The whispers started long ago, and the path has been sketched out over the last several months. Now it seems like we’re on the verge of making it official: Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is running for New York City mayor, and will be considered the front-runner the second he jumps in.
Polling already shows him ahead by double digits over a fractured field that is expected to include incumbent Mayor Eric Adams. That is all despite the fact that, not a full four years ago, the former state executive experienced a stunning collapse from grace and resultant resignation precipitated mainly by a litany of sexual harassment accusations against him. The man who prided himself on a steely resolve seems to have made a snap decision rather than face the gauntlet of impeachment, and then seems to have immediately regretted it, spending the intervening few years trying to poke holes in Attorney General Letitia James’ inquiry into his alleged misconduct and pondering a return to politics.
He’s reportedly already set to receive a major labor union endorsement. Elected officials also seem to be lining up, including some who’d once denounced the governor, like Rep. Ritchie Torres, who praised Cuomo as “a Mr. Tough Guy” (apparently unironically) to the New York Post. Setting aside my doubts about the accuracy of public polling these days, it does seem like Cuomo is kind of a lock, already running far ahead of candidates like Zellnor Myrie and Zohran Mamdani, who have spent months trying to break through.
I mean, what is there to be said about Andrew Cuomo that hasn’t already been said? His advantage is to some extent his saturation: everyone knows about Andrew Cuomo. He was the governor for a decade, almost matching his father’s twelve years at the helm. Most New Yorkers know Eric Adams, too, but for now they mainly know him as the mayor who’s spent almost his whole term under a cloud of suspicion over persistent corruption allegations and the sense that he has been an administration of long-time pals steamrolling the city’s career workforce. The saving grace of a competent and technocratic upper echelon has evaporated as four of the most crucial deputy mayors resigned last week.
Voters especially now know that this cloud has been temporarily lifted by Trump — who despite a far better showing in last year’s election than his prior ones remains unpopular in the city — in explicit exchange for Adams playing ball on federal priorities and in particular immigration enforcement. Adams has done little to dispel this perception, having reportedly told City Hall staff not to interfere with such enforcement hours before the Justice Department memo ordering charges to be dropped, and then getting together to yuk it up with Trump immigration official Tom Homan in a TV interview about their “agreement.” He also reportedly wants to move to allow ICE to have a presence at Rikers Island.
Cuomo had his share of scandals, and I don’t just mean the sexual harassment stuff that felled him. He also had a pretty big public corruption cloud hanging over him. Back in 2014, the governor infamously heavily interfered with and then abruptly shut down the Moreland Commission, a body he himself had set up to investigate public corruption after a series of Albany scandals.
Top aide Joseph Percoco was convicted of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in a bid-rigging scandal associated with the so-called Buffalo Billion initiative (amusingly, City & State ran the headline “Percoco verdict proves corruption won’t go unpunished, after all” five years before the Supreme Court tossed Percoco’s conviction in its ongoing quest to make public corruption effectively legal). In his zeal to inaugurate the Tappan Zee bridge replacement that would be named after his late father, Cuomo’s administration allegedly ignored evidence that fraud committed by the contractors had left the bridge structurally unsound.
More recently, the governor was accused of pressuring staffers to work on his Covid-era memoir, at the same time as he was(according to contemporaneous reporting and a subsequent House investigation) instituting policies that put nursing home residents in harm’s way and then undercounting the deaths. None of this is particularly less serious than what Adams stands credibly accused of, but it does have the advantage of having been longer ago, diffused into the time warp vortex that has been the last few years of pandemic and politics.
Frankly, the Cuomo era seems like an eternity ago to me as well. At this point, most people probably barely remember the nursing home scandal, and no one but political journalists and Albany insiders could call to mind the Moreland Commission debacle. It turns out that what Cuomo needed to revamp a political career was just time, time for the memory of the scandals and the drumbeat of press coverage of them to disappear and let the feeling of competent leadership remain.
Because if there’s one thing the former governor excelled at, it was projecting an air of natural authority, a man who knew what to do so you didn’t have to worry about it. This was especially acute during the Covid pandemic, as his plainspoken daily briefings gave New Yorkers and people around the country a sense that things were under control, even as Cuomo was reportedly ignoring public health officials behind the scenes. As people around New York feel unsettled by Trump administrative chaos, economic shocks (and, I’m sorry to say, I think the likelihood of a significant recession is growing by the day), and general social and political malaise, Cuomo’s the devil you know.
Relevant also is not just the amount of time since Cuomo’s been in the thick of things, but what’s happened in that time. I fear that the entire concept of political accountability for scandal or misconduct is waning to practically nothing. The trajectory began before Cuomo resigned but has continued to a point now where most public or elected officials across parties have realized that the best way to avoid the consequences of scandal is not to try to explain or apologize but ignore it, and if that doesn’t work, make a big show about how it’s all fake news and political meddling and so on.
The standard-bearer for this shift is, of course, Donald Trump, who has racked up not one or two but dozens, maybe hundreds, of scandals that would have spelled electoral death for practically any national political figure pre-2015. I genuinely have a hard time imagining a scandal that would make a dent in his core base of support, including his notorious hypothetical of personally shooting someone on Fifth Avenue. But Trump isn’t the only one; figures like Matt Gaetz, Bob Menendez, and Eric Adams himself have tried to power through encroaching scandal by adopting defiant stances, to varying degrees of success.
So, I don’t know exactly how this campaign is going to go, because as soon as Cuomo jumps in it’s likely that the other candidates will all turn their fire on him as the biggest fish. Can he coast on name recognition and trust that the ghosts of his past scandals won’t haunt him? I think it’s likely, unfortunately. This is the era of shamelessness.
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