The case against Andrew Cuomo

As explained in a fake conversation with a hypothetical NYC voter

The municipal election in New York City is here -- early voting is now open; cast your ballot before the day ends on Tuesday! -- and there is a strong possibility that Andrew Cuomo is going to be our next mayor.

I think this would be an unmitigated disaster for New Yorkers, for the Democratic Party, and for the country.

With just a few days left before polls close, I wanted to make it clear why.

You can many many read pieces from online voices, from the mainstream press, from left wing outlets, and from dedicated New York City publications.

For my money, the greatest anti-Cuomo piece of writing is from 2021 by

Rebecca Traister

, who connects the dots between how Cuomo is both a terrible person and a terrible leader. (If the piece is too long for you, try several interviews Rebecca did about it as well.)

Please check out some of these links. Read ‘em. The arguments against Cuomo are bountiful.

But research shows the most effective way to convince anyone of anything is from a messenger they trust (hi! that’s hopefully me! and hopefully you!) in an open conversation. (Kind of like with book sales: Word of mouth is king.)

To that end, I’ve been real fun lately, ranting against Cuomo to anyone I talk with -- our neighbors, other parents at the playground, at parties, even to the nice woman who recognizes our kids at the grocery store if I’m feeling particularly chatty.

(As an aside, I am fortunate my husband is also a Cuomo hater who has never once voted for Cuomo; he wrote in “fix the subway you criminal” the last time Cuomo was on the ballot. He often shames me for the fact that during my first year in NYC back in 2015, I made a $75 donation to the Cuomo campaign — in my defense, it was to go see a full performance of the original cast of Hamilton on Broadway. Forgive me for I knew not what I was doing.)

Anyway: Ahead of the final GOTV weekend, I wanted to give you a framework for any hypothetical conversations you might be having with someone who was thinking of voting for Cuomo.

None of these arguments are original, and this is certainly not exhaustive -- much like that other bully/corrupt piece of shit/ego-driven dumbass from Queens, Trump, there’s literally so many reasons not to rank Cuomo that it’s hard to get them all into one single piece.

But in the spirit of service journalism, I thought it would be useful to lay this in a conversational format so you can feel prepared for when you’re talking to people this weekend about why ranking Cuomo is a huge mistake.

---

A conversation with a hypothetical NYC voter about why they shouldn’t rank Andrew Cuomo for mayor

Me: Oh hi there, my hypothetical NYC voter! Thank you for shooting the shit with me.

MY HYPOTHETICAL NYC VOTER (MHNYCV): Thrilled to be here -- it’s an honor just to be invited.

I promise, I’ll go easy on you. So, MHNYCV: I hear you’re thinking of voting for Cuomo.

I am! I don’t know who else I’ll end up ranking, but yeah, I’m thinking of putting Cuomo on my ballot.

I really don’t think you should. Cuomo is a terrible person.

I just have such good memories from him during COVID. Remember Cuomo-sexuals?

I do remember! But really: Andrew Cuomo is a terrible person. For starters, he’s been credibly accused of sexual harassment by at least 11 women.

No, yeah, I know. I’ve heard about that. Not great.

You’ve probably heard that in passing, but it’s worth actually looking at what the reports say.

There’s a long documented history of young women saying Cuomo groped them, made them feel unsafe, went out of his way to humiliate them. Throughout his time as governor, there’s story after story of him preying on young vulnerable women whose only crime is that they wanted to serve New Yorkers in government.

That is horrible. But that stuff is all in the past. Don’t we need a way of people to come back? Shouldn’t there be room for some sort of redemption?

Sure. Of course. But any story of redemption has to involve change and repentance.

And by all accounts, that is not Andrew Cuomo’s arc. Instead he’s waged an unrelenting scorched earth campaign against his accusers.

He’s suing many of them, dragging out long legal disputes, and bankrupting them with legal fees. The City, in their deep dive into Cuomo’s “trench warfare”, called his tactics “in many ways unprecedented, wearing down and financially depleting not only women who have accused Cuomo of harassment and brought their own suits but others who never planned to enter a courtroom at all.”

If that’s not bad enough, Cuomo is using the fact that he was employed by the state as governor when these accusations took place to force taxpayers to pay his legal fees! New Yorkers like you and me have already paid over 19 million dollars to his lawyers to defend him in the sexual assault cases alone (in addition to another $40 million in legal fees for other corruption & miscellaneous cases). I want my taxes going to libraries, not his lawyers.

Look, I get it. But #metoo was a long time ago. Some people might even say it went a little far, you know? Remember Aziz Ansari?

LOL, not really, no. But let’s stay on topic. Reasonable people can disagree about #MeToo, or about what should happen to people accused of sexual harassment in the workplace, but the fact is that the sexual harassment is completely of a piece of how Andrew Cuomo does business.

