Mara Gay, a New York Times editorial board member, hosted an online conversation with her fellow board member Brent Staples; Nicole Gelinas, a contributing Opinion writer; and Andrew Kirtzman, a former New York political journalist and the author of two biographies of Rudolph W. Giuliani, to talk about Andrew Cuomo’s mayoral run, his return after his resignation amid scandal (he has denied wrongdoing), the idea of crisis and stability and what it means that Democrats and American voters are now so willing to accept tarnished figures they previously rejected in one way or another.
Mara Gay: I have a big, pretty pressing question. How do the Democrats move on from the past? How do they put the November loss behind them and unite around a message that persuades voters and helps them compete against President Trump? How do they find new leaders? In Washington, Democrats chose Gerry Connolly of Virginia over the sharply talented Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as head of the House Oversight Committee, for instance. Now polls suggest the comeback that the former New York governor Andrew Cuomo is trying to make by running for mayor of New York City is popular with voters. Why are the Democrats holding onto the past so tightly? What’s happening here?
Andrew Kirtzman: To the extent there is a straight line between Cuomo and Connolly, it’s that both men are far more centrist than their competitors. New Yorkers in particular prefer their mayors to be pragmatists — only two ideological liberals have won the mayoralty in the modern era, David Dinkins and Bill de Blasio. One was a one-term mayor and the other left office deeply unpopular. But Cuomo enters the race under unique circumstances, in which the public is desperate for a leader who can get the place under control, and may be willing to overlook a lot to do so.
Brent Staples: New York Democrats are making a simple, if desperate, calculation: They want to jettison Eric Adams and put behind them the chaos he has visited upon Gotham. Andrew Cuomo is desperate to redeem the family name after he resigned — and prayerfully hoping to exploit the Trump effect. The president was elected even after a civil jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation. Not an ideal situation politically, but here we are.
Nicole Gelinas: I think that the Democrats are clinging to the past partly because, for the past decade or so, when the party, nationally and locally, would have been building the next generation of leaders, its progressive wing was in the ascendancy.
Gay: Which moderate Democrats didn’t really do — they swung back to veteran leaders like Joe Biden rather than build a new class as the left did with Ocasio-Cortez.
Gelinas: Look at Cuomo’s experience in the later part of his tenure as governor. From 2017 to early 2020, Cuomo was becoming more worried about his progressive flank than he was about being a centrist. So, we have a terrific assortment of new progressive leaders in New York City and State, all offering slightly different personalities and slightly different varieties of progressivism — just at the inconvenient time when it’s pretty obvious from the election results of the last couple of years that the voters aren’t interested right now in progressivism! And so the party is stuck at a weird time without a Triple-A or even a Double-A team of centrists ready to move up.
Gay: Can we talk about this idea that New York City needs saving? Cuomo talked about it a lot in his little campaign video, and that sentiment, too, felt pretty old-school. It’s an interesting argument coming from a guy who was in charge not that long ago, for a decade. Does New York City need saving? How do you all think about that in terms of what you see in your daily lives around town?
Staples: “Saving” is an emotional term. But, as I travel around Manhattan in particular, the loss of foot traffic and psychic energy — and the sense of both spiritual and corporeal vacancy — are very real. Inept leadership at the top exacerbates what people are experiencing in the streets.
Gelinas: “Corporeal vacancy” is such a great term!
Staples: Nicole, thanks for the shout-out to my 12th-grade English teacher, Ms. Riley.
Kirtzman: To Brent’s point, polls have found vast numbers of New Yorkers feel the city is going in the wrong direction. And fear of crime is, arguably, the No. 1 driver of that. I was on a stalled subway train recently, trapped in a tunnel for five to 10 minutes as a large, deranged man screamed at us. It was a scary moment, and I wondered, as I often do, whether our leaders really understand what goes on down there. In that sense it’s no surprise to me that Cuomo’s message is that he has come to save the day (so to speak). I think his video was pitch perfect in that sense.
Gelinas: There is no question that city voters are unhappy with public safety and quality of life, and that their unhappiness has been backed up by some crime rates (double-digit percentages higher than the pre-Covid norm, in some cases). But! Here’s another weird thing at a weird time in (another) weird year: Don’t look now, but the crime stats are actually looking pretty sharply good for the first two months of this year — felony crime rates are down double digits from last year (although still higher than pre-Covid), and we didn’t have a subway murder during the first two months of the year, the first time since before Covid. I have no idea whether these stats will continue, and/or will translate into a changed public perception, but it’s a (quite welcome) early surprise in this race.
Gay: So much of what we’re really talking about here isn’t just about crime or public safety, but the way New York City felt before the pandemic compared to afterward. Do you think that’s what may be driving nostalgia for Cuomo? Or is it something more?
Gelinas: Absolutely, in terms of the public feeling. That’s why I found it strange that Cuomo was promoting a communal Covid success story this week — the idea that we beat Covid. Leaving aside whether or not we did and who, if anyone, was responsible, I just don’t think the public has a feeling of “Yay, we really beat Covid and are thriving now because of it!” that Cuomo can tap into. As for what’s driving what Mara calls nostalgia, I think for Cuomo, for now, it’s more the name recognition, a public perception that he can actually get certain goals accomplished based on past performance, and a dearth of centrist candidates in the Democratic primary field.
Staples: When you walk through the streets, you see the civic casualties of the pandemic everywhere. The new “normal” is a constant reminder of the Covid era. And Mara: People are grasping for security and stability.
