Back From the Dead

Convincing Your Liberal New York City Parents to Rank Andrew Cuomo Dead Last

“Saddam has been toppled”-Micah Lasher

“The Specter of Andrew Cuomo Continues to Haunt New York” ran the headline of Eric Lach’s August 2023 piece in the New Yorker. Most specters I write about exert their will from beyond the grave, by weighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living. But today, I’m writing about a full-on resurrection. Despite showing conclusive signs of death four years ago, the political life of Andrew Cuomo lives on with a vengeance. He will announce his candidacy for Mayor of New York this weekend, and he will enter the race with a massive lead in the polls.

His path to victory is simple. He will enter the race with 100% name recognition, in a relatively weak field. He will consolidate support with outer-borough Black homeowners and clergy, historically his base downstate, who are up for grabs due to Mayor Eric Adams’s implosion. His announcement will be met with a cavalcade of endorsements from union leaders, local politicians, and other power-brokers, many of whom have already spoken out for him. As his place in the polls solidifies, it will become harder for the skeptics to hold out their endorsements. They will remember Cuomo as a singularly vindictive and petty tyrant, who relishes wielding his power to punish those who stood in his way, and they will get on board if only to protect their constituents from his wrath. Brad Lander, Zellnor Myrie, Jessica Ramos, Zohran Mamdami, and Scott Stringer will all do their best to remind voters why they were so eager to get rid of him four years ago. But among the outer-borough blocs that elected Eric Adams four years ago, they will be seen as progressive highly-educated elitists, and they will struggle to make a dent. Meanwhile, Cuomo also enjoys a decent amount of goodwill among Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn elites, who fondly remember his “Churchillian” COVID press conferences, and long for a familiar face during a chaotic and unfamiliar political time.

Are you, reader, one of these Manhattan and/or brownstone Brooklyn elites? Or do you have parents who are? Are these parents loyal Democrats who despise Trump, who believe generally that more should be done to help the poor and needy in our society, but also know that New York is a big city that needs a competent, experienced manager who knows how to hack their way through bureaucracy and “get things done”? Do they have a vague but deeply-felt antipathy for Bill de Blasio, a nostalgia for the managerial uber-competence of Mike Bloomberg, and a growing disgust for the corruption, conservatism, and chaos of Eric Adams? Are they worried that you, their beloved adult child, are kind of batshit insane, and that your whole generation is full of hysterical censorious communists? If so, this blog is for you, and for them, and for you to share with them, and for them to share with each other in their political moms group chats, if I’m lucky. I’ve also turned it into a slide-deck: “Convincing Your Liberal New York City Parents To Rank Andrew Cuomo Dead Last.”

When you’re done, my hope is that you will have a nice moment bonding over your shared knowledge that Andrew Cuomo is profoundly unfit to be Mayor of New York, that as Governor, he was as corrupt, and as duplicitously accommodating to the Republican Party, as Adams, that he was catastrophically incompetent and myopic both in times of peace and times of crisis, that he shares with Donald Trump both a skepticism for the rule of law and a penchant for sexual abuse, and that he is an enemy of mass transit and congestion pricing.

I’m aware that my attempt to defeat the most powerful political figure in the state for the last twenty years with my 80-person Substack subscriber list, some links to Gothamist articles, and a few novel zingers, is as futile as John Oliver’s “We Got Him,” bit, but if there’s any animating theme to this blog, it is that we must face our spectres if we have any hope of vanquishing them. So here goes:

Like Adams, Cuomo Allied with Republicans Against Democrats

Cuomo ran in 2011 on his promise to end Republican gerrymandering (“I will veto any lines that are not drawn by an independent commission that are partisan”), which had allowed Republicans to remain in the majority in a D+28 state for decades. He broke this promise immediately, signing off on the 2012 Senate Republican gerrymander of the NYS state Senate, which remained in effect for the next ten years. Despite this gerrymander, Democrats won a 33-30 majority. Then, Cuomo orchestrated the Independent Democratic Conference, convincing five Democrat Senators to join a majority coalition with the 30 Republicans. He then refused to help fundraise for Senate Democrats, and fought to keep IDC Senators elected as long as possible, until they were all defeated in primaries in 2018.

Cuomo Governed as a Fiscal Conservative

“I don’t believe in raising taxes on the rich.” Cuomo told the New York Post in 2019. “That would be the worst thing to do.” This was his governing philosophy, and he vigorously fought any tax increase proposals throughout his decade as Governor, while passing and then making permanent a self-imposed cap on property tax. To compensate for the lack of increased revenue, he pursued a wide range spending cuts, from his attempt to cut CUNY funding by $500 million in 2016, to his killing of de Blasio’s 2014 attempt to institute a NYC-wide minimum wage, to his closure of state psychiatric hospitals, with no replacement, which resulted in a loss of 1,849 psychiatric hospital beds, dropping from 9,230 to 7,471 (the state is currently 3,000 beds short, resulting in mental-health-related crises on mass transit, in homeless shelters, and in jails). This fiscal policy (along with a $1.7 billion accounting mistake in 2018), eventually led to a budget shortfall that ballooned to $10 billion during the pandemic. He refused to increase taxes to address this shortfall, and instead cut Medicaid by $400 million during the height of the pandemic, over fierce opposition from state Democrats.