He’s a bully. The stories of him screaming at others, intimidating people who work for him, and holding nasty petty grudges are the stuff of legend.

In their exhaustive look at the subject, The New York Times quotes one person who worked with Cuomo as saying, “his primary tool for governing is to create fear.” One lawmaker, whose father died in a nursing home during COVID (a subject we are going to talk more about in a bit), has publicly said Cuomo threatened to “destroy him” if he ever criticized the governor.

I’m not proud of this, but in a fucked up way, this kind of makes me like Cuomo more? I know, it’s bad, but maybe that’s exactly what we need in the Trump era -- a tough guy. Someone who isn’t afraid to get down in the muck and really do battle. We need a wartime consigliere.

You have to ask yourself if this is the type of management style that will get smart competent people to want to work in his administration.

After all, the mayor is just one person, but the administration requires a huge swath of deputy mayors, department heads, and dedicated underpaid bureaucrats to run it. (The office of the mayor alone has nearly 1000 employees; the city employs over 300,000 people.)

Do you think good people will want to work for someone who runs his shop like Cuomo?

Seems unlikely. Andy Byford, the very talented head of the MTA during Cuomo’s time as the governor, left because he described Cuomo’s management style as “intolerable” — and possibly because Cuomo pushed him out of jealousy that Byford was getting positive press.

More recently, Cuomo’s running on being a “good manager” but his campaign has been chock-full of management issues, including illegally coordinating with a super PAC, fucking up campaign finance filings, and getting caught using AI to write his housing policy.

Also, since you used the phrase “wartime consigliere”… I can’t believe we’ve gotten this far and this is the first mention of Cuomo being Italian.

I know! He talks about being Italian a lot.

Yea. Did you see that time he went on the radio and said the full n-word while discussing how hard it is to be Italian?

What?

This was after he publicly claimed that what some people think of as sexual harassment is actually just him being Italian.

Wait, what? That’s actually anti-Italian discrimination!

Italian on Italian crime, I know.

But to get back to the topic at hand: Cuomo’s tough guy act isn’t just a fun personality quirk, and it’s not just a tool he uses in order to govern more effectively.

It hurts all of us.

Just one example: His decades-long feud with former mayor Bill de Blasio. Admittedly, sometimes it was fun to see two men with truely colossal egos engage in the most petty slap fest imaginable, but Cuomo took the feud so seriously it cost people’s lives.

According to New York City’s official report on the COVID 19 pandemic, Cuomo’s ‘strained relationship’ with De Blasio meant his ‘administration was reluctant to share data with the city and often refused to give advance warning of policy changes and new directives.’ (And FWIW, I’ve heard this anecdotally from friends who worked in city and state government during COVID.)

Cuomo’s shittiness and ego-driven leadership has real consequences for New Yorkers’ lives.

I know we are going to talk a lot more about COVID in a bit, but the feuds, the tough guy stuff, maybe even the thing where he doesn’t believe the rules should apply to him -- it’s all part of his ability to get things done.

I’m not electing Cuomo to be my best friend or a role model for my children or anything. I’m electing a mayor. New York City has a lot of problems and I want someone who can do stuff.

Let’s break this down into two questions:

(1) Can Cuomo get stuff done?

And (2) If he can, what stuff will he get done?

On point #1: Not really! Most of the shit he’s taking credit for was either messy in the process or not really his doing in the first place.

Let’s just take public transit as one category of his failings: He wildly mismanaged the MTA when he was governor, at one point begging Elon Musk to save his ass.

The Second Avenue Subway became the most expensive subway project in the world under Cuomo’s watch; he was also responsible for what was generously called the “worst transit project in the US”.

He forced the NY Power Authority to spend $100 million on fancy lights that are currently being auctioned off for literally $25. (No, that’s not a typo — although you do have to pay $300k a year in storage fees.)

At one point, this idiot spent $30 million of YOUR money to put pretty blue and gold tiles up in the East River tunnels.

On transit, on reproductive health, on congestion pricing — pick the issue; his record doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny. Things happened when Cuomo was governor in spite of his leadership, not because of it.

And as for point #2 -- if he could get things done, what would he do?

Kind of unclear, tbh. His campaign has been light on policy and heavy on avoiding the press or any kind of serious questioning.

He doesn’t seem to have any new (or old) ideas for how to fix our biggest problem -- cost of housing -- and if anything, he’ll be in the pocket of landlords who want the cost of housing to go up (and the supply to remain the same.) He doesn’t seem to have a plan for childcare, or transit, or greenspace, or anything that might make NYC a place for non-billionaires to call home.

