Andrew Cuomo leads NYC mayoral race despite past controversies

Former Governor Andrew Cuomo leads New York’s mayoral race just four years after resigning in scandal. Photo / Getty Images

The room pulsed with hundreds of hotel, casino and maintenance workers wearing “Union Strength Is Built at the Ballot Box” T-shirts like armour against an uncertain economic future.

They chanted loudly for the man they once helped push to resign from office in disgrace.

“CUOMO! CUOMO! CUOMO!”

Former Governor Andrew Cuomo stepped onto the stage and welcomed the two powerful unions gathered before him.

Four years ago, the workers and their leaders joined a widespread Democratic movement to force Cuomo out of the governor’s mansion amid allegations of sexual harassment from 11 women.

But on this day in June, they were trying to help him become New York’s next mayor.

Such reversals are fuelling an unlikely resurrection for Cuomo, 67, who polls show is favoured in tomorrow’s Democratic primary.

Although there is a segment of New Yorkers who will never again support him, many others have set aside their concerns about the former governor, seeing him as the best bet to fight United States President Donald Trump and reverse Democrats’ woes, according to interviews with more than two dozen voters, elected officials, and political operatives involved in the race.

Standing in Cuomo’s way is Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist state assemblyman, a relative neophyte running to Cuomo’s left who is making a late surge with help from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Democrat, New York) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (Independent, Vermont).

Mamdani has drawn enthusiastic support from small-dollar donors and volunteers, and on social media.

The race is exposing the raw emotional battles undergirding the Democratic Party’s identity crisis over generational power, ideological control, the legacy of the #MeToo movement - and most profoundly, how to counter Trump.

“We are scared, and we need someone like Cuomo to stand up and be the armour guard for us against Trump,” said Wendy Williams, a teacher who went to see Cuomo at a Harlem church this month.

Of the sexual harassment allegations and accusations of corruption and self-dealing against Cuomo over the years, Williams said: “Politicians have been corrupt forever. And as for the women, everyone deserves a second chance.”

It’s been less than four years since Cuomo left Albany isolated and rejected by the Democratic establishment, a community that essentially raised Cuomo, a son of former New York governor Mario Cuomo.

But 2021 was a different moment for Cuomo and for the country:

- before he mounted an aggressive defence strategy against his accusers;

- before current Mayor Eric Adams was charged with bribery, wire fraud and seeking illegal campaign donations, and then met with Trump and escaped criminal prosecution;

- and before Trump captured 30% of the 2024 presidential vote in New York City, higher than any Republican nominee since George H.W. Bush in 1988.

The increase was largely driven by depressed turnout for Vice-President Kamala Harris, but it meant every county in the New York metropolitan area swung towards Trump compared 2020. .

Particularly worrying for Democrats was the nature of Trump’s gains, in working-class communities and immigrant neighbourhoods in central Queens and the Bronx - traditional Democratic mainstays.

Trump - whose persona was created in this city’s tabloids and high rises - hovers over the election.

His gains in New York came in a city where he was ordered to pay US$83 million ($138m) to author E. Jean Carroll after being found liable for sexually abusing and defaming her.

His presidential victory, coming after numerous sexual misconduct allegations he has denied from Carroll and others, prompted broader questions about voters’ views of sexual harassment seven years after the #MeToo movement erupted.

Cuomo was contrite when he stepped down as governor but has since changed his posture towards the women who alleged he harassed them, adopting an aggressive and expensive legal strategy.

His legal fees cost New York taxpayers roughly US$60m , including those related to sexual harassment allegations and his handling of the pandemic, when he came under criticism for significantly undercounting nursing home deaths in public data.

Cuomo has long maintained that New York State Attorney-General Letitia James’s report concluding that he had sexually harassed at least 11 women was “political” and “false”. The US Justice Department in 2024 identified two more women as having been subjected to sexual harassment as part of a settlement with Cuomo’s successor.

He said in a debate in June that authorities who had looked into the cases “found absolutely nothing”.

Cuomo countersued one of his accusers for defamation, alleging that she harmed him personally and professionally by making false accusations of sexual harassment.

“Mr Cuomo has been cleared of nothing, and his claims to the contrary are Trumpian propaganda,” said Mariann Wang, a lawyer for several women involved in civil sexual harassment suits against Cuomo.

“The facts are these: Three government investigations have found him to be a serial sexual harasser. Of the three civil cases arising from his conduct, for which he has spent many millions in taxpayer money to defend himself, one was settled for almost half a million dollars, and the other two are ongoing.”

Lisa Haines, a consultant in Brooklyn, said she voted for Cuomo as governor but would never do so again given the allegations against him. She sees him as a prime example of how Democrats don’t live by their principles.

“Aren’t we supposed to stand for decency?” she asked last week as she left her local polling location, where she voted early. She said she ranked Mamdani first on her ballot.

In such an overwhelmingly Democratic city, the winner of the primary, which is being conducted under a relatively new ranked-choice voting system, will be seen as the strong favourite in the November election.

But complicating matters, both Cuomo and Mamdani could continue running even if they lose, with Cuomo expected to rebrand as an independent and Mamdani potentially as the candidate for the left-leaning Working Families Party.

Adams, the incumbent, chose not to run in the Democratic primary and would face off against both men in the general election as an independent.

