Andrew Cuomo is a Nihilist Who Hates New York City
Near the beginning of Andrew Cuomo's mayoral campaign, an eagle eyed observer noticed his car parked illegally and snapped a photo of it for social media. It wasn’t the worst of Andrew Cuomo’s offenses—not by a longshot. But it was indicative of something important about him. There is no privilege or position or aspect of power that he thinks he’s not entitled to.
New Yorkers are accustomed to police parking illegally, and it’s also offensive when they do it. It indicates that they think the law does not apply to them, that they can enforce it but are not subject to it. This is an authoritarian impulse of course, but it’s also just unbridled arrogance. It says I’m more important than you unwashed masses who are going to pay my salary with your taxes and when I slum down here from Westchester, I will park wherever the fuck I want. Abuse of authority is a perennial problem with the police but the incredible thing about Cuomo doing it is that at the moment he doesn’t even have any authority to abuse, which takes a whole other level of hubris.
Part of the reason he’s unlikely to have any authority after November’s election is that this incredible sense of entitlement led him to make a series of mistakes during the primary. He barely campaigned because he thought he had it in the bag, and assumed his big dollar donations would subsidize enough in ad spend to carry him across the finish line. He assumed that as former governor, everyone was already aware of who he was and what he would do as mayor, and he thought he was above the kind of pavement pounding that candidates normally have to do to talk to voters in person. He didn’t think he needed to do any of that, and didn’t break a sweat trying to.
So he was blindsided by Zohran Mamdani’s epic win in the primary. Not content to lose gracefully, he then ignored the obvious voter mandate and chose to run as an independent. In a mealy mouthed way, he acknowledged that he didn’t do enough to ensure the success of his own campaign—a realization that was probably driven home by his disappointed donors. But he doesn’t seem to understand Mamdani’s appeal to voters and is awkwardly trying to ape the tactics Mamdani has used but without understanding why they work. His to-camera videos highlight his stiffness and arrogance. He radiates annoyance at having to do this sort of thing and when he tries to feign genuine concern for voters, he speaks as if they’re an alien species of fearful creatures in a hellscape version of New York City that exists only in right wing fever dreams.
There’s a non-zero probability that this is how Cuomo himself thinks about NYC. He radiates contempt for it at every public appearance, and can only describe it as a problem to be fixed. He seems far more comfortable hovering over a Fox News chyron chatting up other insufferable angry white guys than he does for even five minutes on an actual New York City street. I have very few nice things to say about Curtis Sliwa–he seems to be good with cats?--but I don’t doubt that he actually likes and cares about New York City because he doesn’t seem to think that being out in the community is beneath him, and visibly relishes it. This doesn’t qualify him to be mayor, but it’s table stakes if you’re running.
Cuomo doesn’t clear that bar. But worse, he can’t find values-aligned voters, because he has no discernible values. He apologized for sexually harassing women while he was in office, and when he realized his actions might be disqualifying, he walked back his apology, seemingly under the impression that by doing so, he was magically erasing history. When a right wing podcaster suggested that Zohran Mamdani would have cheered the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Cuomo laughed and said that was another problem to discuss, not just going along with bigotry, but actively affirming it. (It’s hard not to think about John McCain here, who, when asked bigoted question about Barack Obama at a town hall, told the woman she was wrong.) Cuomo considers himself a liberal, but couldn’t even manage to push back against in-your-face bigotry. In his run as an independent, he has adopted right wing talking points about safety and crime, and when asked a softball question about whether he preferred the Mets or the Yankees, he seemed afraid to answer without polling. There is no position on which he is not mutable; he can’t even pick a goddamned sports team to root for. This is not just moral vacuousness, it’s straight-up nihilism in the service of acquiring power for its own sake.
Perhaps from a place of desperation, he went the offensive against Mamdani early on with a line of rhetoric that can only be described as projection, casting Mamdani as a rich kid living in a fancy apartment while preaching some imaginary version of democratic socialism that Cuomo seems to believe is a vow of austerity. In reality, Mamdani lives in a $2300 a month rent stabilized apartment, in an outer borough — relatively modest housing for a married couple in their 30s, in a city where half of the city’s rental units are rent stabilized. In fact, Cuomo has insinuated that Mamdani lives in a rent controlled apartment, which is not remotely the same as a rent stabilized apartment. For those not in New York City: stabilization does not prevent landlords from raising rent, it only caps the extent to which they can do it, and most rentals in New York City are rent stabilized. Rent controlled apartments account for less than 1 percent of the city’s rental housing stock, and in order to qualify, you have to have been living in your apartment since 1971–twenty years before Mamdani was born. There are people who abuse rent control by allowing their adult children and other relatives to move into their rent controlled spaces, but they do it at risk of being caught, and in any case, Zohran Mamdani does not live in and has never lived in a rent controlled space. There is nothing special about Mamdani’s apartment. Which raises two possibilities: one is that Cuomo doesn’t know the difference between the two, which strains credulity, since he was the head of Housing and Urban Development under Bill Clinton, and the other is that he knows the difference and is relying on voter not to, and is willing to lie to them to smear Mamdani.
