No Republican wants to vote for a Cuomo if they’ll get stuck with Mamdani the socialist either way.
With antisemitic socialist Zohran Mamdani poised to win the New York Mayor’s race next week, there has already been a lot of finger-pointing.
A lot of Andrew Cuomo supporters, including those who reluctantly see him as the best hope of stopping Mamdani, have been arguing for months that Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa should drop out — or that voting for him is the equivalent of voting to elect Mamdani.
But if Mamdani wins, the blame should rest with Cuomo.
To start, nothing does more to fuel the rise of somebody proposing radical change from the status quo than a sense that the status quo is broken. No doubt, Mamdani benefited greatly from the fact that Mayor Eric Adams was under federal indictment before being pardoned by President Trump, to whom Adams had cozied up. But he benefited doubly from the fact that when the dust settled, his main challenger ended up being Cuomo.
Cuomo was a failed governor. Not only did his disastrous Covid policies contribute to thousands of nursing home deaths, but then his administration tried to cover up the failure by manipulating the data. And he was forced to resign in disgrace over charges of sexual misconduct. It’s hard to imagine a better avatar for Mamdani’s argument that the existing system is corrupt and broken than Cuomo.
I’m generally reluctant to call anybody a “spoiler” given that elections are ultimately about earning votes. If you’re an older Republican voter who has lived in New York long enough, you probably grew up hating Andrew Cuomo’s father, Mario Cuomo (New Yorkers of a certain age will remember the late talk-radio host Bob Grant’s salute to “the sfaccim”). Andrew Cuomo in 2014 said that conservatives had no place in the state.
It’s ridiculous and arrogant for Cuomo and his supporters to expect that after losing the Democratic primary, that Republicans would somehow decide not to field a candidate just to clear a path for him. It was up to Cuomo to give Republicans who have spent a long time despising him an actual reason to put aside their long-standing feelings. If he wasn’t going to make an appeal to them, he could instead have run a strong enough race to get close to Mamdani. If we were talking about a toss-up race right now, the calls for Sliwa to drop out (or at least for Republicans to suck it up and vote for Cuomo) would be more compelling. But Mamdani has been consistently beating Cuomo by double digits, and in some polls he’s beating Cuomo and Sliwa combined (that’s even if we assume that all Sliwa’s support goes to Cuomo, which we can’t, as some might just stay home or cast a different protest vote).
It would be much easier for Sliwa supporters to hold their noses and vote for Cuomo if he was giving them a reason to believe he actually had a chance of winning. But no Republican wants to vote for a Cuomo if they’ll get stuck with Mamdani the socialist either way.