Of the 11 candidates in the primary, City Comptroller Brad Lander is far behind in third place, but his arrest by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents outside an immigration court last week drew attention to his liberal candidacy.

In the closing arguments of his campaign, Lander appeared with two former Cuomo aides who had accused him of sexual harassment. “No one would let their daughter work for him,” Lander said.

Cuomo outperforms Mamdani among black, older and non-university-educated Democrats, according to the latest Marist poll. Mamdani has higher support with younger voters, Latinos, and those who identify as very liberal.

The ex-governor is backed by the most well-funded super PAC in the city’s history, with US$24m in donations, some from billionaires like Bill Ackman who have also backed Trump.

Still, Cuomo is relying on voters’ fear of Trump to consolidate support, including among establishment figures such as Representative James Clyburn (South Carolina), one of the country’s most prominent black Democrats, who has endorsed him, and former President Bill Clinton, who declared his support yesterday.

Cuomo’s campaign “is the latest example of billionaires and corporations trying to buy an election”, Mamdani said.

“These are the donors who do not want me to be mayor of this city because I will tax them to make this city more affordable, and I will stand up to the very administration in Washington, DC, that they funded.”

Cuomo has called Mamdani’s inexperience a danger to the city and mocked him for passing only three bills in state government.

Trump “would go through Mr Mamdani like a hot knife through butter”, Cuomo said at a recent debate.

He recited a list of things Mamdani had not accomplished.

“He’s never dealt with the city council. He’s never dealt with the Congress. He’s never dealt with the state legislature. He’s never negotiated with a union. He’s never built anything.

“He’s never dealt with a natural emergency. He’s never dealt with a hurricane, with a flood, etc. He’s never done any of the essentials. And now you have Donald Trump on top of all of that.”

Mamdani responded with his own list. “I’ve never had to resign in disgrace,” he said.

“I have never hounded the 13 women who credibly accused me of sexual harassment. I have never sued for their gynaecologic records. And I have never done these things because I am not you, Mr Cuomo.”

Both men have painted Trump - with his immigration raids and threats against liberal big cities - as an existential threat to New York.

But everyday municipal problems still dominate the race. New York lost 500,000 residents during the pandemic; voters have lingering Covid-era concerns such as subway safety, homelessness, affordable housing and schools.

Ranked-choice voting allows voters to choose up to five candidates. Mamdani and Lander have cross-endorsed to try to combine their support and edge out Cuomo. They and other candidates are urging their supporters to leave Cuomo off their ballots.

Cuomo still maintained a healthy lead over Mamdani in the June Marist poll, with 38% of likely voters planning to rank Cuomo first, versus 27% for Mamdani. Marist simulated that Cuomo would win the race by 10 points after seven rounds of voting.

But the “anybody but Cuomo” strategy from other candidates - and Mamdani’s upward momentum in the polls - make the race less predictable.

Mamdani has focused his campaign on making New York affordable: freezing rent on stabilised apartments, making buses free and creating a department of community safety.

But as a Muslim who advocates for Palestinian rights - and who declined in an interview to condemn the phrase “globalise the intifada”, which some Jews see as a rallying cry for violence against them and which Palestinians see as an embrace of their struggle for a homeland - he has faced attacks, many of them funded by Cuomo and his allies.

In the union hall appearance this month, Cuomo looked out at the windowless room, adjusted his microphone and delivered his stump speech.

While his father was an inspired and moving orator, Cuomo is a mechanic at heart, according to aides, eager to dive into the details.

He talked about his desire to fix the city, citing his track record with big infrastructure projects: rebuilding LaGuardia Airport, extending the Second Avenue subway and building Moynihan Train Hall.

But he had another message as well.

“A Democratic primary is also an opportunity for the Democratic Party to look into the mirror and take an honest stock of where we are as Democrats and what we have done as Democrats,” Cuomo continued.

People did not vote for Trump because they wanted him to be president, Cuomo said. “I believe what they said was: I’m disappointed in the Democratic Party.”

YES, the crowd yelled.

You see it here in New York, he said, where 400,000 fewer Democrats came out to vote in the election. “Four hundred thousand!” Cuomo repeated. “Why? Because the Democratic Party lost its identity and lost its connection to who it really is. The Democratic Party lost its soul.”

The room erupted.

A good number of Cuomo’s current backers had urged him to leave the governor’s office after James’ report.

Some of the shift is self-protective. Cuomo is well known for remembering his enemies, and few politicians have proved eager to cross him. But some say they are prioritising Cuomo’s effectiveness as a manager over his past baggage.

Jessica Ramos is a liberal Democratic state senator running for mayor and a longtime Cuomo critic, who last year called him “the same remorseless bully who sexually harassed all those women, covered up the deaths of all those grandparents”.

She recently endorsed him, effectively acknowledging that her own campaign was unlikely to succeed.

It was an especially hard decision to make as a rape survivor, she said, but added that the city is facing too many emergencies and needs someone with Cuomo’s experience and stature to manage its complex bureaucracy and deflect Trump.

Other lawmakers have made a similar calculation.

“Four years is a lifetime in politics,” said Representative Ritchie Torres, another New York Democrat who called for Cuomo to resign in 2021 but has endorsed him for mayor, touting his ability to rebuild a big-tent party and deliver for working-class people.

“This is an election about progress over purity,” he said.