Governor Andrew Cuomo won a relatively comfortable reelection earlier this month, defeating Republican opponent Rob Astorino by 13 points, 54–41. But that’s hardly a resounding victory for an incumbent governor against a relatively unknown foe, and it turns out that he was only dragged over the finish line by an incredibly strong performance in New York City. The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle reports that Cuomo was actually beaten by Astorino in the rest of the state:
Cuomo’s 13-percentage-point win over Republican challenger Rob Astorino on Nov. 4 was fueled by a large margin of victory in New York City, where he took home 77 percent of the nearly 1 million ballots cast, according to the state Board of Election’s unofficial results.
Take away the city, however, and the rest of the state backed Astorino — albeit by a slim margin. Outside of the five boroughs, Astorino collected 1.3 million votes — or 49 percent — compared to Cuomo’s 1.2 million, or 46 percent, in a low-turnout election. Three third-party candidates were also on the ballot.
It’s a shift from four years ago, when Cuomo, a Democrat, won 55 percent of the non-New York City vote en route to a 30-percentage-point win.
“The election returns were a whisper from the past, where Democrats ran up big margins in New York City, lost by big margins upstate and tried to hold strong in the suburbs,” said Lawrence Levy, who heads Hofstra University’s National Center for Suburban Studies.
Astorino’s strong performance upstate isn’t entirely unprecedented, but it shows he had success with plenty of the electorate. And he did that after the immensely powerful and well-known governor next door and no stranger to winning big in the suburbs to outdo the cities, Chris Christie, wrote him off as a lost cause . . .