It’s not the only lie he’s repeatedly told about his opponent, either. In repeated interviews and in the mayoral debates he has asserted that the mayoralty would be Mamdani’s first job. Zohran Mamdani is a 34 year old man, not someone who just finished an internship. He has been an assemblyman, and relevant to the central promises of his campaign, worked as an eviction counselor and has seen the housing crisis up close in a way that Cuomo probably never has, even when he was the director of HUD. The repeated insinuation that Mamdani is just some kid is false, and ironically, very very childish. A guy was handing out Cuomo fliers (“palm cards” in campaign parlance) in my neighborhood the other day and Cuomo’s big message, worth an expensive print run apparently, was “The mayor of New York City is not an entry level job.” Talking about a candidate in his mid-30s as if he’s a child might win Cuomo some voters who resent anyone younger than 65 but to the rest of us, it just looks like Cuomo has no ammunition–and no respect for younger voters.
This is not surprising because Cuomo has little respect for voters in general, and historically his method of dealing with them is talking to them as remotely as possible, largely through paid ads. Being cloistered upstate always worked to his advantage because he’s a terrible retail politician and his entitlement and bullying tendencies show up when he’s left to his own devices and unscripted. In this scenario, voters are merely an inconvenient speedbump on the way to Cuomo’s ascension to the mayoralty. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo speculated that this was because Cuomo viewed the mayoralty as a step down from being the governor of New York, so he thought it was his to lose. But I’m not sure that really captures the ways in which the mayoral position in NYC is not a normal mayoralty. It’s nationally visible in a way that the gubernatorial office, sequestered in Albany out of the media spotlight, simply is not. I think it’s more likely that he thought of it as a lateral move that allowed him to potentially discard his Albany baggage—multiple accusations of sexual harassment, accusations of covering up nursing home deaths, or as social media users and Republican opponent Curtis Sliwa put it, “slapping fannies, and killing grannies”.
Cuomo has always had the persona of the bully and in some cases voters read it as a tough guy persona that seemed on brand for New York. But up against Mamdani, whose enthusiasm and joy are qualities that bully types often mistake for weakness, he simply looks angry and old. And Mamdani can both stand the heat and is comfortable in the kitchen. He has attacked Cuomo’s record, his undisclosed conflicts of interest, and played up the sleazy aspects of his personal and professional behavior with a tongue in cheek demand to release his client list, a la Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.
If Cuomo wanted to get away from these associations, he did himself no favors by having a call with Donald Trump that seemed to involve strategizing against Mamdani. Cuomo is a former lawyer for a firm that worked for the Trump Organization and while they don’t appear to be close, this does nothing to reassure New Yorkers who want a mayor who will stand against Trump and his NYC hostile policies.
But Cuomo seems to believe that none of this matters, and that the mayoralty is his birthright. In response to a broadside by Mamdani’s camp, he tweeted out “I am Andrew, son of Mario, grandson of Andrea” as if cosplaying a Medieval adventure series in which he was the protagonist, thrusting a sword into the sky as his legions of followers genuflected in admiration for his courage and, well, their respect for his dad.
This was not as impressive as he probably thought it was.
It was concise and to the point though: no upstart what’s-his-name and however-it’s-pronounced was going to upstage the rightful heir to the primary office chair at Gracie Mansion. Why couldn’t he just call this pipsqueak a communist already and be done with it?
The reaction from Mamdani supporters was equal part mirth and vomit emojis. It’s true that New Yorkers have elected a lot of aggressive mayors with personality defects. (We arguably have one right now.) But they don’t react well to power grabs “because I said so and I deserve it.” That’s part of why they rejected Trump himself so aggressively. Especially with Mamdani as a foil, Cuomo’s tough guy act looks like a perverse alchemy of toxic masculinity and desperation.
And as I wrote a few years ago, that reminds me of another politician New Yorkers rejected: Donald Trump.
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As always, thanks for reading,
Elizabeth