When former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo returned to the political arena in March as a candidate for mayor of New York City, he commemorated the moment with a 17-minute video describing the city as a place whose denizens nervously avoid eye contact with mentally ill homeless people as they walk past empty storefronts into foreboding subway stations.
Now, with less than two weeks until New Yorkers elect their next mayor, Mr. Cuomo has darkened the narrative further. Fashioning himself a 21st-century Cassandra, Mr. Cuomo has unspooled a grim prophecy for a city that seems poised to elect as its mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist half his age.
“Besides the practical impact of crime, plunging real estate prices, imagine the publicity nationwide, internationally, New York City goes socialist!” Mr. Cuomo, 67, told a crowd of businesspeople on Tuesday. “You’ll see revenue generators leave, you’ll see government spending increase, you’ll see plunging real estate values, and at worst, you see a redux of the 1970 fiscal crisis.”
He predicted certain “mayhem” if President Trump tried to “take over” New York City in response to a Mamdani victory.
During interviews this week, he adopted a similarly gloomy tone.
Speaking to the YouTube personality Logan Paul, Mr. Cuomo said the city’s fragility necessitated his election. Otherwise, “We could lose New York City as we know it.”
And on Thursday morning, he urged the conservative radio host Sid Rosenberg to “imagine Mamdani in that seat,” the mayoralty, if there is another Sept. 11, 2001.
“Yeah, I could. He’d be cheering,” Mr. Rosenberg responded.
Mr. Cuomo laughed. “That’s another problem,” he said.
Around the same time the final general election debate was airing Wednesday night, his campaign posted, and then took down, an A.I.-generated video depicting Mr. Mamdani’s supporters as trespassers, domestic abusers, pimps, drug dealers and drunken drivers — as well as a shoplifter depicted by a Black character in a kaffiyeh.
Common Cause New York, a government watchdog group, said the ad may have violated state election law by failing to properly disclose that it was created with the use of A.I. or computer generated images. The group also called it “offensive and a shocking attempt at fear-mongering.”
Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for the campaign, said the video “was posted in error” and “wasn’t done yet.”
Mr. Cuomo has never been known for projecting a particularly upbeat persona. As a famously combative governor, his administration operated at two speeds, as his top aide described it: “get along and kill.”
But after Mr. Mamdani trounced him in the June Democratic primary, Mr. Cuomo’s approach has grown even grimmer.
“He is resorting to this language and these tactics because he has nothing to offer to New Yorkers — no vision, no plans, no agenda, nothing forward-looking, just fear-mongering,” said Dora Pekec, a spokeswoman for Mr. Mamdani.
Lincoln Restler, a Democratic city councilman, denounced the interview with Mr. Rosenberg as “vile racism.”
To many members of Mr. Cuomo’s party, the world does indeed feel vaguely apocalyptic, with Mr. Trump sending troops into American cities, rounding up immigrants, politicizing the Justice Department to target Democratic leaders and defunding projects important to states run by Democrats.
Some Democratic Party leaders have expressed concerns that a victory by Mr. Mamdani may hurt Democrats in next year’s midterm elections or incite Mr. Trump to further insert himself into city affairs. Like Mr. Cuomo, they point to his lack of relevant experience, his prior statements of antipathy toward the police, and his opposition to the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.
“If you’re asking why he’s talking about why the stakes are so high, it’s because the stakes are so high,” said Mr. Azzopardi.
Mr. Azzopardi was speaking about New York City, but he may as well have been addressing the situation of Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat who is running as an independent on the Fight and Deliver ballot line.
With the mayor’s race entering its final 12 days, he remains at least 10 points behind Mr. Mamdani in recent polls, and the odds weigh heavily against him winning, particularly if Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate, does not bow out. (Mr. Sliwa has repeatedly said he is staying in the race.)
And as Mr. Cuomo faces the prospect of his own political oblivion, he is desperately making a play for Republicans to choose him, a Democrat running on an independent ballot line, over Mr. Sliwa. To do so, Mr. Cuomo has embraced a message that Republicans pioneered.
In late June, the State Senate Republican Campaign Committee described Mr. Mamdani as “the leader of the socialist fringe that’s going to destroy New York City and our state.”
In July, Mr. Trump raised the specter of citywide devastation under Mr. Mamdani, and promised to prevent it. “As President of the United States, I’m not going to let this Communist Lunatic destroy New York,” he wrote on social media.
And in September, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, a staunch Republican ally of the president, described Mr. Mamdani as a “communist who is on pace to destroy N.Y.C.”
Mr. Sliwa has taken a less dire tone about Mr. Mamdani, at times arguing that Mr. Cuomo is the actual looming threat.
“So, I’m supposed to drop out for a loser who destroyed the state?” he said on Newsmax on Monday, when an anchor asked him why he wasn’t leaving the race to help Mr. Cuomo’s campaign. “And you want me to give him an opportunity to put the last nail in the coffin and destroy New York City, too?”
To Mr. Cuomo’s sympathizers, he is simply speaking truth about the real-world consequences of electing a 34-year-old with a thin résumé and an allegiance to a democratic socialist ethos in the financial capital of the United States.
“If we tax our middle class and high earners out, allow vagrancy on our buses, roll back the police, and stop jailing criminals, what else could be the outcome?” asked Joseph Borelli, a Republican former councilman from Staten Island who has not endorsed in the race.
But to his detractors, Mr. Cuomo’s fixation on painting such a grim picture underscores his own unwillingness to present an affirmative vision for his possible mayoralty, and his reluctance to grapple with the grim reality that already exists in New York City — from existing affordable housing and homelessness crises to federal officers arresting immigrant vendors near Canal Street.
Gustavo Gordillo, the co-chair of the city’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, described Mr. Cuomo’s tack as a “Hail Mary” pass that is bound to fail.
“People, if they want to be scared, they look at Trump,” agreed Ana María Archila, the co-director of New York’s Working Families Party. “If they want to feel like their life can change, they look at someone who is not Cuomo for that solution.”
Mr. Cuomo, meanwhile, is grappling with what he describes as a new emotion.
“I am afraid, I am afraid for New York City, and I’ve never felt that before,” Mr. Cuomo said Tuesday. “I’ve seen cities spiral and not come back.”
Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.
Dana Rubinstein covers New York City politics and government for The Times.
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