For Andrew M. Cuomo, the rally rolling out a $20-an-hour minimum wage proposal was supposed to be a high point of his comeback campaign for mayor of New York City.
It did not go particularly well. On the stage of a claustrophobic conference room in Midtown, the former governor flubbed two key lines, at one point promising to “combat affordability.” Many of the laborers paid by their unions to attend appeared uninterested, chatting in the back throughout the speech.
And when it was over, Mr. Cuomo bee-lined to his waiting Dodge Charger, punched the gas past waiting reporters and made an illegal right-on-red turn.
He made no further public appearances that day last month, even with Primary Day weeks away.
Mr. Cuomo, who dominated New York for a decade as governor, entered the crowded field of Democrats back in March with the force of a steamroller and a dominant lead in the polls. He wore down the Democratic establishment until it lined up behind him, strong-armed unions and seeded a record-shattering super PAC that would eventually spend $25 million.
But even some of his allies said that up close, the campaign sometimes looked more like an listing ship, steered by an aging candidate who never really seemed to want to be there and showed little interest in reacquainting himself with the city he hoped to lead.
New Yorkers took note. And on Tuesday, a campaign that Mr. Cuomo, 67, had hoped would deliver retribution four years after his humiliating resignation as governor ended in another thumping rebuke instead. Voters preferred Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old state lawmaker whom Mr. Cuomo dismissed a woefully unqualified, by a comfortable margin.
Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist whose relentless focus on affordability and infectious campaign presence electrified younger voters especially, certainly deserves a great deal of credit for his victory. But a dozen allies and even some of Mr. Cuomo’s own campaign advisers agreed in interviews that if he was looking to assess blame for a loss that could end his political career, he needed to look at himself.
“It was a creaky 1970s political machine versus a generational talent,” said Howard Glaser, a former Cuomo lieutenant who has since fallen out with Mr. Cuomo. “He just couldn’t see it.”
“He tried to force redemption on an unreceptive public,” Mr. Glaser added.
The assessment now hangs over Mr. Cuomo as he deliberates whether to renew his campaign in the fall against Mr. Mamdani on a third-party ballot line. Some wealthy New Yorkers alarmed by Mr. Mamdani’s left-wing views and others are urging Mr. Cuomo to keep running.
But many of his allies said there would be no real point in carrying on if Mr. Cuomo treated the general election like the primary. People who worked on his campaign, who insisted on anonymity for fear of retribution, used words like “entitled,” “arrogant” and “aloof” to describe the former governor’s attitude. Another called the campaign “astonishingly incompetent.”
Mr. Cuomo and his spokesman disputed that his campaign choices — good, bad or otherwise — would have changed the outcome.
Rich Azzopardi, the spokesman, said that the campaign met its turnout goals in key districts and voting groups, particularly among Black and older voters who had a yearslong connection with the former governor. The problem, he said, was that Mr. Mamdani “ran a campaign that managed to expand the electorate in such a way that no turnout model or poll was able to capture, while the rest of the field collapsed.”
In an interview, Mr. Cuomo dismissed the complaints of allies or advisers who said he should have shown up more around the city.
“None of these things explain the election outcome,” he said. “They are either untrue or petty incidents that are of no consequence.”
The contrast on the campaign trail between Mr. Cuomo and all the other candidates was stark.
Under the rationale of protecting his polling lead, Mr. Cuomo skipped candidate forums and dodged the press as his rivals threw themselves into the city’s maw with dizzying schedules. The former governor, who was born in Queens but lived most of his adult life in Albany and Westchester County, traveled in his Charger with an advance team putting out a buffer to prevent unwanted encounters with New Yorkers.
Mr. Cuomo hired a platoon of consultants, but still leaned heavily on his longtime confidante, Melissa DeRosa, who had never run a city race. Mr. Mamdani built an enthusiastic volunteer army to spread his message; Mr. Cuomo largely outsourced his get-out-the-vote operation to labor unions and $25-an-hour canvassers. And in the end, Mr. Cuomo’s message to an electorate hungry for change boiled down to, trust me, I’ve done this before.
