The End of the Bully
A certain kind of politics died with Andrew Cuomo’s political career on Tuesday night.
He was, at his peak, the consummate Machiavellian macher. For him, it was always better to be feared than loved. During his 11 years as governor, he wielded the machinery of the government to unsettle and punish his rivals like few in the history of New York, and he was known, above all, as an executive who was never to be crossed. He was a bruiser, a bully, and as a mayoral candidate he hoped to export that cutthroat style to the streets of New York City. Courting voters was an afterthought. He would intimidate enough of the old power players in the shadows, collect his chits, and rumble to victory.
Instead, he was throttled twice by Zohran Mamdani. Cuomo found himself, for the first time in many decades, bereft of power — the sort that used to make any Democrat in the state quake and the median voter respect the force he brought to bear on the government. On Tuesday, New Yorkers soundly rejected him in the highest-turnout election of the century.
It must have been a surreal stretch for Cuomo, if he ever took the time to reflect on his latest, and likely last, political journey. He was elected governor of New York in Barack Obama’s first term and was in office when Joe Biden drove Donald Trump from the White House. Even when Cuomo resigned in disgrace, following a wave of sexual-harassment allegations, he only seemed dead for so long — there was a comeback opportunity in the mayoral race just a few years off. Eric Adams was drowning in scandal. New Yorkers remembered Cuomo fondly enough from his days delivering televised addresses during the pandemic. The Me Too fervor seemed to have subsided, too. Early polls showed Cuomo well ahead of the field, and he began systematically bringing the Establishment to heel.
Soon, many of the major Democratic politicians, labor unions, and billionaire donors were backing him, if not proudly than at least firmly. They didn’t want to be on the wrong side of the notoriously vindictive politician whose victory seemed inevitable. What he wanted from the office itself was never entirely clear — he hadn’t lived in the five boroughs in decades and often spoke of them with great disdain — but what was obvious enough was that winning City Hall was chiefly about redemption. His political obituary would have to be rewritten. Instead of the governor who fell from grace, he’d be the mayor who found his way back to the political mountaintop.
Now that Cuomo has lost to Mamdani, a state assemblyman, again, it is hard to see how he will ever hold office again. There are only so many comeback chances available to any politician. He is almost 70 and not very popular. As an independent candidate straining to defeat Mamdani, he wracked up support mostly from those who did not want a young Muslim socialist to be mayor. Affirmative votes for Cuomo were harder to find.
When he was the front-runner heading into the Democratic primary in June, Cuomo ducked the media and rarely appeared onstage with his many rivals. He hardly spoke to any voters on the street. Once defeated, he partially recalibrated. He visited more senior centers and, for the first time, appeared at mosques, even as he fanned the flames of Islamophobia by laughing at a talk-show host’s comment about Mamdani celebrating another 9/11. He granted more interviews with mainstream reporters as well as podcasters and influencers. To win over Republicans, he traveled frequently to Staten Island. He didn’t insult Donald Trump and even collaborated with him in a failed quest to Curtis Sliwa, the indefatigable Republican contender, to leave the race (Eric Adams did drop out). After denying that Trump had endorsed him on 60 Minutes, Cuomo admitted on Election Day that the president could be “very helpful” to him.
In the end, Trump wasn’t. The MAGA movement, beyond Staten Island and certain slices of Brooklyn and Queens, is deeply resented in the city, and voters largely didn’t want a retread Democrat cozying up to a man flooding their city with ICE agents and, potentially, National Guard troops.
To beat Mamdani, Cuomo had to hold onto the Democrats who backed him in the primary and rope in Republicans and independents. He did, indeed, find fresh GOP support, cutting into Sliwa’s base, and he was able to make himself the viable alternative to Mamdani. What he couldn’t do was find a plurality of the vote. He was too scandal-scarred to return to power. But what might have hurt him just as much was his seeming resentment of the city he hoped to govern. There was no joy in his campaign and no sense he really wanted to get to know a city that had undergone sweeping transformation since he was a child of the 1950s growing up in Hollis, Queens.
Mamdani was alien to him because Cuomo had sequestered himself in the suburbs or in Albany and taken little interest in the multicultural immigrant city that had grown in his time away. He questioned, at one point, Mamdani’s dual citizenship and repeatedly referenced, as if were a slur, that he had grown up in Uganda. But even if Mamdani came from great privilege, like Cuomo himself with a governor father, the mayor-elect’s story was relatable to the many thousands of New Yorkers who were born elsewhere and only recently became citizens.
Ultimately, they saw themselves in Mamdani. And in Cuomo, who had the bearing of an ancient ward boss finally weary of his urban charges, they didn’t see much at all.