“For two decades I worked hard for my city, and the city needs me more than ever,” center-right political commentator JC Polanco, roleplaying as Mayor Eric Adams, told reporter Ben Max last week. “I did a great job as mayor. I brought crime under control. But now we have a situation where you have the Democratic Socialists of America appointing dozens of commissioners, dozens of judges, dozens of board members all over the city. I think that would be dangerous. I’m going to step down.”
The animating thesis of this blog is that everyone is trapped in the past, walking in someone else’s shadow whether they know it or not. In this case, Polanco walks in the shadow of congressman Jamie Raskin, when he wrote a groveling open letter to Joe Biden on July 18th, 2024, begging him to drop out of the race. Raskin did his best, but you can tell it was a difficult assignment. He had to flatter Biden’s ego, find many different lively and evocative ways to tell Biden how amazing he is (“I write to remind you your true greatness as a leader,” “your presidency will always be known as one of the finest in American history,” “you are both our star pitcher and our manager,”) and gloss over the obvious paradox that if he was truly so wonderful and amazing, it might not be so desperately urgent that he drop out immediately. To square this paradox, Raskin also employed Polanco’s here-is-what-you-say-when-you-drop-out-in-my-imagination rhetorical device. He imputed grand, sweeping statements about George Washington and the brave humility of giving up power and making a personal sacrifice for your country into the president’s mouth, (statements that, in fairness, Biden had made only months earlier at his Valley Forge campaign rally.) Then and now, the goal with this rhetorical device is to frame the imagined drop-out not as a brutal humiliation, but as an awesome moment that will only remind everyone of the subject’s greatness. “Think about how cool it would be,” Raskin and Polanco both said, to different hopelessly unpopular incumbents delusionally seeking re-election, “if you dropped out in this particular way that I have spent so much time imagining.”
While Biden probably did read Raskin’s letter, I doubt Eric Adams listened to this episode of Max Politics. But there are many other people telling him the same thing, including local Republican megadonor John Catsimatidis (“It’s time for you to save New York”), Bill Ackman (“It is time for Eric Adams to step aside”), Andrew Cuomo (“It makes sense that the other candidates should defer to a stronger candidate,”) and Donald Trump (“I would like to see two people drop out and have it be a one-on-one.”) Trump reportedly offered Adams a job in his administration if he would drop out, rumored to be either HUD secretary or Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. In a characteristically lengthy Twitter post, Bill Ackman offered Adams a more creative incentive, instructing him to place a large bet on Cuomo to win on a prediction market right before he drops out.
While I credit Ackman with identifying prediction markets as a potential structural innovation to Sam Bankman-Fried’s controversial bribe-politicians-to-drop-out gambit, I notice a flaw in his plan, which Democrats had to learn the hard way last year. If running your universally despised incumbent guarantees a loss, getting him to drop out at the last minute does not guarantee a win. Cuomo probably needs Adams to drop out in order to come back from his humiliating upset in the primary and beat Zohran Mamdani in the general. But he needs a lot more than that.
Right before the primary, when a friend asked me whether I thought Zohran would pull off an upset, I told him that I was skeptical. “Zohran needs a bunch of things to go right, and he needs all of them,” I said, parrotting pollster and strategist Evan Roth Smith, who tweeted a list of “Mamdominos” that needed to fall for Zohran to win: a younger and more educated electorate than normal, massive turnout in Astoria and Greenpoint, and a slow national news cycle that wouldn’t interfere with his home-stretch messaging campaign. Each of these things duly occurred, and Smith faithfully returned to the prediction on primary night, and reported that “the Mamdominos fell.” Here, then, are my list of Cuominos, which must all cascade in a neat, orderly line for the Cuomo campaign to rise from the dead and save the city from the scary Muslim communist.
Cuomino #1: Eric Adams Drops Out.
There have been four high-quality polls this month, and they tell a remarkably consistent story. Mamdani has 45%, Cuomo is somewhere in the 20s, Sliwa has 15% and Eric Adams, the sitting mayor, is confined to high single-digits, usually around 9%. Adams won the general with 67% four years ago. The degree to which New Yorkers have abandoned him is stunning. Every New York City mayor for the last fifty years was bloodied by the harsh swell of this office, and left much less popular than they were when they entered. No one, not de Blasio, not Bloomberg, not Guiliani, not even Dinkins, fell this far this fast.
