Wake up, New Yorkers! Don't rank Andrew Cuomo of Westchester

Four reasons not to vote for Cuomo that don't have to do with sexual harassment or nursing homes

Spotted on a Brooklyn sidewalk

If I get my act together, this will be Part 1 of a two-part series.

It’s June! That means New York City could choose its next mayor this month, when the Democratic primary takes place on June 24th (the general election isn’t until November, but a Democrat has handily won every NYC general election since 2013 so the Democratic primary is especially important).

For reasons I need not explain, many of us have been hyper-focused on the White House for the last few months, at the expense of tuning in to the race for Gracie Mansion. That’s a real shame, because New York City voters have much (much!) more actual influence over what happens in our city than in Washington D.C. — from education, to transportation, to housing, to public safety, to how NYC defends itself against a coordinated federal assault on our values.

A quick summary of where we’re at for those just starting to pay attention: in May, former Governor Andrew Cuomo held a very comfortable lead with would-be Democratic voters, but that lead is beginning to narrow as Zohran Mamdani and other progressive candidates are getting more organized and voters are starting to take note. (Part 2 of this series will hopefully explore some of those other candidates). This seems to suggest that Cuomo’s frontrunner status can in large part be attributed to his strong name recognition.

The same strong name recognition that could propel Cuomo into the Mayor’s Office also carries with it some infamously bad vibes, not unlike the corruption-plagued mayor he is looking to replace. More voters hold a negative view of Cuomo than of any of the other Democratic candidates, at least in part due to several scandals that dogged him before his resignation from the Governor’s office in 2021. The splashiest of those, of course, included a slew of sexual harassment allegations by former staffers (which Cuomo continues to deny), as well as charges that he covered up nursing home deaths during the COVID crisis by as much as 83% (which Trump’s DOJ is currently investigating).

There’s plenty written about both of these scandals that I won’t get into here, assuming that most NYC voters have now had four years to come to their own conclusions about what they should mean for Cuomo’s mayoral bid. Besides, there are other more pressing and unambiguous reasons not to rank him to be the next mayor of NYC. Allow me now to offer four such reasons (discussed in more detail below):

1. He’s hasn’t lived in NYC for 35 Years - AND THIS MATTERS!

2. Cuomo’s campaign is a case study in why democracy is on the brink.

3. We are trapped in an era of strongman politics - LET US OUT!

4. Cuomo needs redemption, but we need vision.

BUT FIRST, a word about ranked choice voting. In 2019, New York City voters overwhelmingly passed a measure to change the way we vote for citywide offices; now, instead of selecting one candidate, we can rank up to five on our ballot. This is exciting, in that it means we can worry less about “splitting the vote” between top candidates and then winding up with a sleeper mayor no one’s particularly crazy about. It also has the potential to confuse voters who don’t fully understand how to be strategic about it. The League of Women Voters has developed this very handy flyer illustrating exactly how ranked choice voting works, but the takeaway is this: voters should rank as many people as they could live with as mayor. And if you find yourself agreeing with the rest of this post, that means do not rank Andrew Cuomo.

Okay - now back to the why!

1. He’s hasn’t lived in NYC in 35 years - AND THIS MATTERS!

Last week, Cuomo caught some flack for a NY Times interview in which he said his go-to breakfast order is a “Bacon, cheese and egg on an English muffin.” Putting aside that jerky syntax (what self-respecting local says cheese before egg?), he then took an unprovoked swing at the bagel. Call it his Bill-de-Blasio-eats-pizza-with-a-fork moment.

The breakfast sandwich sound byte of the interview made waves because if there’s one (admittedly annoying) thing New Yorkers love to do, it’s judge the credibility of someone else’s New Yorkerness (see also: backlash to J-Lo’s “orange drink”). But after legitimate questions in 2021 about whether then-candidate and now disgraced Mayor Eric Adams might actually live in New Jersey, it’s worth really pausing to consider whether the person vying to be the voice of New York City is in fact a New Yorker.

On that front, there’s no question that Andrew Cuomo has deep ties to NYC, growing up in Queens and staying here through college. But even by his own account in the Times interview, he hasn’t lived in NYC since he was 32 — which brings us way back to 1989.

