The long farewell to Andrew Cuomo | The New Yorker

Andrew Cuomo likes to often broach the age and inexperience of New York City’s next mayor, Zahran Mamdani, but the former governor himself got an early start in politics. Cuomo was 19 when he helped run his father’s doomed mayoral campaign against Ed Koch, in 1977. He was not yet 40 when Bill Clinton appointed him secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, in 1997. When Cuomo was elected governor, in 2010, all of this early experience helped him consolidate his power and govern New York, for eleven years, As one of the most important rulers in the history of the state. By the time he resigned, in 2021, amid credible and documented accusations of sexual harassment and abuse of power, he had imposed his powerful and rebellious politics on New York for nearly half a century.

In his run for mayor this year, Cuomo said Mamdani, a thirty-four-year-old socialist who is 14 points ahead of him, “hasn’t accomplished anything.” “He’s never had a real job,” Cuomo shouted repeatedly Wednesday night, in the final mayoral debate. During his six months on the campaign trail, Cuomo tried to cast himself as a model of battle-tested leadership. In fact, he looked tired and exhausted, and the deep lines on his face were strained by old resentments and bad impulses. Mamdani’s name is smeared in discussions and interviews. He is dismissive and evasive when asked about the women who have accused him of harassment. He increasingly resorted to baroque lines of attack against his opponent. “Why don’t you say BDS against Uganda?” Cuomo barked at Mamdani in a particularly incoherent moment on Wednesday.

Although Cuomo seemingly enjoyed all sorts of advantages — name recognition, Democratic Party support, and the backing of many of the city’s most influential and wealthy residents — Mamdani defeated him in the June primary. That night, Cuomo called Mamdani early to concede, and Mamdani said the disgraced and beaten old man was being anything but polite. However, since then, Cuomo has waged an independent scorched-earth campaign on behalf of the general, which seemed mostly aimed at damaging Mamdani’s newfound public fame. At one point during the last debate, Cuomo said he believed Mamdani was trying to “stoke the flames of hatred against the Jewish people” — a smear no less vile than anything Donald Trump has said about an opponent.

Mamdani believes that Israel is an apartheid state, that the war in Gaza is genocide, and that the US government has been complicit in the Israeli government’s violations of international laws. These are views he did not stray from during his campaign, and which Cuomo assumed would hurt his standing with Jews in New York. However, Cuomo’s public appeasement of the city’s conservative and terrified Jewish population did not work out as planned. Mamdani performed well among Jewish voters in the primary, and one poll this summer showed him winning by seventeen points among Jews overall, with more than sixty percent support among Jews under forty-four. His campaign was built in part on alliances between Jewish and Muslim progressives. Plus, for a supposed anti-Semite, his primary campaign had a fair number of nice Jewish boys.

For all the insults, Cuomo’s general election strategy was, in some ways, an admission that Mamdani had discovered something. Since June, Cuomo has retooled his rhetoric to voters, emphasizing affordability; simulate engagement in short videos on social media; and making overtures to the city’s thriving Hindu communities — all tactics drawn from Mamdani’s primary, during which he courted the city’s Muslim and South Asian voters like no mayoral candidate had done before. Cuomo even softened the focus on Israel, acknowledging that there are “two sides” to the issue. “I haven’t seen the anti-Israel anger,” he said frankly last week during an appearance on “Morning Joe.” “I didn’t see how that would motivate people in the mayor’s race.” In his attempts to compete with Mamdani, Cuomo also proposed a series of policy changes as untested and damaging as anything proposed by a socialist, including the idea of ​​introducing means testing to rent-stabilized housing units in the city. His nomination helped obscure, rather than raise, real questions about whether Mamdani is capable of governing the city.