Still, nine percent of an electorate that will probably exceed 1.5 million is still more than a hundred thousand people. Trailing by twenty points, Cuomo cannot afford to miss out on such a large block of Mamdani-skeptical voters. But even if Adams drops out, it’s not clear that Cuomo will inherit them. Adams’s remaining coalition consists of three main groups: Hasidic Jews, older outer-borough Black moderates and conservatives, and exceptionally low information voters, the type who legitimately may not have read any news since Adams’s first election. The Hasidic Jews are likely motivated by their hatred of the pro-Palestine Mamdani, are highly organized, and will probably shift over to Cuomo easily. But the older Black moderates might not be so enthusiastic, especially after Adams’s recent tirade against Cuomo’s habit of “pushing Black candidates out of races.” Black voters still make up Cuomo’s base, but he did an abysmal job of turning them out in June, and the ones who still support Adams over him may be especially difficult to wrangle. If Adams drops out, many will sit the race out entirely. And the third group, the low-information ostriches, will be operating with a blank slate if Adams drops out. They seem at least equally susceptible to the charms of a viral marketing and door-knocking god like Zohran as they might be to Cuomo.
The polls bear this out. In a hypothetical three-way race without Adams, Cuomo gains about five or six of his nine points, Sliwa gains by two to three, and Mamdani by one to two. On net, this meant that Mamdani leads Cuomo by about fifteen points, instead of twenty, if Adams drops out. That alone will not cut it for the former Governor.
Cuomino #2: Curtis Sliwa Also Drops Out.
Curtis Sliwa leads Eric Adams by five points in every poll conducted this month. Imagine explaining that sentence to a New Yorker who just emerged from a three-year coma. But this cycle, Sliwa’s relative dominance over the city’s conservatives and Republicans makes perfect sense. “Why support two newbie born-again conservatives who are only just now renouncing their allegiance to the Democratic Party after decades of service,” his campaign seems to ask ethnic whites of outer Queens and Staten Island “when you could just vote for the real thing, a lifelong, crime-fighting, Fox-News, full-blown Republican?” This pitch is helped by the fact that while Adams and Cuomo both grow more visibly miserable every day, Sliwa seems to be having the time of his life, whether he’s blissed out under the K Bridge in Bushwick at a midnight Chainsmokers concert, or dropping undeniable bangers on Fox News about Cuomo.
This is why it will be hard for this Cuomino to fall. Last week, the Times ran a story about how despite significant pressure from every Mamdani-fearing billionaire and real estate executive in the city, Sliwa insists he will run through the tape, and will not drop out. “I cannot be bought. I am not corruptible,” he explained. That makes for a good soundbite, but there’s another reason Sliwa’s staying in: he just loves running for mayor, and doesn’t care about winning. It takes a special cocktail of traits to run multiple times as a Republican in a citywide race in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans six-to-one. Indifference to losing is an absolutely essential ingredient in that cocktail. Sliwa’s here for a good time, not a long time, and he knows it. Anyone who appeals to his sense of duty, who begs him to step aside so that someone with a better chance can execute on Sliwa’s policy goals misses the point. Sliwa has no policy goals. He never thought he would win, so reminding him that he will lose accomplishes nothing.
Nevertheless, for the sake of argument let’s imagine that Sliwa does drop out, either because he spontaneously gets religion or because Trump and John Catsimiditis belatedly find a point of leverage on him. Once again, Cuomo does not automatically inherit Sliwa’s voters. Unlike Adams’s holdouts, these are likely to be staunch Republicans. They vividly remember Cuomo as a Democratic Governor who proudly shut down the state during COVID, passed sweeping bail reforms, and legalized gay marriage. Some will hold their nose and vote for the lesser of two evils. Many others will stay home. Polls found that Sliwa’s voters split evenly between these two outcomes in a hypothetical two-way race between Cuomo and Mamdani, without Sliwa. In those polls, Mamdani leads 47-40 and 49-39.
Now, if Zohran Mamdani also drops out, Cuomo might be in business. He should try that! “Zohran Mamdani, for the good of the city, you must drop out and prevent Zohran Mamdani from becoming mayor,” his surrogates could say in their midtown conference rooms. Short of that, Cuomo will need some more Cuominos to fall that don’t involve field-clearing.
Cuomino #3: Cuomo Makes Mamdani Unpopular, Convinces People to Like Him More Instead.
The Marist poll found that 39% of New Yorkers have a favorable impression of Cuomo, while 59% have an unfavorable impression, with 2% unsure. Yeesh. Mamdani sits at 52-40-8 in the same poll. This is really bad, both because it’s hard to win an election (especially a one-on-one election) when almost 60% of voters actively don’t like you, and because there are so few people still making up their minds. Cuomo will have to figure out a way to make himself more appealing not only to voters on the fence, but to voters who are off the fence, on the wrong side of it. He has six weeks to pick those voters up back onto the fence, and then bring them down onto his side. That’s a lot of voters and, with a fifteen-year track record of unpopular actions and controversy, a pretty tall fence.
Meanwhile, he will have to figure out a way to make Mamdani unpopular on net. Thanks to Ackman and other backers in the Hamptons and in the real estate industry, he’ll have a near unlimited budget to spread his message. The problem is, Cuomo already spent tens of millions of dollars on ads and literature trying to remind New Yorkers of Mamdani’s history with far-left groups and rhetoric, and Mamdani just kept getting more popular anyway. He’ll have to come up with a new line of attack. For this domino to fall, we need either a tape of Mamdani committing a felony, or an exogenous sea-change in the narrative that makes Mamdani’s weakest issues more salient, like maybe a spontaneous crime wave specifically in Astoria. On the other hand, there can’t be any other exogenous sea changes that hurt Cuomo. So that means…
Cuomino #4: Donald Trump Is Not A Salient Figure In NYC Politics For The Next Six Weeks.