To put 1989 into context for the non-Swifties among us: the last time Andrew Cuomo actually lived here (before taking over his daughter’s $8000/month apartment this fall so he could run for mayor), New York was at the height of the crack epidemic and a devastating AIDS crisis. The city was the street robbery capital of the US, and logged nearly 2000 homicides a year (as compared to 377 in 2024). Times Square was rife with sex shops and subway cars were plastered with graffiti.

NYC has undergone many profound transformations since that era, and now consistently rank as one of the safest big cities in America. Even so, the NYC that Cuomo wants to lead is a dead-ringer for the Gotham City of the 80s:

We know that today, our New York City is in trouble. You feel it when you walk down the street and try not to make eye contact with a mentally ill homeless person, or when the anxiety rises up in your chest as you’re walking down into the subway. You see it in the empty storefronts, the graffiti, the grime, the migrant influx, the random violence. The city just feels threatening, out of control, and in crisis. (From Cuomo’s video in March announcing his campaign).

To be sure, there are real public safety challenges right now in NYC that require a concerted government response, and there are certainly many voters for whom subway crime and mental illness is a top concern. But Andrew Cuomo from Westchester, who claims now to ride the subway “once every other week”, is not the superhero to tell us how we need saving.

Whatever Cuomo’s management experience and proximity to NYC, they’re no substitute for firsthand knowledge about what it’s like to actually build a life here. Any local who has ever hosted a visitor knows you have to live here to really understand the collective experience of navigating this place as a home — including the incredibly nuanced art of knowing when to worry and what to worry about. Otherwise, you’re just the latest in a national roster of talking heads and out-of-state aunts and uncles insisting on a boogeyman version of New York (a graffiti crisis?) fed to them from some writers’ room on Fox News.

This is not just a matter of bona fides for bona fides’ sake. The ability to speak and think from an authentic first-person perspective about the most pressing problems facing our city matters deeply in this moment, when New York is under attack from a conservative propaganda machine that would have the rest of country believing the city is a lawless liberal hellscape that paves the way for them to deport our students, raid our schools and courthouses, and rip away our social safety nets. The last kind of leader we need right now is the kind who would parrot back these same dystopian talking points.

On the contrary, we need a mayor who is driven by a naked pride of this city, who understands why — through ups and downs — there’s still nowhere better to be. Andrew Cuomo wasn’t here for 9/11, he wasn’t here for the financial crisis, and he wasn’t here for the pandemic; he didn’t raise a family here, he didn’t put kids through our schools, he doesn’t commute to work on our subways, and it’s doubtful he’s spent much time in our parks. Everyone knows that Cuomo would have chosen the national stage if that door hadn’t closed in his face, and NYC is a consolation prize on his journey back to political relevance. New Yorkers deserve a mayor who understands what matters to the people who actually live here, with a track record of always putting the city first. Good people of New York: Andrew Cuomo of Westchester is not that mayor. Don’t rank Cuomo.

2. Cuomo’s campaign is a case study in why democracy is on the brink.

I probably don’t need to tell you that American democracy is in danger, and that the big money interests that fuel our politics are a significant part of it. The result is a lot of disaffected voters who fail to see much of a difference between ostensibly opposed political parties dominated by the same corporate puppeteers.

Enter: Andrew Cuomo of Westchester. Despite NYC’s efforts to rein in the excesses of Citizen’s United with stricter local campaign finance laws, the Super PAC “Fix the City”—run by Cuomo’s longtime collaborator—has so far raised more than $10 million to fund his mayoral bid. His fundraising shenanigans have so far cost him about $1.3 million in penalties from the NYC Campaign Finance Board. Who’s funneling donations through Fix the City? They include Trump-supporting billionaires like Bill Ackman and Ken Langone, as well as businesses lobbying the city - such as DoorDash and Uber.

This weekend, Cuomo received his largest ad commitment yet ($2.5 million) from the Super PAC “Housing for All” which represents landlords. Says Cuomo’s top rival Zohran Mamdani: “It’s not complicated. Landlords know they can make a lot more money if Mr. Cuomo is in City Hall.”

In the first televised Democratic mayoral debate last week, Cuomo brushed off the idea that these corporate donations could present any conflicts of interests for him as mayor — echoing a refrain he employed often as governor when accusations of “pay-to-play” followed him throughout his time in Albany.

