Andrew Cuomo Is A Future Of The Democratic Party

There is a specific and lacerating shame that comes with talking about New York City politics in places where people who do not live in New York City can hear you. This is not just because the people involved are so often so embarrassing. The alpha goofiness of current Mayor Eric Adams, for instance, actually helps with this, if only because the existence of a luridly corrupt and grandiose elected official with a half-dozen Livestrong-style motivational bracelets on each wrist, who has governed more or less as Influencer Cop, is at least strange enough that it might interest someone whose experience of public life does not depend, to some extent, on that particular Influencer Cop’s moods, rivalries, and federal legal entanglements.

It is accurate, if not quite sufficient, to say that the job of being New York’s Mayor is understood by voters and candidates alike to be not just impossible but unclean. It is just not the sort of job that a reasonable person would take if they had designs on a future in politics beyond that office, and so as a general rule only unreasonable people have sought it. A lot of mayoral jobs are thwarted in this way, for something like the same reasons—conflict with equally self-serving state politicians and equally occluded and corrupt state politics; the impossibility of managing increasingly radicalized and unaccountable police forces; the ways in which constituent service, where powerful constituents are concerned, invariably tends to lapse into what is pretty much crime. There are some New York-specific factors in play here, with the incredible wealth and depravity of those most powerful constituents being the most salient and the fact that a reactionary tabloid newspaper that no New Yorker takes entirely seriously nevertheless winds up dictating its political reality being the most deranging. But, again, the shame is not hard to understand. Imagine explaining the New York Post to a cousin from Ohio; try to find a way to say “no but our local real estate perverts are, like, extra perverted” that doesn’t sound like you’re somehow bragging about it.

All of this is to say that there is usually no good reason for anyone who does not live in New York City to care about who New York City’s mayor is. The job is a terminal position in basically every sense, and has for pretty much my whole life been sought only by delusional blowhards, weird vain crooks, and Slimers. That New York City’s next mayor will almost certainly be a Democrat is the sort of thing that naturally interests national Democrats, who otherwise have mostly been reduced to watching Donald Trump do whatever and periodically going on TV and congratulating themselves for not being tricked into caring too much about all the awful things he’s doing. At the national level, the Democrats are an isolated and conflicted minority party in a government that is currently speedrunning a half-dozen concurrent nightmare scenarios. This is very bad, and while Democrats will generally say as much, they also can’t seem to figure out just how much of that bad stuff they actually object to, or how vociferously they wish to object, or whether it is really wise to object to the nightmare scenarios that poll decently.

To describe this as Loser Shit is doing it a favor; accepting that this is a party making repeated ultra-dispiriting mistakes, and not one simply capitulating at the absolute worst time and in the absolute worst way, is assuming facts that are not otherwise in evidence. The calculation is easy to see, if difficult to credit. Americans, like the man said, love a winner, and will not tolerate a loser; a party that is manifestly out of power might think that it would be best not to be seen at all, and to let the party in charge take the blame for all the awful and destructive things that it is doing. The idea that this should somehow be left to happen naturally, through people noticing it on their own, reflects a strategic passivity that is, depending on your perspective, either criminal or merely nauseating. We already know how well it is working; we’re soaking in it.

But this does not mean that the Democrats are not doing things. While they seem disconcertingly at peace with the extent to which they are shut out of power at the national level, the party has been busy and vigorous in enforcing power where and when it can, which is in races like the one for the party’s nomination in the New York mayoral election. That race, which will be decided on Tuesday through a ranked-choice primary that is being contested by 11 Democratic candidates, has been narrowed in the media and by polling into something more like a two-person affair.

One is Andrew Cuomo, 67, who resigned as governor of New York State in 2021 during an investigation into a long litany of sexual harassment and abuse charges; the other is Zohran Mamdani, 33, a state assemblyman whose campaign has found a great deal of success among young voters and other communities that are not traditionally big parts of the Democratic primary electorate. Cuomo’s campaign started late and has been shockingly casual even by the standards of candidates running primarily on their recognizable surname; Cuomo, who was the head of Bill Clinton’s Department of Housing and Urban Development, was caught using ChatGPT to generate his mayoral campaign’s housing policy, and has campaigned mostly through negative advertisements paid for by PACs supported by Trump-aligned finance creeps, the city’s landlord lobby, and DoorDash. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, has built his campaign appeal around expanding affordability; he has policies designed to address that, but the campaign has surged less because of those policies than because of the sense that Mamdani himself cares about the right things and will be vigorous in trying to make them happen. Cuomo’s enormous early lead has shrunk significantly; the most recent polls have the race as something like a tie.