Cuomo’s Corruption Rivalled Adams’s

Cuomo created a Commission to Investigate Public Corruption in 2013 (the Moreland Corruption), which he promised would operate independently from his office so that it could include his administration in their scope. He violated this promise, and had his aides repeatedly interfere with the commission, and ensure that they were stopped “whenever the commission focused on groups with ties to Mr. Cuomo or on issues that might reflect poorly on him.” Then, in the summer of 2014, he abruptly shut the commission down. As a result, his administration continued to flaunt governance rules, working off of private email servers in violation of transparency laws, and was mired in corruption scandals, leading to the federal indictments and eventual convictions of Alain Kaloyeros, architect of the“Buffalo Billion” economic development plan, Joe Percoco, top aide, enforcer, and “third son,” and Tony Howe, lobbyist and Cuomo’s “eyes and ears.” Despite the overwhelming evidence, Cuomo has maintained that these were political witch hunts with no legal merit. In 2023, Cuomo expressed regret for not being more supportive, and called the cases “purely political and only about trying to get me.” He also called charges against Donald Trump “offensive,” in an interview in June of 2024, and said that they should never have been brought.

Cuomo Defunded the MTA

During his tenure as Governor, Cuomo saddled the MTA with debt, repeatedly diverted tax revenue earmarked for the subway, and sometimes used MTA funds for completely unrelated projects, like a $5 million bailout of a ski-resort. He forced the MTA to prioritize flashy, unnecessarily opulent projects like station redesigns and $200 million bridge light-shows, while neglecting basic upkeep and updates to the 1930s-era subway signal system that city transit officials begged for. And he forced talented and beloved MTA chief Andy Byford, who rescued the system from its summer 2017 crisis, to leave by micromanaging him, publicly undermining him, and repeatedly berating Byford’s staff, all because Cuomo resented Byford’s popularity. In December of 2024, he sided with the Trump Administration and publicly opposed Congestion Pricing, which is essential to the MTA’s capital plan, and which is his only remotely positive legacy in this section.

Despite His Public Performance, Cuomo Badly Mismanaged the Onset of Covid

On March 17th, 2020, Cuomo mocked de Blasio’s call for a shelter-in-place guidance (six days after Tom Hanks tested positive), and said he had “no interest whatsoever" in a statewide quarantine. On March 19th, he criticized de Blasio again, telling the press “I’m as afraid of the fear and the panic as I am of the virus, and I think that the fear is more contagious than the virus right now.” New Jersey and California had already shut down most businesses by this point, San Francisco had closed schools on March 12th, LA on March 13th. But Cuomo waited until March 20th before ordering a shutdown effective March 22nd. According to former CDC head Tom Friedan, a shutdown a few days earlier would have prevented “50-80%” of the outbreak in New York. New York had ten times as many Covid deaths as California, a much more populous state with many dense cities, in the first three months of the pandemic. Despite his promises, Cuomo’s administration also failed to set up contact tracing for early positive cases, unlike other states at the same time.

Covid Nursing Homes Policy

Cuomo required nursing homes to accept all hospital patients, including untested or covid-positive ones. This was the preferred policy of the private hospital lobby, but even at the time, public health officials warned that this would lead to dangerous outbreaks in nursing homes. Connecticut and Massachusetts instead designated specific facilities for covid patients only, following these warnings. Then, Cuomo’s administration deliberately undercounted both nursing home deaths and transfers of covid patients from hospitals to nursing homes in public data disclosures. Cuomo’s top aide admitted to the New York Post (and the Times independently corroborated) that this decision came from Cuomo himself, out of fear that the numbers “would be used against us.” More than 15,000 New Yorkers died in nursing homes during the pandemic, much more than in any other state.

Sexual Harassment

According to an independant law firm’s investigation commissioned by the Attorney General’s office: “the Governor sexually harassed a number of current and former New York State employees by, among other things, engaging in unwelcome and non-consensual touching, as well as making numerous offensive comments of a suggestive and sexual nature that created a hostile work environment for women.” Some excerpts from the thirteen separate victims:

• “the Governor put his hand on State Entity Employee #1’s butt, tapped it twice, and then grabbed her butt.”

• “During a close hug with Executive Assistant #1, [the Governor] reached under her blouse and grabbed her breast.”

• “the Executive Chamber’s senior staff sought to implement a practice whereby individual staff members who were women were not to be left alone with the Governor”

“In my mind, I’ve never crossed the line with anyone,” Cuomo said in his resignation speech, “but I didn’t realize the extent to which the line has been redrawn.” Cuomo’s resulting legal bills have cost New York taxpayers more than $25 million, including money that his team has spent on attempts to subpoena the gynecology records of an accuser, among other aggressive intimidation tactics. His younger sister Madeline organized a group of online activists to cyberbully one of his accusers, sending them pictures from her Instagram (“No respectable woman would EVER pose like that,” she told them), and getting them to send messages to her like “Your life will be dissected like a frog in a HS science class.”

I.

Cuomo’s victory is not yet inevitable. At the behest of his nemesis Attorney General Leticia James, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams may join the fray, giving black homeowners in Brooklyn and Queens a real alternative. She is a machine politician with a spotty record, but she took a high profile stand against solitary confinement at Rikers, and has no recent record of accommodating Trump or sexually assaulting subordinates. Queens congressman Greg Meeks could endorse her instead of Cuomo, creating a permission structure for lower-level power brokers to follow suit.

And while the outer-borough blocs elected Eric Adams, it’s worth remembering that they did so with a razor-thin margin. 140,000 of the 942,000 ballots cast ranked neither Garcia nor Adams, the final two contenders in the automatic runoff system. Had only five percent of those ballots included Garcia, she’d be mayor, and the same is probably true for Maya Wiley. A candidate with a broad coalition that includes Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn can win this race, and a candidate with strength in the outer boroughs can lose it. For that to occur in this race, or for Speaker Adrienne Adams to prevail, you and your Manhattan/brownstone Brooklyn-residing, liberal, elite, highly educated, probably extremely nice and lovely parents must rank Andrew Cuomo dead last. Eric Adams would be better, if it comes to that.