Many of the problems the city is currently facing around affordability are because of choices Cuomo made as governor -- he got us into this mess! There is no indication he has the vision or the desire to get us out of it.

OK, fine. But he’s at least been a good member of the party, right? That’s why all the party leaders are rallying behind him?

One would assume so! But alas, one would be wrong.

If you are a Democrat, and I assume you are since we are talking a Democratic primary, or if you care about the thing Democrats care about, or just want your vote to matter in NYC, Cuomo is not the candidate for you.

Throughout his career, he has proven himself to be, at best, a conservative Democrat and at worst a low-key-Republican. He has regularly undermined the party to put himself first.

Ross Barkan has a brilliantly thorough run down if you want all the nitty gritty details. The TLDR is that even though New York is an overwhelmingly Democratic state, Republicans controlled the state senate from the 1960s up until 2019 using extreme gerrymandering. But gerrymandering can only get you so far.

In the 2012 election, Democrats (who hold a 2:1 advantage among New Yorkers) were able to flip the Senate for the first time in a generation. Or so we thought!

As soon as the session started, several Democratic senators defected from the party, forming the Independent Democratic Caucus (IDC) and handed over control to the Republicans. They did this with the full support and encouragement of Cuomo. (That’s why as I said a few sentences earlier: The GOP controlled it until 2019, overruling the voice of the voters.)

Let’s repeat that again: As the Democratic governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo deliberately worked to make sure that the Democrats did not hold power in the state. He wanted to hold all the cards.

In Ross Barkan’s words:

“The consequence of this all was a decade devoid of progressive legislation that should have been passed in 2013 … In New York City, this meant six years of tenant harassment and the permanent loss of affordable housing, as rent-stabilized housing stock was legally deregulated. This meant six years of low-income defendants pressured to take bad deals from prosecutors because their attorneys couldn’t see the faulty evidence against them until it was too late. This meant six years of undocumented immigrants failing to get tuition assistance for their public university education. All of this is Cuomo’s fault. It is the defining feature of his three terms in power.”

Ok, yeah, that sounds pretttttty bad.

We haven’t even finished yet! There’s even more shit that’s Cuomo’s fault.

After the defeat of the IDC in 2019 and then the 2020 census, New York Democrats in the state Senate finally had the ability to redraw the congressional maps in their favor. They were as aggressive as the GOP tends to be and drew a map picking up 3 extra seats in the United States House.

That map was then struck down by the very conservative judge appointed by, you guessed it, Andrew Cuomo. As Vanity Fair put it bluntly, “New York’s Redistricting Chaos Is Part of Andrew Cuomo’s Legacy”

Think about those 3 extra seats when Congress passes legislation to rip away health care from millions of people by a 1 or 2 vote margin.

This is confusing. I thought Cuomo was the Democratic Party’s Democrat -- like, the nepo baby to end all nepo babies of the Democratic Party.

Nah. Most of Cuomo’s political life has been about empowering justtttt enough Republicans so he has leverage over them in order to get what he wants.

It’s telling that some of his biggest backers now are Trump donors like Bill Ackman, the crazy hedge fund billionaire. In fact, his donor list is an absolute murder’s row of real estate interests, conservatives, and billionaires.

These aren’t people who spend money foolishly. They expect something from their investments: a crypto-Republican running New York City.

Well, you make interesting points. But listen. I’m Jewish. I want a mayor that will stand up to anti-semitism.

Yes, as a Jewish woman raising Jewish kids in New York City, I too want a mayor who will take real action for our safety.

That’s why I’m not ranking Cuomo. First: Let’s not pretend Cuomo is personally particularly invested in Jews or in Judaism. He once referred to Jews celebrating Sukkot as “these people and their fucking tree houses.”

But more to the point, I think people should be skeptical of leaders who only seem to be interested in Jews when they can be used as a symbol or in order to score political points rather than as real people. Dara Horn makes this point in her excellent book, “People Love Dead Jews” — much fascination with Jewish deaths, and so little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the present.

Yeah, none of that sounds ideal. But his whole schtick — the accent, the vibe, the fact that his father was the governor — he just feels like a classic tough guy New Yorker!

I love a good commitment to the bit as much as the next person, but there really doesn’t seem to be any indication the Cuomo loves or even particularly likes New York City. He hasn’t actually lived in the city since 1990. (There is even some confusion about if he lives in the city now!)

He has a long history of truly brutal cuts to New York City services, particularly schools, transportation, and health care, often in favor of giving money to upstate projects.

In one particularly galling example he just stole $4.9 million from the MTA to bail out ski resorts upstate.

As governor he often used New York City as a piggy bank to raid in order to benefit conservatives elsewhere (and benefit his own political capital.)

