Blame Cuomo

If you're not happy about the prospect Mayor Mamdani, that's who you should be mad at

This is going to be a relatively short post, because I’m working towards a deadline on something else, plus I’ve got a more substantial piece for here that I’m noodling on in the background. But I’ve been seeing a lot of teeth-gnashing among Cuomo supporters and a lot of finger pointing at other folks—at Curtis Sliwa, at the media, etc.—for their guy’s loss. And I just need to say: while Zohran Mamdani deserves the credit for his historic victory, if you are facing the next mayoralty with dread, overwhelmingly the person you should blame is the one you probably voted for: Andrew Cuomo.

That’s the case first and foremost because Cuomo ran a disdainful, entitled, fear-mongering campaign that could inspire nobody. In fact, he ran two of them—after losing to a virtual unknown in a ranked-choice primary contest that made it unequivocally clear he lacked majority support in his own party, Cuomo refused to take the hint and tried again in the general election without materially changing his approach to anything. Cuomo’s entire run was premised on the highly questionable notion that a widely-disliked former governor who had resigned in disgrace was the only man who could run the city, that there was literally no one else in the ranks of the Democratic Party who could do the job, and that a majority of voters would ultimately agree that this was the case. Cuomo earned his loss as thoroughly as any candidate I’ve seen.

But Cuomo also deserves a lot of the blame for Mamdani’s rise specifically. The reason is that Cuomo entered the Democratic primary as the 800-pound gorilla, instantly vaulting to the top of the polls. That meant that, for every other candidate, the first priority was to keep Cuomo from consolidating a majority. That’s why you saw the entire field to Cuomo’s left (which is to say, the vast majority of the candidates) cross-endorsing each other and telling their voters not to rank Cuomo on their ballots at all. Once Cuomo was in, the campaign was Cuomo versus not-Cuomo, and the only question was who the not-Cuomo would be.

Why, though, should Mamdani have been the one to consolidate the anti-Cuomo vote? His own campaign deserves most of the credit for that, but I think a major reason that campaign worked is that he was the anti-Cuomo; if you wanted to vote against everything Cuomo stood for and was running on, there was no better choice on offer than Mamdani. If you imagine a race without Cuomo, however, in which Mamdani would have been staking out the farthest-left position, even if he was able to take the lead in a multi-candidate race, would he have been able to win the majority of second-choice votes? I’m not so sure. In that scenario, it’s easier for me to see Brad Lander or Adrienne Adams presenting themselves as more experienced but still thoroughly progressive, and ultimately consolidating the support of Democrats who might have harbored some doubts about Mamdani. It’s also easier for me to imagine some of the progressive candidates questioning the viability of some of Mamdani’s more extravagant promises, which they generally avoided doing when their most important task was taking down Cuomo.

And then there’s the question of Israel/Palestine. I think anger at Israel is a major reason why Mamdani was able to get as much traction as he did early in the campaign, and rise from an unknown to a major contender. But it was Cuomo’s presence in the race, and his centering of the question of whether Mamdani was an antisemite, that made the primary in part a referendum on the legitimacy of anti-Zionism. (To be clear: not a referendum on anti-Zionism itself, but on its legitimacy; Mamdani voters weren’t necessarily endorsing anti-Zionism, but they were saying that anti-Zionism wasn’t a disqualifier.) Cuomo was betting, in effect, that he would win such a referendum, and instead he lost—twice. I feel confident that in his absence no other major Democratic primary contestant would have made the same bet—and if not, then we might have discovered that a candidate primarily distinguished by his anti-Zionism might have struggled to consolidate a progressive majority on that basis.

We might not, of course. New York Democrats might still have consolidated around someone young, energetic and great at campaigning, running a campaign centered on freezing the rent. But in Cuomo’s absence, they might have given that campaign a more critical look, and more seriously considered the other options on offer. And who knows what might have happened then.

If you were a Cuomo supporter on the merits—if you thought, from the beginning, that he was by far the best man to be the next mayor, and that he had the best chance of winning as well—then you still have to take a hard look at what your candidate and his campaign did wrong, but you can reasonably say that you backed the horse you believed in, and that all these other considerations about the dynamics of the race were and are ultimately unknowable. Fair enough. But if you backed him primarily out of fear—and my sense is that a great many Cuomo voters, and even more Cuomo endorsers, were doing precisely that—then Mamdani’s victory should land as yet another demonstration that acting out of fear often precipitates precisely the eventuality you most dearly wished to avoid.