It’s less than eight weeks until the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, and front-runner Andrew Cuomo is nowhere to be found.

Only two months ago, the disgraced former governor of New York declared his candidacy for New York City mayor amid a crowded field. The primary race was already full of drama, as incumbent mayor Eric Adams announced that he would not seek renomination under the Democratic party line following a public capitulation to the Donald Trump administration on immigration enforcement to get his federal corruption charges dropped. And while Cuomo’s high name recognition has gained him a steady lead in polls, he remains suspiciously absent from the public eye, including in public mayoral candidate forums.

Instead, Cuomo has recently released statements declaring his intention to run third party in the general election even if he wins the Democratic nomination — perhaps as a counter to both Eric Adams and the Working Families Party, who will both be on the ballot in the general election in November.

Despite his current status as a front-runner, Cuomo remains largely out of the public eye, running a “Rose Garden” campaign strategy and taking very few questions. He refuses to commit to a public debate with his opponents. This reflects the strategy that Cuomo took in his election and reelection bids as governor, in which he often ignored his opponents and refused to engage with them, claiming he was “campaigning without campaigning.” This is in stark contrast to how other front-runner mayoral candidates have behaved, with former mayor Bill de Blasio and current mayor Eric Adams both frequently making appearances in public, connecting with future constituents, and fielding direct questions from voters.

Considering that he’s also running a mayoral campaign premised on New York City being a dangerous, chaotic, broken place, Cuomo is taking a Trumpian approach to winning the primary, leaning on distrust and fear to motivate voters. Cuomo is refusing to respond to demands for transparency. Between his resignation as governor in August 2021 and his declaration of mayoral candidacy, Cuomo ran a legal consultancy called Innovation Strategies and reported $500,000 of income to the city’s Conflict of Interest Board (the highest income of all the mayoral candidates) for 2024 alone. While Cuomo recently “pledged” that he would recuse himself from all potential conflicts of interest, he refused to disclose his clients, as the board does not require this. In contrast, mayoral candidate Scott Stringer released his consulting clients.

While Cuomo tried to strengthen ethics reporting rules for elected officials and state employees during his time as governor, he often backtracked to avoid any scrutiny of his own behavior. For example, Cuomo created the Moreland Commission in July 2013, tasked with investigating potential corruption and making recommendations on new ethics rules. During its one-year tenure, the commission issued around three hundred subpoenas (which many legislators simply ignored) and found the Cuomo administration interfering with its duties. Cuomo then abruptly shut down the Commission in March 2014, over the protests of state legislators. As a result, US attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara started an investigation of Cuomo’s potential obstruction of justice, which ended in 2016 “prematurely” but without sufficient evidence for federal charges.

This is a pattern with Cuomo. Bloomberg recently reported on Cuomo’s relationship with a Seychelles-based cryptocurrency company that faced federal investigations for operating illegally in the United States. Cuomo allegedly advised this company on how to deal with the criminal investigation, even getting the company to hire one of his longtime allies to its board of directors, who later became the company’s chief legal officer. Cuomo’s consulting company also advises a nuclear energy company, NANO, with zero employees, zero products, and no patents.

Seeking private gain and shielding himself from public scrutiny has long been Cuomo’s MO. As a former cabinet member in the Bill Clinton administration, Andrew Cuomo has been a loyal Third Way ideologue, publicly devoted to free markets but insisting on state subsidies to struggling private businesses (such as three struggling upstate New York ski resorts, which received $4.9 million in funds that were supposed to go to the Metropolitan Transit Authority in 2016) and staunchly committed to underfunding essential services, all in the name of fiscal responsibility.

Despite his claims of competence, Cuomo has run his campaign with errors and incompetence. These gaffes — including failing to prepare paperwork (a “technical software error”) to qualify for public matching campaign funds and using ChatGPT to write policy papers without even editing the output (which he strangely blamed on a campaign staffer’s having only one arm) — could lead to potential confrontations for his rivals that Cuomo needs to avoid. And the Cuomo campaign hired as its finance manager Kristofer Graham, a former staffer for a campaign opposing an anti–gender discrimination 2024 ballot measure designed to protect abortion rights. Graham’s campaign instead worked to portray the measure as about transgender rights, no doubt in an effort to hitch its wagon to the broader anti-trans political climate in 2024.

Perhaps the most concerning problem part of Cuomo’s campaign is his use of campaign contribution bundlers while failing to disclose their names in violation of campaign finance reporting. Only after a local publication, New York Focus, published this oversight did the Cuomo campaign release the list, which included lobbyists, Republicans, Eric Adams associates, real estate interests, and businesses that already have contracts with the city. While the initial investigation prompted the campaign to comply with the law, it’s clear that Cuomo continues with his flexible approach to ethics: rules, transparency, and regulations should not apply to him unless he is directly called out.

Cuomo’s absence and silences on the campaign trail are no accident. They reflect the kind of administration he plans to run, one of contempt for democratic processes and accountability. He claims he’s the mayoral candidate to challenge Trump, but Cuomo’s campaign behavior doesn’t sound all that different from the president’s.