Andrew M. Cuomo, tieless but never casual, was making a familiar point in an unfamiliar place.
“You know, government is supposed to function,” Mr. Cuomo, the 67-year-old mayoral candidate, told Logan Paul, the 30-year-old influencer-wrestler-bro, seated recently in a luxury hotel room between at least six bottles of Paul-branded energy drinks and two Paul-branded snack packs. “It’s not a debating society.”
The host had something to add.
“EYOOOOOOOOOO.”
Suddenly Mr. Paul was shouting, transition-less, at his great many podcast listeners, smash-cutting to a prerecorded ad break about professional wrestling merch.
Thirty-two seconds later, Mr. Cuomo had the floor again.
“There was a great senator, Ted Kennedy, God rest his soul …”
There was a governor, Andrew Cuomo, God rest his decade ruling Albany, who would have sooner traveled the state by Winnebago with Bill de Blasio, his sworn nemesis, than submit to the sundry humiliations of the modern underdog campaign.
Now, straining to catch Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, in the closing stages of this mayoral race, Mr. Cuomo has shown far more hustle than he did in his languid primary bid — sitting with seniors and shock-jocks, semi-smiling for cellphone selfies, play-grabbing the shoulders of men with silver hair who said they remembered his father.
He has embraced schlocky A.I.-generated advertising to depict Mr. Mamdani as a secondary character from the Austin Powers franchise; adopted a high-pitched voice to play the role of New Yorker Grateful for Andrew Cuomo’s Construction Projects as Governor (“This is nice! We did this! I feel good about New York!”); commended Mr. Paul for his feats in hydration commerce (“I’m going to bring some bottles with me”).
What Mr. Cuomo has not done, what former aides have long said he is incapable of doing, is change.
To see him up close in the campaign’s final frames — pressing, pleading, seeing what sticks, calling his opponents meritless hacks and unbridled zealots while lamenting the bygone civility he ascribes to the less-than-utopian New York of his 1970s adolescence — is to see a man betting that this city has not changed as much as others seem to think it has, either.
“Our city,” he thundered last weekend in Queens, standing atop a flatbed truck draped in hybrid American-Israeli flags. “Our city.”
And doesn’t everyone remember? Don’t they remember when he was younger, when we all were, when he was in charge? Don’t they remember that New York — where he was feared and respected and feared and ascendant and feared and inevitable and occasionally beloved?
There is a reason his remarks lately have drifted toward a verbal slide show about his decades in public life:
“When I was H.U.D. secretary …”
“When I was governor …”
“I go out into the briefing room — CNN, live …”
He has made it plain that his chief regret about any behavior that led to his resignation as governor is that he resigned.
He has issued increasingly foreboding warnings about “that young man” before audiences who worry, too, that a victory for Mr. Mamdani would signal the end of something for them.
“He is an extremist!” Mr. Cuomo said in Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, looking out on a crowd of yarmulkes and a MAGA cap or two.
“Who’s the oligarch?” Mr. Cuomo asked at a senior center in Harlem, speaking beside a headshot of Barack Obama as older Black voters urged him on. (Mr. Cuomo’s $4.9 million in income last year did not preclude his hyping Mr. Mamdani’s family wealth.)
“This election is a choice,” he told a business group in Midtown, “between capitalism and socialism.”
Yet for him, the race remains less a choice than a referendum: Andrew Cuomo or not Andrew Cuomo; unlikely redemption or another unwanted retreat.
Aides and allies used to invoke an iron rule of Cuomo scholarship: Since his failed first campaign for governor in 2002, he had resolved to never again risk such embarrassment, arranging to run only in elections he viewed as virtual certainties.
That he abandoned that principle after his stunning primary defeat in June is as instructive as anything, those who know him say — the crackling id behind everything he is saying and doing to reverse that recent history before it can happen again.
“He lives for political power,” Frank Seddio, a former Brooklyn Democratic chairman who has known Mr. Cuomo since the 1970s, said after the two campaigned together in southeast Brooklyn last week. This was a compliment.