In 2013, Cuomo greenlit the Moreland Commission to Investigate Public Corruption, then infamously shut it down a year later when the Commission began doing its job too well. Janos Marton, who had been Special Counsel for the Moreland Commission, wrote this at the time, when Cuomo sought re-election:

Governor Cuomo's general approach to governance is that fundraising nearly exclusively from mega donors, strong-arming independent entities and bullying Democrats to get in line with his moderate-conservatism is a necessary part of "œpolitics as usual," and his strongest defense is that the other power brokers of Albany feel the same way. Weak-kneed politicians can perhaps live under this system, but primary voters ought to reject it.

In a healthy democratic environment, Cuomo would need to do more than simply dismiss the real concerns about the influence of his “Fix the City” and “Housing for All” donors. But instead, Cuomo is doing what he’s always done — counting on our short attention spans and gambling that the noise will eventually die down if you ignore it altogether.

Case in point: Cuomo has spent his entire mayoral campaign avoiding the press and NYC voters. Although his rivals have been crisscrossing the city for months participating in candidate forums and holding press conferences, Cuomo has largely opted out. Some have referred to this as the “Rose Garden Strategy” — when an incumbent president stays home for Rose Garden photo ops to avoid confrontation and project an image of inevitability.

This strategy just might work — unless New York City voters take back their power and reject the influence of the big money interests that have no true ideology beyond profit (of note: if Cuomo loses the Democratic nomination, he’s already created a new independent party called “Fight and Deliver” to run again in the general election). We have other Democratic candidates available to us who are unbought, accessible to the people, and transparent. Don’t rank Cuomo.

3. We are trapped in an era of strongman politics - LET US OUT!

“Andrew Cuomo is the only one tough enough to stand up to Trump.”

Quick: how many “tough guys” can you name who are running the world right now? How is that going?

Our current ex-cop mayor literally flexed his muscles at me the first time I was in a room with him. His “toughness” has done nothing to protect this city from the Trump administration.

Someone, anyone: let the rest of us off this PopEye train. Please don’t rank Cuomo.

4. Cuomo needs redemption, but we need vision.

Much has been made of the excesses of Cancel Culture, so much so that eventually we all landed headfirst into Canceled Man Culture. Regardless of how justified, we are now knee-deep in a cultural and political moment dominated by men with an ax to grind.

New York is no stranger to once-powerful men making a play at a second (or third) chance at politics after allegations about their behavior with women derailed their political careers. In 2013, Eliot Spitzer made a failed bid for City Comptroller six years after resigning from the governorship due to a prostitution scandal. That same year, disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner got crushed in the mayoral primary after his campaign was rocked by a second sexting scandal.

But the climate is remarkably different now than it was in 2013. One in three New Yorkers voted for Trump in 2024, despite his multiple sex scandals and a court finding of sexual assault. Even Anthony Weiner senses his opening here; after a third sexting scandal with a 15 year-old landed him in prison in 2017, Weiner is now running for a city council seat. Cuomo now says if he had to do it again, he would not have resigned over the sexual harassment allegations four years ago.

I said this post was not about sexual harassment, and it’s not. Whether or not the allegations against Cuomo are true, I reject carceral ways of thinking that would have us completely discard people from society with no chance for redemption. It’d be up to the voters to assess whether he deserves another shot at leading in light of the allegations against him.

Instead, what I mean to highlight is that political redemption tours are, by their nature, an ego-driven exercise in making up lost ground and proving haters wrong. Cuomo is singularly fixated on rescuing his name and besting those who bet against him. Whatever else, this kind of rear-looking endeavor is inherently incompatible with offering voters a fresh vision for New York City.

It’s no wonder then that Cuomo’s campaign centers around a grim 1980s view of a city in crisis, casting himself as the crisis-manager-in-chief. Another way of framing this is to say that the most Cuomo is willing to offer us is a city not in crisis.

But isn’t this the greatest city in the world? Can’t we dream bigger than not being in crisis? Don’t we deserve a mayor who can articulate a dynamic vision for the future that isn’t rooted in grievance and ego, but in possibility?

If you think so too, don’t rank Andrew Cuomo.