If anyone had dared to tell me last winter that I would eventually vote to make Andrew Cuomo New York’s next mayor, I would have shot back, “Never.”
I was still thoroughly disgusted with the former governor, had applauded his forced 2021 exit from Albany and saw no evidence he was doing anything to make himself fit to hold public office again.
In the three-plus years since his resignation, he had continued to play defense and attack his critics, including me, but had done nothing to demonstrate he had learned anything or accepted any responsibility for his historic collapse.
In his public remarks and private conversations, there were no apologies for the heartless nursing home debacle he caused during the COVID pandemic.
Nor was there remorse over the finding that he was guilty of sexually harassing 13 women.
I’m voting for Andy
He never said so directly, but he seemed to believe that if he got back into politics, enough voters enamored of the Cuomo name would give him a second chance, even if he didn’t show them why he deserved it.
My view was that the nursing home deaths and the harassment findings probably marked the end of any chance to get back into the game.
In fact, he had become so toxic in his own party that not a single fellow Democrat anywhere defended him as his troubles piled up.
His reflexive defense against criticism — “it’s all politics” — wasn’t working since it was his own party tearing him down.
Even then-President Joe Biden joined the chorus in calling for his head.
Facing certain impeachment and removal by the Legislature, the governor threw in the towel and skulked out of town, presumably, in political terms, a dead man walking.
But fate gave him a new chance.
And fate has forced me to see him from a different perspective.
The result is that I do indeed plan to vote for him next Tuesday.
Getting here has been a long, bumpy process driven by facts and the poor alternative choices in the race for City Hall.
The campaign has evolved in a way that those of us who care about our remarkable metropolis no longer have the luxury of seeing Cuomo only as the sum of his misdeeds and failures in Albany.
The facts command us to see him as the only candidate who can steer the SS Gotham away from the approaching iceberg.
This is an SOS moment.
Anyone failing to realize that at this late date is missing the key fact: Perfection is not on the ballot, but disaster is.
Unilateral power
Its name is Zohran Mamdani.
The question of whether New York would ever recover from a Mamdani mayoralty is not only a fair one.
It is essential because he would be in a position to do enormous damage and turn back the clock on decades of progress, especially on public safety and quality of life issues.
As Mayor Adams told me recently, the danger lies in how much unilateral power a mayor has.
Mamdani could order the NYPD to ignore, say, shoplifting or street prostitution.
He could allow the homeless to live on the subways or set up street encampments in residential neighborhoods.
The imposition of socialist and antisemitic indoctrination in schools would also be within his realm.
Those abominations should focus the attention of the anti-Cuomo holdouts on the fact that he is the only candidate remaining in the three-man field who has sufficient experience in leadership and the views needed to guide the city’s massive bureaucracy and 300,000 employees on a sensible, affordable course.
He is also the only one who can beat Mamdani, a fact that has been obvious to me since the June primary, where Mamdani beat him by 12 points.
That marked a final nail in hopes that a moderate Dem other than Cuomo would emerge or that Adams could make a comeback.
Meanwhile, the coronation of Curtis Sliwa by GOP leaders, without a primary, proved the insular party is still content with putting up a protest candidate who is unelectable.
Sliwa lost in a blowout to Adams four years ago, getting just 28% of the vote.
This time, his only possible impact is to be a spoiler and siphon off enough of the vote to allow Mamdani to win with a plurality.
By far, Cuomo would be the best mayor of the three.
The right priorities
Even an abbreviated list of his priorities versus those of Mamdani illustrate why I will have no hesitancy in checking his name on my ballot.
The former governor pledges to hire 5,000 new police officers to bolster the shrinking NYPD.
For the same reason, he also vows to raise starting salaries.
He also wants to maintain mayoral control of city education, a power that numerous mayors before him fought to win.
On those issues, Mamdani wants to hog-tie the NYPD and turn the schools over to the tender mercies of the rapacious United Federation of Teachers.
And those are only two of many areas where Cuomo and Mamdani are at odds.
To say the differences don’t matter is to be willfully blind to reality.
Cuomo’s reemergence and my decision to support him have driven home an old truism about politics and politicians: No matter how they start, elections in the end are always about comparisons and hard choices.
This year’s race confirms the point — with an exclamation mark.
As 2025 started, I didn’t take Cuomo seriously because I assumed there would be far better options for City Hall.
That was my big mistake.
None emerged, and so here we are.
Pied-piper
Early polls showed Cuomo with a big lead, but I always believed his support was soft, and that much of it was based on name recognition.
That turned out to be correct as Mamdani surged, and won handily through the radical left’s manipulation of the ranked-choice system, which steered the votes of all the other candidates to him.
That victory spotlights the danger he represents.
In my 50 years of writing about politics, I have rarely seen a candidate so unworthy of the office he seeks.
Initially, I dismissed him as too young and too unserious for the heavy lifting the City Hall job requires.
Most Dems did, too, as he was stuck in single digits in the primary polls for months, while Cuomo looked to be coasting to victory.
But as the campaign wore on, it became clear that Mamdani is a smooth-talking, pied-piper for many young voters.
But the world view he is selling would destroy virtually everything good about New York.
He was raised by his parents to hate America, our history and our institutions, and many of his associates are cut from the same radical cloth.
His election would be far more than just a mistake.
It would be a tragedy.