The Dictatorship
Why New Yorkers rejected Andrew Cuomo
“All he had was name recognition, and then Mamdani had that,” my mother — a New Yorker for a half-century — said late Tuesday night when I filled her in on what had just happened in the city’s Democratic mayoral primary.
The results were an emperor-has-no-clothes moment, revealing that former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s city-in-crisis campaign was wildly out of step with what New York’s Democrats want in their next mayor. Though it’s only a local election, it’s a repudiation by the electorate of the fading Democratic dynasties, which Cuomo surely represents.
Tapping into that pessimism to lecture voters to grit their teeth and think about how much worse it could be wasn’t a winning message.
After three months of projecting his grim inevitability, beginning with a 17-minute straight to camera monologue about a city in crisis while channelling the only I can fix it vibes of another son of Queens, New York’s Democrats poured into the polls to reject Cuomo’s fear-based attempt to tap into the darker instincts of a city where most voters think things are headed in the wrong direction.
Spoiler alert: Tapping into that pessimism to lecture voters to grit their teeth and think about how much worse it could be wasn’t a winning message. Zohran Mamdani, running with much more vigor and urgency, offered a far more compelling Trump-derived counterpunch: Look at this guy. How much worse could I be?
Cuomo’s fall came as news to pundits, pollsters, editorial board members and a business class that spent millions trying to derail Mamdani, many months after he built up a small army of young volunteers knocking on doors with enthusiasm on his behalf. Suddenly, people who’ve never felt connected to the city’s suffocating backroom politics — where the politicians like to pick their voters instead of the other way around — went out to make sure their friends and neighbors voted, too.
That’s the sort of small-d democratic politics the city’s big-D Democratic gave up on many years ago — so that they could keep the same voter base that elected them in the first place, at least until those voters die or move. But that means outsiders, like the Democratic Socialists of America, willing to put in the work to get new voters to turn out, have an opportunity to change the math and wield an awful lot of power.
Mamdani’s supporters weren’t downstream of politics but active participants in it. They got an energy boost in the closing phase as former Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who openly envisioned the city as a luxury product while spending a quarter billion dollars on his own three runs here, put $8.3 million into outside spending backing Cuomo and trashing Mamdani.
Others dumped tens of millions more into an endless deluge of TV ads and mailers treating a smiling young man (who’s been game to talk to anyone, any time, make his case) as some sort of alien threat. It felt like an awfully heavy and negative thumb on the scale, and failed to make much of a positive case for Cuomo.
“The governor,” as his team continued to refer to him years after he resigned from that office before his own party could impeach him, turned out to be an indefinite object, giving way the moment voters had their say. The unstoppable force of Mamdani’s smiling populist promise of a city that can deliver more to New Yorkers, rather than tell them what they can’t afford to hold onto, won the day.
Mamdani’s supporters weren’t downstream of politics but active participants in it.
Cuomo, who’d dominated New York’s politics for the past two decades, clearly disdained the office for which he was running (regularly sneering about how the mayor can’t do anything Albany won’t allow), and kept his distance from the city even after moving into his daughter’s $8,000-a-month office to establish residency here. He never fully engaged with rival candidates, the press or the people in a city he hadn’t lived in for decades.
New Yorkers aren’t stupid. We know the difference between a volunteer and someone paid or pressed by their union to show up to support a politician — and we know the difference between a candidate running to manifest something new and one running because he feels entitled to public power.
National Democrats reeling after last year’s elections need to take care not to over-index what happened here. Mamdani isn’t a model, he’s a moment — a candidate with great natural gifts who also was blessed with a perfect opponent. Mamdani rose to the occasion, but he still needs to win November’s general election in what will be a crowded field, open to all voters and (unlike the ranked choice vote primary) where the most votes will win.
Cuomo could still be on the ballot. And Mayor Eric Adams, who won the Democratic primary four years ago and is running as an independent, as he’s midway through a heel turn toward Trump, also loves to punch left.
But it’s clear that Mamdani is now the favorite to be New York City’s 111th mayor, and he gave a fine primary night speech about seeking to unite the whole city and not just his political movement. But there are serious questions he’s yet to answer, including what he’d do to make government more efficient to help pay for his pricey proposals about “free” benefits to New Yorkers.
Perhaps more urgently, he’s been vague about how the police would function under him, specifically how they would or would not work with or against Trump’s federal agents, how they would handle protesters and how he would relate to the Democratic Socialists of America that’s treated its elected officials as avatars rather than independent agents.
Remarkably, endless questions about his views on Israel have helped him avoid addressing these more local and pressing concerns about how his ideology would lead him to govern.
If the center wanted to hold, it should never have lined up behind a divisive and overly familiar establishment figure like Cuomo — who’s breeded pessimism and seemed epically incapable of self-reflection about his treatment of women who worked for him, or of the political leaders who worked with him, pushed him out and then lined up behind him again this year.
It turns out that voters weren’t interested in following those leaders.
Harry Siegel is a senior editor at the newsroom The Citya columnist for the New York Daily Newsand the producer and a co-host of the “FAQ NYC” podcast.