Some allies said it all contributed to an unhelpful image.
“All of us have a blind spot,” said former Gov. David A. Paterson, who endorsed Mr. Cuomo. “His blind spot is that he doesn’t really connect particularly well with, just, people.”
For a time, it seemed Mr. Cuomo’s return to power was a certainty. He began plotting a path back almost as soon as he resigned in August 2021 after sexual harassment allegations. He spent tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds fighting to clear his name in court, as he hungrily waited for an opening for public office.
It arrived when Mayor Eric Adams was indicted on federal corruption charges and then persuaded the Trump administration to drop them. Mr. Cuomo, a master backroom deal-maker, exploited the opening deftly, nudging the mayor out of the primary while convincing business leaders, labor bosses and other Democrats that they should back him — if not out of excitement than out of a sense of inevitability.
“I feel like people misunderstood my $250,000 for Cuomo for real enthusiasm,” said Mark Gorton, an investor who gave $250,000 to a pro-Cuomo super PAC. “It was basically, ‘Oh, looks like Cuomo is coming back. We don’t want to be shut out. Let’s try and get on his good side.’”
At the time, polls showed Mr. Mamdani in second place, trailing by 20 points or more. Mr. Cuomo’s allies openly pined for a two-man showdown. They figured Mr. Mamdani’s socialist views and harsh criticism of Israel would act as a ceiling on his support.
It turned out to be a fundamental miscalculation. In a race where a large majority of voters said the city was headed in the wrong direction and where many Democrats were looking for a change, Mr. Cuomo struggled.
Mr. Cuomo launched his campaign with a 17-minute video, lecturing New Yorkers on how and why the city was spiraling to dark places. Mr. Mamdani’s videos showed him spiraling across the city, riding the subways, embracing working New Yorkers and running into the icy waters off Coney Island to dramatize his call to freeze rents.
Stuart Appelbaum, the head of the retail workers union that formally endorsed Mr. Cuomo at the minimum wage rally, credited Mr. Mamdani for running a campaign about the future. “Cuomo’s campaign reflected the reality of New York from decades ago,” he said.
Mr. Cuomo had another real problem. The same polls that showed him leading showed that he was also widely disliked by a large swath of Democratic primary voters who were either put off by his moderate policies, domineering style or past scandals.
By all appearances, Mr. Cuomo made little effort to reach them. Though it has been just four years since he resigned after 11 women accused him of sexual harassment, he offered no real contrition. He was not sorry, he said, because he had done nothing wrong. When he did venture to share a regret, he said he wished most that he had never resigned at all.
Some of the governor’s supporters and some of his own advisers had concerns about his low-key campaigning in real time, and pushed him to take up a more active public schedule.
But Mr. Cuomo rarely strayed from his comfort zone in the pulpits of Black churches or at senior centers.
Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, the head of the Brooklyn Democratic Party, said she pleaded with the campaign to have Mr. Cuomo visit a mosque to build ties to Muslim New Yorkers.
“That was a very big thing,” she said. “They told me he was scheduled to go to the mosque, and then I found out he didn’t. I was not too happy.”
Last Sunday, on the last day of early voting, Mr. Cuomo did show up at the Christian Cultural Center, a Black Brooklyn megachurch. But the Rev. A.R. Bernard, its pastor, said that after the former governor spoke “brilliantly” for five minutes, he left rather than mingling with congregants.
“He was not on the streets, where the people are,” he said. “Maybe we have to be careful when we assume that we’ve got enough reputation, history and gravitas to float through an election like this.”
Mr. Paterson described a different problem.
“Once I endorsed him, some of his campaign workers called me like I was an employee of his,” he said, demanding he show up in the spin-room of the final debate to promote Mr. Cuomo even though the candidate would not be there himself.
“I said, ‘this is not my role,’” Mr. Paterson said. “‘Thank you. Good night.’”
Theodore Schleifer contributed reporting.
Nicholas Fandos is a Times reporter covering New York politics and government.
The post Cuomo Doesn’t Blame Himself for Losing the Primary. Others Do. appeared first on New York Times.
