I feel like he’s a competent politician. He’s proved himself in New York, and a lot of the stuff that’s led to his downfall are personal issues,” he said.
Bob Liff, a longtime political operative in New York, believes candidates are miscalculating if they think Cuomo can be defeated on scandal alone, judging that Cuomo’s polling lead already factors in voters’ perception of him.
“I think people are for Cuomo because as heavy-handed as he can be, that’s why we have a Second Avenue subway. That’s why we have a Moynihan train station, that’s why we have a new LaGuardia,” Liff said. “There’s a sense of OK, he’s got all these flaws, but maybe he can run the city.”
Cuomo’s rivals, for their part, are folding the personal attacks into a broader critique of his candidacy. Assemblyman Khaleel Anderson, who represents Cuomo’s home borough of Queens, pointed to Medicaid cuts under his tenure as governor, echoing Democratic attacks on Trump at the national level.
“People are hollering about Medicaid in Washington — we led the way with Medicaid cuts here in New York State under Gov. Cuomo,” said Anderson. “I don’t hear people hollering and screaming about that.”
He and other opponents believe the momentum will shift when the mayoral race enters late spring, as the campaigns deploy their war chests and ramp up public appearances.
“He was the governor for a very, very long time, but as people are reminded of his record and what he’s done … his poll numbers will start to drop, and I anticipate that will be happening over the next several weeks,” state Sen. Jabari Brisport said of Cuomo.
Brisport, a progressive lawmaker from Brooklyn, has endorsed Mamdani in the mayoral race.
Cuomo siphons Adams voters
Cuomo’s campaign is not unlike that of Adams’s circa 2021. He’s offered the same focus on public safety that helped elect the mayor, a retired NYPD captain.
But Adams’s leadership has implicitly become a political foil for Cuomo as he paints for voters a picture of a New York City in chaos.
Even as crime has dropped under Adams’s tenure, Cuomo has tapped into the feeling that residents still aren’t safe. He’s proposed the hiring of 5,000 additional police officers, with an emphasis on combatting crime and homelessness on the city’s subways.
“I’ve described the Eric Adams coalition as the coalition of people who don’t care what the editorial page of the New York Times says, and a lot of those voters will naturally go to Cuomo,” said Lincoln Mitchell, a New York-based political pundit and lecturer at Columbia University.
From the Left, candidates have attempted to portray Adams as a puppet of Trump using allegations that he’s cooperating on immigration enforcement in exchange for the dismissal of his corruption charges.
The Adams campaign did not respond to a request for comment, but the mayor flatly denied the accusation at a congressional hearing in March.
Cuomo will have nearly as hard a time reaching the left wing of the Democratic Party. He has support from 41% of centrist or conservative Democrats, according to Quinnipiac, compared to 12% of those who consider themselves very liberal.
But his path to the Democratic nomination requires him to limit the cross-over appeal of progressives while taking flack from virtually the entire primary field as the front-runner.
Azzopardi, Cuomo’s spokesman, notably took a shot at Mamdani unprompted when asked about the scandals his opponents have sought to re-litigate.
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“These are serious times that demand a serious Mayor, not performance art from a defund the police, DSA-extremist and anti-Israel activists,” he said.
Mamdani, who is polling at 8%, has gained attention with viral videos on social media, including an attempted confrontation with border czar Tom Homan at the New York state Capitol this month.