For someone who is likely to be governed by one of these two men for the next few years, what they are proposing to do as mayor is important. But for our purposes here, let’s leave all that aside and take a more global perspective. You have one candidate who is familiar to New York City residents, but liked by few; he is famously abusive, passionately vindictive, controlling, and upsetting to be around; he rarely appears in public, and his main appeal is that he will Get Tough on all the problems that the city has, all of which he appears to understand in exactly the same way and in roughly the same depth that the average New York Post casualty or low-information suburbanite might, and that he will Stand Up To Trump, with whom he has few substantive disagreements. Opposing him is a candidate who has aimed at some specific issues in creative ways, has been charismatic and effective in communicating those goals, and has pulled together a coalition against that more familiar, more conservative establishment candidate. The first candidate, who does not live in New York City, is running more or less on bringing it to heel; the second, who does, is running on opening it up.

Now: stipulating that the preposterously corrupt and unpopular incumbent is not in this primary, which candidate would you expect Democratic Party elites would support? Before you answer, remember that this is the same national Democratic Party that has recently committed to spending millions of dollars in an attempt to connect with younger voters, which is the demographic that the second candidate seems to be winning handily. Also and again remember that this is the Democratic Party we are talking about.

“The mayor of New York is uniquely positioned to play an important role in the future of the national Democratic Party,” South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn said, incorrectly, when he endorsed Andrew Cuomo last week. It is unclear which New York City voters might be swayed by the robocalls Rep. Clyburn recorded on Cuomo’s behalf, just as it is hard to imagine an undecided voter whose mind might be changed by the endorsement of Bill Clinton in the year 2025. But that’s not really what these endorsements were for, or what they were meant to signal. Their symbolic significance, like the New York Times‘ queasy and qualified unofficial endorsement of Cuomo over Mamdani, is easy enough to parse. It is a matter of some institutions, out of power but not quite powerless, policing what they can police, and prioritizing the influence they have in the present over a future in which they might play a smaller or just different role.

As with the many politicians who endorsed Cuomo after calling for his resignation just four years earlier, this seems mostly like the firing of the same sort of shameful elite reflex that powers so many of our culture’s most embarrassing capitulations. Nothing has changed about Andrew Cuomo; he has not learned or changed at all, and will not even pretend to have learned or changed at all. He has barely even deigned to campaign. Some of the people that endorsed him and many of the people that will vote for him are doing so simply because they believe he will win; those elected officials know that there is no percentage in being on his bad side, and those voters understand that their job is to pick a winner. It’s defensive driving; the only real argument for this decision, and the only one that Cuomo has even attempted, is that the alternative would be worse. This has, not coincidentally, been the Democrats’ argument in each of the last three presidential elections, two of which they managed to lose to a man who is basically the living embodiment of The Alternative That Is Worse.

The elites that have rallied behind Cuomo—not various state assembly humps but real national elites—are doing so precisely because he has not learned or changed, and because in his strident unwillingness to do either he represents the only future they care to imagine, which is one in which they remain on top. Cuomo, a multiply disgraced mediocrity with pronounced Nosferatu vibes, will not be The Future Of The Democratic Party for a number of obvious reasons. But, for the Democratic elites that have endorsed him, it is enough that Cuomo might temporarily forestall the arrival of a future that looks and sounds and campaigns like Zohran Mamdani. A generation of leaders just never listened or left, and that elite now oversees an exhausted and abstracted party that can’t or won’t argue against its lavishly fascist opposition, and now understands its purpose as arguing against any alternative to that approach.

If there is anything meaningful in this, and anything that might actually speak to The Future Of The Democratic Party, it has less to do with dueling visions of New York City’s governance—James Clyburn, as an extremely powerful 83-year-old South Carolina resident, would not stand to win or lose much either way, there—than with this political party’s aging and unaccountable elite rallying around one of their fellow elites on perverse principle. However atrophied and sclerotic that elite might be, and however peevishly indifferent and ineffective their political party has become, they can at least still bestir themselves to do this—to remind the voters they ostensibly serve who is actually in charge, and to rally them around a cause they can actually win, which unfortunately is preserving a degrading and patently unworkable status quo. The idea is less to make sure that nothing happens without that elite’s approval and more to guarantee that nothing happens, period, and to hold this increasingly untenable present in place so that it does not become any other thing.