For Key Cuomo Voters, “Holding Your Nose” Means Overlooking the Scandals

It was one of those rare moments when the political crossed over into the genuinely personal and painful. Last week, Adrienne Adams, the Speaker of the New York City Council and a candidate for mayor, was standing at a podium next to a framed photograph of her father, who had died of COVID five years ago to the day after being turned away from the overwhelmed Elmhurst, Queens, hospital where his daughter now stood. Adams, wiping away tears, attributed the pandemic plight of city hospitals to what she said was mismanagement by Andrew Cuomo, who is currently the front-runner in June’s Democratic mayoral primary. “I remember begging then governor Cuomo, begging his office to send life-saving vaccines to my community. And for weeks and months, our request was denied,” she recalled, while urging voters to “stop electing the politicians who visit and start empowering the people who never left.”

Cuomo’s campaign spokesman calls it “absolutely false” that the governor denied vaccines to city residents and “a ridiculous assertion” that he weakened hospitals. But in highlighting a specific, contentious episode, Adams was also hitting on a broader mystery in the mayor’s race. Cuomo’s nearly 11-year record as governor includes successes. But it also includes choices that were a mixed bag for neighborhoods like Elmhurst—and yet he has maintained a solid polling lead with New York’s Black and Hispanic voters.

They are hardly the only New Yorkers who so far seem willing to overlook Cuomo’s flaws. Whether in the people’s republic of Park Slope, Brooklyn, or elsewhere, there’s been a significant polling gap between Cuomo’s unpopularity and his electability.

Nowhere is the contradiction more apparent than in many of the conventional liberal voters I’ve talked with. They’ll express dismay over the sexual harassment allegations against Cuomo made by 11 women (accusations documented in a report from state attorney general Letitia James, though vehemently denied by Cuomo). They’ll say they dislike how Cuomo’s department of health issued a directive that required nursing homes to admit COVID-positive patients during the pandemic. And then they’ll say they’re planning to vote for him anyway.

“Voters will negotiate with themselves,” says Basil Smikle, a former executive director of the state’s Democratic Party and an MSNBC contributor. “They’ll ask themselves: What’s more important here, my connection to a movement like #MeToo or Black Lives Matter, which may have run its course, or something that I care about immediately, which is my quality of life and the need to have the city run a different way?”

A frustrated strategist working for one of Cuomo’s opponents puts it more vividly: “You have people in focus groups who say, ‘Yeah, I know he killed a lot of people in nursing homes, but I kind of like the guy.’ I don’t know what to do with that.” (Cuomo has argued that the New York State Department of Health directive was simply following federal guidance, and his campaign spokesman now claims that no credible report has ever definitively found that the order directly contributed to additional COVID deaths.)

Familiarity is part of the reason for Cuomo’s resilience. He has been a major political presence for more than four decades, following in the footsteps of his father, former governor Mario Cuomo. “Familiarity should not be mistaken for loyalty,” Adams tells me, heatedly, a week after her hospital speech. “People had been thinking, This is the man that was on TV every day, giving us a report. But wait a minute. We also lost so many people. Those deaths could have been prevented under his watch as well.’”

But name recognition doesn’t entirely explain the pattern. For many civilians, records and particulars matter less than many political insiders would like. As Bill Clinton has said, people often prefer leaders who are strong and wrong to those who are weak and right. Cuomo has always looked up to Clinton. And he has been nothing if not strong for the bulk of his political career.

That muscular image may be especially handy at the moment thanks to the incumbent mayor and president. Eric Adams won a narrow victory in the 2021 Democratic primary largely on the promise to restore law and order, but he’s fumbled his way through the migrant crisis and a series of corruption scandals. Donald Trump’s offensives against the city have included seizing immigrants and clawing back tens of millions in federal funding. “Yes, the nursing home scandal is very real. Yes, Cuomo did have people in his administration who were close to him go to prison,” says Christina Greer, a political science professor at Fordham University and a cohost of the FAQ NYC podcast. “But I think a lot of voters are making a calculus about who can essentially stand up for New York City in the Trump era. What many of them remember was, in a time of extreme crisis, the president was saying, Inject yourself with bleach, and the governor was having a daily press conference saying, We’re gonna keep calm and here’s what we’re doing.”

Cuomo has long been a staunch believer in the power of TV ads, and a (supposedly independent) Super PAC has raised more than $9 million to help his cause. Otherwise, perhaps wisely aware of his high negatives, Cuomo has run an extremely risk-averse campaign, agreeing to only a handful of interviews, one of which was with the Free Press’s Bari Weiss, and appearing very few times with other candidates. Which greatly raises the stakes for two scheduled primary debates, on June 4 and June 12. It’s been nearly seven years since Cuomo last participated in a debate.

The race appears to be tightening as it enters the final month and voters start paying more attention. In new polling from PIX11, Emerson College, and The Hill, Cuomo’s closest competitor, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, has closed the first-round voting gap with Cuomo to 12 points and, in a ranked-choice simulation, to single digits in the final round. Adrienne Adams has some reason to hope as well: Despite entering the race late, the most recent Marist poll showed her support about double, to 11%, and the city’s campaign finance board just approved millions in public matching funds for the 2025 elections. In the upcoming debates, Adams will talk about policy details. But she will also take square, emotional aim at her main rival. “Showing the total picture of who Andrew Cuomo was during this pandemic is resonating,” she tells me. “Holding your nose—that’s not okay.”