In the primary debate, Cuomo tried to frame himself as the guy “Trump least wanted to see” because of his masculinity and toughness, as opposed to Mamdani, who would be “Trump’s delight” and who the president would “go through like a hot knife through butter.” Circumstances have forced Cuomo to abandon this narrative, as Trump makes it clear with both his actions and his public statements that he would, in fact, very much like Cuomo to beat Mamdani. This is a massive liability for Cuomo, because New Yorkers really hate Trump (32-65-3 favorability rating according to the most recent Marist poll). Cuomo needs to hope that people do not pay that much attention to Trump’s preferences, that Trump is generally not front-of-mind for voters in six weeks, and that they are instead distracted by other, more beneficial news cycles (like that Astoria-only crime wave from Cuomino Number Four). In the Year of our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Five, it is not generally a good bet that President Donald J. Trump will stay out of the news for six weeks. But hey, if he does, Cuomo has a shot, provided a few more Cuominos fall.
Cuomino #5: Cuomo Assembles a First-Rate GOTV Operation, While Zohran’s 90k Volunteers Take a Collective Nap.
Having cleared the field, refurbished his public image while meaningfully denting Mamdani’s halo, and convinced the president not to do anything newsworthy and infuriating to New Yorkers for an extended period of time, Cuomo will now enjoy a neck-and-neck race with Mamdani into the home stretch. The last time he was in this position, Mamdani put together a 50k volunteer army, and scored 100% turnout increases in the neighborhoods where they ran up Assad-in-Damascus margins. Cuomo, with the backing of almost every major union and a broad coalition of high-powered elected officials, put together one of the worst get-out-the-vote operations in recent memory. His social media content was limp and boring, and he relied heavily on paid canvassers, who lacked the crazed enthusiasm of Mamdani’s volunteers. One of his canvassers posed with Mamdani on election day. In the end, Zohran won that race by more than ten points. This time, Cuomo will have to do much better, and this time he will have to do it with virtually no institutional support, against a volunteer army that the Mamdani camp alleges to be nearly twice as large. I look forward to the viral social media posts that drive a volunteer army of private equity and real estate developer executives to pound the pavement and make sure that Cuomo’s voters get to the polls.
Cuomino #6: There are secretly way more landlords than we thought.
If there are secretly a hundred thousand more landlords than we think there are, and all of them are registered to vote in the general election but not the Democratic primary, this will probably be enough to push Cuomo and his new-and-improved campaign operation over the top. He can become mayor if all six of these Cuominos fall.
II.
“Andrew Cuomo is a snake and a liar,” a beleaguered Eric Adams told the press corps outside Gracie Mansion two weeks ago, as rumors of his imminent drop-out, which had been amplified by the Cuomo camp, reached a fever-pitch. “I am in this race and I’m the only one who can beat Mamdani.” Adams clearly meant to end the conversation, and definitely rule out the possibility of an early exit. This has not been successful; only a few days later, NBC News reported that he had revealed in a “closed door meeting” that “might consider leaving” the race. ABC News then followed up with reports that Adams would issue an “independant poll” (all of the polls quoted in this blog are independent, meaning they are not affiliated with any campaign, unlike a poll that Adams’s campaign might issue), and base his decision on its results. This forced Adams’s spokesperson to once again deny these rumors, calling them “complete bullshit.” We went through a million of these cycles last July. When the incumbent says they are definitively not dropping out, and then everyone else says “I hope he decides soon,” and “he is nearing a decision,” that means the noise will not stop until he drops out.
Adams has drowned out the noise before. People have reported that his resignation was imminent at many different points in his adventure with federal prosecution. Nevertheless, Polymarket currently gives him a 61% of dropping out before election day on November 4th, and if I had to say one way or the other, I’d say that’s probably an underestimate. Like Biden, I predict he will eventually fold to the pressure, at which point he will follow Raskin and Polanco’s direction to remember the essence of what makes him such a great leader, and find it in himself to make the Washingtonian sacrifice for the good of his people.
When this happens, Cuomo will spin the media as hard as he can that this is a new race, that his campaign has a heartbeat, that he now has a clear path to a plurality of the vote. The media, eager to gin up excitement for what threatens to be a boring final stretch, will be amenable to this frame. I expect the Post to go especially nuts with it, but it will be hard for everyone else to resist as well. It will be important to remember at this point that just as Biden’s surrender did not guarantee a victory for Kamala Harris, Cuomo will still have work to do. In fact, there will be five more Cuominos that he needs to fall. Frankly, it seems unlikely that any of them will.