Kirtzman: It’s ironic, because Cuomo resigned from office in 2021 in a blaze of drama. But the indisputable fact is that as governor he accomplished major things that his predecessors could not. City government is so ridiculously debilitated under Adams that the idea of a competent, effective leader taking over is enormously appealing. The public has been thrust into a position of judging whether Cuomo’s offenses outweigh his potential to get us out of this troubled period.
Staples: Yes, Andrew. About that messy departure and the goodbye speech in which he allows that he “truly offended” 11 women: The anti-Cuomo campaign ads are going to write themselves.
Gelinas: I wonder. Yes, I know negative advertising works, but it didn’t work with anti-Trump ads. There’s not much there the public doesn’t know. If they vote for him, it won’t be because of ignorance of those things, but because they feel there isn’t a better supposedly centrist alternative. A replay of the Trump year.
Gay: The fact remains that Cuomo is leading in the polls. So what does his return say about the Democratic Party? Beyond the debate over centrist versus progressive leadership, I mean. Are Democratic voters chucking out questions of ethics and even certain values in favor of someone they view as capable of getting things done?
Staples: One of the things it says, Mara, is that the party politicians are largely unknown to the broader public.
Kirtzman: I think there’s a parallel to the 1997 mayor’s race, Rudy Giuliani versus Ruth Messinger. Giuliani governed as an authoritarian, someone who destroyed reputations and arguably used racist police tactics in the streets. But he won by a landslide because he had come to represent people’s personal security. Cuomo was a strong leader who browbeat, bullied and outsmarted a generation of adversaries. In this environment that may not look so terrible to New Yorkers.
Gelinas: I think, Andrew, the difference between 1997 and now was that back then, people in New York — Democrats, mostly! — felt that things were going in the right direction and wanted to keep them going in that direction, even if they found Giuliani distasteful. Oddly, considering that Cuomo’s accomplishments were mainly big infrastructure and big social issues, he’s not running on those things to apply to New York City — the ideas platform he put out this week was mostly real smallish-scale City Hall everyday governance local stuff (that’s not necessarily bad!), plus a bunch of things that, ironically, he would need the governor and state lawmakers to do.
Gay: Is there a lesson for the national party here? Or is this just a New York political drama?
Staples: Mara, I think this is largely a Gotham thing.
Gelinas: I think where the lesson is for the national party is that roughly from the Giuliani years until just before Covid, New York looked to the rest of the country like an urban success story, driven by a Republican mayor and a Republican-ish mayor. Now, we don’t. So it looks to the national voter like a failure of the Democratic Party. Either Democrats turn it around locally or (eventually) they need someone to do it for them … and that’s how we got Giuliani in the first place.
Kirtzman: That is crazy smart, Nicole. The one thing I’d add is that Democrats are desperate for national leaders who aren’t paralyzed by exhaustion, indecision or fear. There’s a big market for fighters now. The Republic is in huge trouble with Trump, and a lot of people are desperate for a hero. Cuomo is hoping to catch that wave.
Gay: How do we think about Cuomo’s comeback in the context of the very specific kind of masculinity we’re seeing on display in American life right now, particularly from Elon Musk and at the White House? Do you think that’s a winning tack for him?
Gelinas: Are they going for a masculine vibe in Washington? I totally missed that; I thought they were just acting like gleeful antisocial vandals. We can’t discount the possibility that voters will be tired of all the D.C. antics by June, and that plays out personality-wise in terms of whom they choose here. Or, alternatively, swing voters are thrilled by Trump’s first-six-months accomplishments and reflect that locally; who knows?
Staples: Mara, people haven’t focused on this race yet. Someone could come out of the pack — but that candidate would have to give good bomber-jacket vibe. Whoever vaults forward will need to do it swiftly: Patience is waning with all those chairs onstage.
Gay: Knowing what we do today, acknowledging that just about anything can happen between now and June — who do you think will win the Democratic mayoral primary?
Gelinas: Brad Lander, the city comptroller, is obviously trying to move to the center-ish and grab voters who don’t like Cuomo, including voters who moved to the left in 2020 and later regretted it, and so see Lander’s own attempted move to the middle-ish reflected back to them; who knows if he will succeed. I will repeat something here that people always laugh at me for saying: I think Adams has a bigger chance than people think.
Staples: Nicole, only if the right combination of people run against him — in terms of the math of splitting the opposition.
Kirtzman: I don’t know, guys. Adams barely breaks double digits in polls. He has almost no campaign organization. The public wasn’t thrilled with him before all the madness began and now many people just want him to go away. Unlike Cuomo, who has been able to capitalize on the credibility he built up as an effective leader pre-scandal, Adams has no reservoir of credibility to help him in his desperate hour. He’s had some significant accomplishments, but much of his mayoralty has just been a mess.
Gay: Going back to this idea of saving the city, do you think Cuomo represents a “return to stability” or “breaking things up”? And final word, will he become mayor?
Staples: It will not be difficult for him to cast himself as Mr. Stability, given the chaos and legacy of indictments left behind by Adams.
Gelinas: He will cast himself (implicitly) as the devil you know … when sometimes, to get what you want done, you need and want the devil on your side. Oddly, Adams is going to cast himself as the same — with, if this year’s trend continues, his new police commissioner to back him up with some actual results, finally and oddly. Adams still has a powerful pulpit. So who is the more competent devil?
Kirtzman: My only prediction is that Andrew Cuomo will be a polarizing figure as a candidate and as a mayor. He was forced to resign in a sexual harassment scandal, so many people hate the idea of his political comeback. And if he wins he will be out for revenge. You’re not talking about a soothing guy here.
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