He doesn’t ride the subway regularly — in fact, he’s notoriously a car guy. His bagel order is weird (and also, not a bagel.) He’s avoided meeting regular New Yorkers throughout this entire campaign.

Arguably, he’s only running for mayor so he can run for president in 2028. This isn’t about New York. It’s about him.

You’re making Andrew Cuomo out to be a monster! Can’t you admit that he cares about something?

Of course Cuomo cares about things! He cares about himself.

He cares about keeping his ass out of prison: Back in 2013, Cuomo set up a high-powered commission to root out corruption in state politics -- then a year later, whoops, he shut it down because seems like they found a bunch of corrupt shit Cuomo was doing.

He also cares about his reputation, which is why he forced state employees to help him write his COVID memoir (while the crisis was still happening) instead of doing their real jobs.

Fine, I get it. But let’s be real. We’re in a time of crisis! Look all around us! Cuomo is the man for a crisis. He was there during COVID.

Let’s finally talk about COVID. Cuomo’s record during the coronavirus pandemic is one of style over actual substance.

ProPublica lays out the numbers fairly starkly: “By mid-May, New York City alone had almost 20,000 deaths, while in San Francisco there had been only 35, and New York state as a whole suffered 10 times as many deaths as California.”

Early in the pandemic, it’s clear that it was Cuomo’s ego delayed necessary intervention. Since DeBlasio wanted to shut New York City down, Cuomo, naturally, forcefully argued that COVID was no big deal.

According to ProPublica’s report, “had New York imposed its extreme social distancing measures a week or two earlier, the death toll might have been cut by half or more.”

The Guardian succinctly puts it, “There’s something disturbing about Cuomo being hailed as the hero of the pandemic when he should rightly be one of the villains.

This is before we even get to Cuomo’s decision to force nursing homes to accept patients who tested positive for the virus thereby spreading the illness further and causing many deaths.

And much like with his sexual harassment allegations, Cuomo continually refuses to take any responsibility. He and his aide deliberately doctored a report about his nursing home screw up to hid his mismanagement. The New York Times, in discussing Cuomo’s disastrous handling of the crisis, quotes him as arguing, “governors don’t do global pandemics.”

As a New Yorker who stayed in the city during COVID, I say this with all disrespect — fuck off.

You make a compelling case that Cuomo would be bad for New York City. But wouldn’t he at least be a good person to have in power in the fight against Trump?

No. Again, he shares many of the same donors. That’s telling.

But zooming out even further: For Democrats to nominate Cuomo in this particular moment would be a huge step backwards for Democrats and for the opposition to Trump. In the NYT yesterday, Mara Gay wrote it out clearly:

“His return is a vivid example of the dysfunction eating away at the Democratic Party nationally. For the past decade, uninspiring politicians have stomped out competition and held on to power. Many of them have clear flaws and liabilities. Many have also ignored the grinding challenges faced by their constituents, like the nationwide housing shortage. Yet they insist they should remain in charge, strangling the new talent that could reinvigorate the party. …

Democrats have to realize that becoming the serious opposition party the country needs requires them to embrace competition and let the best talent rise to govern cities and states in a way that works for a majority of their constituents. The dinosaur wing doesn’t have the answers. It’s in the way.”

This primary is the first big fight about the direction of the Democratic Party, and the (mostly) millennial movement that’s taking over in the next few years. It won’t be the last.

So No Cuomo. Got it. Who instead?

You can put together a full ballot of five leaders who all seem to genuinely give a shit about NYC without putting Andrew Cuomo anywhere near your ballot.

If it’s helpful, I’m ranking in order: Zellnor Myrie, Brad Lander, Zohran Mamdani, Adrienne Adams, and Scott Stringer. (A slight variation from my original post back in April but time has changed my mind!)

I’m also pumped to cast my vote to re-elect my city councilmember, Crystal Hudson, a RFS alum (!) who’s been a fierce advocate for building more housing.

One final thing to keep in mind: This may be the rare year where the general election really matters. If Cuomo loses this primary (and especially if Zohran wins it), it’s extremely likely that the fall ballot will include some combination of Cuomo, Adams, Zohran, and the Republican party’s evergreen nominee, notorious cat-dad Curtis Sliwa. Get excited (?) for No Cuomo Summer.

---

This email was long enough as is — other reading recs will be back next week.

---

“Most leadership books suck and feel out of touch. This one is worth your time, especially if you’re under the age of 45. Grounded, relevant, and thoughtful. 💯”

That’s what people are saying about When We’re in Charge.

Join the thousands of people currently reading and order it in any format you’d like — fun fact: If you have Spotify premium, you already have access to the audiobook!

---