Woof. If you’ve been reading (and listening) to me in the past month, you’ll know I’ve been on a bit of a journey with City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and her potential to poach key endorsements of outer-borough Democratic machine types from Andrew Cuomo. “Queens congressman Greg Meeks could endorse [Adrienne Adams] instead of Cuomo, creating a permission structure for lower-level power brokers to follow suit,” I wrote four weeks ago. The following week, I reiterated this in my post about Speaker Adams, touting her “close ties” to Queens Democratic Party figures like DA Melinda Katz, Borough President Donovan Richards, and again, Representative Greg Meeks. And the week after that, I released an endorsement tracker, which at the time showed that while Cuomo had a modest lead, most key officials had not yet endorsed him, and that it wouldn’t take much for Speaker Adams to catch up. By last week, though, I’d started to feel antsy. Cuomo kept getting more endorsements every day, including from a group of elected officials in Speaker Adams’s home turf of Southeast Queens. In our conversation on my new podcast, Ross Barkan mentioned that from his reporting, Adrienne Adams had the “tacit endorsement” of New York State Attorney General Tish James. I wasn’t impressed. “Tish James, if you’re listening, please endorse Adrienne Adams tomorrow.” I replied. “A tacit endorsement isn’t going to do much.” Then, last weekend Greg Meeks very un-tacitly endorsed Cuomo. “RIP Adrienne Adams Hype Train (March 2025-March 2025),” NYC politics blogger Michael Lange tweeted in response.
Adrienne Adams is probably not quite cooked yet, but the picture looks increasingly bleak for fans of hers, or for any other DREAM (Don’t Rank Eric or Andrew for Mayor) supporters. Cuomo’s lead in the polls has only grown since he entered the race; the most recent one has him in the 40s in a nine-person field. And with the Meeks announcement, his score on my endorsement tracker officially broke into triple digits, seventy points (equivalent to thirty-five City Council members, seven US House Representatives, or three and a half Chuck Schumers) ahead of Adrienne Adams in second place. It’s only grown since then. She could get endorsements from virtually every remaining prominent Queens Democrat and still end up with a less valuable set of endorsements than Cuomo has right now. And it’s much more likely that most of those remaining endorsers will support Cuomo, the candidate with the perceived momentum. If enough of them join Team Cuomo, the big influential labor unions, with whom Cuomo has always had a good relationship, will not be far behind, and his dominance over the “invisible primary” of courting influential party elites will be complete. There is, however, one influential outer-borough kingmaker that seems exceedingly uninterested in endorsing the former governor: the New York Post.
There’s not much daylight between Cuomo and the Post in terms of policy. Both view crime and related quality-of-life concerns as the city’s key issue, and have much less interest in other topics like education, climate, housing, affordability, and street planning. Both are staunchly pro-Israel, and view any criticism of its current government’s war aims as deeply anti-Semitic and equivalent to supporting terrorism. And both see the left of the party (and they have an expansive definition of the “left” that includes old-guard liberals like Jerrold Nadler, Scott Stringer, and Chuck Schumer) as insane, dangerous radicals, and also as elitist professional-class hypocrites out of step with the real working people of the outer boroughs. They speak to the same audience, and in the same voice.
And yet the Post has been relentlessly antagonistic to Cuomo from the jump. As rumors about his impending campaign launch swirled in late February, the Post Editorial Board begged for an alternative. “Jessica Tisch could offer real hope for the coming mayoral race,” ran the headline of their February 22nd editorial, urging the billionaire scion, Dalton School graduate, and former city sanitation chief who had been running the NYPD for less than six months to enter the fray. “The other options,” the editorial board wrote, “are beyond bleak.” In addition to a bunch of “a cadre of far-leftists hellbent on making the city’s problems worse” (for their faults, these guys know how to write), there was “the guy polls put as the current favorite: ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo — who has some claim to being a moderate but in his final years as governor let the left wreak havoc.” They then run through what they see as his specific failures as governor: signing a “no-bail law,” “packing the Parole Board with let-’em-loose bleeding hearts who’ve since freed one cop-killer after another” (This is depraved bullshit. Parole release rates didn’t change under Cuomo, they remained very low by national standards, and they had, and continue to have massive racial disparities), “severely restricted law-enforcement cooperation with ICE” (nope), “ramming through the congestion-pricing scheme” (he regrets this), “imposing the insane “climate agenda” that’s now begun to send electric and gas bills soaring,” and “sending thousands of elderly people to their deaths during COVID” (they're right about this one!). I also listed Cuomo’s failures around this time, and came up with a very different list, but the overall message was the same. The Post and I both did not want Andrew Cuomo to be mayor, and were scrambling around desperately for alternatives.
