Andrew Cuomo Is Making All the Moves for a Mayoral Run

Andrew Cuomo walked into a conference room inside a Manhattan corporate office wearing a suit and tie and spoke for 30 minutes straight. “We are at a critical point in the city’s history. The city goes through cycles, but this one is different. People are leaving,” he said at the private event, according to a source familiar with the meeting. “They’re afraid.”

Officially, Cuomo is not running for mayor. Unofficially, he is doing just about everything someone running for mayor would do. His allies have conducted polling; they’re contacting possible staff; they’re lining up the signature-gathering operation needed to put his name on the ballot. Perhaps most important and intriguing, though, Cuomo has for months been traveling throughout the city, speaking to Jewish groups and at Black churches, from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side, road-testing the ideas and messaging he’d use to mount one of the most audacious comeback attempts in New York political history.

Audacious because Cuomo left his last job, as the state’s three-term governor, early and under heavy fire. New York state attorney general Letitia James released a 165-page report that she said substantiated complaints that Cuomo had sexually harassed multiple women. A separate controversy was also swirling over whether Cuomo’s office manipulated reports of the number of COVID deaths in New York and had issued an order that increased the pandemic’s danger in nursing homes. Cuomo has strenuously denied all of the allegations, then and since, attacking James’s investigation as politically motivated, and he and several of his top aides have burned through at least $25 million in state taxpayer money for aggressive and ongoing defense against both controversies. But in August 2021 he quit in disgrace.

And then Cuomo almost immediately began looking for a path to electoral redemption. In 2022, he came close to running against his gubernatorial replacement, Kathy Hochul, before deciding it was too soon to subject his daughters to the fray again, according to one of his top aides.

Three years later, though, the city’s incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, has opened the door to a Cuomo resurrection bid. Seven of the mayor’s former top aides have resigned and are under investigation; Adams himself was indicted last September and faces a federal trial in April. A recent poll shows Adams to be one of the least-preferred candidates and Cuomo trouncing him in a prospective Democratic primary match this June.

Assuming he runs, that is. Cuomo’s longtime spokesman, Rich Azzopardi, has been wearing out the word “premature” for months whenever he’s asked whether the ex-governor will challenge Adams, and he’s sticking to the company line now. Other New York political insiders who’ve talked with Cuomo aren’t so coy: “He’s running,” one tells me, emphatically. To appear on the Democratic primary ballot, candidates need to collect 7,500 signatures between February 25 and April 3. There are good reasons for Cuomo to delay getting into the race as long as possible, however—some of them strategic and some emotional.

Cuomo’s ideal path to City Hall would have been a special election necessitated by Adams resigning before March 26, according to the New York City Charter, but that window is rapidly closing. So the ex-governor’s camp now prefers that Adams remain in the race, believing it allows more time for the incumbent’s support to crumble and dilutes scrutiny that might otherwise be devoted to Cuomo—who, in one recent poll, registered a disapproval rating of 44%. Waiting to publicly declare a bid also buys Cuomo time to calibrate his pitch. At the moment it leans heavily on the supposed “chaos” engulfing the city, with the horrific recent immolation of a homeless woman sitting inside a subway car as one prime example. Cuomo is also trying to figure out how to walk the line between criticizing Adams personally—which could risk alienating some Black voters—and professionally, as someone who has failed as a manager of the city.

Another thing holding back a final decision and announcement, Cuomo allies say, is that he hasn’t completely let go of the idea of running for governor in 2026. Vanquishing Hochul, his former lieutenant governor, and reclaiming the Albany throne would deliver a kind of direct revenge satisfaction that becoming mayor doesn’t offer.

At 67, Cuomo likely has one last shot, so he’s choosing carefully. His camp believes Donald Trump’s win in November proves that enough voters are willing to overlook bad behavior and character flaws if they think, rationally or not, that their candidate can deliver better outcomes. On top of that, Cuomo, unlike Trump, has never been charged with, let alone convicted, of any crimes.

Maybe that assessment is correct, and maybe Adams and the rest of the declared mayoral field is so weak that Cuomo will cruise to victory. Maybe the city is so desperate for swagger to be replaced by hard-assed micromanagement as a governing principle that people will embrace Cuomo’s pugnacious style. “He gets things done—major projects, like Moynihan Station and the Second Avenue subway. He’ll be able to take control of the reins of government,” a veteran city political leader who has been both a Cuomo ally and a critic says. “That’s the one thing that people who don’t like him agree on.”

But Cuomo’s lingering attachment to Albany suggests what could become a problem in a mayoral race. The New York political insider interrupts before I can finish asking a question about why Cuomo would run for City Hall. “Vindication!” he says. “I think he wants to be like, ‘See, I’m not the governor who had to resign and was going to be impeached. Voters still like me!’”

Yet if city voters think Cuomo is in the race for himself, and not for them, the contest could turn out to be closer than all these early polls make things appear.