New York City

Good Riddance, Andrew Cuomo

The former governor had a bad record, a worse attitude, and zero vision.

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Andrew Cuomo | John Angelillo/UPI/Newscom
(John Angelillo/UPI/Newscom)

The results are in, and Zohran Mamdani will be the next mayor of New York City, after winning a raw majority of the vote and easily besting former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa.

Over at Cuomo's election night party, independent journalist Michael Tracey captured one of the former governor's supporters engaging in some blunt analysis of the results.

"Hey Curtis [Sliwa], you're a fucking scumbag like I said all along," he says in the video. "You split the fucking vote."

This unnamed "Cuomosexual" wasn't alone in expressing these sentiments.

Hear, for instance, former Republican Congressman and pardoned fraudster George Santos saying something similar:

To be sure, neither are official campaign spokesmen. But both the level of their rage and their target for it says a lot about the purely negative pitch of the Cuomo's mayoral campaign and why that proved so completely unconvincing for voters.

In both the primary and the general election, Cuomo never seemed to be able to get beyond the idea that all he had to do to win was point at the other candidates and say, "you're really going to vote for them?"

On election night, that proved woefully insufficient.

To start with some pure arithmetic, contrary to our video subject, it couldn't matter less that Sliwa "split the vote." Mamdani is walking away from this election with a raw majority, meaning that if even every single Sliwa voter lined up behind Cuomo, he'd still have lost.

More substantively, Cuomo was never able to articulate why people should line up behind him besides the fact that he wasn't Mamdani.

The obvious strategy for an experienced politician running against a young, inexperienced ideologue is to emphasize one's own record of achievement and administrative acumen.

But Cuomo couldn't convincingly do this, given that he spent the last year or so of his governorship stumbling from one incompetence scandal after another, before eventually resigning in response to sexual harassment allegations.

It was Cuomo's administration that forced nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients, and then tried to cover up the deaths that resulted from this deeply mistaken policy.

It was under his governorship that New York had the worst-administered emergency rental assistance program in the country.

It's hard to argue that you are a steady, capable alternative to the starry-eyed socialist when your administration can't do something as simple as not recklessly endanger senior citizens or cut checks to people.

Even less helpful was that Cuomo had seemingly no positive agenda for New York City to counter Mamdani's simple, catchy (and to be sure, ill-conceived) plans to make New York affordable with free buses and free childcare.

Mamdani was, famously, the candidate of "freeze the rent." Cuomo rightly argued this was an irresponsible policy that would push more landlords into insolvency. And yet the governor had no plan to improve the sorry state of New York's rent-stabilized housing stock either.

His campaign's housing policy platform was a bunch of AI-generated pablum. In an effort to score a cheap hit on Mamdani for living in a rent-stabilized unit, Cuomo proposed "Zohran's law" that would, if anything, make life harder for the owners of rent-stabilized housing.

It bears repeating that Cuomo also signed the 2019 rent law that has done so much to damage the financial position of New York City housing.

With no decent record to run on and no positive visions to pitch, Cuomo fell back on aristocratic entitlement. If you didn't like Mamdani, you had to vote for him as the only realistic alternative. Sliwa voters weren't worth convincing; they simply owed loyalty to Cuomo.

This was hardly a winning attitude. Now that's failed, his supporters are directing their rage at Sliwa for not simply giving up, instead of Mamdani for actually winning.

Cuomo's faults obviously don't mitigate any of Mamdani's own flaws, to be sure. The mayor-elect's remarks during his victory speech about how there's no problem too large or small for the government to solve are alarming, to say the least.

While fiscal realities will do a lot of work to check Mamdani's ideas, one shouldn't expect city policy to improve during his tenure.

It's not good to see Mamdani win. But, as a consolation prize, it is good to see Cuomo lose.

Whatever else one wants to say about them and their choices, New York voters were right to decide that they don't want a disgraced politician with a bad record, a worse attitude, and no vision running their city government.