Since then, Jessica Tisch has rebuffed the Post’s request, and there seems to be no other viable conservative candidate, but their stance on Cuomo has not changed. “Behold! Biggest Liar in New York wants to be mayor,” proclaimed the March 1 editorial, the day Cuomo officially announced his candidacy. “If you want to see perps locked up, don’t count on Andrew Cuomo,” they wrote nine days later, and “Emperor Cuomo has no clothes,” a week after that. Individual opinion columnists have gotten in on the game as well, like Steve Cuozzo (“The COVID lockdown nearly killed NYC — and it was Andrew Cuomo who came close to destroying it”) and Michael Goodwin (“Cuomo greenlit progressive nonsense and royally fumbled COVID”). Meanwhile, the news side of the paper (always reliably in sync with its editorial side) has covered Cuomo incredibly aggressively, highlighting the accounts of his sexual abuse accusers, digging into his dubious status as a NYC resident, fiercely jabbing into his vague statements on his COVID record (“Cuomo continues to deflect blame over admin’s disastrous COVID-19 nursing home directive in half-baked apology” was a headline in their metro news section, not an editorial, on March 14), tracking his steady accrual of parking tickets, and most recently, pushing their scoop that Cuomo and top aide Melissa Derossa had an “intimate” relationship while she was working for Cuomo and married to someone else, with multiple follow-up stories explaining what an affair is for some reason. If you read the New York Post, and a lot of New York Democrats do, you’re getting a picture of Cuomo as a morally degenerate, incompetent progressive, and you’re getting reminders every day.
Can any candidate harness this unending gusher of anti-Cuomo propaganda to their electoral benefit? It’s tricky. Post readers are likely to be turned off by the elite, professional-class technocrats like Lander, Stringer, and Myrie. If you squint, you could imagine a world where some of them move towards Zohran Mamdani, whose status as an insurgent outsider might be more appealing. But these readers are probably not incredibly sympathetic to self-described democratic socialists, and would have to ignore a whole lot of Post coverage that rages against Mamdani as a Defund the Police radical in cahoots with Hamas (He’s been very quiet on both issues for a while now, and his latest public safety plan involves increasing community policing budgets, not defunding existing ones, but this won’t placate the Post). Jessica Ramos, with her base in working-class Queens and somewhat more flexible positions on safety and quality of life issues, would be an excellent fit for some of these readers, but her complete inability to raise money has made her path to increased prominence and viability extremely narrow. And Adrienne Adams, who I had hoped would have the ability to straddle both the outer-borough working class and the Manhattan progressives, seems for now to have not much support from either group.
The one candidate who seems interested in forcefully attacking Cuomo along the New York Post’s lines is our sitting mayor. After months of conspicuous silence, perhaps having gotten advance word of the impending dismissal of his federal indictment, yesterday Eric Adams let loose on Cuomo, attacking his record on nursing homes and bail reform (“You mean the management he did with the nursing homes? Or probably the management he did with the bail reform, is that what you’re talking about? That caused the ruckus we’re facing?”), his management style (“Good management is not sitting behind a table with a PowerPoint and act like you're leading”), his refusal to regularly speak to the press (“You can’t just hide out in a mansion”), and his lack of connection with the city (“ask him when was the last time he rode the subway alone”). At the moment it’s unclear whether Adams is even running in the Democratic primary at all, or if he believes he can win as an independent after the primary is over. This would be delusional, Adams’s political career in this city looks to be completely finished, and I can’t imagine that plugging Kash Patel’s book is going to help. But for now, we need all the Cuomo haters we can get. If no one can land a damaging blow from the right, the New York Post will eventually come to the conclusion that virtually every other influential party elite in the city has reached, which is that Cuomo is the party’s best hope at staving off a progressive mayor for another four years. For those of us that want a progressive mayor, it would be nice if the Post doesn’t figure this out for a little while, and continues its inexplicable friendly-fire bombardment of Cuomo for as long as possible.