And so, with some polls tightening and Mr. Cuomo’s rhetoric unbound, his last days on the trail have felt at times like a collective spasming of the old guard — or a proper countermovement, admirers hope — as a new would-be political order threatens their grip and his relevance.
Outside his event with Mr. Seddio, Cuomo supporters and backers of Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, bickered on the sidewalk between a Chinese takeout spot and a vape shop, before agreeing that they should all probably leave the city together if Mr. Mamdani wins.
In Queens, hats and signs specking an outdoor crowd of more than 100 seemed as good a marker as any of Mr. Cuomo’s closing messages: “Ready on Day One.” “Mamdummy.” “Don’t Kvetch. Vote.”
There and elsewhere, Mr. Cuomo has spoken often of his father, Mario M. Cuomo, who, like his son, won three terms as governor. He suggested the elder Mr. Cuomo, who died in 2015, would not recognize a New York that elected Mr. Mamdani.
“He sheds a tear,” Mr. Cuomo said, “that we need to be here.”
The younger Mr. Cuomo can likewise sound flabbergasted at his current lot — the Democratic son of a Democratic stalwart sitting for a Fox News interview as a third-party challenger with an I-for-independent identifier on the chyron, emphasizing his own fiscal discipline in a triple-bank-shot bid for conservative votes.
At nearly every appearance, though, he continues to argue he is the true Democrat.
“I didn’t change,” Mr. Cuomo told Mr. Paul, noting that he was once caricatured as a “crazy liberal” and is now considered a moderate. “The planet shifted.”
Mr. Cuomo’s spokesman, Rich Azzopardi, said that the campaign had course-corrected after a lackluster Democratic primary effort without altering the fundamental political product on offer.
“We’ve never tried to sell him as anybody but himself,” he said. “Wouldn’t be right to the voters.”
What has changed most is what Mr. Cuomo seems willing to put up with, at least in the interim.
His relative media blitz in recent weeks — after Mr. Mamdani’s success with an everywhere-all-at-once strategy in the primary — has compelled Mr. Cuomo to navigate the sort of unwieldy interactions he once tended to avoid.
He has laughed along with a right-wing radio host who said that Mr. Mamdani would cheer another 9/11-style terrorist attack on New York City.
He has smiled tightly through a procession of unflattering questions from the women of “The View”:
“Why aren’t you doing better?” (“Yeah, good question.”)
“Why are you losing to a democratic socialist?” (“It is a very good question.”)
What of the sexual harassment allegations? (“It’s a good question.”)
Other stops have been more comfortable for him.
Last week, Mr. Cuomo visited an office building on Park Avenue to address the Association for a Better New York, a business group, and deliver some attendant reminders.
“Remember Amazon!” Mr. Cuomo said, recalling left-wing opposition to the company’s planned corporate campus in Queens years ago.
“A.O.C.,” an attendee whispered gravely to her seatmate in the back. (Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a high-profile supporter of Mr. Mamdani, helped lead the backlash against Amazon.)
It was a room full of people whom Mr. Cuomo had known and teased and sometimes thrilled and often tormented, people who knew him when he was permitted to thrill and to torment with civic impunity.
The session was moderated by Steven Rubenstein, the association’s chairman and the son of Howard Rubenstein, the New York public relations titan who died in 2020. Mr. Rubenstein asked Mr. Cuomo how he planned to negotiate governing partnerships amid complicated relationships across Washington and Albany.
“Love,” Mr. Cuomo deadpanned. “Give love, get love, circle of love.”
This, understandably, was a laugh line.
But as he outlined the future he imagined, Mr. Cuomo lingered on the New York he remembered.
His father and Mr. Rubenstein’s father had “made this place,” Mr. Cuomo said. This was their city.
“I will be damned,” he vowed, “if Steven Rubenstein and Andrew Cuomo are going to leave their children a New York that is anything less than they inherited.”
And if he was wrong about all that — about what his city thought it needed; about what awaited New York if he lost; about what awaited him — that was not something that Mr. Cuomo seemed ready to contemplate yet.
“I’m afraid for New York City,” he said. “And I am New York City.”
Matt Flegenheimer is a correspondent for The Times focusing on in-depth profiles of powerful figures.
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