In the New York City mayor’s race, many of the candidates trying to displace former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo from his front-runner status are deploying a new strategy.
They contend that Mr. Cuomo is just like the current mayor, Eric Adams — which, in many New Yorkers’ view, is an unflattering comparison.
And yet their similarities keep piling up.
Mr. Adams has steered New York City in a more conservative direction after eight years under the left-leaning Mayor Bill de Blasio. If Mr. Cuomo wins, he is expected to keep the city firmly in the ideological center.
Both are moderate Democrats who delight in attacking the left wing of their party. They have similar plans to get mentally ill people off the streets. They oppose rent freezes and support charter schools. They share more than 200 donors, including powerful real estate leaders.
When Mr. Cuomo recently decided to create his own independent third party to run on an extra ballot line in the general election, Mr. Adams — who is also collecting signatures for a third-party run in November — appeared irritated.
“All he’s doing is looking at Eric Adams’s playbook,” the mayor said earlier this month at City Hall, adding: “He follows my housing plans. He follows my mental health plans.”
The latest parallel between the two men was disclosed last week, when The New York Times reported that the Justice Department was investigating Mr. Cuomo over whether he lied to Congress about his handling of the Covid pandemic.
Mr. Adams was also the subject of a federal investigation, which led to a five-count indictment. The Trump Justice Department dropped the charges after the mayor openly aligned himself with the president, prompting concerns about his independence.
How such an investigation will affect Mr. Cuomo may be more complicated. While the announcement drew attention to criticism of his handling of the pandemic, it also provided an opportunity for him to appear to New York Democrats as a Trump enemy.
Mr. Cuomo’s campaign is also predicated on what it says is another key difference: proving to voters that he is a better manager than Mr. Adams has shown he is during his scandal-tarred tenure.
Mr. Cuomo’s message has resonated with voters at a moment when many New Yorkers believe that the city is headed in the wrong direction. He has a strong lead in the polls ahead of the June 24 primary.
Many of the other mayoral candidates have focused on the city’s affordability crisis, offering a different vision of the city’s future than Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Adams have, one that focuses on helping working-class New Yorkers. And they have become increasingly willing to lump the two together as examples of the unacceptable status quo.
Zohran Mamdani, a progressive state lawmaker who is polling in second place, has argued that electing Mr. Cuomo would amount to a second term for Mr. Adams and his pro-business policies.
“The donors, the agenda, the corruption,” Mr. Mamdani said in an interview. “The same people who are funding the Cuomo campaign and his super PAC are the very New Yorkers who decided that Eric Adams was going to be their mayor in 2021 and it’s for the same reasons.”
Brad Lander, the city comptroller who is running for mayor, said that Mr. Cuomo would continue Mr. Adams’s “repeated assaults on working families” and “failed strategies to address homelessness,” and that the former governor was “a misguided man in it only for himself.” The campaign of Zellnor Myrie, a state senator, said that Mr. Adams and Mr. Cuomo project competence but “fail at the basics” and would “sell out our futures to billionaires.”
Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, said the former governor’s Democratic rivals “have no record or vision to run on” and were “running to be de Blasio’s third term.” He said that Mr. Cuomo was proud to “make New York the progressive capital of the world” when he was governor, and pointed to laws that raised the minimum wage, addressed gun violence and created paid family leave.
“There has not been a competent administration governing City Hall for the past 12 years,” he said, “and what replaced it was far-left ideology over basic management, and then well-intentioned but ineffective governance combined with craven self-interest over what’s best for New Yorkers — and people are tired of it.”
Kayla Mamelak Altus, a spokeswoman for the mayor, said that Mr. Adams was running on his record while Mr. Cuomo was “running from his.” She said the mayor had created affordable housing, brought down crime “in spite of the former governor’s disastrous bail reform laws” and shut down illegal cannabis shops “despite Cuomo’s unrealistic and sloppy cannabis laws.”
“Simply put, comparing Andrew Cuomo to Eric Adams is like comparing J.V. to varsity,” she said.
Mr. Adams and Mr. Cuomo, though, have things in common. Both were recently faulted by the city’s Campaign Finance Board over their fund-raising practices. They have also faced a series of ethics investigations during their long careers in politics.
Aside from the federal corruption investigation into Mr. Adams, which stemmed from allegations that he accepted travel and gifts from the Turkish government and solicited illegal foreign campaign donations, other investigations led to a series of high-profile resignations from his inner circle.
While he wa governor, Mr. Cuomo’s office interfered with an anticorruption panel known as the Moreland Commission that he created and then abruptly shut down. That led to one of several federal investigations of his administration by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, some of which resulted in convictions of his close associates. Two of those convictions were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Mr. Cuomo resigned as governor in 2021 after 11 women accused him of sexual harassment. He denies wrongdoing.
In the aftermath of his resignation, Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Adams — who were friends and allies — remained cordial. In 2022, when Mr. Cuomo was still viewed as politically toxic, the two had dinner in Manhattan for two hours. Mr. Adams defended his choice of dinner companion, saying at the time, “I’m going to sit down with everyone.”
And in the early stages of the mayoral campaign, the two men rarely criticized each other. That has changed.
When Mr. Cuomo called recently for expanding involuntary hospitalizations for people with severe mental illness, a spokeswoman for the mayor said that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” and criticized Mr. Cuomo’s record of closing psychiatric hospital beds as governor.
Mr. Azzopardi responded with a list of ways Mr. Adams had failed to address the problem.
“Words are nice; action is better,” he said. “The mayor had four years to act and things have only gotten worse.”
At an event this month outside a former illegal smoke shop, Mr. Adams blamed Mr. Cuomo for the botched rollout of legal cannabis in New York.
“I’ve had to clean up a lot of the stuff that the former governor did and just try to get it right,” he said.
Still, when it comes to policy and politics, Mr. Adams and Mr. Cuomo remain alike. Their strongest support has been among Black and Latino voters. They have both criticized Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Each insists he is the strongest friend to Israel.
They support more aggressive policing tactics and are resisting closing the Rikers Island jail by 2027, the legally mandated deadline. Their housing policies are more friendly to developers than other candidates’ are. Both have even faced questions about where exactly they live.
Basil Smikle, a professor at Columbia’s School of Professional Studies and a Democratic political strategist, said that Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Adams are aligned on many issues, but that Mr. Cuomo is more politically savvy and picks his battles.
“Cuomo is a lot more shrewd,” he said. “He knows how to play more of an inside game.”
Emma G. Fitzsimmons is the City Hall bureau chief for The Times, covering Mayor Eric Adams and his administration.
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