Andrew Cuomo likes to make a big deal about the age and inexperience of New York's future mayor. Zoran Mamdanibut the former governor himself began to engage in politics early. Cuomo was nineteen when he helped manage his father's doomed campaign against Ed Koch in 1977. He was not yet forty 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 powerful governors in state history. By the time he resigned in 2021 amid credible and documented allegations of sexual harassment And abuse from powerhe imposed his strong and unruly policies on New York for nearly half a century.
In his campaign for mayor this year, Cuomo assumed that Mamdani, a thirty-four-year-old socialist with a fourteen-point lead over him, had “not accomplished anything.” “He’s never had a real job,” Cuomo shouted repeatedly Wednesday night at the final mayoral debate. During his six months on the campaign trail, Cuomo has tried to portray himself as a model of battle-tested leadership. In truth, he looked tired and worn, the deep lines on his face strained by old grudges and bad intentions. He misrepresents Mamdani's name in debates and interviews. He responds dismissively and evasively to questions about women who have accused him of harassment. He resorts to increasingly bizarre methods of attacking his opponent. “Why don’t you say BDS against Uganda?” Cuomo barked at Mamdani in one particularly incoherent moment Wednesday.
Even though Cuomo seems to have all the advantages – name recognition, the support of the Democratic Party, the support of many of the city's most powerful and wealthy residents – Mamdani beat him up in the June primaries. That night, Cuomo called Mamdani early to concede, and Mamdani said the disgraced and battered old politician was just being polite. However, Cuomo has since mounted an independent campaign in support of the general that appears largely aimed at damaging Mamdani's new public prominence. At one point during the last debate, Cuomo said he believed Mamdani was trying to “fan the flames of hatred against the Jewish people,” a smear that is about as vile as anything Donald Trump has said about his opponent.
Mamdani believes that Israel is an apartheid state, that the war in the Gaza Strip is genocide, and that the American government was complicit in the Israeli government's violations of international laws. These are views he has maintained throughout his campaign and which Cuomo assumed would undermine his reputation among New York Jews. However, Cuomo's open pandering to the city's conservative and anxious Jewish residents did not work as intended: Mamdani performed well among Jewish voters in the primary, and one poll this summer showed him winning by seventeen points among Jews overall, with over 60 percent support among Jews under forty-four. His campaign was built in part on alliances between Jewish and Muslim progressives. Plus, for an alleged anti-Semite, his campaign involved a non-trivial number of cute Jewish boys.
Despite all the insults, Cuomo's general election strategy was in some ways an admission that Mamdani was on to something. Since June, Cuomo has shifted his pitch to voters to emphasize accessibility; imitation of attractiveness in short videos for social networks; and efforts to reach out to the city's growing Hindu communities—all tactics borrowed from Mamdani's primary, in which he courted Muslim and South Asian voters in the city like no mayoral candidate had done before. Cuomo even softened his focus on Israel and acknowledged that there are “two sides” to the issue. “I haven’t seen any anti-Israel anger,” he said candidly during an appearance on “Morning Joe” last week. “I didn’t understand how that could motivate people in a mayoral election.” In his attempts to compete with Mamdani, Cuomo has also proposed a series of sweeping policy changes that are as untested and disruptive as anything the socialist has proposed, including the idea of introducing means testing for the city's rent-stabilized housing units. His candidacy has helped to obscure rather than raise real questions about whether Mamdani can govern the city.
