Who Is This For?
It’s one of those beautiful early spring days in New York City where everything feels alive and you can fool yourself into thinking it’s time to dress like it’s summer, and I spent my afternoon walking around my neighborhood listening to Andrew Cuomo’s 17 minute announcement that he is running for Mayor. As I walked past happy New Yorkers and new stores, his voice came over my AirPods and said:
We know that the first step towards solving a problem is having the strength, having the courage to recognize it, and we know that today our New York City is in trouble. You feel it when you walk down the street and try not to make eye contact with a mentally ill homeless person, or when the anxiety rises up in your chest as you’re walking down into the subway. You see it in the empty storefronts, the graffiti, the grime, the migrant influx, the random violence. The city just feels threatening, out of control and in crisis.
The contrast between the city as he describes it and the city that I inhabit could not have been more vast, and it got me wondering — who is Andrew Cuomo running for?
His full announcement is an odd thing, an attempt to paint himself as a progressive while also sounding like he only learns about the city by reading the New York Post, going so far as to explicitly argue that it’s progressive to oppose recent reforms pushed for by progressives, like bail reform. In a lot of ways, the answer to that question is that he’s running for older Democrats who are worried that All Of This Is Going A Little Too Far while insisting that they’re still as liberal as they come. You can see him going for this group in the speech by leaning heavily on COVID leadership and the specter of Trump, even with his abysmal record on nursing home deaths in 2020. He’s the candidate for people who think the City needs a stern dad to bring order, even as crime continues to fall.
Another piece of the answer is tied up in the last guy who tried to govern as the city’s stern dad, Eric Adams, or rather his absence in the election. The Democratic establishment in the city needs a candidate they can lean on to get their people in city departments, and Eric Adams is no longer that guy. He likely wasn’t going to be that guy after his corruption charges in 2024, but he’s certainly not going to be that guy after cowardly selling out the city’s migrant population to President Trump to try to save his own skin.
(I should add that Cuomo’s got similar concerns about the migrant population as the man he’s trying to replace, making me wonder how different having him as mayor would be for Trump than having a clearly compromised Adams. It’s a question someone should ask him!)
The giveaway that Cuomo was moving into the establishment role came last week when Henry Butler, the current vice chair of the Brooklyn Dems who unsuccessfully ran for city council in 2021 against BLM protestor Chi Ossé, endorsed him before he even announced he was running, along with a number of other endorsements. They need a guy, and Cuomo’s their great white hope to continue to control City Hall over a progressive or an outsider. We are, of course, talking about the man who endorsed the IDC and gave the GOP control over the state senate to keep progressives outside the party establishment from gaining too much power.
But I don’t think that’s the actual answer to the question of who Andrew Cuomo’s running for, because that’s been clear from the start — he’s running for Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo’s spent the last four years clearly bitter that he was removed from power for being a serial sexual harasser, and he sees running for Mayor as his big comeback. That’s why he’s trying to run a city that he governed as though he hated during his term as governor, it’s a way to prove to his ego that people still like him, even thought he left office in shame and had massive unfavorables as recently as last year.
If Cuomo’s running for Cuomo, then one thing is also very clear. He’s not running for me or you. I love this city, there is nowhere in the world that I would rather live and if I’m lucky enough, I’ll get to die here too. I want a mayoral race where we can have conversations about how best to fix the city’s problems, problems that have grown worse under Eric Adams. What frustrates me the most about Cuomo entering the race is that instead of being able to have that conversation, we’re going to spend the time talking about fucking Andrew Cuomo because that’s what Andrew Cuomo wants us to do. We all deserve better than this race, and the city deserves better. Don’t rank Andrew Cuomo.
